In the hall was the voice of the trumpet, but therein might it nowise
      abide,
    But over burg and lealand it spread full far and wide,
    And strong men quaked as they heard it in the guarded chamber of stone,
    And the lord of weaponed kinsfolk was as one that sitteth alone
    In a land by the foeman wasted, and no man to his neighbour spoke,
    But they thought on the death of Atli and the slaughter of the folk.

    Of the Battle in Atli’s Hall.

    Ye shall know that in Atli’s feast-hall on the side that joined the
      house
    Were many carven doorways whose work was glorious
    With marble stones and gold-work, and their doors of beaten brass: 
    Lo now, in the merry morning how the story cometh to pass! 
    —­While the echoes of the trumpet yet fill the people’s ears,
    And Hogni casts by the war-horn, and his Dwarf-wrought sword uprears,
    All those doors aforesaid open, and in pour the streams of steel,
    The best of the Eastland champions, the bold men of Atli’s weal: 
    They raise no cry of battle nor cast forth threat of woe,
    And their helmed and hidden faces from each other none may know: 
    Then a light in the hall ariseth, and the fire of battle runs
    All adown the front of the Niblungs in the face of the mighty-ones;
    All eyes are set upon them, hard drawn is every breath,
    Ere the foremost points be mingled and death be blent with death. 
    —­All eyes save the eyes of Hogni; but e’en as the edges meet,
    He turneth about for a moment to the gold of the kingly seat,
    Then aback to the front of battle; there then, as the lightning-flash
    Through the dark night showeth the city when the clouds of heaven
      clash,
    And the gazer shrinketh backward, yet he seeth from end to end
    The street and the merry market, and the windows of his friend,
    And the pavement where his footsteps yestre’en returning trod,
    Now white and changed and dreadful ’neath the threatening voice of God;
    So Hogni seeth Gudrun, and the face he used to know,
    Unspeakable, unchanging, with white unknitted brow,
    With half-closed lips untrembling, with deedless hands and cold
    Laid still on knees that stir not, and the linen’s moveless fold.

Turned Hogni unto the spear-wall, and smote from where he stood,
And hewed with his sword two-handed as the axe-man in a wood: 
Before his sword was a champion and the edges clave to the chin,
And the first man fell in the feast-hall of those that should fall
therein,
Then man with man was dealing, and the Niblung host of war
Was swept by the leaping iron, as the rock anigh the shore
By the ice-cold waves of winter:  yet a moment Gunnar stayed,
As high in his hand unbloodied he shook his awful blade;
And he cried: 
“O Eastland champions, do