gold
    They have ended many a story, they shall fashion a tale to be told: 
    They have lived in the wrack of the people; they shall live in the
      glory of folk
    They have stricken the Gods in battle, for the Gods shall they strike
      the stroke.”

    Then she felt his hands about her as he took the fateful sword,
    And he kissed her soft and sweetly; but she answered never a word: 
    So great and fair was he waxen, so glorious was his face,
    So young, as the deathless Gods are, that long in the golden place
    She stood when he was departed:  as some for-travailed one
    Comes over the dark fell-ridges on the birth-tide of the sun,
    And his gathering sleep falls from him mid the glory and the blaze;
    And he sees the world grow merry and looks on the lightened ways,
    While the ruddy streaks are melting in the day-flood broad and white;
    Then the morn-dusk he forgetteth, and the moon-lit waste of night,
    And the hall whence he departed with its yellow candles’ flare: 
    So stood the Isle-king’s daughter in that treasure-chamber fair.

But swift on his ways went Sigurd, and to Regin’s house he came,
Where the Master stood in the doorway and behind him leapt the flame,
And dark he looked and little:  no more his speech was sweet,
No words on his lip were gathered the Volsung child to greet,
Till he took the sword from Sigurd and the shards of the days of old;
Then he spake: 
“Will nothing serve thee save this blue steel and cold,
The bane of thy father’s father, the fate of all his kin,
The baleful blade I fashioned, the Wrath that the Gods would win?”

Then answered the eye-bright Sigurd:  “If thou thy craft wilt do
Nought save these battle-gleanings shall be my helper true: 
And what if thou begrudgest, and my battle-blade be dull,
Yet the hand of the Norns is lifted and the cup is over-full. 
Repentst thou ne’er so sorely that thy kin must lie alow,
How much soe’er thou longest the world to overthrow,
And, doubting the gold and the wisdom, wouldst even now appease
Blind hate and eyeless murder, and win the world with these;
O’er-late is the time for repenting the word thy lips have said: 
Thou shalt have the Gold and the wisdom and take its curse on thine

    head. 

I say that thy lips have spoken, and no more with thee it lies
To do the deed or leave it:  since thou hast shown mine eyes
The world that was aforetime, I see the world to be;
And woe to the tangling thicket, or the wall that hindereth me! 
And short is the space I will tarry; for how if the Worm should die
Ere the first of my strokes be stricken?  Wilt thou get to thy mastery
And knit these shards together that once in the Branstock stood? 
But if not and a smith’s hands fail me, a king’s hand yet shall be

    good;

And the Norns have doomed thy brother.  And yet I deem this sword
Is the slayer of the Serpent, and the scatterer of the Hoard.”