Áslaug Talks to Birds

When Ragnar and Kráka went to bed, she asked him again what the
news was, and he said he didn’t know any. She wanted to keep talking,
but Ragnar said he was very sleepy and worn out from traveling.

“Then I will tell you some news,” she said. “If you won’t tell me any.”

He asked what this news might be.

“I call it news,” she said, “if a king is engaged to a woman, when
some would say that he already has a wife.”

“Who told you this?” asked Ragnar.

“Let your men keep their lives and limbs, because none of them
told me,” she said. “You must have seen that three birds sat in the
tree nearby you, and it was they who told me this news. I ask you not
to do this thing you have planned, and I tell you that I am a king’s
daughter, not a farmer’s, and my father was such a great man that
there has never been his equal, and my mother was the wisest and
most beautiful of all women, and her name will be famous as long as
the world lasts.”

Ragnar asked who her father was, if she was not the daughter of
the poor farmer at Spangarheiđ. She said that she was the daughter
of Sigurđ, killer of Fáfnir, and that her mother was Brynhild, daughter
of Buđli.

Ragnar said, “It seems extremely unlikely to me that their daughter
would be named ‘Crow’ or that their child would grow up in such
poverty as I saw at Spangarheiđ.”

Then she said, “There is a story behind this.” And she told him,
beginning her story with Sigurđ’s meeting with Brynhild on the
mountain, where she was conceived. “And when Brynhild gave birth, I was
given the name Áslaug.” And now she told him everything that had
happened since she and Heimir first met Aki and Gríma.

“These are terrible things that you say happened to Áslaug,” said
Ragnar.


- The Saga of Ragnar Lođbrók, Chapter 9