Reid Across the Norwegian and Icelandic Poems

Reid's two surviving stanzas agree on riding as the rune's subject while drawing on entirely different registers to develop it: the Norwegian poem states plainly that riding is said to be hardest on the horses themselves, and then, in the same stanza's second half, names Reginn, the legendary smith of the Volsung cycle credited in Old Norse tradition with forging the sword Gram for Sigurd, an allusion the poem offers without further explanation, assuming its audience already knew the story well enough to supply the connection between horse riding and a mythic weapon smith the stanza itself never quite states.

The Icelandic poem takes a gentler, more domestic approach, reading riding as joy to the one seated and a swift journey, while still acknowledging the toil it demands of the horse carrying that rider, a paired image of ease and labour reminiscent of the Old English Rad stanza's own contrast between riding imagined from indoors and riding actually endured on the road. Dickins' 1915 edition treats the Norwegian stanza's reference to Reginn as one of the clearer points of contact between the rune poems and the wider corpus of Old Norse heroic legend, a genuinely mythological allusion embedded in what otherwise reads as a fairly practical, everyday stanza about horses and travel.