Sigurðarkviða hin skamma
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Sigurðarkviða hin skamma or the Short Lay of Sigurd is an Old Norse poem belonging to the heroic poetry of the Poetic Edda. It is one of the longest eddic poems and its name derives from the fact that there was once a longer Sigurðarkviða, but this poem only survives as the fragment Brot af Sigurðarkviðu (see the Great Lacuna).
According to Henry Adams Bellows, the poem was mainly composed for "vivid and powerful characterization" and not for the telling of a story with which most of the listeners of his time were already quite familiar. Bellows notes that the story telling is closer to the German tradition (found in the Nibelungenlied) than it is to the Scandinavian tradition, and that this is because the matter of Sigurd existed in many and varied forms in Northern Europe c. 1100 when the poem was probably composed.