Abstract: The “weeping Gudrún” is a well-known female tragic figure in the medieval Nordic Poetic Edda. Her delayed weeping offers plenty of wiggle room for profound cultural elucidation and conceals unique ethical concepts and emotional structures. As a representative piece of “eddic elegies”, “The First Poem of Gudrún” subverts the stereotype of powerful women in the mythical poems of Edda and creates a brand new image of sentimental women, thereby establishing an emotional community of Nordic women characterized by “sympathy”. All this has a lot to do with not only the cultural influence from romance and Christianity, but also the awakening sense of individuality and the reckoning with death in the wake of social progress. The exquisite lyric narrative in “The First Poem of Gudrún” helps us renounce our stereotypes of the Old Norse culture as something savage and bellicose, thus developing a deeper and fuller understanding of the Old Norse literature in the Middle Ages.

Key words: the Nordic, “eddic elegies”, ethics, emotion