The tale of Gudrun’s vengeance begins not with a feast, but with a shroud. After the death of her beloved first husband, the dragon-slayer Sigurd, Gudrun was a woman whose heart had been cauterized by grief. Her mother, the sorceress Grimhild, administered a potion of forgetfulness to dull the edges of her pain, eventually engineering a political union between Gudrun and Atli, the powerful King of the Huns. This marriage was never one of love; it was a cold alliance forged in the shadow of the Nibelung gold, a treasure that Atli coveted above all else. Gudrun lived in the Hunnish court—often identified with the historical city of Gran, or Esztergom—as a captive queen, her loyalty remaining firmly with her Burgundian kin, the brothers who had participated in her first husband's downfall but who remained her last link to her heritage.
King Atli’s greed eventually overrode his caution. He devised a plan to seize the vast wealth of the Nibelungs by inviting Gudrun’s brothers, Gunnar and Högni, to his court under the guise of a peaceful visit and shared inheritance. Despite Gudrun’s attempts to warn her brothers—sending a ring wrapped in wolf's hair to signify treachery—the Burgundian kings were lured by the promise of glory and the arrogance of their own strength. When they arrived at the court of Atli in the lands of the Huns, they were met not with welcoming arms, but with the clatter of spears and the closing of iron gates. A desperate and bloody battle ensued within the halls of the king. Gudrun, caught between her husband and her brothers, eventually cast off her role as Atli’s queen and fought alongside her kin, arming herself and urging them on as the Hunnish forces overwhelmed the outnumbered Burgundians.
The slaughter was absolute. Högni was captured, and in a display of terrifying stoicism, Atli ordered his heart cut out. The executioners first tried to fool Gunnar by bringing him the heart of a coward, but Gunnar recognized the trembling meat for what it was. Only when he saw the steady, unmoving heart of his brother Högni did he know that the secret of the Rhine gold’s location would die with them. Gunnar was then cast into a pit of venomous snakes. Gudrun tried to save him, smuggling a harp to him so he could charm the serpents with his music, but a single great adder, perhaps Atli's mother in disguise or a manifestation of fate, bit him in the breast, ending the line of the Burgundian kings.
With her brothers dead and her lineage extinguished, Gudrun’s grief underwent a final, monstrous transformation. She ceased her weeping and replaced it with a mask of deceptive submission. She approached Atli, claiming that since her brothers were gone, she would devote herself entirely to him and his household. She proposed a great funeral feast to honor the fallen, a ceremony that would also serve to celebrate Atli’s supposed victory and the acquisition of the Hunnish territories. Atli, blinded by his own triumph and the relief that his wife appeared to have yielded, allowed her to manage the preparations for the banquet. It was in this period of quietude that Gudrun’s mind turned toward the ultimate violation of the domestic sphere.
Gudrun had two sons by Atli, young boys named Erp and Eitil. In the logic of the ancient blood-feud, these children were part of Atli’s bloodline, and thus, they were the tools of her retribution. She called the boys to her under the pretext of play or a private meal. With a hand that did not tremble, she ended their lives, transforming the fruit of her womb into the instruments of her husband's damnation. She took their young hearts and, according to the grim details of the *Atlamál* and *Atlakviða*, prepared them as meat for the king's table. She further desecrated the remains by fashioning drinking vessels from their skulls, silvering them to hide their origin, and mixing their blood with the wine that would be served during the festivities.
The night of the feast arrived, and the hall was filled with the smell of roasted meat and the sound of drunken revelry. Atli sat upon his high throne, gorging himself on the delicacies provided by his queen. When he asked for his sons to be brought to the table so they might share in the celebration, Gudrun stood before him, her voice cold and steady. She revealed the nature of the meal he had just consumed, telling him plainly that he had chewed the hearts of his own offspring and drunk their blood from their own skulls. The hall fell into a horrified silence as the realization of the atrocity dawned upon the king. Atli, weakened by wine and shattered by the news, could only lament his fate, but Gudrun was not finished.
As the Hunnish court descended into a stupor of grief and intoxication, Gudrun moved through the shadows. She recruited Högni’s son, Niflung, who had survived the earlier slaughter, to aid her in the final act. Together, they entered the king's bedchamber. As Atli lay in a heavy sleep, Gudrun drove a sword through his chest. He woke long enough to exchange final, bitter words with his queen, questioning why she had brought such ruin upon their house. Gudrun’s response was a recitation of the many wrongs he had done her—the murder of her brothers and the theft of her happiness. After Atli expired, Gudrun set the entire palace ablaze. The fire roared through the timbered halls of Gran, consuming the living and the dead alike. The Hunnish warriors, trapped in the inferno, perished in a conflagration that marked the end of Atli’s reign and the total destruction of his court. Gudrun, having completed her vengeance, sought the sea to end her own life, but the currents refused to take her, carrying her instead toward further tragedies in distant lands, forever haunted by the day she turned a mother's love into a weapon of war.