Colma

Colma is the solitary, grieving figure in the song Minona sings before the heroes. Waiting on a storm-swept hill for Salgar, she discovers that he and her brother have died by one another’s swords. Her lament turns the failed meeting into a meditation on bereavement: she cannot recover either beloved companion, and imagines that her own life will end beside theirs.

Identity and Narrative Setting

Colma appears within the song Minona sings, rather than in the surrounding action as an independently observed character. Minona introduces her as a woman whose beauty is shadowed by sorrow: her gaze is lowered, her eye tearful, and her hair moves in the wind that occasionally rushes over the hill. The heroes listening to Minona’s song are saddened by Colma’s story before Colma’s own voice takes over.

The setting gives the episode its emotional shape. Colma is alone on a hill exposed to wind and rain, near a roaring stream and a rock. There is no hut to shelter her. The landscape does not simply frame her loneliness: its wind, torrent, and darkness make the absence of human response seem almost audible.

Waiting for Salgar

Colma waits for Salgar, who had promised to meet her at night. She calls for the moon and stars to guide her to where he might be resting after the chase, imagining the signs that would accompany his arrival: his unstrung bow nearby and his dogs panting around him. But she remains beside the stream, listening to the wind and water and hearing no voice from the person she expects.

Her waiting is also a defiance of inherited hostility. She says that she would flee with Salgar from her father and her proud brother, although their families have long been enemies. In her understanding, that feud does not define the two lovers: she insists that she and Salgar are not enemies. The promised meeting holds out the possibility of escape from the conflict between their families, but the night offers no reunion.

As the moon emerges and the flood brightens, Colma searches the brow of the hill and sees no sign of Salgar. His dogs do not come ahead to announce him. She repeats that she must sit alone. The expected signs of arrival have become signs of absence, and the scene’s gradual clearing only sharpens the fact that he has not come.

Discovery and Grief

Colma then asks who lies on the heath beside her, wondering whether the dead are her beloved and her brother. When neither answers, she recognizes that they are both dead and that their swords are red from the fight. The discovery resolves the mystery of Salgar’s delay: the meeting has been made impossible by the violence between the two men.

Her grief does not turn either man into an enemy. Colma cries out over her brother’s killing of Salgar and Salgar’s killing of her brother, then declares that both were dear to her. She remembers them through contrasting qualities: Salgar was fair among thousands, while her brother was terrible in battle. Their deaths leave her unable to choose one loss over the other, and unable to make praise or pleading reach them. She calls to them, but they remain silent.

Anticipated Death and Lasting Voice

Unable to receive an answer from the dead, Colma asks where they have gone and whether she might find them in a cave in the hill. The storm carries no reply. She waits for morning in tears and asks the companions of the dead to raise a tomb, but not to close it before she comes. Her declaration that her life is flying away like a dream makes her expectation of death explicit, though the song does not narrate her death as an event.

Colma imagines remaining with her friends beside the stream and returning as a ghost when night and loud winds come to the hill. In that imagined afterlife, the hunter will hear her voice from his shelter and feel fear, yet love the sound because it is sweet to her friends. Her final image turns the very landscape that isolates her into the medium through which her mourning will endure. Minona’s listeners weep for Colma, and the song preserves the voice that its living speaker fears will otherwise go unanswered.