Andvaranaut ("Andvari's gift," and the name is spoken bitterly) was the one thing the dwarf begged to keep when Loki stripped his hoard — because it was the ring that breeds gold. Refused, Andvari laid his curse: the ring and its gold shall destroy every owner. The mythology took him at his word with bookkeeping precision.
Loki paid it to Hreiðmarr as blood-money for Otr; Fáfnir killed his father Hreiðmarr for it and became a dragon on the hoard; Sigurd slew Fáfnir and took it; gave it to Brynhild as a love-token; the token surfaced in the wrong quarrel, exposing betrayal, and Sigurd was murdered in his bed; Brynhild rode his pyre; the gold ended sunk in the Rhine and every hand that held it, dead. A ring of power that corrupts and dooms its bearers, from a creature robbed in a riverbed — Tolkien, who knew this material professionally, denied nothing.
Andvaranaut is not divine regalia like Mjölnir or Draupnir; it is the object through which one careless afternoon of the gods spills into human history — the engine of the Völsung cycle, the greatest story the Norse told.
The otter's ransom
The chain begins with three gods on a journey: Odin, Loki, and the quiet Hœnir. At a waterfall Loki killed a drowsing otter with a thrown stone, pleased at taking otter and salmon in one cast — but the otter was Otr, son of the magician Hreiðmarr, wearing his favourite day-shape. Lodging at Hreiðmarr's hall that evening, the gods showed their catch, were seized, and heard the ransom: stuff the flayed otter-skin with gold, then heap gold over it until not a whisker showed.
Loki was sent to raise the payment, and he knew where money lived. In a pool below a waterfall swam a pike that was no pike but the dwarf Andvari, guarding wealth hoarded in the rock. Loki netted him — with a net borrowed from the sea-goddess Rán, says Völsunga saga — and stripped him of everything, including the one small ring Andvari held back, the ring that could breed his fortune again. Left with nothing, the dwarf spoke the words that drive the whole cycle: the ring and all its gold would be the death of whoever owned them. In Reginsmál, Loki accepts the curse almost cheerfully; he is about to pass it on.
Back at the hall the skin was stuffed and covered — and Hreiðmarr, inspecting, found a single whisker bare. Odin had kept back Andvaranaut, the finest thing in the hoard, and now had to lay it over the whisker. The moment the ransom was complete, Loki told Hreiðmarr exactly what came with it.
The curse keeps its ledger
Hreiðmarr refused his sons Fáfnir and Reginn any share. Fáfnir killed his father for the gold, drove his brother off, and carried the hoard to Gnitaheiðr, where, wearing the terror-helm ægishjálmr, he brooded until he became in body what he already was in spirit: a dragon coiled on treasure. Reginn, cheated of everything, became a smith at a king's court and waited a generation for his revenge to grow up — his foster-son Sigurd, last of the Völsungs, for whom he reforged the shards of Gram and whom he steered toward the dragon.
Sigurd dug a pit in Fáfnir's track and drove Gram up into him from below. Dying, the dragon warned that the gold and the ring would kill their new owner; Sigurd answered that every man must die sometime, and rode off with the hoard anyway, Andvaranaut on his hand. Warned by birds — he understood them after tasting the dragon's heart-blood — that Reginn planned treachery, he beheaded his foster-father, and the curse moved on with him.
He betrothed himself to the valkyrie Brynhild and gave her Andvaranaut as his pledge. Then a potion of forgetting at the Gjúkung court washed her from his memory; he married Gudrún, and rode through Brynhild's flame-wall in the shape of his brother-in-law Gunnar to win her for another man — drawing Andvaranaut from her hand on that ride, and leaving a different ring from the hoard. Years later, queens quarrelling in a river, Gudrún ended the argument by showing Brynhild Andvaranaut on her own finger: proof of who had really ridden the flames. From that flash of gold came Brynhild's fury, Sigurd stabbed in his bed by Gudrún's youngest brother, and Brynhild mounting the pyre to burn beside him.
The gold kept its schedule. Gunnar and Högni took the hoard, and when Atli the Hun lured them to his hall to seize it, they sank it in the Rhine first and died without telling where — Högni's heart cut out, Gunnar playing a harp in the snake-pit. The Rhine has it still, the tradition says, and Andvaranaut with it.
Did Tolkien base the One Ring on Andvaranaut?
Tolkien never claimed a single source for the One Ring, and when critics routed it through Wagner he bristled that both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceased. But he knew Andvaranaut professionally — he taught this literature at Oxford and retold the cycle in his posthumous Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún — and the resemblance is hard to unsee: a gold ring taken by force from a wretched, hoarding creature beside deep water; a curse that follows ownership; a dragon on stolen treasure; kin killing kin for it. Readers have long noticed how much of Andvari the pike there is in Gollum in his pool. Wagner and Tolkien drank from the same Norse well, and Andvaranaut lay at the bottom of it.
In the primary sources
Reginsmál in the Poetic Edda preserves the oldest surviving layer: prose and verse telling of Otr's death, Andvari's capture, and the curse in the dwarf's own stanzas. Völsunga saga, the thirteenth-century Icelandic prose epic of the Völsungs, carries the ring from the waterfall to the Rhine in one connected chain. Skáldskaparmál in the Prose Edda retells the story to explain why skalds call gold "otter's ransom" — the whole tragedy folded into a kenning. The German Nibelungenlied knows Siegfried and the doomed hoard, but nothing of Andvari or his cursed ring; that thread is distinctly Norse.
Legacy
Andvaranaut is arguably the most influential object in Norse literature. Wagner built the central device of Der Ring des Nibelungen from it; William Morris carried it into Victorian poetry; Tolkien's Middle-earth gave its pattern to the most famous ring in modern fiction. Every cursed treasure that ruins its finders is working out the terms Andvari set, standing robbed and furious on his stone in the river.
Frequently asked questions
What does Andvaranaut mean?
It means "Andvari's gift" or "Andvari's possession," from the dwarf's name plus -naut, a thing given or had from someone. The irony is built into the word: it was never a gift. It was taken, and the curse was the receipt.
Is Andvaranaut the same ring as Draupnir?
No. Draupnir is Odin's ring, forged by Brokkr and Sindri, which drips eight equal rings every ninth night. Andvaranaut belonged to the dwarf Andvari and "breeds gold" for its holder. The sources keep the two firmly distinct, though both express the idea of self-renewing wealth.
Where did the cursed gold end up?
Sunk in the Rhine. Gunnar and Högni hid the hoard in the river before Atli captured them, and both died rather than reveal the spot. In legend it lies there still — which is why Wagner could call his opera's opening evening Das Rheingold.