Gram

Gram ("Wrath") enters the world in Odin's hand: a one-eyed stranger at a wedding drives a sword to the hilt in the house-tree Barnstokkr — whoever draws it, owns it. Only Sigmundr the Völsung could, and he refused a king's weight in gold for it; the sword served him until, in his last battle, Odin himself met him with raised spear and Gram broke on Gungnir. The god gives, the god collects.

The shards were kept, as dying Sigmundr ordered, for his unborn son. The smith Reginn reforged them for young Sigurd, and the new-old blade split Reginn's anvil to the base at the first test-blow, then cut a tuft of wool drifting downstream — edge and mass in one weapon. With Gram, Sigurd pierced Fáfnir from the slaying-pit; with Gram, laid naked between himself and Brynhild, he kept a vow now more famous than the sword. Wagner called it Nothung; every reforged-blade-of-the-father since — a certain shard-sword in Middle-earth included — is Gram's descendant.

The sword in Barnstokkr

King Völsung's hall was built around a living tree, Barnstokkr, whose trunk rose through the roof. At the wedding-feast of Völsung's daughter Signý to King Siggeirr of Gautland, a stranger walked in: very tall, old, one-eyed, his hood drawn low. He drove a sword into the trunk to the hilt — whoever pulled it out should have it as his gift, and never bear a better blade — and was gone.

Every man in the hall tried, the noblest first; the sword did not move until Sigmundr, the king's son, drew it out as if it lay loose. Siggeirr offered three times its weight in gold; Sigmundr answered that if the sword had been meant for Siggeirr, he would have drawn it — no price would buy it now. The humiliation festered: Siggeirr lured the Völsungs to Gautland, killed King Völsung by treachery, and destroyed his sons — all but Sigmundr, who survived in hiding with Signý's help and, years later, burned Siggeirr in his own hall. Through it all the sword from Barnstokkr was proof of a favour no enemy could revoke.

Broken on Gungnir

Odin's favour has a term, and it expires on a battlefield. When Sigmundr, an old king now, fought King Lyngvi, his rival for the hand of Hjördís, a man strode through the battle in a blue cloak and a broad hat, one-eyed, and lifted his spear against him. Sigmundr's sword struck the spear-shaft and broke in two, and with it broke his luck; he fell mortally wounded.

He refused to have his wounds bound: Odin no longer wished him to draw sword, he told Hjördís that night. But she was carrying his child, and Sigmundr's last command reached past his own death: gather the shards. From them a great sword could be forged — it would be called Gram, their son would bear it, and his name would last while the world lasted.

Who reforged Gram?

Reginn — smith, tutor, and the most dangerous foster-father in Norse literature. Brother of Fáfnir and son of Hreiðmarr, he had been cheated of the cursed hoard of Andvaranaut and needed a hero-shaped weapon to get it back. He raised Sigurd at King Hjálprekr's court and goaded him toward the dragon; the first sword he forged shattered on the anvil under Sigurd's test-blow, and so did the second. Then Sigurd took the shards of his father's sword from his mother and brought Reginn iron with a destiny already in it.

From the fragments Reginn forged Gram, and the saga says it seemed as if fire burned along its edges. Sigurd struck the anvil and split it to the base — the blade held. Then he let a tuft of wool drift downstream onto the edge, and the current alone cut it in two. A sword that cleaves an anvil and a floating thread is the whole point of Gram: no gap between power and precision.

The dragon, the flame-wall, and the last throw

With Gram, Sigurd first avenged his father, cutting down Lyngvi in battle. Then came the deed the sword was remade for. On Fáfnir's track at Gnitaheiðr, Sigurd dug a pit and waited in it — an old, one-eyed stranger had advised digging more trenches to carry off the blood — and as the dragon crawled over him to drink, he thrust Gram up beneath the left shoulder to the hilts. Fáfnismál preserves their dying conversation: the dragon's warning that the gold would kill its new owner, and Sigurd's shrug. When the nuthatches, whose speech he understood after tasting the dragon's heart-blood, warned that Reginn planned treachery, Gram took Reginn's head as well.

The sword kept one gentler vigil. Riding through Brynhild's wall of flame in the shape of Gunnar, wooing her on another man's behalf, Sigurd shared her bed for three nights with the drawn Gram laid bare between them — a blade as a wall of honour. And at the very end, when Guttormr stabbed the sleeping Sigurd, the dying hero hurled Gram after his killer and cut him in half at the door — the sword avenging its owner in the breath he died.

In the primary sources

Völsunga saga carries Gram's whole biography, from Barnstokkr to Sigurd's death. In the Poetic Edda, the prose of Reginsmál tells of the reforging and the anvil, while Fáfnismál gives the slaying of the dragon and the birds' counsel. Skáldskaparmál in the Prose Edda confirms the tradition in summary: Snorri names Gram as the sword that slew Fáfnir. The scene was famous enough to carve in stone — the eleventh-century Ramsund carving in Sweden shows Sigurd driving his sword up into the serpent from below.

Legacy

Gram is the template of the reforged sword. Wagner renamed it Nothung in the Ring cycle, where Siegmund pulls it from an ash tree and Wotan's spear shatters it, following the Norse scenes closely. Tolkien gave the pattern to Narsil, the broken blade reforged as Andúril for the heir of kings — and reused the name Gram itself in Middle-earth. The deeper legacy is the idea: a father's broken sword, kept as shards, remade for the son whose deed will be greater. Norse legend invented that inheritance, and fiction has never stopped drawing it from the tree.