Fáfnir

Fáfnir was not born a dragon; he became one, and that is the story's engine. Son of the magician Hreiðmarr, he took the weregild the gods paid for his brother Otr — the dwarf Andvari's gold, cursed ring and all — by killing his father, then carried the hoard to Gnita-heath, put on an 'ægishjálmr,' the helm of terror, and lay down on the gold until his shape matched his heart: the serpent-dragon of the North.

Sigurðr, coached by Fáfnir's own brother Reginn, dug a pit in the dragon's track to the water and drove the sword Gram up into the soft belly. The dying dragon's dialogue with his killer is eerie and courtly: he warns the boy, truthfully, that the gold dooms everyone who holds it. Roasting the heart, Sigurðr burnt his thumb, sucked it — and understood the speech of birds, who told him Reginn planned murder. Fáfnir on his hoard is the ancestor of every dragon on gold since, Tolkien's Smaug most gratefully of all.

The otter's ransom

The gold came into the family as blood-money, and it never changed its nature. Three gods — Odin, Hœnir, and Loki — were travelling when Loki killed an otter with a stone by a waterfall. The otter was Otr, son of Hreiðmarr, who fished the falls in that shape by day; and when the gods lodged that night at Hreiðmarr's house and showed off the pelt, they found themselves seized and ransomed. The price: fill the otter-skin with gold and cover it outside until not a whisker showed.

Loki was sent to raise the money and did it the Loki way — netting the dwarf Andvari, who lived as a pike beneath his own waterfall, and stripping him of his entire hoard, down to the one small ring, Andvaranaut, with which the dwarf had hoped to breed his wealth back. Denied even that, Andvari laid his curse: the ring and the gold should be the death of everyone who owned them. Loki, delivering the ransom, passed the warning on to Hreiðmarr with something like relish. When one whisker of the otter-skin still showed, Odin covered it with the ring — and the curse was fully paid into the family. Hreiðmarr refused his surviving sons any share; Fáfnir, with his brother Reginn's grievance beside his own, killed his father as he slept and then refused Reginn everything. The gold had claimed its first owner within days.

How did Fáfnir become a dragon?

This is the question the story exists to answer, and the sources answer it morally rather than magically. Fáfnir carried the hoard to Gnitaheiðr — Gnita-heath — made himself a den, and lay upon the gold. He took with him the ægishjálmr, the "helm of awe" or terror-helm, at which, the Völsunga saga says, all living things quail; in Fáfnismál the dying dragon boasts that he wore it over the hoard and breathed poison abroad, trusting no one to come near. And in the lying-down, he changed: he became the great serpent — ormr, dragon — of the heath, so venomous and vast that the earth shook when he crawled to the water to drink. No source describes a spell or a single night of transformation; the strong implication, made explicit by generations of readers, is that the shape grew to fit the behaviour. A man who does nothing but lie on gold and terrify becomes, in time, a thing that lies on gold and terrifies. Greed, in this mythology, is not an emotion but a metamorphosis.

The slaying on Gnita-heath

Reginn, cheated of his share, played the longest game in the sagas: he became a smith at a king's court and fostered the boy who could do what he could not — Sigurðr, last of the Völsungs. He forged him the sword Gram, reforged from the shards of Sigurd's father's blade, so keen it split an anvil, and whetted the boy against the dragon with talk of glory and gold. The plan was Reginn's: dig a pit in the track Fáfnir had worn crawling from his den to the water, crouch in it, and strike upward into the soft underside armour cannot cover. In the Völsunga saga an old man with one eye — Odin, unannounced as always — appears as Sigurd digs and advises more trenches to carry off the blood, or the dragon's gore will drown the boy in his own ambush.

Fáfnir came down the track blowing poison, and the earth trembled. Sigurd, in the pit, held his nerve and drove Gram up to the hilts into the dragon's belly. And then, instead of a death-roar, the story gives us a conversation.

What did the dying dragon say?

The dialogue in Fáfnismál is one of the strangest and finest scenes in the Poetic Edda — courtly, riddling, and cold. The dying Fáfnir asks his killer's name, and Sigurd at first conceals it, answering in riddles ("I am the noble beast: I have neither father nor mother"), for a dying creature's curse, laid on a name, had power. Named at last, Fáfnir turns prophet: the gold, he tells the boy, the flame-red treasure and the rings, "will be your death" — the plain truth, offered by the one owner past being harmed by lying. He answers Sigurd's questions about the gods and fate like a seeress; he warns him of Reginn — "he will betray you, who betrayed me"; and he dies advising his killer. Sigurd's reply is the hero's creed at its starkest: every man holds his wealth until that one day; a man must die sometime.

Reginn arrived when it was over, cut out his brother's heart, drank the blood, and asked Sigurd to roast the heart for him. Testing the meat, Sigurd burnt his thumb, sucked it — and the dragon's heart-blood on his tongue opened the speech of birds. The nuthatches in the thicket were discussing, with great clarity, how foolish the boy was to roast a heart for the man planning to kill him. Sigurd took off Reginn's head with Gram, ate of the heart himself, loaded the gold on his horse Grani — of Sleipnir's line — and rode away into the rest of the tragedy, Andvari's ring in his baggage like a lit fuse.

In the primary sources

The Fáfnir material is unusually rich. In the Poetic Edda, Reginsmál gives the otter's ransom and the curse, and Fáfnismál the killing, the death-dialogue, the birds, and Reginn's end. The Völsunga saga retells the whole cycle in prose with details of its own (the one-eyed advisor at the pit among them). Snorri summarises the story in Skáldskaparmál of the Prose Edda to explain why gold is called "Fáfnir's lair" and "otter-payment" in skaldic verse. And the slaying was carved in stone by people for whom it mattered: the Ramsund carving in Sweden, cut around the early eleventh century, shows the whole story in one panel — Sigurd stabbing the serpent from below, the roasting heart, the burnt thumb, the birds, the headless smith, and Grani loaded with treasure. The German tradition reworked the same legend into the Nibelungenlied, where the dragon-slayer is Siegfried and the dragon goes unnamed.

Legacy

Fáfnir is the most consequential dragon in Western literature, because he is the one Tolkien read. Smaug — the talking, riddling, gold-jealous worm of The Hobbit, wise and wicked in conversation with a burglar who conceals his name — is Fáfnir's direct descendant, and through Smaug every treasure-hoarding dragon of modern fantasy and gaming descends from Gnita-heath. Wagner set him (as Fafner) in the Ring cycle, giant-turned-dragon, murdered for the same gold. The deeper legacy is the idea itself, which has never needed updating: the dragon is not a species but a fate — what a person becomes who lies down on wealth and lets it replace everything else.