Gunnarr

Gunnarr's part in the tragedy is a study in second-best: he could not cross Brynhildr's fire, so Sigurðr crossed it wearing his face; he could not kill Sigurðr himself — oaths — so he had his youngest brother do it; and he then wore, for years, a crown and a marriage both won by another man's courage. The sagas rate him precisely: not wicked, but persuadable, which around cursed gold amounts to the same thing.

His redemption is one of the great death-scenes of world literature. Lured with Högni to Atli's court, he refused to reveal where the Rhine-gold was sunk while his brother lived; Atli obliged with Högni's cut-out heart, at which Gunnarr laughed — 'now only I know where the gold lies, and the Rhine shall keep it.' Thrown bound into the snake-pit, he was slipped a harp and played it with his toes, charming every serpent but one until the adder found his liver. The gold stayed in the river. Doomed, complicit, and magnificent at the end: the North forgave him almost everything for the harp.

The king in Sigurd's shadow

Gunnar was the eldest son of King Gjúki and the sorceress-queen Grímhildr, brother to Högni, Guttormr, and Gudrun — heir to a rich kingdom on the Rhine and, by every ordinary measure, a distinguished king. The Völsunga saga introduces him with genuine respect: a great warrior, a generous lord, a famous harper. His misfortune was proximity. When Sigurd arrived at the Gjúkung court with the dragon's hoard, Grímhildr bound him to the family — the potion for Gudrun's marriage, blood-brotherhood oaths with Gunnar and Högni — and from that day everything Gunnar attempted would be measured against the best man alive, who had sworn to help him.

The measurement came fast. Gunnar rode to woo Brynhild, whose oath demanded a man who knew no fear, past a wall of fire. His horse refused. He borrowed Sigurd's Grani; Grani would not move for him. So the brothers-in-law used Grímhildr's shape-changing magic: Sigurd, wearing Gunnar's form, rode the flames, spent three nights beside Brynhild with a naked sword between them, took the ring Andvaranaut from her, and handed Gunnar a bride won under false pretenses. The saga does not flatten Gunnar into a coward — he was brave enough by mortal standards — but Brynhild's test was calibrated for exactly one man, and Gunnar married the proof that he wasn't it.

The murder he ordered but could not do

When the queens' quarrel at the river exposed the deception, Brynhild put Gunnar in the vise that defines him: she would leave, taking her father's alliance and Gunnar's honour with her, unless Sigurd died. Gunnar's deliberations, which the saga records, are a small masterpiece of moral bookkeeping — the oaths to Sigurd against the loss of Brynhild, the shame of the deed against the shame of the alternative. Högni told him plainly it was Brynhild's malice and the worse choice. Gunnar chose it anyway, and solved the oath problem with a lawyer's trick: young Guttormr had sworn nothing, so Guttormr, fed wolf and serpent flesh to harden his heart, held the knife. Sigurd died in bed naming Gunnar's broken faith; Brynhild then told Gunnar the whole truth — that Sigurd had kept every oath, that the sword had lain between them — and killed herself on his hearth. Gunnar had traded the best man in the North and the proudest woman for a hoard with a curse on it. The saga lets the price accrue silently.

The snake-pit: how Gunnar died

The redemption, when it came, was total. Atli, Gudrun's second husband, invited the brothers to Hunland, wanting the Rhine-gold. They knew — Gudrun's warnings reached them, and Högni's wife read the runes and dreamt the truth — and they came anyway, first sinking the hoard in the Rhine, the two of them alone knowing the place. In Atlakviða, the oldest and hardest of the Eddic poems, the trap closes at once: seized after fierce fighting, Gunnar is asked to buy his life with the gold. His answer is the poem's famous pivot — he will speak only when he sees Högni's heart cut out. Atli's men first try to cheat, carving the heart from a thrall, Hjalli; Gunnar identifies the fraud because the heart trembles on the platter. When Högni's true heart is brought — and it barely quivers, Högni having laughed under the knife — Gunnar laughs too, and delivers the lines the North quoted forever after: now only he knows where the gold lies, and the Rhine shall keep it before the Huns wear it on their arms.

So Atli had him thrown, bound, into a pit of serpents. Someone — the saga says Gudrun — conveyed a harp to him, and with his hands tied Gunnar played it with his toes, so beautifully that the snakes slept. All but one: an adder (the saga makes it a monstrous exception, in some tellings Atli's own mother in serpent form) struck through to his liver, and Gunnar died with the secret intact. The image seized the Northern imagination like almost nothing else in the cycle — a bound king lulling his executioners with music — and it was carved and pictured across Scandinavia; the wooden cart from the Oseberg ship burial carries a scene of a man in a snake-pit that has been read as Gunnar since the excavation. Even the later Ragnar legend borrowed the death: Ragnar Lothbrok's snake-pit end in Ælla's Northumbria is the old scene restaged, singing instead of harping.

In the primary sources

Gunnar runs through the whole Völsung corpus: the Poetic Edda's Sigurd poems for the wooing and the murder, Atlakviða and the later Atlamál for the Hunnish catastrophe, and the Völsunga saga for the connected account; Snorri gives the summary in Skáldskaparmál in the Prose Edda. Behind him stands real history: Gunnar preserves the name and fate of Gundahar, king of the Burgundians, whose kingdom on the Rhine was annihilated by Hunnish forces around 437 — the historical seed of the whole Atli episode. In the German Nibelungenlied he is Gunther, whose failure at Brünhild's athletic contests and death in Etzel's hall carry the same skeleton with different flesh; there it is his sister who destroys him, not his brother-in-law's ghost.