Reginn

Reginn was the third son of Hreiðmarr, cheated twice: his brother Fáfnir took the gods' gold over their father's corpse and became a dragon on it, leaving Reginn a court smith with a legal claim and no army. His solution was patient and entirely modern: acquire a promising asset young. He fostered Sigurðr, taught him, needled him about his unavenged father and missing inheritance, and forged him a sword — twice failing deliberately? the saga lets you wonder — until the boy demanded his father's shards, and Gram split the anvil.

At Gnita-heath, Reginn's coaching turned to accounting: dig a pit, stab from below — then, with Fáfnir dead, he crawled from hiding, drank the dragon's blood, and asked Sigurðr to roast the heart, calling the killing of his brother a debt the boy now owed him. The nuthatches overhead, suddenly intelligible to a hero with dragon's blood on his tongue, gave the audit: 'there sits Reginn, planning to betray the boy who trusts him.' Sigurðr weighed fostering against evidence and took the smith's head. Reginn is the cycle's essay on advisors: the man who sharpens you always knows exactly where your edges are.

The family the gods ruined

Regin's grievance begins with a divine accident. His father Hreiðmarr was a wealthy farmer versed in magic; his brothers were Otr, who spent his days as an otter fishing the falls, and Fáfnir, the strongest and greediest of the three. When Odin, Hœnir, and Loki travelled past the falls, Loki killed the otter with a stone — pleased, the saga notes, to get otter and salmon in one throw — and the gods walked into Hreiðmarr's hall wearing the skin of his son. Held for ransom, they paid what Hreiðmarr demanded: the otter-skin stuffed and covered entirely with gold, which Loki extorted from the dwarf Andvari, taking even the ring Andvaranaut that the dwarf begged to keep. Andvari cursed the hoard as it left him — it would be the death of whoever owned it — and Loki, characteristically, passed the curse along with the payment and told Hreiðmarr so.

The curse worked fast. Fáfnir killed his father for the gold, refused Regin any share, and carried the hoard to Gnitaheiðr, where brooding on it transformed him — the saga treats it as the natural chemistry of greed — into the dragon Fáfnir, wearing the terror-helm and poisoning the land around his bed of treasure. Regin, cheated of father's inheritance and brother's share alike, went to the court of King Hjálprekr and became its smith: a master craftsman, learned in runes and many tongues, with a legal claim on a hoard and no possible way to collect it. In Reginsmál he states his position with the cold precision that defines him.

Forging the hero

Regin's remedy has struck modern readers as startlingly contemporary: lacking an army, he acquired an asset. The young Sigurd, posthumous son of Sigmund, was growing up at Hjálprekr's court, and Regin became his foster-father and teacher — chess, runes, languages, the full education of a prince — while conducting a patient campaign of needling: was Sigurd content to run errands like a stable-boy? Where was his father's wealth? Did he not care that his inheritance sat under a serpent on Gnitaheiðr? When Sigurd answered that he first needed a horse, an old one-eyed man helped him choose Grani, of Sleipnir's line — Odin quietly co-investing in Regin's project, for reasons of his own.

Then came the swords, and one of the saga's finest small scenes. Regin forged a blade; Sigurd struck it on the anvil and it shattered. A second; it shattered too. The saga does not say Regin failed deliberately — it lets you weigh the possibility that the smith was testing his weapon's temper, boy and blade alike. Sigurd fetched from his mother the shards of his father's sword, the gift of Odin broken on Odin's spear, and from them Regin forged Gram: the blade split the anvil to its base, and severed a tuft of wool drifting against its edge on the current. Master smith, master claim: the weapon of the whole cycle was Regin's work, whatever else he was.

The heath, the heart, and the birds

At Gnitaheiðr, Regin's counsel was tactically flawless and morally instructive: dig a pit in the dragon's track and stab from beneath — advice he delivered before withdrawing to a safe distance, "sick with fear," as Fáfnismál has the birds later observe. When Sigurd remarked on the risk of drowning in the blood, Regin waved it off; it was a stranger, the old man Odin again, who advised digging additional trenches. Fáfnir died on Regin's plan and Sigurd's arm, in that order, and the division of credit is the scene's hidden knife.

Regin crawled back to the corpse, drank of the dragon's blood, and made his position explicit: Sigurd had killed his brother, so — by the grim arithmetic of kinship — Sigurd now owed him. As part-payment he asked the hero to roast Fáfnir's heart for him, and lay down to sleep. What followed is told above the hero's head: Sigurd, testing the roast with his thumb, burnt himself, tasted the heart-blood, and understood the nuthatches in the thicket, who laid out the situation with avian directness — there lies Regin, who means to betray the boy who trusts him; wiser to strike off the smith's head and own the hoard alone; a wolf is to be expected where a wolf's ears stick up. Sigurd reasoned it through in one line — if Regin planned his death, the plan should travel — and beheaded his foster-father with the sword his foster-father had forged. In some accounts he then ate of the heart himself: the whole of Regin's commission, consumed by the instrument.

In the primary sources

Regin's story is carried by Reginsmál (the otter's ransom, the curse, the grooming of Sigurd) and Fáfnismál (the heath, the birds, the beheading) in the Poetic Edda, by the connected account in the Völsunga saga, and by Snorri's summary in Skáldskaparmál in the Prose Edda, where the tale explains the skalds' gold-kennings. He is also one of the few saga figures you can visit in stone: the Ramsund carving in Södermanland, Sweden (c. 1030), shows the whole drama in a single panel, and there among the pictures lies Regin — decapitated, his smith's tools scattered around him, hammer and bellows and tongs. The carver, like the saga, gave the smith his attributes and his verdict in the same image. In the German tradition the smith who forges the hero appears as Mime (Wagner kept the name), but the fully drawn portrait — claimant, teacher, tactician, traitor — is Norse.