Sigmundr

At his sister Signý's wedding feast, a one-eyed stranger drove a sword into the house-tree Barnstokkr and left. Every man pulled; only Sigmundr drew it, and the jealous groom, king Siggeirr, promptly slaughtered the Völsung menfolk by treachery — leaving Sigmundr, presumed dead, in the forest. What followed is the sagas at their most feral: years as an outlaw; a spell in wolf-skins with the son his sister sent him (Sinfjötli, bred by Signý on her own brother in disguise, specifically for the work of vengeance); and at last Siggeirr's hall burned with Signý choosing to walk back into the fire — vengeance complete, on her terms.

Sigmundr ruled long, buried Sinfjötli (a mysterious one-eyed ferryman took the body), and fathered his greatest son late. In his last battle, an old man with a spear and a broad hat stepped into his path; Gram shattered on Gungnir, and Sigmundr fell — declining healing with saga-fatalism: 'Odin does not wish me to draw sword again.' He ordered the shards kept for his unborn child. The god's sword, the god's collection, and the god's long game: Sigmundr's whole line is Odin breeding heroes for Ragnarök, and Sigmundr is the first to understand the terms and consent anyway.

The sword in the tree

The scene that opens Sigmund's story is one that later literature never stopped borrowing. King Völsung — himself a great-grandson of Odin, in the Völsunga saga's genealogy — built his hall around a living apple tree, Barnstokkr, the "child-trunk." At the wedding feast of his daughter Signý to King Siggeirr of Gautland, a stranger walked in: barefoot, in a hooded cloak and a broad hat, one-eyed. He drove a sword to the hilt into the trunk of Barnstokkr, announced that it belonged to whoever could draw it, and walked out. Every man at the feast tried, the insulted bridegroom included. Only Sigmund, Völsung's eldest son, drew it free — the blade that would be called Gram, the finest sword in the world. Siggeirr offered three times its weight in gold; Sigmund refused with an insult about men who let swords be pulled from under their hands; and the feud that would consume two families was lit at a wedding, by a god's gift. If the sword-in-the-stone shape looks familiar, it should — the Völsung version is centuries older than any Arthurian text that survives, whatever the lines of influence.

The dark years: Signý, the wolf-skins, and Sinfjötli

Siggeirr's revenge was total by design: inviting the Völsungs to Gautland, he ambushed them, killed King Völsung, and set his ten sons in stocks in the forest, where a she-wolf devoured one each night. Signý's cunning saved the last — honey smeared on Sigmund's face led the wolf to lick, and Sigmund tore its tongue out with his teeth. Officially dead, he dug into the earth of the forest as an outlaw, and his sister ran the long game from inside her hated marriage. She sent him her sons by Siggeirr to test for the work of vengeance; they failed her standards, and the saga is unblinking about what she did with failures. Then Signý exchanged shapes with a seeress, came to her brother's den as a stranger, and conceived a child by him — a pure-blooded Völsung, bred deliberately for revenge. That child was Sinfjötli, who as a boy kneaded a snake into bread-dough without flinching.

Man and boy lived as beasts in the deep forest — literally, in the saga's most uncanny episode: finding two enchanted wolf-skins hanging in a hut, they put them on and could not take them off, running as wolves for days, howling in wolf-voice, keeping a pact to hunt apart. When Sinfjötli boasted and Sigmund, in wolf-rage, tore his throat, only a raven's leaf — Odin's courier, the saga hints — healed the boy. They burned the skins when they could finally shed them. The vengeance, when it came, was fire: Sigmund and Sinfjötli put Siggeirr's hall to the torch with the king inside, and Signý, who had sacrificed her children, her body, and every year of her adult life to reach that night, told her brother the whole truth of Sinfjötli's parentage, kissed him, and walked back into the burning hall to die with the husband she hated. Vengeance complete, on her terms — the saga gives her the exit of a queen.

Odin's sword, Odin's spear

Sigmund reclaimed his kingdom and ruled long and gloriously. The god's attention never wandered far. When Sinfjötli was poisoned at court by a vengeful stepmother, Sigmund carried the body to a fjord where a one-eyed ferryman offered to take it across — and vanished, boat and corpse and all, mid-water: the Allfather collecting a Völsung for his hall in person. And at the end, in Sigmund's last battle against the suitors of his young wife Hjördís, the pattern closed. An old man in a broad hat and dark cloak stepped through the ranks carrying a spear — Gungnir — and raised it against Sigmund. Gram struck the spear and shattered. The luck of the Völsungs left the field with the sword's edge, and Sigmund fell among his men.

Found dying by Hjördís that night, he refused all healing with perfect clarity about what had happened: Odin no longer wished him to draw sword, and he had lived by the god's favour too long to whine at its withdrawal. His last orders were dynastic — keep the shards of Gram for the son Hjördís carried; he will forge them anew and do greater deeds than any of us. That son was Sigurd, the shards became Gram reforged, and the greater deed was the killing of Fáfnir. Sigmund is the first Völsung to see the whole shape of the bargain — the god arms his line, harvests it, and is breeding champions for the last battle at Ragnarök — and to consent with open eyes. That consent, more than the wolf-years or the vengeance, is what the North admired in him.

In the primary sources

The Völsunga saga carries the full story; the Poetic Edda preserves the prose piece Frá dauða Sinfjötla ("On Sinfjötli's Death," with the one-eyed ferryman) and refers to Sigmund across the heroic poems — Eiríksmál, the tenth-century praise-poem for Eirik Bloodaxe, even shows Sigmund and Sinfjötli in Valhalla, sent by Odin to welcome a dead king, which tells you how early and how firmly the family was installed in the god's hall. Most remarkably, Sigmund appears in Beowulf: the poem's minstrel praises Sigemund the Wælsing and his nephew Fitela (Sinfjötli), and in that oldest attested version it is Sigemund himself, not his son, who slays a dragon and takes its hoard. The tradition later transferred the dragon to Sigurd — a rare, visible case of a legend being edited across the centuries, with both drafts surviving.