Sigurðr

Sigurðr was born after his father Sigmundr fell in battle against Odin himself, and raised by the smith Reginn — who reforged his father's shattered sword Gram and aimed the boy at a dragon, neglecting to mention the dragon was Reginn's brother and the errand was an inheritance dispute. From a pit dug in the dragon's track, Sigurðr drove Gram into Fáfnir's belly, and the dying monster's courteous, terrible warnings about the cursed gold changed nothing: heroes hear prophecy the way rivers hear advice.

Roasting the heart for Reginn, he burnt his thumb, tasted the blood, and understood the birds overhead — who explained that Reginn was planning his murder. Sigurðr beheaded the smith, loaded the hoard on his horse Grani (of Sleipnir's line), and rode to a fire-ringed mountain where a valkyrie slept in mail. He woke Brynhildr; they exchanged vows and, fatally, the cursed ring Andvaranaut.

At the Gjúkung court, a potion of forgetfulness erased Brynhildr from him. He married Guðrún, and — in borrowed shape — rode the flame-wall again to win Brynhildr for his brother-in-law Gunnarr, laying the naked sword Gram between them at night. When the queens quarreled at the river and the ring surfaced on the wrong hand, Brynhildr learned the truth and required his death: stabbed in bed by Gunnarr's youngest brother, Sigurðr died throwing his sword after his killer. Wagner made him Siegfried; the Norse made him the proof that the gold's curse outranks the best man alive.

The last of the Völsungs

To understand Sigurd you have to start a generation back, in the wreckage of his family. The Völsungs were Odin's project: a line descended from the god himself, bred — the sagas strongly imply — for the harvest of heroes the Allfather is gathering against Ragnarök. Sigurd's father Sigmund drew Odin's sword from the tree Barnstokkr, survived treachery, outlawry, and years in wolf-skins, and died when the same one-eyed god who gave him the sword stepped onto the battlefield and broke it against his spear. Dying, Sigmund refused healing and left one instruction: keep the shards for the son not yet born.

That son was Sigurd, born to Hjördís after his father's fall and fostered at the court of King Hjálprekr in the Frankish lands, where the smith Reginn took charge of his education. The Völsunga saga makes the boy's quality obvious early — when Reginn needles him about having no horse, Sigurd goes to choose one and meets an old man with a long beard who helps him pick: a grey stallion of Sleipnir's line, whom Sigurd names Grani. The old man, of course, is Odin, quietly equipping his investment. It is worth noticing how often this happens in Sigurd's story: the god never leaves the Völsungs unattended for long.

How did Sigurd kill Fafnir?

Reginn's motive lesson came next: the tale of the otter's ransom. Odin, Loki, and Hœnir had killed Reginn's brother Otr in otter form, and paid the blood-price with gold Loki extorted from the dwarf Andvari — gold Andvari cursed as it left his hands, along with the ring Andvaranaut. Reginn's father Hreiðmarr took the payment; his brother Fáfnir murdered their father for it, took the hoard to Gnitaheiðr, and brooded on it until he became a dragon. Reginn, cheated of his share, had spent decades preparing his remedy: a hero, raised by hand.

The killing itself, told in Fáfnismál and the saga, is unglamorous and brilliant. Fáfnir left his lair by a single track to drink; Reginn advised digging a pit in the track and striking from below. (In the saga, Odin appears once more — an old man who suggests digging several trenches so the dragon's blood can drain away rather than drown the boy in it.) Sigurd waited in the earth, and when the dragon's bulk passed overhead he thrust Gram up to the hilt into its heart. What follows is one of the strangest and finest scenes in the Poetic Edda: the dying dragon and his killer hold a courteous conversation. Fáfnir asks the boy's name, warns him — accurately — that the gold will be his death, and dispenses cryptic wisdom about the fates of gods and men. Sigurd's reply is the heroic ethic in one sentence: every man must die someday, and gold in hand is worth more than fear of a curse.

Then came the accident that made him more than a swordsman. Roasting Fáfnir's heart at Reginn's request, Sigurd tested it with his thumb, burnt himself, and put the thumb in his mouth. The dragon's heart-blood on his tongue opened the speech of birds, and the nuthatches in the branches were discussing, in plain terms, how Reginn meant to kill him and take everything. Sigurd cut off the smith's head, ate of the heart himself, loaded the hoard onto Grani — who refused to move until Sigurd himself mounted, carrying gold and hero together — and rode away as Fáfnisbani, Fáfnir's Bane, the name the whole North would know him by.

Sigurd and Brynhild: the vow and the trick

The birds had one more piece of advice: a valkyrie slept on the mountain Hindarfjall, ringed with fire. Sigurd rode through it — Grani, alone among horses, would face the flames — and found what looked like an armoured warrior asleep. He cut the mail from her, and Brynhild woke from the sleep Odin had laid on her for the crime of giving victory to the wrong king. In Sigrdrífumál she greets the day, the gods, and her rescuer, then teaches him runes and the conduct of a wise man — one of the most complete pieces of ethical instruction in the Poetic Edda. They swore to marry. By most tellings, Sigurd gave her Andvaranaut, the cursed ring, as the pledge — the curse changing hands with the love.

Everything after runs on that ring. At the court of King Gjúki, Queen Grímhildr — a witch with dynastic ambitions — served Sigurd a potion of forgetfulness that erased Brynhild from his memory. He married Guðrún, swore blood-brotherhood with her brothers Gunnarr and Högni, and, when Gunnarr's courtship of Brynhild failed at the flame-wall — his horse refused, and Grani would not carry him — Sigurd and Gunnarr exchanged shapes by Grímhildr's magic. Sigurd rode the fire a second time wearing Gunnarr's face, spent three nights beside Brynhild with the naked sword Gram laid between them as guarantee of chastity, and took Andvaranaut from her hand, later giving it to Guðrún. Brynhild married the man she believed had crossed the fire. The best man in the North had become, unknowingly, the instrument of the worst trick ever played on the woman he had sworn to.

Why did Sigurd have to die?

The truth surfaced where saga truths usually do: in a quarrel between queens. Washing in the river, Guðrún and Brynhild fell to arguing over whose husband was greater, and Guðrún ended it by showing Andvaranaut on her own finger — proof that it was Sigurd, not Gunnarr, who had ridden the fire. Brynhild's response was not hysteria but arithmetic: her oath had been to marry the man who crossed the flames; she had been cheated of it by everyone she now lived among; and the only repair her honour recognized was Sigurd's death. She told Gunnarr she would leave him — taking her father Buðli's alliance with her — unless it was done.

Gunnarr and Högni were bound to Sigurd by blood-brotherhood, so the work fell to their young brother Guttormr, who had sworn nothing. Fed on wolf and serpent flesh to harden him, he stabbed Sigurd in his bed. The dying Sigurd threw Gram after his killer and cut him in half at the door — the hero lethal even in his last heartbeat — then died telling Guðrún, correctly, that Brynhild was behind it and that his brothers-in-law had broken oath. (The traditions disagree on the setting: the Eddic poems admit frankly that German accounts placed the killing outdoors, in the forest — the version the Nibelungenlied follows, where Siegfried is speared at a spring. The Norse mainstream keeps it in the bedroom, which is crueller.) Brynhild laughed once when she heard Guðrún's cry, then told Gunnarr the whole truth of what he had destroyed, and followed Sigurd onto the pyre.

In the primary sources

Sigurd is the best-attested hero in Norse literature. The Völsunga saga (13th century, Iceland) gives the full connected biography. The Poetic Edda carries the older poetry: Reginsmál (the otter's ransom and Reginn's grooming of the boy), Fáfnismál (the dragon-slaying and the birds), Sigrdrífumál (the valkyrie's wisdom), and the fragmentary and complete Sigurd lays around his death — a leaf-gap in the Codex Regius, the famous "great lacuna," has swallowed the middle of the story, which the saga author luckily paraphrased before the loss. Snorri retells the whole cycle compactly in Skáldskaparmál in the Prose Edda, because half the kennings of skaldic verse — gold as "Fáfnir's bed," "Grani's burden," "the metal of the Gnita-heath" — assume you know it. Beyond the manuscripts, the story is carved in stone: the Ramsund carving in Sweden (c. 1030) shows the whole plot in one panel — the pit, the sword-thrust, the roasting heart, the burnt thumb, the birds, and Reginn's severed head. In medieval Germany the same hero, as Siegfried, anchors the Nibelungenlied, where the dragon is almost an afterthought and the court intrigue everything; Wagner's Ring fused both traditions into Siegfried, which is why modern audiences keep meeting Sigurd without knowing his name.

Sigurd and the gods

No hero's life is more thoroughly stage-managed by Odin. The god fathered the Völsung line, gave and then broke Sigmund's sword, chose Sigurd's horse, advised on the trenches at Gnitaheiðr, and — in the saga — even appears aboard ship as Hnikarr to teach Sigurd battle-omens. The hoard itself is the gods' debt: gold that Odin and Loki handed over, curse included, to settle a killing. Read coldly, Sigurd's whole career is the interest accruing on the Aesir's bad payment, and his death sends one more perfect champion to the halls of the slain, where Odin needs him. The Völsungs get glory; the god gets an army; the curse gets everyone.