Tonight's story is the biggest one the North ever told — so big that it outlived the people who told it, and crossed the sea, and put on operas and novels and films the way other stories put on new cloaks. It is the story of a treasure, and of everyone who ever held it. And I will be honest with you before we begin, as the old tellers were honest: this is a tragedy. Wonderful things happen in it, and brave people do brave and beautiful deeds, but the gold at the middle of it is cursed, and the curse never misses. Why tell such a story at bedtime? Because it is also the greatest story of courage we have — and because it ends, as you will hear, with the trouble sunk safely in a river, where it lies to this very night. You are entirely safe. Only the people in the story are not. Come along, then. We begin, of all places, with three gods on a walking holiday, and an otter having lunch by a waterfall.
Odin, Loki, and quiet Hoenir were travelling the world in the old way, on foot and unannounced, when they came to a river and a falls, and there on the bank sat an otter with its eyes shut, eating a salmon, happy in the spray. And Loki — for no reason, which by now you will know is the most Loki reason there is — picked up a stone and threw it, and killed the otter, and boasted all afternoon that he had taken an otter and a salmon with one throw. That evening the three gods asked lodging at the house of a farmer named Hreidmar, a grim man deep in old magic, and showed him their day's takings by way of friendliness. And the room went very quiet. For the otter was Hreidmar's son — a boy named Otr who loved the water so much he wore an otter's shape all day and fished the falls with his eyes closed, tasting the river. The gods had killed their host's child and worn him into the house like a game-bag. Hreidmar called his two living sons, Fafnir and Regin, and bound the gods where they sat — even gods sit down to supper, and magic knows where the chairs are — and named the old, lawful price of a death: weregild. Gold. The otter's skin would be flayed, and stood open, and the gods must fill it with gold inside and cover it with gold outside until not one whisker showed. And Odin and Hoenir looked at Loki, whose stone it was, and unbound him to go and find it.
Loki went straight down under the waterfalls of the world to a dark pool, and to the dwarf who lived in it. Andvari was his name, and he had swum his whole long life in the shape of a pike, guarding a hoard he had gathered in the deep. With a borrowed net — the sea-goddess Ran's own drowning-net, if you want the full pedigree of the disaster — Loki hauled the pike thrashing into the air, and squeezed. The dwarf gave up his gold, armful by armful, all of it, to buy his life — all but one small thing he begged to keep: a plain little ring, the seed-corn of his fortune, for that ring was Andvaranaut, and gold grew from it as cress grows from seed. Loki saw the begging and took the ring precisely because it was begged for. And Andvari, treading water in the ruin of his life's work, spoke the sentence that drives everything you are about to hear. He cursed the ring, and the whole hoard with it: that gold shall be the death of every being who owns it, he said, until it comes home to the water. Loki, who collected curses the way other travellers collect shells, said thank you, and carried the treasure — sentence included, and he mentioned the sentence to nobody — back to Hreidmar's hall.
They stood the otter-skin up and filled it, and it held more than any skin should, for grief is roomy. They heaped the outside until the boy was a mound of gold. And Hreidmar walked round and round the mound, and found — one whisker. One whisker of his son, showing. And Odin, who had held back the little ring because even a god's eye is caught by a thing that makes more of itself, gave up Andvaranaut to cover the whisker. So the debt was paid to the last hair, and the curse was formally delivered, wearing the shape of the payment. The gods walked free, and Loki, at the door — he could never resist a doorway — told Hreidmar cheerfully exactly what the dwarf had said over the gold. And the gods walk out of this story now, all the way out, which should frighten you a little on the family's behalf: what is coming is too heavy even for gods to stand near.
The curse did not dawdle. Hreidmar, who had buried a son that morning, sat up with his gold that night and would give his living sons not one coin of their brother's price. And Fafnir, the elder — a big, brooding, capable man; remember him capable, because of what he becomes — rose in the dark and killed his father, and took it all. Regin, the younger — a smith, the finest smith of his age, clever hands and a clever, patient, pocketed heart — asked for his share and was told, by a brother suddenly enormous in the doorway, to run. He ran. And Fafnir carried the hoard up onto the high stony moor called Gnitaheath, far from every road, and lay down upon it, and set himself to the only work left in him: keeping. He put on his father's helm of terror, that fills every eye that sees it with fear; he watched; he counted; he let his heart grow around the gold the way tree-roots grow around a stone. And year by year, the old ones said — and they said it without surprise, as if it were only natural history — the keeping reshaped him. His body lengthened to lie around the mound. His skin hardened to scale. His breath soured to poison. There was no witch and no spell, little one; that is the terrible teaching of it: no one turned Fafnir into a dragon. Greed did it, quietly, from the inside, over years — the way water makes caves. By the end, the man was gone entirely, and on Gnitaheath there lay coiled the great worm of the North, and nothing came near, and nothing needed to, for the dragon and the curse were the same thing now, waiting with the patience of geology for the story to send them someone.
The story took its time, as good stories do, and went to find a family worth the trouble. In the south there ruled a line called the Völsungs, kin of Odin himself, famous for a house built around a living oak — and for what happened at a wedding there. Into the feast of King Völsung's daughter came a stranger: old, one-eyed, wide grey hat, you know him by now. He drew a sword and drove it to the hilt in the oak-tree's trunk, and said the blade belonged to the man who could draw it, and walked out. Every strong hand in the north country tried that tree. It came free, at last, easy as out of water, for the youngest of the house: Sigmund Völsungsson — and the sword was the finest ever seen, and men called it Gram, which means Wrath. I will not tell tonight all that Sigmund suffered and did — betrayals and burnings, exile in wolf-skins, a vengeance long as winter; his life is a whole dark saga of its own. Know only this of him: he lived by that god-given sword until the day, grey-bearded, in the middle of a battle he was winning, the one-eyed stranger stood suddenly in his path and lifted a spear — and Gram broke on it like ice on stone, and Sigmund fell with his luck. For that is Odin's way with the heroes he loves, and no one has ever liked it, and the old poets did not ask you to: he lends greatness, and he calls the loan in early, because he is gathering the brave against the last battle, and he wants them at their brightest. Dying, Sigmund forbade the mending of the sword for himself, and left its two pieces to his wife for the son she carried. Keep the shards, he said. The boy will make a blade of them, and a name the world will not forget while the world lasts.
The boy was Sigurd. He grew up fatherless at a foreign court, bright as a struck spark, and the man appointed to foster and teach him — the smith of that kingdom — was Regin. Yes: that Regin, Fafnir's brother, grown old and thin around his one uncashed grievance. Understand what that means, and the next years explain themselves: the cleverest injured man in the North spent a childhood shaping the strongest innocent one into an arrow, and the target was a dragon. Regin taught him runes and tongues and smith-craft, and told him, evening after evening, of a moor called Gnitaheath, and of gold beyond kings' dreams kept from its rightful heirs — Sigurd's rightful teacher among them — by a mere worm. And when the boy at last said he would go, Regin forged him a sword, and Sigurd tested it on the anvil and it shattered. A second; shattered. Then Sigurd went to his mother and asked for his inheritance, and she gave him the two shards of Gram; and Regin — whatever else we say of Regin, his hands were honest — reforged the god's blade whole. When Sigurd struck the anvil with Gram, the sword split the anvil to its base. And when he laid a wisp of wool on the stream and let the current carry it against the edge, the wool fell apart at the touch, in silence, and the two halves floated on. A blade for the world's weight, and a blade for a hair: there has never been another like it, and it had one more thing the others lacked. It had history. It was his father's death, made useful.
So they rode to Gnitaheath, teacher and pupil, and found the dragon's track running from the hoard-mound down to the water — a trench worn smooth by centuries of one belly going to drink — and Regin advised: dig a pit in the track, crouch in it, and strike up into the soft. Then Regin withdrew to a safe distance, which was his gift. As Sigurd dug, an old man with one eye stopped to watch — he does keep turning up, doesn't he; count tonight how many times — and offered better counsel: dig more pits, boy, channels beside your own, for the blood of a dragon is a scalding river and one pit will be your grave. Sigurd dug them. And then the earth itself began to shake, in slow rhythm, footfall by footfall, and the poison-breath went over the pit like weather, and the sky darkened with the bulk of what was crossing, and Sigurd — sixteen winters old, alone in a hole in the ground under the whole moving mass of the North's oldest fear — waited, and did not shake, and when the soft pale underside slid over him he set Gram's point and thrust upward with both arms, to the hilt, into the dragon's heart.
Fafnir took a long time dying, and what he did with it was talk — and here the saga becomes as strange and cold and wonderful as anything the North ever made. The dragon did not curse or thrash. He asked questions. Who are you? Who is your father? Who sent you? — and the dying voice was almost kind, and the boy and the monster spoke together on the darkening moor like travellers sharing a fire. And Fafnir told him, plainly, as one professional to the next: the gold is cursed. It was my death, as you see; it will be yours; ride away, Sigurd, and leave it, and live. And Sigurd answered with the sentence every Norseman knew by heart, the creed of the whole hard old world: every man dies one day, and until that day, a man wants to be rich. Fafnir said, more or less, so be it — you will find it an expensive kind of rich — and died. And out from behind his safe distance came Regin, rubbing his hands, glowing, and — watch him now — began at once to reprice the work. You have slain my brother, he said (mourning arriving neatly the moment it was useful): heavy is my guilt in it — so roast me the heart, boy, that I may eat it and settle my grief. Everything in that sentence is false, and one thing in it is fatal: the heart of a dragon, eaten, gives wisdom. Regin knew it. The arrow was to hand back the treasure and the wisdom both, and go home a spent shaft. Sigurd, trusting as bread, built the fire and set the heart to roast on a spit.
And the fat hissed, and the boy — checking, the way you check a sausage — touched the heart with his thumb and burned it, and put the thumb in his mouth. One taste. That is all the accident there was: one drop of dragon's heart on the tongue of the wrong brother — and the world changed key. For at once, Sigurd understood the speech of birds; and the moor, which had seemed empty, was full of voices. Nuthatches were talking in the thorn-tree above him, five or six of them, gossiping the way small birds do, and what they were gossiping about was him: There sits the boy roasting wisdom for the man who means to kill him. There sits Regin, wording his brother's price. Fool, to sweat for another's supper. Wiser, sang the third bird — and bird-song can be very matter-of-fact — wiser to eat the heart himself, take the head of the smith, and ride to the gold alone. Sigurd looked across the fire at his teacher then — at the hands that had reforged his father's sword, and the eyes that were already, quietly, measuring his neck — and the saga gives us no long agony over it, because the age did not pause where we would pause. He took up Gram, and Regin's plotting ended where the birds had said the sentence should go. Then Sigurd ate the heart himself, and drank the wisdom the smith had ordered, and rode Grani — his grey stallion, of Sleipnir's own line, a horse an old one-eyed man had once helped him choose; count again — up to the dragon's mound, and loaded the hoard: the helm of terror, the golden mail, the armfuls beyond counting, and on his own finger, bright and light and pleased with itself, the little ring. Andvaranaut, riding a hero at last. The curse had upgraded.
Now the story climbs to its high place, and you must see it: a mountain called Hindarfell, and on its top a ring of fire burning night and day, year on year, a hedge of flame with something sleeping at its centre. Grani took the fire like a hedge at a canter — no other horse alive would have — and inside, Sigurd found a sleeping warrior in full mail, and drew off the helmet, and a woman's long hair fell loose. He cut the armour from her — Gram again, silk-work now — and she woke, and looked at the sun and the sky and the boy, and her first words were a hymn to the daylight, for she had slept a very long time. Her name was Brynhild, and she was — had been — a valkyrie, one of Odin's own choosers of the slain, until the day she disobeyed him: promised the victory to one king, she had given it to the younger, better man. For that, the god of gathered heroes had pricked her with a sleep-thorn and decreed her mortal and married; and her one wrung-out concession had been the fire: I will wake only for a man who can ride it — which is to say, only for a man who does not know how to be afraid. And here he stood. They talked on that mountaintop for a day and a night — she taught him runes and counsel, the deep things valkyries know; the sagas record the lessons like a syllabus, as if the North could not imagine wooing without a curriculum — and they swore to marry one another and no one else under the sun. And Sigurd set on her finger, as the seal of it, a ring. That ring. Of course, that ring; it was the finest he had; the curse always travels first class. Then he rode down the mountain to see the world, meaning to come back — and the world, which was waiting for him with a cup, saw him first.
For south of the mountains lay the rich kingdom of the Gjukungs on the Rhine: old King Gjuki; his sons, chief among them Gunnar, a good king in fair weather; and their mother, Queen Grimhild, who knew herbs and doors and the price of everything. When the dragon-slayer rode into that court with fame before him and a packhorse of legend behind, Grimhild looked at him the way a chess-player looks at an undefended queen — and one evening she gave him welcome in a horn of ale she had dressed herself. The drink of forgetting. He drank it as a guest drinks, trustingly — trust was always the door they came through — and Brynhild went out of him. Not out of the world: out of him — the mountain, the fire, the vows, the day and the night of runes, all of it sank below remembering, the way a stone sinks in a well and the water smooths over. He woke the next morning cheerful, empty, and eligible; and in due course, with everyone smiling, he married the king's daughter — Gudrun, who was kind and true and blameless in every particle of what her mother had done, which is the sort of detail this saga sharpens on purpose: the innocent marry into the curse too, and pay its rates. And when the wedding-gold was weighed, Sigurd, past remembering why one ring in the heap mattered, gave the little ring away — some say to Gudrun then; hold the thought either way, for it is now a loaded weapon lying on the table of the tale, waiting for the act it was forged for.
The house of Gjuki now wanted one thing more. Gunnar the king had heard — everyone had heard — of the matchless woman in the ring of fire, and he would have her to wife. So the brothers-in-law rode north together, bound now by oaths — they had mixed blood in a footprint, Sigurd and Gunnar, sworn brothers to the death; the North could not tie two men tighter, and remember the knot when the strain comes. At the fire, Gunnar set his horse at the flames, and his horse refused. He borrowed Grani; Grani, with the wrong rider, would not go. And so it was done the crooked way, with the last of Grimhild's craft: shape-changing. Sigurd took on Gunnar's face and form, and on Grani rode the fire a second time — and Brynhild, within, rose to meet her promised fearless one, and found a stranger wearing a king's face. He named himself Gunnar Gjukason, come to claim her. And she — bound by her own public oath to wed the man who rode the flame — consented, because honour consented for her; her heart was given already, but her word had been set as the price, and the price appeared to be paid. Three nights the false Gunnar stayed, and each night he laid a drawn sword down the middle of the bed between them — Gram itself, keeping the last faith left in the arrangement, cold steel doing duty for a sleeping conscience. And at parting — here the saga tightens like a knot — the rings were exchanged: and Andvaranaut came back, from her hand or to it, changing hands in the dark between two people, neither of whom knew what they were passing, or from whom, or why it mattered. The curse had finished loading. Brynhild came south and married Gunnar, believing him her flame-rider; Sigurd woke fully into his own face beside Gudrun, remembering nothing amiss; and for a while — the saga gives them the small mercy of a while — two couples lived in one bright hall on the great river, and there was feasting, and children, and the gold of Gnitaheath shone on every arm, and if you listened at night you could almost hear it, in the strong-room, breathing.
It broke over a hairwash. Two queens went down to the Rhine to wash their hair, and Brynhild waded upstream of Gudrun — for my husband, she said, is the greater king. And Gudrun, stung, let fly the truth like a girl slamming a door, without measuring it: your husband never rode the fire — it was Sigurd, my Sigurd, in Gunnar's shape; and if you doubt me — here is your ring. And she held up Andvaranaut, on her own finger, in the sunlight, over the running water. There are moments in the old stories when the world goes silent and you can hear the curse click home like a key; this is the great one. Brynhild looked at the little ring and saw the whole machine at once — the theft of her fate, the drink, the borrowed face, the three cold nights of the sword, her marriage a stage-play and her oath spent on a trick — and she went white, the saga says, as a dead woman, and said nothing at all, and walked up from the river. She lay down then and would not speak, not to Gunnar, not to the sun; and when at last she spoke it was one sentence at a time, each like a stone laid on a scale: You have all betrayed me. I had one honour, and it was spent for you by strangers. And to her husband, the man whose face had been borrowed because his courage could not fill it: I will not live two lives in one hall with Sigurd. He dies, or I go — and everything of mine goes with me. Gunnar was caught then between his queen and his blood-oath, and he found the coward's third way: he could not raise a hand against his sworn brother — so he found a hand that had sworn nothing. The youngest brother, Guttorm, was fed — the old books are exact — on wolf-meat and serpent-flesh and strong words till the pity was cooked out of him, and in the grey of morning he went in, where Sigurd lay asleep beside Gudrun, and put a sword through the greatest heart in the North. Sigurd woke dying, and his last act — count the strength of it — was to take up Gram and throw it at the fleeing killer with such force that it cut the man in two at the door. Then the hero of the age went out like a hall-fire, in his bed, in his sleep's ruin, beside a screaming wife — and through the wall, in her own bed in the same house, Brynhild heard Gudrun's scream — and laughed. One laugh, the saga says, that frightened everyone who heard it. Then her heart broke cleanly, once and for all, and she told Gunnar the whole truth of everything at last, wounding him with it precisely, leaving nothing kind out and nothing false in; and she ordered Sigurd's pyre built wide, and when it burned she gave herself to it — the sword between them once more, she asked, as it had lain honest in the borrowed nights — and so the valkyrie and her fearless one went up in one smoke after all: married at the last, as sworn on the mountain, in the only hall left that could not be tricked.
The gold has more history — trouble always does. It passed to Gunnar, and the curse looked up from its work and followed. In time Gudrun was married away again, poor woman, to Atli, the terrible king of the Huns — Attila himself, wearing the saga's clothes — and Atli, dreaming of the dragon's hoard he had married the widow of, lured Gunnar and his iron brother Hogni east with promises, and took them in his courtyard with all their men. And here, at the very end, the doomed house found its finest hour — for the North loved nothing better than a man magnificent in a trap. Where is the gold? asked Atli. And Gunnar answered: I will tell you — when I see the heart of Hogni my brother cut out; for while he lives, two of us know, and I will not risk his tongue. They brought him first a thrall's heart on a platter, and Gunnar looked once and laughed: that quivering thing was never Hogni's — Hogni's heart would lie still. So they cut out Hogni's heart in earnest — he laughed as they did it, says the poem, and you may believe as much of that as you need to — and it lay on the platter still as a stone. And Gunnar looked at his brother's quiet heart and spoke the victory the whole ambush had been for: Now only I know where the gold lies. And the Rhine shall keep it. Every ounce, king of the Huns, sleeps in the river — we sank it before we rode to you, deep in the current, under the turning water, and you may torture the fish for it. And so the singing king was thrown bound into a pit of serpents, and even there he was not done: hands tied, he played a harp with his toes — the sagas insist on the toes, and after this long together, you and I are not going to doubt them — and the music held the snakes off, coil by coil, sweet and stubborn, until at last one old adder, deaf where the music could not reach, found him out; and so ended the Gjukungs' king, harping. Of Gudrun's revenge on Atli — the fire, the feast, the things a wronged queen of that age did that this age will not say over a nightlight — ask me when you are older, and I may still say ask me when you are older. It is enough for tonight that Atli got no gold, and kept no hall, and history itself will tell you he died in his bed beside a new bride, of nothing anyone could prove: the saga only nods along, and adds quietly that the bride was owed.
And the ring? The ring went into the river with the rest — down with the armfuls and the terror-helm and the mail of gold, down where Gunnar's stubbornness sent it, into the turning dark of the Rhine, where the curse, having eaten a dwarf, a father, a dragon, a smith, the brightest hero of the age, a valkyrie, two kings, and the peace of every house it lodged in, finally arrived where Andvari had priced it from the first: home to the water. It shall be the death of every owner, the dwarf had said, until it comes back to the deep. It is in the deep. No one has ever brought it up — men have dived and dredged and sung about it for a thousand years, and the river keeps its strong-room shut — and so, alone among all the world's great treasures, this one is exactly where it can do no more harm. That is the strange lullaby hidden in the hardest saga of the North, and it is why, of all their stories, this is the one the old ones told longest into the dark: the gold is in the river, little one. The debt is paid to the last hair. The harp has outplayed the snakes, the fire on the mountain is embers, and the two proud sleepers on the pyre are past all tricks and at peace. Somewhere tonight the Rhine is turning over its cold gold in the dark, and the water is telling it, over and over, the only bedtime story a curse ever needs to hear: sleep, sleep, and never come out. Goodnight.