Andvaranaut

The last thing the gods needed was one hair’s width of gold. The otter skin stood on its feet in Hreidmar’s house, stuffed tight and heaped over with red gold until it looked like a statue of treasure. Hreidmar walked round it slowly, looking hard, and found a single whisker poking out of the muzzle. Cover it, he said, or the bargain is broken. Odin reached into his own keeping and brought out a little gold ring, and laid it over the hair.

That ring is Andvaranaut, and nearly everything bad that happens afterwards in the Northern story of Sigurd can be traced back to it. The name means Andvari’s gift, or Andvari’s treasure; Old Norse naut is a word for a precious thing received. Nineteenth and twentieth century translators could not agree on how to put it into English. Rasmus Anderson called it Andvari’s Gift, Henry Adams Bellows called it Andvari’s Gem, and Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris, translating the Volsunga saga, called it Andvari’s loom. It is the same ring in every version, and it never stops being trouble.

The story is told three times in medieval Iceland: in the prose and verse of the Reginsmal in the Codex Regius collection of Eddic poems, in Snorri Sturluson’s Edda, where it explains why poets call gold “otter-ransom”, and in the Volsunga saga, written down around 1270. It begins at a waterfall. Odin, Hoenir and Loki were walking along a river when they saw an otter on the bank eating a salmon with its eyes shut. Loki threw a stone and killed it, and bragged that he had taken an otter and a salmon with one throw. That evening the three gods asked for a night’s lodging at the house of Hreidmar, a man skilled in magic, and proudly showed him the catch. The otter was his son Otr, who spent his days in the river in otter shape. Hreidmar and his other sons, Fafnir and Regin, seized the gods and named the price of their lives: fill the otter’s skin with gold, and then cover the outside of it with red gold as well.

Loki was sent to find the gold. It belonged to a dwarf named Andvari, son of Oin, who lived in the waterfall in the shape of a pike. In the Reginsmal and the saga, Loki borrowed the net of Ran, the sea-goddess who draws down drowning men, and cast it in front of the pike, and the fish ran straight into it. Snorri says more simply that Loki caught him in his hands and places the dwarf in the land of the dark elves. Loki’s opening line in the poem is a riddle: if the fish wants to redeem its head from Hel, it must find him “the water’s flame”, which is gold. Andvari answers with the saddest line in the episode: an evil Norn, long ago, doomed him to wade in water.

He brought out everything he had, and Snorri says it was a very large amount. Then the dwarf closed his hand around one small gold ring. Loki saw the gesture and demanded it. Andvari begged to keep it, because, as Snorri tells it, with that ring he could increase his wealth again. Loki told him he would not keep so much as a penny, and took it. The dwarf went into his rock and cursed what he had lost. In Snorri’s words the ring would be the bane of everyone who possessed it; in the saga the curse falls on the ring and on all the gold together. Snorri adds a detail that is pure Loki. He said he was glad to hear it, and promised to make sure the curse reached the ears of whoever received the ring.

Odin, when he saw it, thought it a fair ring and quietly set it aside, handing the rest of the gold to Hreidmar. So the ring was nearly spared its whole history. Then came the whisker. Odin brought out the ring and covered the hair, and the ransom was paid. Only when Odin had his spear back in his hand and Loki had his shoes, so that they had nothing more to fear, did Loki pass the curse on. In the Reginsmal his parting verse is a gloating one: the gold is given and the price is great, but fortune your sons shall not find there, and it will be the bane of you both. Hreidmar answered that the gifts had not been given kindly, and that he would rule the red gold as long as he lived.

He did not live long. Fafnir and Regin asked for their share of the wergild for their dead brother, and their father refused them a single penny. Fafnir drove a sword through Hreidmar while he slept. The dying man called for his daughters, Lyngheid and Lofnheid, and Lyngheid answered with cold family arithmetic that a sister seldom takes revenge on her brother for a father. Fafnir kept everything, drove Regin away, put on his father’s terrifying helmet, went out to Gnita-heath and lay down on the gold in the shape of a serpent. Regin became a smith at a king’s court and raised the young Sigurd to kill his brother for him.

When Sigurd did it, with the sword Gram, the dying dragon warned him. In the saga Fafnir tells him the same gold will be his bane, and the bane of everyone who owns it. Sigurd took the treasure anyway. The ring now went where no dwarf’s ring should go, into a marriage plot. The two versions disagree here in small ways that matter. In Snorri, Sigurd rides through the ring of fire in the shape of Gunnar, spends the night with Brynhild with his sword laid between them, and in the morning gives her Andvaranaut as a bridal gift, taking another ring from her in return. In the saga, he had already given her a gold ring at an earlier meeting, and on the night in the fire she takes Andvari’s ring off and gives it back to him, and he gives her a different ring out of Fafnir’s hoard.

Either way the ring comes out into daylight at a river. Brynhild and Gudrun, Sigurd’s wife, went down to the water to wash their hair, and Brynhild waded upstream so that no water from Gudrun’s hair would run into hers. The quarrel that followed ended with the ring. In the saga Gudrun tells Brynhild that it was Sigurd, not Gunnar, who rode her fire and took Andvari’s ring from her hand, and holds it up: here you may see it. Brynhild recognised it and went as pale as a dead woman, and spoke no word all evening. In Snorri the ring is on Brynhild’s own finger, and Gudrun points at it and names it, and says she does not think Gunnar got it on Gnita-heath. Brynhild went home silent and began arranging Sigurd’s death.

Sigurd was run through in his sleep by Gunnar’s brother Guthorm, and cut his killer in two with Gram as he died. Brynhild died and burned with him. Gunnar and Hogni took Fafnir’s gold and, in Snorri’s words, the Gift of Andvari, and ruled with them for a while. Before they rode to the court of King Atli they hid Fafnir’s hoard in the Rhine, and Snorri says that gold has never been found since. No source says in so many words whether the ring went into the river with it. The curse did not need it to. Atli killed both brothers, Gudrun killed Atli, and the dying goes on down the generations. A single Eddic stanza, which Bellows thought came from a separate poem, has Andvari foresee the gold bringing death to two brothers and evil to eight heroes.

Andvaranaut is not quite the story Wagner told. The German Nibelungenlied has a hoard, a dragon and a Siegfried, but no Andvari, no otter and no cursed ring, and the introduction to the Victorian English translation of the saga was already pointing out that the whole mythological opening had dropped out of the southern tradition. The otter’s ransom and the dwarf’s curse are purely Norse. It was the Volsunga saga that Richard Wagner drew on, among other texts, for his Ring cycle, first performed in sequence in 1876.

As an object, the ring has exactly two properties. According to Snorri alone, it could multiply wealth, which is why a dwarf who had just surrendered a mountain of gold fought hardest to keep one little band. Nobody in the story ever uses it to make gold. Its other property is the curse, and that one works with total reliability on everyone who holds it, from Hreidmar in his bed to the heroes at Atli’s court. The ring cannot be destroyed in any telling and cannot be given away safely either, since giving it away is exactly how it travels. The only person who ever escaped it was Loki, who handed it on with a smile and went home.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Andvaranaut in Norse mythology?

Andvaranaut is a small gold ring that belonged to the dwarf Andvari, who lived as a pike in a waterfall. Loki took it from him along with the rest of his gold, and Andvari cursed it to be the death of anyone who owned it. The story is told in the Reginsmal, Snorri Sturluson’s Edda and the Volsunga saga.

What does the name Andvaranaut mean?

Andvaranaut means Andvari’s gift or Andvari’s treasure, from Old Norse naut, a precious thing received. Translators have rendered it as Andvari’s Gift, Andvari’s Gem and, in the Magnusson and Morris translation of the Volsunga saga, Andvari’s loom.

What power did Andvaranaut have?

According to Snorri Sturluson, Andvari begged to keep the ring because with it he could increase his wealth again. Its better-known property is the curse Andvari laid on it, which brings death to everyone who possesses it. No one in the surviving stories is shown using the ring to make gold.

Who owned Andvaranaut after Andvari?

Loki took Andvaranaut from Andvari, and Odin used it to cover the last whisker of the otter skin in the ransom paid to Hreidmar. Fafnir killed Hreidmar for the gold, Sigurd killed Fafnir, and Sigurd gave the ring to Brynhild. Gudrun’s revelation of the ring during a quarrel with Brynhild led to Sigurd’s murder.

Is Andvaranaut the ring in Wagner’s Ring cycle?

Andvaranaut is not the same ring as Wagner’s, but the Volsunga saga, which tells its story, was one of Wagner’s sources for Der Ring des Nibelungen, first performed in sequence in 1876. The German Nibelungenlied, by contrast, has no Andvari, no otter’s ransom and no cursed ring.

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Sigurd, Fafnir, Loki, Odin, Ran, Aegir, Norns, Dvergr, Svartálfar, Sigmund, Draupnir, Brísingamen, Gungnir, Dragon