Sigurd

The sword came out of the rye first. A young man walking through a full-grown field, the crop standing high around him, and the metal tip of his scabbard brushing the topmost ears as he went. That is how the saga takes Sigurd’s measure. Not by his speeches, not by his titles, but by the length of blade a man could hang at his hip and still walk upright through standing grain.

He was born after his father was already dead. Sigmund of the Völsungs, whose line ran back to Odin, fell in a battle he should have won, because a one-eyed stranger in a blue cloak walked into the fighting and held out a spear, and Sigmund’s sword shattered against it. Dying, he refused to have the wound bound. He told his wife Hjördís to keep the broken pieces. A better man than he was would carry them, and the shards would make a blade called Gram.

So the boy grew up at the Danish court of Hjálprek, fostered by a smith named Regin who had reasons of his own for wanting a hero in the house. Regin’s family had come apart over money. His brother Ótr, who liked to take an otter’s shape and fish, had been killed by Loki, and Loki paid the weregild in gold squeezed out of a dwarf named Andvari, down to a last ring the dwarf tried to keep back. Andvari cursed it as it left his hand. The gold would be the death of whoever held it. Then Regin’s father was murdered for that gold by Regin’s other brother, Fáfnir, who took the hoard onto the heath at Gnitaheiðr, put on a helm of terror and lay down over it in the shape of a serpent, and stayed there.

Regin told the story well, and left out only his own appetite.

He forged the shards twice and Sigurd broke the sword twice against the anvil. The third blade held. Sigurd struck the anvil and split it down to the stock, then went to the river and let a tuft of wool drift on the current against the edge, and the water carried the wool onto the blade and the blade cut it in two. He chose a horse the same way an old man he met on the road advised him to, driving the herd into the water and taking the one that would not turn back. That was Grani, of Sleipnir’s stock. The old man had one eye. Sigurd did not ask.

There was a killing to do before the dragon. He hunted down the sons of Hunding and paid his father’s debt in blood, and only then rode out to the heath, where the ground was scored with a track worn smooth by a body dragging itself to water and back for years. On advice from the same one-eyed stranger, he dug a pit in that track and lay down in it in the dark. The weight came over him, the earth shook, venom ran down into the trench, and he drove Gram up to the hilt into the soft underside as it passed. Fáfnir thrashed, and then talked. Dying, the dragon told him who he was and named the curse on the gold, and said plainly that it would kill him too. Sigurd took it anyway.

Regin came out of hiding, cut the heart from his brother, drank the blood, and asked Sigurd to roast the heart for him. Sigurd knelt at the fire and pressed the meat with his finger to see if it was done, and the juice scalded him, and he put the burned thumb in his mouth. Fat, salt, char. The moment it touched his tongue the nuthatches in the branches overhead stopped being birds and became voices, and the voices were discussing how soon Regin intended to kill him. He beheaded Regin, ate his share of the heart, loaded the hoard onto Grani and rode away with a horse carrying more gold than a horse should be able to carry.

Then came the fire on Hindarfjall, a wall of flame on a high ridge with something sleeping inside it. He rode through and found a figure in mail so long-worn it had grown to the skin, and cut it away with Gram, and a valkyrie woke who had been put to sleep by Odin for giving victory to the wrong king. She taught him runes: runes for ale, for childbirth, for the sea, for speech. They swore themselves to each other. In the sources her name shifts between Sigrdrífa and Brynhild, and the saga treats them as one woman.

Everything after that is the curse working. At the hall of the Gjúkungs, Queen Grímhild gave him a drink that took the memory of Brynhild out of him, and he married the king’s daughter Gudrún, and then, in Gunnar’s shape, rode a second time through the fire to win Brynhild for his brother-in-law, laying the naked Gram in the bed between them for three nights. The deceit held until two queens quarrelled over precedence while washing their hair in the Rhine, and Gudrún produced a ring as proof of who had actually crossed the flames. Brynhild, who had been traded like a herd animal by the only man she had wanted, went cold and quiet and asked for a killing.

Gunnar and Högni had sworn oaths to Sigurd. Their younger brother Guttorm had not. He was worked on with wolf-meat and serpent-flesh and promises, and went into the bedchamber at dawn and put a sword through Sigurd where he slept. Sigurd woke long enough to throw Gram after him as he ran, and the blade took Guttorm in half at the doorway. Then he spoke to Gudrún, and died. Brynhild laughed once in the hall, told Gunnar she had lied about Sigurd’s honour, and had herself burned on his pyre.

His powers were the ordinary heroic ones raised past ordinary limits: strength, nerve, a sword nothing turned, a horse nothing tired, and the birds. What he did not have was any protection against people. No source gives him an invulnerable hide in the Norse telling, no charm against betrayal, no second sight for anything except what the nuthatches happened to say out loud. The blood on his tongue told him about one plot and not the next. Stone-carvers in Sweden and wood-carvers in Norway went on cutting the same four moments into rock and church doorways for centuries after: the pit, the thumb, the birds, the horse under its load of gold.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Sigurd in Norse mythology?

Sigurd was the greatest hero of the Völsung family, a line descended from Odin, and he is best known as the man who killed the dragon Fáfnir. He was the posthumous son of Sigmund and Hjördís, raised at a Danish court and fostered by the smith Regin. His story is told in the Völsunga saga, in several poems of the Poetic Edda, and in Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda.

How did Sigurd kill the dragon Fafnir?

Sigurd dug a pit in the track that Fáfnir wore into the ground crawling to water, hid inside it, and stabbed upward into the dragon’s soft underside with his sword Gram as it passed over him. The kill was a matter of position rather than strength. Fáfnir lived long enough to speak with Sigurd and warn him that the gold he had been guarding was cursed.

Why could Sigurd understand the language of birds?

Sigurd gained the ability by accident while roasting Fáfnir’s heart for Regin. He touched the meat to test whether it was cooked, burned his thumb, and put it in his mouth, swallowing a little of the dragon’s blood. Immediately he understood the nuthatches overhead, who were saying that Regin planned to kill him for the treasure.

Who killed Sigurd and why?

Sigurd was killed by Guttorm, the youngest of the Gjúkung brothers, who stabbed him while he slept. Brynhild engineered the murder after discovering that Sigurd had used a shape-change to win her for Gunnar while himself married to Gudrún. Gunnar and Högni had sworn oaths to Sigurd and could not strike him, so they used the one brother who had sworn nothing.

Is Sigurd the same as Siegfried?

They are the same legendary figure in two traditions. Sigurðr is the Norse form, preserved in Icelandic manuscripts, while Siegfried is the continental German form found in the Nibelungenlied. The stories overlap in outline, a dragon killed, a cursed hoard, a betrayed marriage, a murder, but they differ in many details, including where and how the hero dies.

Related Entries

Fafnir, Sigmund, Odin, Valkyrie, Norns, Sleipnir, Níðhöggr, Jörmungandr, Dwarf, Dragon, Lindworm, Beowulf, Saint George