The Norse Myths Read online

  Reginn, left, and Sigurðr reforge Sigmundr’s sword Gramr. A detail from the carved wooden doors of Hylestad church, Norway, c. 1200.

  Fáfnir Becomes a Dragon

  Reginn and Fáfnir were brothers; their third brother Otr used to transform himself into an otter to catch fish. One day the three gods Loki, Óðinn and Hœnir came upon him and Loki threw a stone at Otr, killing him. The gods took the otter-skin and unwittingly showed it to Hreiðmarr, Otr’s father, who promptly demanded recompense for his son. The gods obtained gold by capturing the dwarf Andvari and taking all he had, right down to a ring on which the furious dwarf laid a curse. And no sooner had Hreiðmarr accepted the treasure than his sons demanded a share, and Fáfnir killed his father for it. The curse was clearly working. Fáfnir then turned into a dragon and lay on the treasure-hoard, while Reginn plotted to get the gold for himself.

  Sigurðr kills Fáfnir the dragon. A detail from the carved wooden doors of Hylestad church, Norway, c. 1200.

  Reginn leads Sigurðr up to the heath where the great serpent lies on his heap of gold. Reginn advises the hero to dig a pit, lie in it, and stab the dragon to the heart as he crawls down to the river to drink, then he retreats out of harm’s way. As Sigurðr sets to digging, a bearded old man appears and advises him to dig several pits so that the dragon’s poisonous blood will run harmlessly away. Then he vanishes. This is the last that Sigurðr will see of his family’s patron; indeed it is Óðinn’s last appearance in this legendary cycle until the concluding deaths of Hamðir and Sörli, as we shall see. Sigurðr’s combat with Fáfnir is disappointingly undramatic; the pit-ambush is successful and the dying dragon exchanges prophecies (‘my brother will be the death of you, as he has been of me’) and wisdom with the young hero. Reginn emerges from his hiding-place and orders Sigurðr to roast the dragon’s heart over a fire while he takes a nap. Sigurðr does as he’s told; he prods the heart to see if it’s done and burns his finger. When he sucks it to ease the pain, he finds that he can now understand the language of birds. A flock of nuthatches perched nearby warn him, as had Fáfnir, that Reginn plans to kill him for the gold. Sigurðr forestalls this by cutting off Reginn’s head, loading Grani with the treasure and setting off for his next adventure: the encounter with the sleeping valkyrie on the mountain Hindarfjall.

  The Ramsund stone, Sweden, c. 1030. The rune-band forms the body of the dragon, pierced from below by Sigurðr. Within the loop, from left to right, the dead Reginn, Sigurðr tasting the dragon’s blood, Grani the horse and the talkative birds, perched on the tree.

  Sigurðr on Picture-Stones

  Sigurðr’s adventures are frequently illustrated on Viking-Age stone monuments. The best-known version is on the Swedish Ramsund stone, which shows the story from the killing of Otr, via the killing of the dragon (the rune-band through which Sigurðr is sticking his sword) to the cooking of the heart, the birds’ warning and the killing of Reginn. There are other Swedish runestones with similar carvings, in varying states of repair. Images of Sigurðr sticking his thumb in his mouth are also quite common in British stone sculptures; there are images from Ripon and Kirby Hall in Yorkshire. On the Isle of Man there are a number of Sigurðr-related scenes carved on stone crosses. There’s a particularly good image on the stone labelled as Andreas 121, showing Sigurðr roasting Fáfnir’s heart (neatly sliced into rings) and putting his finger in his mouth. The horse Grani is looking over his shoulder, ear cocked to listen to the birds. Elsewhere in Man we see Sigurðr stabbing the dragon; another stone shows both Loki shying the stone at Otr and Grani with the gold on his back.

  Sigurðr roasts slices of Fáfnir’s heart over the fire, while Grani looks over his shoulder. Detail from a Viking-Age stone cross, Andreas 121, Isle of Man.

  Tolkien’s Dragon

  Smaug, J. R. R. Tolkien’s dragon in The Hobbit, gets his name from an Old Norse word meaning ‘crept’. He is based on Beowulf’s dragon, a flying fire-breathing monster, but unlike the Old English dragon, and much more like Fáfnir, Smaug can talk. He has a long conversation with Bilbo the hobbit, who distracts him with a riddling conversation while he spies out the dragon’s vulnerable spot, a place in his armpit where his scales have worn thin. This knowledge, imparted to Bard the Bowman by a friendly thrush, allows him to shoot the dragon down out of the skies. Bard is one of the Men of Dale, all of whom, like Sigurðr, understand the language of birds.

  In the Old English poem Beowulf, which is much earlier than the saga and probably earlier than the eddic poems on which it’s based, the dragon-fight is ascribed to Sigmundr, not his son, and it’s a far more daring combat. Beowulf too participates in an epic struggle against a treasure-loving dragon who lurks in a barrow in his kingdom. Provoked by the theft of a single golden goblet, this dragon has wreaked fiery destruction over the land. Beowulf, aided by his young kinsman Wiglaf, kills the beast, saves his people and wins the hoard, but at the cost of his own life. Beowulf’s dragon is a winged fire-drake and inherently more difficult to deal with than the crawling serpent Fáfnir; it must be trapped in its barrow and fought at close quarters, despite its fiery breath. The other great dragon-slayer of the north, Ragnarr Shaggy-breeches, whose tale is told in Chapter 5, uses cunning to overcome his monster and lives to tell the tale.

  SIGURÐR AND THE VALKYRIE

  Guided by his bird friends, and having eaten more of Fáfnir’s heart, Sigurðr makes his way to Hindarfjall. There, surrounded by a shield-wall, sleeping in her mailshirt, lies a valkyrie. She had disobeyed Óðinn by giving victory to a handsome young prince instead of his elderly opponent and had been punished: Óðinn had pricked her with a sleep-thorn and decreed that she must marry. The young hero awakens the woman, who greets him warmly, offers him a ‘memory-drink’ and imparts magical and social wisdom to him. Here the Norse traditions become complicated. Eddic poems name the valkyrie as Sigrdrífa (Victory-procurer) and her counsels mark the point after which a whole section of the manuscript is missing. When the collection resumes, Sigurðr is already at the court of the Gjúkungs and enmeshed in the interlocking love-triangles set up by his brothers-in-law’s deception. In the Saga of the Völsungs, the valkyrie is named as Brynhildr; here she assumes the role of Sigrdrífa, whose function may simply have been to give vital advice to the hero.

  Statue of Sigurðr (Siegfried) and Grani from the Siegfried fountain, Berlin, sculpted by Emil Cauer the Younger (1911).

  Brynhildr clearly must have a valkyrie/shield-maiden element in her history, for in the saga, Sigurðr betrothes himself to her there on the mountain and rides on. Now, at least in the saga, the young man leaves the heroic–epic world behind and enters the sphere of courtly romance; a domain as rife with double-dealing as any of the king’s halls from earlier in the cycle. Although he has pre-emptively killed his foster-father, Sigurðr is ill-equipped to deal with the kinds of politicking that he will now encounter.

  Sigurðr comes to the court of the Gjúkungs at Worms on the Rhine. Here the brothers Gunnarr and Högni make him welcome and their mother Grímhildr plots to unite him to their family by marrying him to her daughter Guðrún. Guðrún herself quickly falls in love with the handsome newcomer; Grímhildr gives Sigurðr a magical ‘drink of forgetting’, and he is soon betrothed to Guðrún, oblivious to his previous vows. Now Gunnarr decides to seek a bride for himself and has heard tell of the shield-maiden Brynhildr, dwelling in her hall surrounded by a flame-wall. She has sworn to marry only the man who can pass through the flames. The young men set out together, but Gunnarr’s horse baulks at the fiery barrier. Only Grani has the mettle to gallop through the inferno. Aided by Grímhildr’s magic, Gunnarr and Sigurðr exchange appearances and, in Gunnarr’s guise, Sigurðr crosses the flame-wall and spends three nights with Brynhildr, laying his sword between them to ensure chastity. Deeply unhappy, Brynhildr suspects that something is radically amiss: surely only Sigurðr, her betrothed, could pass the flames? And yet here, apparently, is Gunnarr, claiming her as his bride.

  A Modern Reima
gining of the Völsung Legend

  The author Melvin Burgess has written two young adult novels based on the Völsung legend. These are set in a cyberpunk future England where genetic engineering is rife and rival ganglords tussle for control over London. The first, Bloodtide (1999), is based on the story of Sigmundr and Signý, while the second, Bloodsong (2005), follows Sigurðr’s fate: his quest to rescue Bryony, the equivalent of Brynhildr, from the underground city where she is held captive and the double-dealing on the part of his friends Gunar and Hogni. Burgess draws his imagery from computer games, films and comic-books to create his extraordinary vision. Both novels vividly reimagine the legends in ways which engage with teenagers’ struggles to find their identities and to discover what they truly believe in.

  A double wedding is celebrated, during which the ‘drink of forgetting’ wears off for Sigurðr; he recalls his vows but decides to remain silent. Brynhildr is both astonished and miserable at his perfidy. When Guðrún and Brynhildr quarrel about precedence as they are washing at the river, Guðrún reveals the deception practised on her sister-in-law. Brynhildr shuts herself up in her quarters, plotting her vengeance. Neither Gunnarr nor Högni, nor yet a repentant Sigurðr, who offers to abandon Guðrún and marry her, can assuage Brynhildr’s fury.

  I shall have Sigurðr – or else he’ll die—

  that young man I’ll have in my arms.

  The words I’m speaking now I’ll be sorry for later,

  Guðrún is his wife, and I am Gunnarr’s;

  the hateful norns decreed this long torment for us. […]

  I go without both happiness and husband,

  I’ll pleasure myself with my savage thoughts.

  SHORT POEM ABOUT SIGURÐR, VV. 6, 7, 9

  Other complications are revealed in the eddic poems, once the sequence resumes after the missing leaves. Brynhildr has been bullied into marrying by her brother Atli, who has threatened to withhold her share of the parental inheritance if she refuses to wed. Reluctant to surrender her freedom, Brynhildr had herself devised the flame-wall test and sworn an oath to marry only the man who could cross it, an oath she has now been deceived into breaking. Brynhildr suggests to Gunnarr that Sigurðr was her ‘first man’, a claim that makes sense in terms of the earlier betrothal (and indeed in one tradition the pair have a daughter, see Chapter 5). Gunnarr construes this claim as Sigurðr having lied about the chaste nights he and Brynhildr spent together after the crossing of the flame-wall. Gunnarr does not want to lose Brynhildr nor her treasure, but she will not reconcile herself to him. His brother Högni heartily wishes that none of them had ever set eyes on Brynhildr. And Brynhildr herself wants Sigurðr dead.

  Brünnhilde rides Grani into the flames at the end of Götterdämmerung. Arthur Rackham (1911).

  The domestic strife soon reaches crisis point; Gunnarr and Högni have sworn such strong oaths to Sigurðr that they fear to break them so they feed a potent magical brew to their youngest brother Guttormr, who had not sworn the oath, and Sigurðr is murdered. Different eddic poems suggest different locations for this; one says that the hero dies on the way to the Assembly, his death revealed by a riderless Grani who gallops home to Guðrún. Or he is killed in the forest, out hunting, as in the Middle High German Nibelungenlied. In the weightiest Old Norse tradition, Guttormr slays him as he lies in bed with Guðrún; she awakens to find herself bathed in her husband’s blood. Guðrún is so traumatized that at first she cannot even weep, until her sister displays her husband’s corpse to her. Brynhildr’s rage remains unappeased; she curses the woman who has saved Guðrún’s sanity. Guðrún seeks refuge in Denmark, away from the tumultuous aftermath of Sigurðr’s death. Vengeance seems out of the question, for to kill her brothers for plotting her husband’s death would decimate her kindred and bring little satisfaction – and who is left to carry out that killing?

  Wagner’s Brünnhilde and Siegfried

  Wagner’s Brünnhilde is awakened by the hero Siegfried in Act III of the third opera of the cycle, Siegfried, and the two look set for happiness together. But at the beginning of the final opera, Götterdämmerung (The Twilight of the Gods), Siegfried longs for further adventure and leaves his beloved, sailing off down the Rhine into the clutches of Gunther, Hagen (son of the Nibelung Alberich and Gunther’s half-brother) and their sister Gutrune. The intrigue plays out as in the saga, with a ‘drink of forgetting’, an exchange of appearances, the deception of Brünnhilde and her reluctant marriage to Gunther. When Brünnhilde realizes what has happened, she reveals the secret of how Siegfried may be killed to Hagen, and Siegfried is murdered while they are hunting in the forest. Brünnhilde’s decision to die on her beloved’s funeral pyre precipitates the end of the gods’ rule, but the cursed ring, which had passed from Siegfried to Brünnhilde and back to Siegfried again, is finally returned by Brünnhilde to the Rhine-maidens from whom it was first stolen.

  Brynhildr soon realizes that by causing Sigurðr’s death she has left herself nothing to live for. She mounts his funeral pyre and prepares to die, delivering a long prophecy about the bleak future of the Gjúkungs. And so ends the Völsung line – for Sigurðr and Guðrún’s little son Sigmundr was murdered along with his father. Brynhildr dies spectacularly. An eddic poem, Helreið Brynhildar (Brynhildr’s Ride to Hel), shows her journeying after death to find Sigurðr. She passes the home of a giantess who reproaches her, ‘It would befit you better to be at your weaving / than to be going to visit another woman’s man’. Brynhildr, calling the giantess ‘you very stupid woman’, launches into self-vindication: ‘the heirs of Gjúki made me love-bereft /and made me an oath-breaker’. And on she goes to her reunion with her beloved Sigurðr, never to be parted from him again.

  GUÐRÚN AND ATLI

  Brynhildr cannot forgive the bad faith of the Gjúkungs and her unwitting former lover, and exits the legend in a glorious blaze. Poor Guðrún, whose betrayal of her husband’s secret has unleashed catastrophe, must find a way to continue. Despite the dire warnings that Brynhildr uttered in her final monologue, Guðrún’s family are soon plotting to bring her home and marry her off again. Her new husband is Atli (Attila the Hun), Brynhildr’s brother, who resents the family’s treatment of his sister. The Gjúkungs owe him a woman, and Guðrún is sent to marry him. Again, traditions vary. In one poem they are said to have got on well at first, ‘they lovingly / would embrace one another in front of the nobles’; in another they exchange recriminations about who behaved worse to whom, in a horrible display of marital wrangling. Atli and Guðrún have two sons, but the Huns’ leader has his mind on seizing the treasure that belonged to his wife’s former husband, now in the hands of her brothers.

  Gunnarr in the snake-pit. A detail from the carved wooden doors of Hylestad church, Norway, c. 1200.

  A friendly invitation to Gunnarr and Högni to visit (despite Guðrún’s warnings that treachery underlies it) is accepted. In one poem, the brothers suspect that Atli means them no good, but regard it as cowardly to refuse to go; in another the messenger reveals the plot only when they are almost at Atli’s farmhouse. The brothers fight desperately and are captured. Gunnarr refuses to reveal the whereabouts of the treasure unless he sees Högni’s heart cut out from his body. After an attempt to substitute a slave’s heart, Högni is killed: ‘Then Högni laughed as they cut to his heart, / that living smith of scars, he never thought to cry out’. Gunnarr now knows that the secret will perish with him; he is cast into a snake-pit where, though he plays his harp to calm the serpents, one finally strikes him to the heart and he dies.

  Meanwhile at home, Guðrún has taken terrible vengeance on her husband. When he returns from the snake-pit she welcomes him, offers him a drink, and provides snacks for him, and all the other Huns, to go with their ale. Only then does she reveal what they are eating:

  Your own sons’ – sharer-out of swords –

  hearts, corpse-bloody, you are chewing up with honey;

  you are filling your stomach, proud lord, with dead human flesh, />
  eating it as ale-appetisers and sending it to the high seat.

  POEM OF ATLI, V. 35

  Guðrún has butchered their children and Atli has eaten them. In this poem she brings events to a speedy close, stabbing her drunken husband in bed, setting fire to the hall and going down to the seashore where she intends to drown herself. But the waves bear her away to the land of King Jónakr, where a third marriage awaits her.

  In the other poem relating these events, Guðrún jests as she calls the boys to her, ‘I’ve long wanted to cure you of old age’. The boys calmly accept their fate, warning, ‘brief will be your respite from rage / when you find out what results’. Guðrún’s murder of her children, her forcing their father to take back into himself the sons who are flesh of his flesh, is a remarkably vivid sign of her rejection of the lineage into which she has been incorporated. The later parts of the Völsung–Gjúkung cycle develop the theme of the mistreatment of women, as mere objects of exchange between kin-groups, creatures whose feelings need be little regarded in the quest for political advantage through the forging of alliances.