The Saga of the Volsungs: The Norse Epic of Sigurd the Dragon Slayer (Penguin Classics) Read online

  THE SAGA OF THE VOLSUNGS

  Written by an unknown author in thirteenth-century Iceland, The Saga of the Volsungs is the greatest of the mythic-legendary tales of early Scandinavia. A prose work with epic sweep that tells the extraordinary story of Sigurd the dragon slayer, the saga is based on ancient cycles of heroic poetry carried to Iceland by Norse seamen during the Viking Age.

  The saga, whose roots reach deep into the oral culture of the ancient North, recounts the loving and warring of tribal kings and great heroes. Attila the Hun, Valkyries (warrior women of power and anger), and the war god Odin all play major roles. Woven into the medieval narrative is invaluable information concerning early beliefs, including the magical treasure of the Rhine, stories of giants, gods, and creatures. The tale of the hero Sigurd and his family the Volsungs was hugely popular in the Viking world, and the Icelandic saga is related to the medieval German poem the Nibelungenlied. Richard Wagner based much of his Ring of the Nibelung on The Saga of the Volsungs. The Introduction to this edition will open up the world of the sagas to the expert and non-expert alike.

  JESSE L. BYOCK is Professor of Old Norse and Medieval Scandinavian at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a member of the UCLA’s Cotsen Institute of Archaeology. He has published numerous articles and books on Iceland and the sagas, including Medieval Iceland: Society, Sagas and Power, Feud in the Icelandic Saga, Viking Age Iceland (Penguin, 2001) and a translation of The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki, also published in Penguin Classics. Professor Byock received his Ph.D. from Harvard University after studying in Iceland, Sweden and France. A specialist in North Atlantic and Viking studies, his work has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

  THE SAGA OF THE VOLSUNGS

  The Norse Epic of Sigurd the Dragon Slayer

  Translated with an Introduction, Notes and Glossary by

  JESSE L. BYOCK

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  This edition first published in the USA by the University of California Press 1990

  First published in Great Britain in Penguin Classics 1999

  17

  Copyright © the Regents of the University of California, 1990

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the translator has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-192155-6

  To my daughter Ashley and the fun we had telling the Sigurd story on a trout fishing trip

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Representations of the Volsung Story in Norse Art

  Myths, Heroes, and Social Realities

  History and Legend: Burgundians, Huns, Goths, and Sigurd the Dragon Slayer

  Richard Wagner and the Saga of the Volsungs

  NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION

  THE SAGA OF THE VOLSUNGS

  1. Odin Guides Sigi from the Otherworld*

  2. The Birth of Volsung

  3. Sigmund Draws the Sword from Barnstock*

  4. Siggeir Plots Revenge*

  5. The Fall of Volsung

  6. Signy Plots Revenge*

  7. Signy Gives Birth to Sinfjotli

  8. Sigmund and Sinfjotli Don the Skins

  9. Helgi Marries Sigrun

  10. Concerning the Volsungs

  11. Sigmund Marries Hjordis*

  12. Hjordis Remarries*

  13. The Birth of Sigurd

  14. The Otter’s Ransom*

  15. Regin Fashions Gram

  16. Gripir Foretells Sigurd’s Future*

  17. Sigurd Kills Lyngvi and Hjorvard and All the Others

  18. Regin and Sigurd Go Riding

  19. Regin Drinks Fafnir’s Blood

  20. Sigurd Eats the Serpent’s Heart

  21. Concerning Sigurd

  22. Brynhild’s Wise Counsel

  23. Concerning Sigurd’s Appearance

  24. Sigurd Comes to Heimir

  25. The Conversation between Sigurd and Brynhild

  26. Concerning King Gjuki and His Sons

  27. Brynhild Interprets Gudrun’s Dream

  28. The Ale of Forgetfulness Is Blended for Sigurd

  29. Sigurd Rides through the Wavering Flames of Brynhild, the Daughter of Budli

  30. Dispute of the Queens, Brynhild and Gudrun

  31. Brynhild’s Grief Only Increases

  32. The Betrayal of Sigurd

  33. Brynhild’s Request

  34. The Disappearance of Gudrun

  35. Gudrun Carves Runes

  36. Hogni Interprets His Wife’s Dream

  37. The Brothers’ Journey from Home

  38. The Battle in the Fortress and the Victory

  39. Hogni Is Captured

  40. The Conversation between Atli and Gudrun

  41. Concerning Gudrun

  42. Svanhild Is Married and Trampled to Death under the Hooves of Horses

  43. Gudrun Urges Her Sons to Avenge Svanhild

  44. Concerning the Sons of Gudrun. The Final Chapter

  NOTES

  EDDIC POEMS USED BY THE SAGA AUTHOR

  GLOSSARY

  MAPS

  1. The world of the Vikings (ca. 1000)

  2. Migrations of the tribes central to The Saga of the Volsungs up to the death of Attila the Hun

  INTRODUCTION

  The unknown Icelandic author who wrote The Saga of the Volsungs in the thirteenth century based his prose epic on stories found in far older Norse poetry. His sources, which may have included a lost earlier prose saga, were rich in traditional lore. The Saga of the Volsungs recounts runic knowledge, princely jealousies, betrayals, unrequited love, the vengeance of a barbarian queen, greedy schemes of Attila the Hun, and the mythic deeds of the dragon slayer, Sigurd the Volsung. It describes events from the ancient wars among the kings of the Burgundians, Huns, and Goths, treating some of the same legends as the Middle High German epic poem, the Nibelungenlied. In both accounts, though in different ways, Sigurd (Siegfried in the German tradition) acquires the Rhinegold and then becomes tragically entangled in a love triangle involving a supernatural woman. In the Norse tradition she is a valkyrie, one of Odin’s warrior-maidens.

  In Scandinavia, during the centuries after the Middle Ages, knowledge of the Sigurd story never died out among the rural population. Full
of supernatural elements, including the schemes of one-eyed Odin, a ring of power, and the sword that was reforged, the tale was kept alive in oral tradition. In the nineteenth century, as the Volsung story was discovered by the growing urban readership, it became widely known throughout Europe. Translated into many languages, it became a primary source for writers of fantasy, and for those interested in oral legends of historical events and the mythic past of northern Europe. The saga deeply influenced William Morris in the nineteenth century and J. R. R. Tolkien in the twentieth. Richard Wagner, in particular, drew heavily upon the Norse Volsung material in composing the Ring cycle. In 1851 he wrote to a friend concerning the saga:

  Already in Dresden I had all imaginable trouble buying a book that no longer was to be found in any of the book shops. At last I found it in the Royal Library. It… is called the Völsunga saga—translated from Old Norse by H. von der Hagen [1815].… This book I now need for repeated perusal.… I want to have the saga again; not in order to imitate it…, rather, to recall once again exactly every element that I already previously had conceived from its particular features. [Wagner’s use of the Volsung material is discussed later in this Introduction.]

  One can only speculate about the origin of the saga’s dragon slaying and of other mythic events described in the tale. Many of the saga’s historical episodes, however, may be traced to actual events that took place in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., the period of great folk migrations in Europe. In this time of upheaval, the northern frontier defenses of the Roman Empire collapsed under the pressure of barbarian peoples, as Germanic tribes from northern and central Europe and Hunnish horsemen from Asia invaded what is now France and Germany. A seemingly endless series of skirmishes and wars were fought as tribes attempted to subjugate their enemies and to consolidate newly won territories into kingdoms and empires.

  The memory of the migrations became part of the oral heritage of the tribesmen, as epic poems about heroes and their feats spread throughout the continent during succeeding centuries. In the far north legends and songs about Burgundians, Huns, and Goths, as well as new or revised stories about indigenous northern families such as the Volsungs, became an integral part of the cultural lore of Scandinavian societies. The old tales had not died out by the Viking Age (ca. 800–1070), that is, several centuries after the migration period had ended. On the contrary, during this new age of movement in Scandinavia the epic cycles of the earlier migration period seem to have gained in popularity. As Norsemen sailed out from Viking Scandinavia in search of plunder, trade, and land, they carried with them tales of Sigurd and the Volsungs.

  One of the places to which the Norsemen carried these epic lays was Iceland, an island discovered by Viking seamen in the ninth century, which soon after its settlement (ca. 870–930) became the major Norse outpost in the North Atlantic. In Iceland, as in the Norse homelands and other overseas settlements, the traditions about Sigurd and the various tribesmen—among them Huns, Goths, and Burgundians—became choice subjects for native poets.

  The Saga of the Volsungs was written down sometime between 1200 and 1270. Its prose story is based to a large degree on traditional Norse verse called Eddic poetry, a form of mythic or heroic lay which developed before the year 1000 in the common oral folk culture of Old Scandinavia. Eighteen of the Eddic poems in the thirteenth-century Codex Regius, the most important manuscript of the Poetic (or Elder) Edda, treat aspects of the Volsung legend. (The specific extant poems on which the saga author relied are listed at the end of the book.) This manuscript, which is the only source for many of the Eddic poems, is, however, incomplete. An eight-page lacuna occurs in the middle of the Sigurd cycle, and the stories contained in The Saga of the Volsungs, chapters 24–31, are the principal source of information on the narrative contents of these lost pages.

  So popular was the subject matter of the saga in the period of oral transmission that, if we are to believe later Icelandic written sources, some of the stories traveled as far as Norse Greenland. Someone in this settlement, founded in 985 by Icelanders led by Erik the Red, may have composed the Eddic poem about Attila (Atli) the Hun called “The Greenlandic Lay of Atli.” This poem of heroic tragedy and revenge was later written down and preserved in Iceland.

  Written Icelandic material builds on a long oral tradition. By the tenth century the Icelanders had already become renowned as storytellers throughout the northern lands, and Icelandic poets, called skalds, earned their keep in the royal courts of Scandinavia and Anglo-Saxon England. We may assume that, along with many other stories, they told the Sigurd cycle just as German poets told the story of Siegfried. It is noteworthy that about the year 1200, the Nibelungenlied, with its poetic version of the Siegfried story, was written, probably in Austria. At approximately the same time or within seven decades, The Saga of the Volsungs was compiled in Iceland with far fewer chivalric elements than its German counterpart.

  It is not by chance that in Scandinavia so much of the narrative material about the Volsungs was preserved in Iceland. This immigrant society on the fringe of European civilization, like frontier societies in other times and places, preserved old lore as a treasured link with distant homelands. Fortunately for posterity, writing became popular among the Icelanders in the thirteenth century, when interest in old tales was still strong. Almost all the Old Norse narrative material that has survived—whether myth, legend, saga, history, or poetry—is found in Icelandic manuscripts, which form the largest existing vernacular literature of the medieval West. Among the wealth of written material is Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, a thirteenth-century Icelandic treatise on the art of skaldic poetry and a handbook of mythological lore. The second section of Snorri’s three-part prose work contains a short and highly readable summary of the Sigurd cycle which, like the much longer prose rendering of the cycle in The Saga of the Volsungs, is based on traditional Eddic poems. Although Snorri and the unknown author of The Saga of the Volsungs were treating the same material, there is no indication that the latter was familiar with Snorri’s Prose Edda.

  In the Middle Ages, when most narrative traditions were kept alive in verse, the Icelanders created the saga, a prose narrative form unique in Western medieval culture. Why the Icelanders became so interested in prose is not known, but it is clear that they cultivated their saga form, developing it into a suitable vehicle for long tales of epic quality, one of which is The Saga of the Volsungs. At times it seems as if its anonymous author was consciously trying to make history from the mythic and legendary material of his sources. It is also possible that he was drawing upon an earlier prose saga about the Volsungs. He may have been influenced by The Saga of Thidrek of Berne, a mid-thirteenth-century Norwegian translation of tales from north and west Germany about King Theoderic the Ostrogoth, a heroic figure from the migration period later called Dietrich of Berne. This saga is a rambling collection of stories about the king, his champions, their ancestors, and several renowned semimythic heroes, including Sigurd.

  Along with tales of Sigurd and those of historical peoples and events, The Saga of the Volsungs recounts eerie stories whose roots reach back into European prehistory. When Sigurd’s father Sigmund is driven from society by his enemy the king of Gautland (in southwestern Sweden), Sigmund finds a companion in his son Sinfjotli. Away from other humans, the two live in an underground dwelling, clothe themselves in wolfskins, and howl like wolves. They roam the forest as beasts of prey, killing any men they come upon. This section of the tale may be interpreted in light of traditions concerning some of Odin’s warriors who, according to Snorri Sturluson, behaved like wolves. The description of Sigurd’s kinsmen living like werewolves may also shed light on the “wolf-warriors.” Helmets and sword scabbards decorated with these strange figures, perhaps werewolves or berserkers, date from the sixth through the eighth century and have been found widely in northern and central Europe. The account of Sigmund and his son Sinfjotli in the forest, and others like it in the saga, reflect the uncertain boundaries be
tween nature and culture and between the world of men and the world of the supernatural. The saga’s frequent descriptions of crossings of these borders reveal glimpses not only of fears and dreams but also of long-forgotten beliefs and cultic practices. Not least among these is Sigurd’s tasting the blood of the dragon, thereby acquiring the ability to understand the speech of birds. The mixture of arcane knowledge and oral history in the Volsung material proved a potent lure for Norse audiences.