The Lays of Sigurd

This atlas already tells the story of Sigurd the Dragon-Slayer through the prose Völsunga saga. But that saga was built, centuries later, out of older material — and here is that material itself: three linked poems of the Poetic Edda, the ancient verse from which the legend was made. Reginsmál, Fáfnismál and Sigrdrífumál run together in the old manuscript as one continuous tale, and they are among the oldest heroic poetry surviving in any Germanic tongue.

Reading them beside the saga shows how the tradition worked: the prose saga retold, expanded and connected what these stark, fragmentary lays present in concentrated dramatic form — mostly dialogue, riddle and counsel rather than narration. This journey is the bridge between two layers of the atlas: the mythological Edda (where the cursed gold begins, among the gods) and the legendary saga (where it ends, in the doom of the Völsungs). It is myth shading into heroic legend, caught at the seam.

The story begins not with Sigurd but with the gods, and a curse. To pay a death-ransom, the gods seize the hoard of the dwarf Andvari — and as they take even his last ring, Andvari lays a curse upon the gold: it shall be the bane of every owner.^[1] This is the engine of the entire Völsung tragedy, reaching back here to its mythic root: the treasure that brings death runs as a poisoned thread from the gods, through the dwarf's curse, into the world of men.

The cursed gold passes to a father who is slain for it by his own sons; one of those sons, Fáfnir, takes it all, turns into a dragon, and broods upon it on the lonely heath. The other, the smith Regin, nurses his cheated greed and his hatred — and waits for an instrument to win the gold back. That instrument will be the boy he is fostering: Sigurd. Already, before the hero has struck a blow, his doom is set, because the thing he will win is cursed. In the Norse imagination, gold won by killing carries death in it — and the gods themselves started this one.

Goaded and armed by Regin, Sigurd slays the dragon — and Fáfnismál gives us the strange, unforgettable scene of the dying dragon and the young killer in conversation. The mortally-wounded Fáfnir asks the youth who he is and whose son he is,^[1] and as he dies he speaks dark wisdom: of the Norns who shape fate, of the doom that hangs on the gold, warning Sigurd that the very treasure he has killed for will be his death too.^[2]

It is a deeply Norse idea — that the dragon, the embodiment of greed and hoarded death, should be the one to speak truest about fate and doom. Fáfnir is no mere monster but a once-human being consumed by the gold, and his dying words carry the weight of someone who has seen where greed leads. Sigurd hears the warning that the gold is cursed and will destroy him — and takes it anyway.^[3] That choice, made with open eyes, is the heart of the heroic ethos this atlas keeps returning to: the hero who knows his fate and walks into it rather than turn aside.

Then comes one of the most famous moments in all Norse legend. Regin bids Sigurd roast the dragon's heart for him; but Sigurd, testing whether it is done, burns his thumb on the hot blood and puts it in his mouth — and tasting the dragon's heart-blood, he suddenly understands the speech of birds.^[1] In the branches above, nuthatches are talking, and what they say is a warning: that Regin lies there plotting to betray the youth who trusts him.^[2]

The birds counsel Sigurd to strike first — to take Regin's head before Regin takes his.^[3] And Sigurd, his eyes opened, kills the treacherous smith. It is a turning-point rich with the tradition's themes: hidden treachery exposed, the foster-bond broken by greed, and a hero saved by a sudden uncanny gift of understanding. The image of Sigurd among the singing birds, abruptly hearing the truth of his danger in their chatter, is one the whole medieval North loved — carved on church doorways and rune-stones for centuries. Here is its source, in the bare verse of the Edda.

The last of the three lays, Sigrdrífumál, turns from blood to wisdom. Riding on, Sigurd comes to a mountain ringed with fire, and within it a warrior sleeping in full armour; he cuts the byrnie from her and wakes her — and she is no man but a valkyrie, Sigrdrífa, 'the victory-bringer'.^[1] Odin had pricked her with a sleep-thorn and shut her in the flames for disobeying him in battle, dooming her to wake only for a man who knew no fear.

Waking, she greets the day and the gods in words of great beauty, and brings Sigurd a cup of memory and wisdom.^[2] Then she begins to teach him — the counsels and the runes that follow are a treasury of Norse lore: victory-runes and ale-runes and healing-runes, and plain hard advice for living and dying well. In the legend this valkyrie is none other than Brynhildr, and this bright meeting on the fire-girt mountain is the beginning of the love that the prose Völsunga saga carries to its tragic end. Here, though, the verse holds the moment before the sorrow: the hero and the wise woman, the runes given, the doom not yet come.

These three lays end before the great tragedy — the broken troth, Brynhild's vengeance, Sigurd's murder — that the prose Völsunga saga tells in full. But set in the atlas they do something the saga alone cannot: they show the seam between myth and legend. The gold that dooms Sigurd is the gods' gold, cursed by a dwarf in a tale that belongs to the same world as Odin and Loki; the valkyrie he wakes is one of Odin's own, punished by the Allfather; the wisdom she gives is the runes that Odin himself won by hanging on the tree in Hávamál.

So the Sigurd lays are the hinge of the whole corpus. Above them stand the pure myths — Völuspá and the Gylfaginning — where the gods make and lose the world. Below them spread the human legends and then the historical sagas of Iceland. The cursed gold runs down through all of it, from the gods' hands to a dragon's hoard to a hero's doom to, in the legends, the kings of the Rhine. To read these lays is to stand exactly where the divine and the heroic meet — the point at which the Norse imagination passes from telling of gods to telling of men, with the same dark thread of fate running unbroken through both.