Gnitaheiðr

Gnitaheath is the heath where the dragon Fáfnir lay brooding over the cursed gold of Andvari, and where Sigurd slew him — the lair of the corpus's most famous monster. Here Fáfnir, once a man turned by greed into a venom-spouting serpent, coiled upon the hoard he had murdered his father for; and here the young Sigurd, goaded by the smith Regin, dug a pit in the dragon's path and stabbed it from beneath as it crawled to water, taking both its life and its accursed treasure. Gnitaheath is the legend's image of the dragon's ground — the desolate heath where avarice in serpent-shape guards its gold, the killing-place where a hero wins both a dragon's death and a curse's beginning, the lair from which the cursed hoard passes out into the world to doom everyone who holds it.