Sigurd

Summary

Sigurd is the most famous hero of the Scandinavian north, called "Fáfnir's slayer". He is the son of Sigmundr of the Völsungs; he killed the dragon Fáfnir and took his gold, woke a sleeping warrior-woman on a mountain, and was then treacherously killed in his in-laws' house because of that gold and that woman. His story is told in the poems of the Poetic Edda from Reginsmál to the Short Lay of Sigurd, in Snorri's Skáldskaparmál, and in the Völsunga saga, which gathered the whole family's history into prose.

His story begins before his birth, with a broken sword. In Sigmundr's last battle a one-eyed man in a long hood and a blue cloak, spear in hand, came into the fighting; Sigmundr struck the spear, his sword broke in two, the battle turned against him and he fell. The man was Odin. Dying, Sigmundr told his wife Hjördís, who was with child: keep the pieces of the sword; from them a sword called Gramr will be made, and our son will carry it. Sigurd was born in the house of King Hjálprekr and fostered by Reginn, a smith of dwarfish size, wise, grim and skilled in magic. He chose his horse Grani on the advice of a long-bearded old man he did not know, who told him the horse came of Sleipnir's line and then vanished; the old man was Odin.

Reginn told him the story of the gold. His father Hreiðmarr had three sons: Fáfnir, the eldest and fiercest; Otr, who fished in the shape of an otter; and Reginn. Loki killed Otr with a stone as he ate a salmon by a waterfall, and Hreiðmarr held the gods until they filled the otter's skin with gold and covered it. Loki took the gold from the dwarf Andvari, together with a ring Andvari cursed to be the death of whoever owned it. Then Fáfnir killed his father for the gold, took the shape of a serpent and lay on it at Gnitaheiðr. Reginn made Sigurd the sword Gramr. In the saga Sigurd breaks two swords of Reginn's on the anvil, then brings him the pieces of his father's sword; Reginn forges them into a blade along whose edges fire seemed to run, Sigurd cleaves the anvil to its base with it, and a tuft of wool thrown into the river parts when it meets the edge. Reginsmál and Skáldskaparmál say only that Reginn made Gramr, and do not mention the broken pieces.

Sigurd did not go against the dragon until he had avenged his father on the sons of Hundingr. At sea a storm struck them, and a man called from a rock, naming himself Hnikarr, one of Odin's names; when he came aboard the wind dropped, and he taught Sigurd the omens of victory in battle. Then Sigurd and Reginn went up to Gnitaheiðr and found Fáfnir's track where he crawled to the water. Sigurd dug a pit in his path and sat in it, and when the dragon crawled over it blowing venom he thrust the sword up from below into its heart.

The dying Fáfnir asked his name. At first he hid it, because it was believed that a dying man's curse would strike an enemy he named; then he said: I am Sigurd, and Sigmundr was my father. Fáfnir warned him that the red gold would be his death. Reginn came, cut out his brother's heart, drank of his blood and lay down to sleep, telling Sigurd to roast the heart for him. Sigurd touched the heart to see if it was done, burned his finger and put it in his mouth, and when the heart's blood touched his tongue he understood the speech of birds. He heard birds in the brushwood saying that Reginn meant to kill him to avenge his brother, that he should cut off Reginn's head and own the gold alone, and then ride to a hall on Hindarfjall ringed with fire, where a warrior-woman slept. He cut off Reginn's head, ate of the heart, and loaded the gold on Grani.

On the mountain he found a woman asleep in full armour, her mail fast to her body as though it had grown into her flesh. He cut it open with Gramr, she woke, and she taught him the runes. Sigrdrífumál calls her a valkyrie named Sigrdrífa; the saga and Snorri make her Brynhildr. Then Sigurd came to King Gjúki, where Queen Grímhildr gave him a drink that made him forget Brynhildr; he married her daughter Guðrún and swore brotherhood with her brothers Gunnarr and Högni. He then rode with Gunnarr to woo Brynhildr for him. She had vowed to marry only the man who rode through the fire around her hall; Gunnarr's horse would not face it, so the two men changed shapes, and Sigurd rode through on Grani in Gunnarr's likeness and lay beside her with the sword Gramr between them. They exchanged rings, and one of them was Andvari's ring.

Then the two queens quarrelled at the river. Guðrún told Brynhildr that the man who rode the fire and lay beside her was Sigurd, not Gunnarr, and showed her the ring. Brynhildr urged her husband to kill Sigurd. Gunnarr and Högni could not do it themselves because they had sworn oaths to him, so they fed their younger brother Gotthormr, who had sworn nothing, on wolf's and serpent's flesh, and he stabbed Sigurd as he slept beside Guðrún. Dying, Sigurd threw Gramr after him and cut his slayer in two. Then Brynhildr stabbed herself and asked to be burned at Sigurd's side, with the sword between them as it had lain in the bed.

The idea the story turns on is that everything Sigurd won by his own hand came back on him. He inherited a broken sword from his father, reforged it and killed the dragon with it; by the killing he inherited cursed gold; he heard from the birds what was coming and guarded himself against Reginn, but not against the house of Gjúki. The sword that killed Fáfnir is the sword he laid between himself and Brynhildr, then threw at his killer, then the sword laid between them on the pyre. And the gold Fáfnir warned him of passed from hand to hand: from Andvari to the gods, from them to Hreiðmarr, from him to Fáfnir, from Fáfnir to Sigurd; and it was a ring from it that exposed the deceit at the river.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method, since the essay does not read it. The final r of Sigurðr is the Old Norse nominative ending; it drops in the accusative, Sigurð. In Norse the name is a compound of sig-, "victory", and vǫrðr, "warden", whose v fell silent. The first member names the whole family: Sigi, their ancestor, whom the saga makes Odin's son; Sigmundr his father; Signý his aunt. We read it as Arabic shawka: sh becomes s, k becomes hard g, and w melts away. In Lane shawka is the point or edge of a weapon and vehemence of might in fighting, and dhū shawka is said of one who has weapons and prowess. The second member we read as wārith, "heir": its w is the v lost from vǫrðr, r is r, and th is the Norse ð. On this reading Sigurd is "heir of the weapon's edge", which is what the story makes him: born after his father's death, he inherited the pieces of his sword and reforged them, took his vengeance, and then won Fáfnir's gold with that sword.

Linguistic Root

Sigurd and "heir of the edge"

Cleasby–Vigfusson gives sigr as "victory", with a radical r, but notes that "sig without the r is used in poets and in proper names". Orel derives it from Germanic *segaz, whence Gothic sigis, and sets it beside Sanskrit sáhas, "force, victory", and Middle Irish seg, "strength". Vǫrðr is "a warden, warder", and Heimdallr is called vǫrðr goða, warden of the gods. So the Norse name means "warden of victory".

Lane, under sh-w-k: shawka is a weapon, its sharpness, or its point or edge; "vehemence of might or strength, or of valour or prowess, in respect of fighting"; "they have shawka in war"; and "he has shawka against the enemy", effectiveness in inflicting havoc. Under w-r-th: waritha, he inherited his father's property; warithtuhu majdahu, "I inherited his glory"; wārith, an heir.

The comparison follows the Juthoor sound laws: sh becomes s in the European languages; k belongs to the group of k, q and j that becomes c, k and g; w is a weak letter that melts away; and the feminine -a is an ending that drops. In the second member w answers the v lost from vǫrðr, r answers r, and th answers Norse ð, since þ at the start of a word and ð inside and at the end are one sound in Old Norse. In the first member the senses meet: victory in Norse, force in its sister languages, prowess and a weapon's edge in shawka. The second member keeps the letters of vǫrðr but reads them as "heir", where the Norse dictionary has "warden".

Gramr, Sigurd's sword

The sword's name is Gramr, which Cleasby–Vigfusson gives as "wrath, especially of the gods", in the plural "fiends", and in poetry a word for a king or warrior. We read it, as a reading proposed on the method, with Arabic ghurm and gharām: gh becomes hard g regularly, and r and m stay as they are. Lane: gharima, he paid a bloodwit after it had become due from him; gharām, "lasting evil", a thing from which one cannot free himself, torment; gharīm, an adversary who clings to his opponent. In the story the sword pays a debt: it was forged to avenge Sigmundr, and the gold it opened to the hero was in origin the price of a killing, which Skáldskaparmál calls "the otter-payment" and "the Æsir's forced ransom".

Key Mythic Narratives

Grípir's prophecy

Grípisspá tells that Sigurd visited his mother's brother Grípir, who knew what was to come, and was told his whole life: he would kill Fáfnir, cut open the mail of a king's daughter asleep on the mountain, who would teach him runes; then at King Heimir's he would meet a maiden called Brynhildr, Buðli's daughter, who would rob him of his rest; they would swear oaths and not keep them, and after one night in Gjúki's house he would forget her. In this poem the sleeper on the mountain is not named, and Brynhildr comes after her as if she were another woman.

The dragon's talk

At first Sigurd told Fáfnir that his name was "noble beast" and that he had neither father nor mother. Then he asked him about the norns who come at births, and was told they are of many kinds, some of the Æsir, some of the elves, some daughters of the dwarf Dvalinn; and about the island where Surtr and the gods will fight at Ragnarök, and was told its name is Óskópnir and that the bridge will break under them. The dying dragon knows fate and the end of the world.

Fáfnir's lair

Sigurd followed Fáfnir's track to his lair and found it open, its doors and every beam of iron, dug into the earth. He found much gold there and filled two chests, and took the helm of terror, a golden mail-coat and the sword Hrotti. Grani would not move under the load until Sigurd mounted him.

His death in two versions

The Short Lay of Sigurd, Skáldskaparmál and the saga place his death in his bed, where Guðrún wakes to find herself in his blood. The Fragment of a Sigurd Lay says instead that he was slain south of the Rhine, and that a raven cried from a tree that Atli, Brynhildr's brother, would redden his sword on the slayers. Snorri adds that Sigurd's three-year-old son Sigmundr was killed with him, and that Gunnarr and Högni then took Fáfnir's inheritance and Andvari's ring.

Symbolic Reading

Neither essay reads Sigurd himself. But the Arabic essay compares Odin, the one-eyed old man in disguise, with al-Khiḍr, the mysterious old man who appears suddenly; both know men's fates, travel and teach. In Sigurd's story an old man of this kind appears three times, and the hero never recognizes him: a long-bearded old man who chooses his horse, whom the saga names as Odin; a man on a rock in the storm who teaches him the omens of victory, and calls himself by one of Odin's names; and a long-bearded old man who comes while he digs his pit, tells him to dig several pits for the dragon's blood to run into and to sit in one of them, and is not named. Each time he vanishes.

The texts set the story within the social arrangements of the North: the payment for a slain man, inheritance among brothers, fostering in another man's house, and brotherhood sworn by oath. Fáfnir and Reginn asked their father for a share of their brother's blood-price, and when he refused they killed him; Fáfnir refused to share his father's inheritance with Reginn, so Reginn fostered another man's son to kill his brother for him. Gunnarr and Högni could not kill Sigurd because they had sworn oaths to him, so a brother who had sworn nothing killed him. The curse in the story does not work by magic alone; it runs through these very bonds.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Killing the dragon from a pit is another case of divine combat with sea and serpent, but here it is a man's deed, not a god's. Thor fishes up the world serpent and it slips from him; he kills it only at the end of time and dies of its venom. Sigurd kills his dragon in a single day, and the venom does not kill him; his in-laws do, years later, because of the dragon's gold.

In the Kojiki Susanoo kills the serpent Yamata no Orochi at the headwaters of the river, finds the sword Kusanagi in its tail, and marries the girl he saved. Sigurd kills the dragon on its way to the water, takes from its lair the sword Hrotti and the helm of terror, and then rides on to the sleeping woman. In both stories a sword and a woman come out of the slain serpent.

Heracles dips his arrows in the gall of the Hydra he has killed, and dies at last of the Hydra's own poison, in the tunic his wife put on him. Sigurd inherits the dragon's gold, and the gold kills him at last, in his wife's house.

As Sigurd killed the dragon guarding the gold, Jason in Pindar's version killed the serpent guarding the Golden Fleece on an oak in Colchis, while in Apollonius Medea put it to sleep with her herbs and her song; see Jason.