A young hero, a greedy dragon and a gold that drags everyone to ruin: Sigurd’s saga is one of the most powerful tales of the North.
No heroic saga of the North is as influential as that of Sigurd (Siegfried in German). It survives in the Völsunga saga and in songs of the Edda, and its influence reaches through the Nibelungenlied all the way to Richard Wagner.
At the centre stands a cursed gold, the hoard of the Niflungs. Out of greed, Fafnir turns into a dragon to guard the treasure. The young Sigurd, egged on by the smith Regin, forges from the shards of his father’s sword the blade Gram and slays the dragon from a pit.
When Sigurd tastes the dragon’s heart-blood, he suddenly understands the speech of birds – and hears that Regin means to betray him. He forestalls the betrayal. Then he rides through a wall of flames and wakes the sleeping valkyrie Brynhild.
But the gold is cursed: it brings betrayal, jealousy and death to all who own it. Sigurd’s story ends tragically – like almost all the great heroic sagas of the North. It is precisely this union of splendour and ruin that gives them their magic.
Dragons and heroes are among our favourite motifs – and stand in the tradition of the Gotlandic picture stones that show such scenes.