The Saga of the Völsungs: Norse Heroic Epic
Explore the Völsunga saga — the great Norse prose epic of the Sigurd cycle, preserved in a 1400 manuscript, drawing on Eddic poems and Eddic tradition.
The Völsunga saga (Völsunga saga ok Ragnarssonar loðbrókar) is the longest and most fully developed of the Norse prose redactions of the Völsung cycle. Preserved in a single manuscript (Nks 1824 b 4to) dating from about 1400 and held in the Royal Library of Copenhagen, it tells the story of the Völsung dynasty from the legendary arrival of Odin in the north to the long aftermath of the death of Sigurd and the destruction of the great houses. With the Eddic poems of the Codex Regius and the Skáldskaparmál of the Prose Edda, it is one of the three principal sources for the Norse heroic tradition, and it is the most accessible single account of the central story of that tradition. The figure of Brynhild at the heart of the saga is treated on her own page.
The Manuscript and Its Date
The manuscript of the Völsunga saga is a small paper quarto in the collection of the Royal Library of Copenhagen, catalogued as Nks 1824 b 4to. It contains the Völsunga saga and a number of related texts: the Ragnars saga loðbrókar, the Þáttr af Rauðúlfssonum, and a number of other small fornaldarsögur. The manuscript is written in a single hand of the early fifteenth century, in a clear Icelandic bookhand, and it is one of the principal witnesses for the late medieval transmission of the Völsung tradition.
The saga itself was probably composed in the thirteenth or early fourteenth century, and the language of the prose fits that date. The author is unknown, but the work is clearly the work of a learned and cultivated Icelander with a thorough knowledge of the Eddic poems, the Prose Edda, and the wider corpus of the fornaldarsögur. The author drew on the Eddic poems for the central action of the saga, on the Skáldskaparmál for the wider mythological background, and on his own literary invention for the connecting prose.
The first printed edition of the Völsunga saga was that of P. A. Munch and C. R. Unger in 1854, published in Christiania (Oslo). The standard modern critical edition is that of Theodore J. Arngart, published in 1955 in the Thule series and reissued in the Fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda series edited by Guðni Jónsson (1954–1959, with a revised edition in 1980). The most accessible English translation is that of William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon (1870), with later translations by R. G. Finch (1965) and David F. Tinsley (1990).
The Plan of the Saga
The Völsunga saga is divided into 42 chapters and is a long, sweeping narrative of the rise, triumph, and destruction of the Völsung dynasty. The action is set in the Migration Period, in the lands of the Goths, the Huns, the Burgundians, the Franks, and the Danes, and the geography of the saga is the geography of central and northern Europe in the fifth and sixth centuries. The saga is sometimes called the prose epic of the North, and the comparison with the German Nibelungenlied is natural: the two works are the two great prose (or partly prose) retellings of the same heroic material.
The action of the saga can be divided into four main parts. The first part (chapters 1–14) tells the story of the Völsung dynasty from its legendary origins to the death of Sigmund and the conception of Sigurd. The second part (chapters 15–28) tells the story of Sigurd himself: his rearing by Regin, the slaying of Fafnir, the meeting with Brynhild, the wooing of the Gjüking princess Guðrún, the deception and death of Sigurd. The third part (chapters 29–38) tells the story of the aftermath: the marriage of Guðrún to Atli (Attila the Hun), the death of Gunnar and Högni, the death of Atli, the vengeance of the sons of Guðrún. The fourth part (chapters 39–42) tells the story of the return of the treasure and the final doom of the dynasty.
The four parts are united by the curse of Andvari, which is the central moral structure of the saga. Every killing, every death, every disaster is part of the working-out of the curse, and the saga ends with the return of the treasure to the depths of the Rhine and the extinction of the great house of the Völsungs. The curse is also the central motif of the wider Norse and German heroic tradition, and it is the curse that links the Völsunga saga to the Nibelungenlied and the Þiðreks saga.
The Story of the Saga
The opening chapters of the Völsunga saga are the longest and most elaborate of any Norse prose redaction. The saga traces the lineage of the Völsungs from the arrival of the god Odin in the north, where he fathers a son Sigi on the wife of a certain giant, and from Sigi descends the line of the Völsung kings. Sigi is murdered by his brother, and his son Rerir is raised in the wild country of the north. Rerir, after long prayer, receives a son Völsungr from Freyja, and from Völsungr descends the long line of the Völsung kings of the Huns.
The central action of the saga begins with the Völsung king Sigmund and his sister-wife Signy. The Danish king Siggeirr, who has married Signy, betrays the Völsungs, and Sigmund and his brothers are captured. The young Sigmund is set free by the will of Odin, who strikes off his fetters with the divine sword Gram (which he had already hidden in the apple-tree of the Völsung hall). Sigmund and Signy are united in a strange and terrible incest, and the son of the union is Sinfjötli, the great champion of the Völsung wars. The wars are long and bloody, and they end with the death of Sigmund in the last battle of the Völsungs, when Odin’s own spear breaks Gram in his hand. Before he dies, Sigmund commends his unborn son Sigurd to the care of the smith Regin and his brother Fafnir.
The middle part of the saga is the story of Sigurd. Raised by Regin, the young Sigurd forges the sword Gram, slays the dragon Fafnir, and wins the cursed gold. He then rides to the mountain of Hindarfjall, where he finds the valkyrie Sigrdrífa (also called Brynhild) sleeping within a fire-wall. He wakes her, and they exchange vows of love, and she teaches him the runes of victory. The next chapter of the story is the meeting with the Gjükungs, the sons of Gjúki: Gunnar, Högni, and Guttorm. Sigurd is given a potion of forgetfulness by the Gjüking queen Grímhild, and he forgets his love for Sigrdrífa and falls in love with the Gjüking princess Guðrún. He marries Guðrún, and he swears brotherhood with Gunnar and Högni. The blood-brotherhood is the central moral bond of the saga, and its violation is the cause of the doom of the great houses.
The deception of Brynhild is the turning-point of the saga. Gunnar, who cannot ride the fire-wall that surrounds Brynhild’s hall, exchanges forms with Sigurd (with the help of the magic helmet of the dwarf Grímnir), and Sigurd wins Brynhild for Gunnar. The truth comes out. Brynhild is consumed with rage, and she procures the murder of Sigurd by her brother Guttorm (who is not bound by the blood-oath). Sigurd is killed in his bed, and the dying hero gives Guðrún fragments of advice about the future. Brynhild then kills herself and is burned with Sigurd on the same pyre.
The last part of the saga is the story of the aftermath. Guðrún is married to the Hunnish king Atli (Attila), and she is dragged into the wars of the Huns. Atli, in his greed for the Niflung treasure, attacks the Gjükungs and takes them captive. The deaths of Gunnar and Högni are among the most famous set-pieces of the saga. Guðrún, in her turn, avenges her brothers by killing Atli and his sons, and the saga ends with the death of the last survivors of the dynasty and the return of the Niflung treasure to the depths of the Rhine.
The Sources of the Saga
The sources of the Völsunga saga are the Eddic poems of the Codex Regius, the Skáldskaparmál of the Prose Edda, and the oral tradition of the Völsung story that the saga author was working in. The author quotes the Eddic poems at length in some passages (notably in the death of Sigurd and the lament of Guðrún), and he summarises them in others. The author also drew on the Skáldskaparmál of Snorri Sturluson for the wider mythological background, and he drew on the oral tradition for the connecting prose.
The Eddic poems that the saga draws on include Grípisspá (the prophecy of the dwarf Grípir), Fáfnismál (the conversation of Sigurd with the dying dragon), Sigrdrífumál (the teaching of the valkyrie), Helreið Brynhildar (the journey of Brynhild to the realm of the dead), Guðrúnarqvida in fyrsta (the first lament of Guðrún), Guðrúnarhvöt (the incitement of Guðrún), Atlakviða (the attack of Atli on the Gjükungs), and Hamðismál (the last stand of the sons of Guðrún). The Eddic poems are quoted directly in the saga in the form of prose paraphrases and direct quotations, and the saga is one of the principal sources for the modern reconstruction of the older poems.
The Skáldskaparmál of Snorri Sturluson is the source of the Sigurðarkviða en mesta (“the longest Sigurd poem”), a long composite poem preserved in the Skáldskaparmál that tells the story of Sigurd from beginning to end. The Völsunga saga drew on this poem for some of its most elaborate scenes, and the parallels between the two are striking.
The Style of the Saga
The style of the Völsunga saga is the prose style of the Icelandic fornaldarsögur, in which the older oral-formulaic tradition of the heroic age is combined with the literary prose of the thirteenth-century saga writers. The author uses a rich vocabulary, a complex sentence structure, and a careful attention to the rhythm and balance of the prose. The author also uses a number of stylistic devices that are characteristic of the heroic tradition: the long, formal speeches of the heroes, the elaborate descriptions of weapons and treasure, the careful genealogies, the prophetic passages that look forward to events of the later action.
The author’s technique of drawing on the Eddic poems gives the saga a particular kind of density: the prose carries the action, but the embedded poems are the moments of greatest emotional power. The death of Sigurd, the lament of Guðrún, the death of Gunnar — these are the moments at which the saga lifts itself out of the prose and into the older oral-formulaic tradition. The Völsunga saga is, in this sense, a hybrid work: it is a prose narrative that includes the older oral tradition as a living element in its own structure.
The style of the saga is also characterised by a certain austerity that distinguishes it from the romance forms of the continental tradition. The hero is not described in terms of chivalric love; the women are not described in terms of courtly beauty; the treasure is not described in terms of ornamental luxury. The style is closer to the style of the Old English poem Beowulf (with which the saga has many points of contact) than to the style of the German Nibelungenlied. The Norse redaction of the heroic tradition preserves a colder and more tragic vision than the continental redactions, and the Völsunga saga is the most fully realised example of that vision.
The Place of the Saga in Norse Literature
The place of the Völsunga saga in the wider Norse literature is a peculiar one. The saga is the most accessible single account of the central story of the Norse heroic tradition, and yet it is preserved in a single late medieval manuscript. The saga was clearly known to the authors of the later rímur and the later ballads, and it was clearly read by the Icelandic scholars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but it was not, in the nineteenth century, the most widely read account of the Sigurd story. The most widely read account was the older Eddic poem Fáfnismál, which was edited and translated by the scholars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The modern reception of the Völsunga saga begins in the late eighteenth century, when the manuscripts of the fornaldarsögur were rediscovered by the Icelandic-Danish scholars. The first critical edition of the saga, that of P. A. Munch and C. R. Unger in 1854, was the foundation of the modern study of the saga, and the first English translation, that of William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon in 1870, was the foundation of the English-language reception of the saga. The William Morris version of the saga was the basis of his long narrative poem The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niflungs (1876), which is one of the great works of the English-language reception of the Norse heroic tradition.
The twentieth-century reception of the saga includes the films of Richard Fleischer (the Vikings of 1958), the Wagner productions of the great opera houses of Europe, the fantasy literature of J. R. R. Tolkien, and the video-game God of War of Santa Monica Studio. The wider modern reception of Norse mythology in popular culture is treated on the Norse mythology in modern culture page.
The Saga and the Eddic Poems
The relationship of the Völsunga saga to the Eddic poems of the Codex Regius is one of the central topics of the modern study of the saga. The author drew on the Eddic poems for the central action of the saga, but the order in which the poems are quoted in the saga is not the same as the order in which they appear in the Codex Regius. The author also drew on the Skáldskaparmál of Snorri Sturluson and on the oral tradition of the Völsung story. The result is a saga that is not a simple prose paraphrase of the Eddic poems but a literary work in its own right, with its own structure, its own themes, and its own vision of the heroic age.
The relationship of the saga to the Nibelungenlied and the Þiðreks saga is also a topic of the modern study. The Völsunga saga is a Norse redaction of a common Germanic tradition, and the Nibelungenlied and the Þiðreks saga are continental redactions of the same tradition. The Norse redaction is the more archaic of the three, and the German redaction is the more chivalric. The Þiðreks saga is the most extensive of the continental redactions, and it includes much material that is not in the Nibelungenlied or the Völsunga saga. The comparison of the three is one of the most illuminating exercises in the modern study of the heroic tradition.
The Heroic Vision of the Saga
The heroic vision of the Völsunga saga is one of the great tragic visions of the medieval world. The saga is a story of the rise, triumph, and destruction of a great house, and the author is unsparing in his account of the moral failures of the heroes. Sigmund is a man of great courage but he is also a man of great violence. Sigurd is a man of great love but he is also a man of great deception. Brynhild is a woman of great passion but she is also a woman of great rage. Guðrún is a woman of great endurance but she is also a woman of terrible revenge. The author is interested in the moral complexity of the heroes, and he does not allow his readers to forget that the doom of the Völsungs is the result of human choices, not just of divine fate.
The curse of Andvari is the central moral structure of the saga, and the curse is the explicit expression of a divine or supernatural judgement on human greed. The curse is also a working-out of a deeper moral logic: the gold of Andvari is the gold of the dwarf, and the dwarf is a figure of the older order that has been displaced by the heroic order. The hero who takes the gold of the dwarf is taking on a responsibility that he cannot discharge, and the doom of the gold is the doom of the hero. The vision is profoundly pessimistic, and the Völsunga saga is one of the great expressions of the tragic sense in the medieval world.
The Saga and the Conversion
The conversion of Scandinavia is one of the central facts of the Völsunga saga’s background. The saga was composed in a Christian Iceland of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and the author was a Christian scholar working in a tradition that was already two or three centuries Christian. The author does not introduce Christian elements into the action of the saga, but he does introduce them into the framing of the saga. The Prologue of the Völsunga saga presents the heroes as pagans who are not blameworthy for their paganism, but who are nevertheless caught in a moral order that they cannot escape.
The fornaldarsögur of which the Völsunga saga is the most fully developed example were, for the medieval Icelandic writers, a way of preserving the older pagan tradition in a form that was acceptable to a Christian audience. The fornaldarsögur are not anti-Christian: they are simply not Christian. The heroes of the fornaldarsögur are pagans, and they act in a pagan world, but they are not condemned for their paganism. The Völsunga saga is, in this sense, a monument of a cultural memory that was preserved by a Christian culture for its own purposes. The figure of the doomed hero was a figure that the medieval Icelandic writers could understand and appreciate, and the Völsunga saga is the most fully developed example of that appreciation.