Norse Heroes and Sagas: The Matter of the North

Alongside the gods of Asgard and the giants of Jotunheim, Norse tradition preserved a vast cycle of stories about mortal champions, doomed dynasties, and the treasuries of fate that determined their lives. These tales — the matter of the North — were sung by skalds across Scandinavia, Iceland, the Orkneys, and the Norse colonies of the British Isles from at least the ninth century onward, and they survive today in some of the most extraordinary medieval manuscripts ever composed. The heroes of these stories are not immortal, and their tragedy lies precisely in their mortality: they win glory, they win love, and they are devoured by feuds, curses, and the prophecies of seeresses that no sword can cut.

This survey traces the heroic age as it appears in Old Norse literature, the principal sagas that carry the tradition, the skaldic verses embedded in those sagas, the relationship between Scandinavian legend and the wider Germanic heroic world (including the Old English Beowulf and the continental Nibelungenlied), and the archaeological traces that suggest where memory and myth meet. It is the natural companion to the pages on the gods of Asgard and Vanir, the structure of the nine worlds, and the creatures and beings that populate Norse imagination.

The Heroic Age in Old Norse Tradition

Norse writers distinguished sharply between two kinds of past. The first was the time of the gods, the mythic age in which Odin hanged himself on the world-tree, Thor fished for the Midgard Serpent, and the Norns set the fates of all beings. The second was the heroic age (hetjuöld in modern Icelandic), a slightly later but still legendary period in which the ancestors of royal dynasties — the Ynglings, the Skjöldungs, the Völsungs, the Háleygjars — fought their wars, married their brides, and died violent deaths. Most skalds and saga writers of the thirteenth century treated the heroic age as a real period somewhere between the great migration of peoples (fourth through sixth centuries) and the consolidation of the Norwegian and Danish kingdoms (tenth through eleventh centuries).

The Prologue to the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson (c. 1220) sets out a chronology in which Troy fell in the generations just before the birth of Christ, and from the shattered Greek and Trojan worlds descended a chain of royal houses that eventually reached northern Europe. According to Snorri, the gods of Asgard were themselves Trojan exiles whose memories were later darkened into myth. Whether or not one accepts this euhemerist scheme, the prologue shows how seriously medieval Icelanders took the historicity of the heroic age. To them, Sigurd the Völsung and Brynhild of the shield-maidens were as real as King Harald Fairhair, and they placed their deeds in a real geography: the Rhine, the Danube, the fjords of Norway, the forests of Sweden, the black sands of the Black Sea.

The heroic age, in this conception, was a transitional world. The gods still intervened, sometimes openly. Odin counselled kings; the valkyries carried the slain to Valhalla; the Norns still wove. But the heroes themselves were mortal, subject to wounds, to old age, to treachery, and to the long memories of the women whose husbands and brothers they had slain. The genre of the heroic saga is essentially tragic. The great houses of legend — the Völsungs, the Gjükungs, the Niflungs, the Scyldings, the Hervarar — rise, flourish, and are extinguished in a sequence of revenge killings, broken oaths, and doomed love affairs, and the audience of the sagas is invited to contemplate the ironies of fate and the insufficiency of courage against destiny.

Sources and Manuscripts

Almost everything we know about the Norse heroic age reaches us through three channels: Icelandic saga manuscripts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Poetic Edda of the Codex Regius (c. 1270), and the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson. Each channel is shaped by the hands of Christian redactors working in a society that had been officially Christian for two centuries or more.

The Codex Regius (GKS 2365 4to), now in the Arnamagnæan Institute in Copenhagen, contains the great bulk of the Eddic heroic poems: Völuspá, Hávamál, Vafþrúðnismál, Grímnismál, Helreið Brynhildar, Sigrdrífumál, Atlakviða, Atlamál, Guðrúnarhvöt, Hamðismál, and others. These poems — many of them probably composed in Norway, Iceland, or the Norse colonies of the British Isles between the tenth and twelfth centuries — preserve a layer of tradition older than the prose sagas, in which the allusive, dialogue-driven style of the skaldic age still survives.

The Prose Edda (Edda Snorra Sturlusonar), written by Snorri Sturluson around 1220, is in part a manual for aspiring skalds and in part a mythological compendium. Its Skáldskaparmál contains the stories of Sigurd’s slaying of Fafnir, the theft of Andvari’s ring, the wooing of Brynhild, and the death of the Niflungs, retold in the elegant prose of an Icelandic chieftain steeped in Latin learning.

The Völsunga saga, preserved in a single manuscript (Nks 1824 b 4to) dating from about 1400, is the longest and most coherent narrative of the Sigurd cycle, drawing together poems and prose traditions into a single sweeping tale. It is the chief source for our cluster page on the Saga of the Völsungs.

Beyond these stand the fornaldarsögur (“sagas of ancient times”), a sprawling genre of legendary fiction in which historical persons mingle with dragons, berserkers, and the descendants of gods. The Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks, the Hrólfs saga kraka, the Gautreks saga, the Ragnars saga loðbrókar, the Örvar-Odds saga, the Hálfdanar saga Brönufóstra, and many more preserve fragments of tradition that go back to the Viking Age and earlier. Their tone is often deliberately archaic, with skaldic stanzas embedded in the prose to lend an air of authenticity.

The Matter of the North: Sigurd and the Völsungs

The single most important cycle in Norse heroic legend is the story of Sigurd Fáfnisbani (“the slayer of Fafnir”), the Völsungs, and the Gjükungs. Its centre of gravity is the murder of the dragon Fafnir, the acquisition of the cursed gold of Andvari, the love and betrayal of Brynhild, and the long chain of revenge killings that ends with the destruction of nearly every great house involved. The cycle is preserved in the Völsunga saga, in Eddic poems, and in Snorri’s Skáldskaparmál, but the story it tells is older than any of these sources and was almost certainly known in oral form across the Germanic world in the Migration Period.

Our cluster page on Sigurd the Völsung traces the hero’s life in detail, but a summary is essential here. Sigurd is the son of Sigmund, the last great king of the Völsungs, who broke Odin’s sword and died in battle when Sigurd was an infant. The boy is raised by the smith Regin, brother of the dragon Fafnir, who goads him into killing the dragon to gain its hoard. From Fafnir’s heart Sigurd tastes the blood and gains the power to understand the speech of birds; he learns of Regin’s treachery and slays him too. He then rides through the fire wall surrounding the valkyrie Brynhild, wins her love, and (in most versions) leaves her through the potion of forgetfulness administered by Queen Grímhild of the Gjükungs. He marries Guðrún, slays the king of the Huns, and is himself eventually murdered by his brother-in-law Guttorm at the instigation of Brynhild, who has been deceived into believing he had betrayed her. Brynhild then kills herself, and the curse of the ring begins the destruction of the Gjükungs, the Niflungs, and ultimately the Völsungs themselves. Our cluster on Brynhild, Shieldmaiden and Queen follows the woman at the heart of the tragedy.

The cycle is the centre of gravity for the entire heroic tradition. Poets as late as the fourteenth century returned to it. The German Nibelungenlied (c. 1200) is its continental cousin, recasting the same story with the names Siegfried, Kriemhild, and Brünhild; the Old English poem Waldere, the Middle High German Klage, and the Old Norse Þiðreks saga (a Norse redaction of continental material) all draw on the same well. The Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus, writing in Latin around 1200, retold the story in his Gesta Danorum with a strongly euhemerist slant, presenting Sigurd as a historical Danish prince.

Other Major Cycles

If the Sigurd cycle is the heart of Norse heroic legend, the Hervarar cycle is its strangest offshoot. Preserved in the Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks (c. 1300, but clearly drawing on much older verse), it tells the story of the sword Tyrfing, a weapon forged by dwarves and cursed to bring death to every man who wields it. The saga includes a complete version of the Old English poem Waldere in Norse translation, the riddle-contest of Odin and King Heiðrek, and a long catalogue of Swedish and Gothic kings ending in the apocalyptic last stand of the Goths against the Huns. The archaeological analogues of this last scene — particularly the Vendel period (c. 550–790) and the ship burials at Vendel and Valsgärde in Sweden — are discussed below.

The Hrólfs saga kraka (“the saga of Hrólf Kraki”) preserves the legend of the Danish Skjöldung dynasty. Hrólf is a great king of Lejre in Zealand whose hall is a Scandinavian counterpart of the Welsh Arthur’s Camelot. He is killed in single combat by the Swedish prince Böðvarr, and his body is carried to his mound by the warrior Skarphedin, who leaps onto the funeral pyre rather than survive his lord. The saga preserves the famous lay of Bjarkamál, an exhortation to battle originally composed in honour of the doomed champions of Hleiðr (Lejre). The poem is one of the oldest pieces of Danish heroic verse to survive and is mentioned by Saxo.

The Gautreks saga is shorter and more obviously fictive, but it preserves the otherwise lost story of Víkarr, a king whom Odin takes into his own ship and whose saga ends in a human sacrifice. The ritual killing described in the saga is one of the most explicit pieces of evidence for the hanging-and-spearing sacrifices associated with Odin in the Migration Period.

The Ragnars saga loðbrókar (“the saga of Ragnar Shaggy-breeches”) is a wildly legendary account of the Danish king whose sons Ivar the Boneless, Björn Ironside, Halfdan, Ubbe, and Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye are said to have led the Great Heathen Army to England in 865. The historical core is slender: the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle gives a different account of the brothers and their father, and the saga blends genuine history with the patently fictitious kingship of Ragnar over Sweden and Norway. Nevertheless, the saga is a major source for the skaldic tradition associated with the house of Ragnar, and it preserves the famous death-song of Kráka (Aslaug) and the vengeance of the sons for their father’s death in the snake-pit of King Ælla of Northumbria.

The Skaldic Tradition

The skalds were the professional poets of the Viking Age and the early Middle Ages. Unlike Eddic verse, which is anonymous, alliterative, and composed in strophic forms called lǫg or þula, skaldic verse is characterised by its extraordinary formal complexity. A typical skaldic stanza has eight lines, each with three main stresses, and binds them together with a system of internal rhyme, alliteration, and syllabic count that approaches the difficulty of medieval Welsh cywydd. The earliest skald whose work survives in any quantity is Bragi Boddason the Old, active at the court of the Swedish king Björn at Haugi (Birka?) around the mid-ninth century; the Ragnarsdrapa of Bragi is the oldest preserved skaldic poem and is built around the slaying of the sea-giantess Hlésey and the wooing of the goddess Iðunn.

The function of the skald in heroic saga is twofold. On the one hand, he is the in-world composer who celebrates the deeds of his lord and earns his reward in gold rings, swords, and lands. On the other, he is the guarantor of historical truth: when a saga cites a skaldic stanza in support of a claim about the past, the author is appealing to a witness living in the heroic age itself. Thus the Heimskringla of Snorri Sturluson leans heavily on the verses of Eyvindr skáldaspillir, Þjóðólfr of Hvinir, and Einarr skálaglamm to anchor the reign of Harald Fairhair in the late ninth century, and the Völsunga saga preserves stanzas attributed to the Gothic king Jörmunrekr (Ermanaric) and the valkyrie Sigrdrífa (Brynhild).

The skaldic vocabulary was the technical language of praise and blame (lof and níð). Every name for a king, a ship, a sword, a battle, a woman, a shield, or a body of water could be replaced by a kenning — a periphrastic compound such as “sea of the sword” for “battle”, “storm of the swan-bath” for “battle again”, or “destroyer of the door-ridge” for “fire”. The skald could express praise, satire, lament, invective, or erotic longing with an unmatched precision of form, and the best of the late skalds — Hallfreðr vandræðaskáld, Egil Skallagrimsson, Kormákr Ögmundarson — exploited the medium to produce poetry of remarkable psychological depth. The Sonatorrek of Egil, composed after the drowning of his son Böðvarr, ranks among the most moving laments in any medieval language.

In the heroic sagas, the skaldic stanzas are almost always embedded as set pieces: a recitation at a feast, a song composed in honour of a victory, a death-song on the battlefield. Their preservation is a measure of how seriously the Icelanders took the historicity of the heroic age, and of how carefully the manuscript culture of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries conserved the inherited verses.

Continental Cousins: The Wider Germanic Heroic World

The Norse heroic tradition does not stand alone. Across the Germanic-speaking world, between the fifth and the eleventh centuries, a small set of stories circulated in oral and written form, centring on a handful of legendary dynasties, treasuries, and doomed heroes. The Norse and continental versions of the Sigurd story share so much detail — the cursed gold, the slain dragon, the valkyrie beloved, the murder of the hero, the long aftermath of revenge — that they must descend from a common source, now lost, that scholars call the Nibelung tradition (German Nibelungenstoff).

The earliest datable reference to this shared story is in the Frankish Origo gentis Langobardorum of the seventh century, which tells of a “wonderful woman” of the Winnili people named Frea and a battle with the Vandals in which the slaughter was so great that the survivors called themselves the Langobardi (“long-beards”). The Old English poem Deor, of the eighth or ninth century, laments the passing of several heroes including Theodric (Dietrich von Bern), and the Old English Waldere, surviving on two leaves of a tenth-century manuscript, recounts the escape of the Frankish prince Walter of Aquitaine from the Huns with his lover Hildegund. The Latin Waltharius by Ekkehard of St. Gall (c. 900) and the eleventh-century German version of the same story show how the legend travelled.

The Nibelungenlied of an anonymous Austrian or Bavarian poet (c. 1200) is the longest and most famous of the continental redactions. It tells the story of Siegfried of Xanten, his murder by Hagen of Troy, the marriage of his widow Kriemhild to Etzel (Attila the Hun), and her terrible revenge. The parallels to the Völsunga saga are clear, but the German poem has been thoroughly recast in the chivalric idiom of the High Middle Ages, with its courtly love, its crusading ideology, and its Christian framing. The Norse version preserves an older, more pagan layer, in which the gods intervene openly and the heroes are still half-figures of the world of the Norns and the valkyries.

The hero Theodoric the Great, king of the Ostrogoths (r. 471–526), was historicised in the German tradition as Dietrich von Bern (“of Verona”). His exile from his Italian kingdom, his wanderings among the Huns, his eventual return, and his war with Ermanaric became one of the most popular cycles of Middle High German heroic epic. The Þiðreks saga of thirteenth-century Norway is a Norse redaction of much of this material, drawing on Low German sources and preserving a number of lost German lays in Norse translation.

The English tradition, which had broken away from the continental Norse world after the eleventh-century Norman Conquest, preserved its own heroic cycle centred on the Scyldings of the Beowulf poem: Hrothgar, Hrothulf, Hygelac, Beowulf himself, and the dragon at the end. Our cluster page on Beowulf, the Epic Hero examines this poem in detail, but its place in the wider Germanic world is essential: it is the longest and arguably the finest heroic poem in any Old Germanic language, and it preserves older and more sober traditions than the Völsunga saga or the Nibelungenlied.

Archaeological Analogues

Where myth meets material culture, the heroic age becomes visible. The great princely burials of the Migration Period (c. 300–700) and the Vendel period (c. 550–790) supply a tangible context for the world of the sagas.

The Vendel boat-graves in Uppland, Sweden, and the related finds at Valsgärde and Old Uppsala, contain not only weapons, horses, and sacrificed retainers but also strikingly elaborate helmets of the same general type as the Sutton Hoo helmet in Suffolk. The Vendel helmets (and the later Viking Age helmets from Coppergate in York, Gjermundbu in Norway, and the depiction on the Tjängvide image-stone in Gotland) all share a visual scheme: a face-mask, a crest, and protective plates around the brow. These are the helmets that the sagas call hjálmar and that, in heroic poetry, are sometimes personified as dwarven or supernatural helpers.

The Sutton Hoo ship-burial in Suffolk, dated to c. 625–635 and almost certainly the grave of King Rædwald of East Anglia, is the most spectacular single archaeological analogue. Its ship was 27 metres long; its burial chamber contained silverware from Byzantium, gold jewellery, a great shield, a helmet of the Vendel type, a complete set of lyre-playing equipment, and a hoard of Frankish gold coins. The parallels to the funeral of Scyld Scefing in the opening lines of Beowulf are unmistakable.

The Tjängvide and Tune stones in Gotland, and the Drävle stone, depict scenes that may illustrate heroic legend: a warrior arriving on horseback before a woman, a man fighting with a serpent, an assembly of armed men. The interpretation of any single image is contested, but the iconographic parallels to the Sigurd story are strong: the Tune stone shows a man with a sword thrusting downward at a serpent-like figure below him, in a posture that closely resembles the conventional depiction of Sigurd slaying Fafnir.

Farther afield, the Benty Grange helmet in Derbyshire (c. 600), the Pioneer helmet in Northamptonshire, and the many bog-bodies of Tollund and Grauballe in Denmark underline that the heroic world of the sagas was a real world in which chiefs were burned or buried with their weapons, their horses, and their servants, and in which sacrifices to Odin were still being made well into the Christian period.

Women in the Heroic Sagas

The Norse heroic tradition is conspicuously the work of men — composed by men, performed by men, and addressed to a male aristocratic audience. Yet the women of the sagas are not merely passive objects of exchange. The valkyrie Brynhild, the queen Guðrún, the sister Gudrun, the avenger Hervör, the valkyrie Sigrdrífa are agents in their own right, who choose husbands, pronounce prophecies, raise armies, and (in the case of Guðrún and Hervör) survive their menfolk and exact revenge across generations. Our cluster on Brynhild, Shieldmaiden and Queen follows the most fully realised of these figures.

The Gudrun/Gudrun figure appears in five different Eddic poems (Guðrúnarqvida in fyrsta, … önnur, … þriðja, Guðrúnarhvöt, and Oddrúnargrátr), each presenting a different aspect of her role as abandoned wife, widow, mother, and avenger. In Oddrúnargrátr she converses with Oddrún, sister of Atli (Attila), and the two women exchange laments that border on the explicitly erotic. In Guðrúnarhvöt she is driven by her dead daughter Guðrún (a different Guðrún, daughter of Guðrún and Sigurd) to reveal that she has been concealing her brothers’ murder of her husband Atli, and she is forced to submit to a blood-eagle sacrifice of her sons in vengeance. The psychological pressure of these poems is intense, and they constitute some of the most powerful portrayals of female agency in medieval literature.

The shield-maidens (skjaldmeyjar) — women who fight as warriors in heroic legend — are most fully embodied in Brynhild, but they appear in Saxo’s Gesta Danorum (Lagertha, who fights alongside the Danish king Ragnar), in the Hervarar saga (Hervör alvitr, who confronts the ghosts of her father’s war-band to claim the cursed sword Tyrfing from his burial mound), and in the Völsunga saga itself (Hildr, who fights alongside the Völsung champions in the last stand). The archaeological evidence for actual female warriors in the Viking Age is thin but not absent: the Birka warrior burial (Bj 581), long thought to be that of a male, has been re-examined and identified by some researchers as a female warrior, a re-analysis that continues to be debated.

Geography of the Heroic Age

The geography of the Norse heroic tradition is, in many respects, the geography of the Migration Period and the early Viking Age. The Rhine is the boundary between the Frankish and Burgundian kingdoms, and the Rhine-gold legend is set along its banks. The Danube is the river of the Gothic and Hunnish empires. The Black Sea and the Caspian steppe are the homelands of the Huns whom Attila leads west. Scandinavia, the Baltic, and the North Sea coast are the homelands of the Völsungs, the Gjükungs, the Skjöldungs, and the Ynglings.

Specific places recur. Hleiðr (Lejre) in Zealand is the seat of the Skjöldung kings, including Hrothgar of Beowulf and Hrólf Kraki of the Hrólfs saga kraka. Hedeby (Haithabu) at the base of the Jutland peninsula is the great trading emporium of the Viking Age, and its ramparts and harbour have been extensively excavated. Uppsala in Sweden is the seat of the Yngling dynasty and the site of the great pagan temple described by Adam of Bremen in 1070. Birka on Lake Mälaren is the legendary residence of the early Swedish kings, and its thousand graves preserve a continuous archaeological record from the ninth and tenth centuries. The Volga route to Byzantium, traced by Ibn Fadlan in 922, leads through the lands of the Rus’ to the markets of Itil and the great portage to the Don and the Black Sea.

Many saga places can be located with reasonable confidence. The Sléttahellir (“smooth cave”) of Grettis saga is the great lava cave of Surtshellir in western Iceland. The Haugr (“howe”) of King Herlaug in the Gautreks saga has been identified with the great burial mound at Haukeland in Hordaland, and the saga of King Gold-Lam-Boði has been convincingly connected with the cult centre of Gulating. The river Dvina (Dvina) of the Sigurðar saga is a tributary of the Volga, and the scenes of battle in the Hervarar saga have been placed in the Polish and Ukrainian landscapes of the actual Gothic migrations.

Religion and the Afterlife in the Heroic Age

The afterlife of the heroic saga is not exactly the afterlife of the gods. Most of the heroes do not go to Valhalla; the most consistent belief is that of the burial mound, in which the dead king continues to live with his retinue and his weapons, and from which he can be called out to fight alongside his descendants in time of crisis. King Arngrímr of the Hervarar saga rises from his howe with twelve champions to fight alongside his granddaughter Hervör. The heroes of the Eyrbyggja saga walk out of their mounds on the night of the Icelandic settlement. The mound of Grettir the Strong at Bjarg on the coast of Iceland was opened in the seventeenth century to reveal a skeleton of enormous size, and the story is that the bones were still red with blood. The motif is the central image of the Gothic novel of the eighteenth century, which in turn derives from the Norse tradition.

The cult of the ancestor-mound seems to have been a real one in the Migration Period and the early Viking Age. The princely graves at Old Uppsala, Vendel, Valsgärde, and Sutton Hoo were not mere tombs but also shrines, and the kuml (“howe”) was a place at which oaths were sworn, contracts made, and the dead could be consulted. The cult is alluded to in several Eddic poems and is implicit in the heroic sagas as a whole.

The gods of the heroic age are the same gods as the gods of the gods, but they appear in a different idiom. Odin is the lord of the slain, the giver of victory, the patron of poets and kings. Thor is the protector of the common man and the foe of the giants. Freyja receives half of the slain in her hall Fólkvangr. The valkyries are the agents of Odin on the battlefield and the women who choose the dead. The curse-and-blessing structure of the sagas, in which a wronged woman pronounces a doom that takes generations to work itself out, is in part a re-statement of the mythological conflict of the gods and the Jotnar.

The Tragic Vision

What finally distinguishes the Norse heroic tradition from the heroic poetry of the continent is the dark, secular tragic sense that runs through the best of the Eddic poems and the Völsunga saga. The medieval German poets of the Nibelungenlied could be confident that Kriemhild’s crimes would be punished and that Christian civilisation would survive. The Norse poets were, in this sense, less protected by their Christian frame. They looked at the fall of the Völsungs, the Gjükungs, the Niflungs, the Skjöldungs, the Hervarar, and they could see only the workings of fate. The last great heroic poem in Old Norse, the Hlöðskviða of the thirteenth century, laments the death of the Norwegian prince Halldórr in a battle on the ice of the Lake of Dalsfjörðr in 1238, and the lament ends with the cry: “And I, who am no god, can do nothing to bring the slain back to life.”

This tragic vision has its roots in the older Northern idea of the doom of the heroes (goðatjalda ragna), the moral insufficiency of courage in the face of a universe whose Norns have set a particular sequence of events. It survives in the medieval Icelandic writer’s recurrent interest in the death of the hero, the futile quest, and the irony of triumph turning to ash. The Renaissance redactors of the Völsunga saga, the Norwegian translators of the Eddic poems in the nineteenth century, the Nordic composers Grieg, Sibelius, and Nielsen, and the modern writers of fantasy and science fiction from William Morris to J. R. R. Tolkien, all return to this same tragic sense, and it is one of the great gifts of the Old Norse tradition to the literature of the world.

The Heroes in Later Norse Literature

After the thirteenth century, the heroic tradition did not die; it was transformed. The rímur — long narrative ballads in a complex stanzaic form — became the chief vehicle for the heroic stories, and the most popular of all the rímur cycles was the rímur af Völsungum and the rímur af Sigurði Fölni (“the thin-steed Sigurd”), the latter sometimes known as the Völsungsrímur. These were sung or recited at evening gatherings, at weddings, and at the vaka vigils, and they preserved the Völsung story in a continuous oral-formulaic tradition into the nineteenth century. The earliest of the rímur of Sigurd is attributed to Bjarni Jónsson of Skarðsá (c. 1570) and reaches its highest point in the rímur of Gunnar Gröndal and Steingrímur Thorsteinsson in the nineteenth century.

The Danish ballad tradition (Danmarks gamle Folkeviser) preserves dozens of heroic ballads on the Völsungs, the Niflungs, the Skjöldungs, and the kings of Denmark and Sweden, many of them with roots in the Middle Ages. The ballad of “Hildebrand og Hildelev” is the Danish form of the older Germanic Hildebrandslied (c. 830), and the ballad of “Marsk Stig Andersen” preserves historical memory of the late thirteenth-century Danish court. The Faroe ballad tradition is even richer, with the great Hjútingakvæði cycle and the Sigmundar kvæði preserving a continuous oral memory of the Sigurd cycle into the nineteenth century.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the heroic tradition was taken up by the Danish-Norwegian writers who shaped the modern nation-states. Johan Ludvig Heiberg of Copenhagen wrote a verse drama Völsungerne (1837) modelled on the Völsunga saga. Carl Wilhelm Peters and Lorenz Frölich illustrated the Sigurd cycle in the romantic style. The Icelandic novelist Jónas Hallgrímsson (1807–1845) drew on the rímur in his great lyric “Gunnar”, and Sveinbjörn Egilsson compiled a lexicon of the Eddic vocabulary. The Norwegian and Danish nationalists saw the Völsungs and the Nibelungs as the founding heroes of the North, and the German Wagner drew on the Völsunga saga and the Eddic poems to construct his Ring cycle (Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, Götterdämmerung), one of the most influential single bodies of operatic writing in the history of Western music.

The Heroic Age in Modern Scholarship

Modern scholarship on the Norse heroic tradition has been shaped by a handful of critical methods. The Finnish school of folklore, founded by Antti Aarne and developed by Antti Amatus Aarne and Stith Thompson, constructed the Aarne-Thompson tale-type index, in which the Sigurd story is type 303 (“The Twins or Blood-brothers”) and the dragon-slayer story is type 300 (“The Dragon-slayer”). Comparative work by the philologist Theodor Benfey (1859) and the folklorist Märchen tradition of the brothers Grimm, Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale (1928), and the work of the historic-geographic method of folklorists such as Kaarle Krohn have located the Norse hero-tales in a much wider Indo-European pattern of dragon-slaying, treasure-curse, and dynastic doom.

The textual philology of the Eddic poems and the heroic sagas was founded by Sveinbjörn Egilsson (1831–1833), Konrad Gíslason (1860s), and the great Icelandic-Danish philologist Finnur Jónsson (1858–1934), whose Lexicon poeticum antiquae linguae septentrionalis (1931) remains the standard reference for skaldic and Eddic vocabulary. The English scholarship of the period was dominated by Frederic Jameson, Sophus Bugge, Bertha Phillpotts, and E. V. Gordon, whose Introduction to Old Norse (1927) set the standard for a generation.

The archaeological turn in the twentieth century, with the excavation of Vendel, Valsgärde, and Sutton Hoo and the great new finds at Birka, Helgö, and the Russian sites along the Volga, has made it possible to anchor the heroic tradition in a real material world, and the modern study of runic inscriptions (with the great Scandinavian runestone corpora) has given us glimpses of the names of the heroes as they were remembered in the Viking Age. Our cluster page on the Younger and Elder Futhark examines the script in which these memories were carved.

Continuing the Tradition

The heroic stories of the North did not end with the last skald or the last rímur. In our own time, they live on in the films of the Nordic countries, in the operas of Wagner and his successors, in the science fiction and fantasy of Tolkien, in the novels of Halldór Laxness and the Sagan af Völsungum of the Icelandic writers, and in the works of video-game designers from Bungie to Santa Monica Studio. The cursed ring, the slain dragon, the valkyrie who chooses the slain, the sword that cannot be sheathed without killing — these are figures that have outlasted the culture that produced them, and they continue to furnish the modern imagination with one of its deepest sources.

The pages that follow, on Sigurd the Völsung, on Beowulf the Epic Hero, on the Saga of the Völsungs, and on Brynhild, Shieldmaiden and Queen, each open a different door into this vast hall of memory. They are the entry points through which the curious reader can pass into the matter of the North.

The Heroic Heroines

Beyond the great female figures of the Sigurd cycle, the heroic tradition is rich in women whose names have entered the literature of the North. The Hervör of the Hervarar saga is a child of mixed human and supernatural parentage, raised as a girl, who cuts her hair, takes up weapons, and rides alone to the burial mound of her father Angantýr to demand the cursed sword Tyrfing from the ghosts within. Her speech of confrontation is one of the most quoted passages in the saga, and she eventually marries the Swedish king Hlöðr, only to be widowed in his war against the Goths. The mother of all the Hervarar women was Heiðr, whose name means literally “bright”, and who is sometimes identified with the valkyrie Heiðr of the Völuspá.

The Auðr/Unnr djúpúðga Ketilsdóttir of the Laxdæla saga, the Melkorka of the same saga, and the Hallgerður Höskuldsdóttir of the Njáls saga are women of the historical-legendary age rather than the heroic age proper, but they inherit the same traits of the heroic woman: the capacity to plan, to endure, to forgive, and to take terrible revenge. The Njáls saga, the longest and arguably the greatest of the Íslendingasögur (Sagas of Icelanders), is sometimes called the prose epic of Iceland, and its climax is the burning of Bergþórshváll in 1011 in which the hero Gunnar’s widow Hallgerður refuses three times to give her husband the locks of her hair to wick the fire to its origin.

The women’s fornaldarsögur include the Gunnars saga Keldugnúpsfífla, the Kara saga, the Þorsteins saga Víkingssonar, and the late medieval Jarlmanns saga ok Hermanns, all of which place female heroes at the centre of the action. The tradition continues into the riddarasögur (knightly sagas) of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which translated French, German, and Latin chivalric romance into Old Norse prose and added their own Norse women to the cast of heroes and heroines.

Feasting, Gift-Giving, and the Heroic Economy

The heroic world of the sagas is a gift economy. The lord holds feasts (veislur), distributes treasure, gives rings and swords to his retainers, and receives in return loyalty in battle and the composition of praise-poems. The economy of the heroic age is, in this sense, the economy of the skald: every act of generosity is a stimulus to a praise-stanza, and every act of praise is a stimulus to a further gift. The elaborate system of gift-giving described in the heroic sagas and in the historical fornaldarsögur has no direct parallel in our own economic system, but it is preserved in the records of the Norwegian court of King Hákon góði (Hakon the Good, r. 934–961) and the Danish court of Harald Bluetooth (r. c. 958–986).

The feast is a setting for political negotiation, marriage alliance, and the recital of stories. The great hall of the Hrólfs saga kraka, with its golden pillars and its magic hart whose antlers sprout the winds of the world, is a setting of formal entertainment in which the king’s champions display their fighting skill, his skalds compose their verses, and his visitors exchange gifts. The “Hart” episode is found in no other source, but it parallels the Scyld Scefing opening of Beowulf, in which the legendary founder of the Scylding dynasty is described as a child washed up alone on the beach, and the funeral of Scyld is described in terms of a ship-borne burial with all the treasure of the king laid on the deck.

The gift of treasure is the sending in the sagas, the political instrument by which kings recognise their supporters and by which supporters lay claim to a share in their lord’s authority. The cursed gold of the Nibelungs, the Niflung treasure, is the dark mirror of this institution: it is the gift that becomes a curse, the treasure that destroys every house that owns it, the gold that the dragon Fafnir hoards in his sleep and that Sigurd wins by killing him and that is finally sunk in the Rhine. The symbolism is complex: the Niflung treasure is at once the king’s wealth, the prosperity of the heroic age, and the moral burden that the hero must take on when he accepts the responsibilities of leadership.

The Hero and the Supernatural

The Norse hero is not the chivalric knight of the French or German tradition. He is a figure of the older, wilder world in which gods and giants, dragons and valkyries, dwarves and seeresses are encountered directly, and in which the gifts of the supernatural are made under supernatural conditions. The most striking motif of the heroic saga is the encounter with a supernatural woman, almost always in the wilderness and almost always at a turning-point in the hero’s life. Brynhild is awakened by Sigurd after her sleep in the fire-walled hall. Sigrdrífa teaches Sigurd the runic wisdom of victory. The valkyrie Sváva of the Helreið Brynhildar is a divine messenger. Hervör meets the ghost of her father. Grettir of the Grettis saga is killed in the end by a revenant of a man he had wronged in his youth. The world of the sagas is porous, and the heroic self must be open to the incursions of the gods.

The runes of the heroic tradition are not the alphabet of the modern runic scholar but the magical signs of the Rúnatál (Rune-Magic) that the völva lays out on her magic tent-cloth and that the skald composes on his tongue. The Rune-Magic of the Sigrdrífumál is one of the most fully developed magical systems in Old Norse literature: a complete set of victory-runes, ale-runes, sea-runes, limb-runes, speech-runes, and mind-runes, each addressed to a specific divine power and each supposed to give the hero mastery over a particular aspect of his world. The runes are one of the principal channels through which the heroic hero communicates with the gods, and their study is essential to a full understanding of the heroic tradition.

The runic names of the heroes are also revealing. The names Sigurðr, Brynhildr, Guðrún, Atli, Gunnarr, Högni, Hamðir, Sörli, Svanhildr are found both in the heroic poems and on the runestones of the Viking Age, and the interchange between the legendary and the historical worlds is constant. The Danish king Gormr of the tenth century is named in the same form as the legendary king Gorm of the Scylding dynasty. The runestone from Karlevi in Öland (DR 96) preserves a complete nine-line stanza in the skaldic form of the dróttkvætt, the metre of the court, in memory of a Danish chieftain who had been the “land-protector” of the Danish king. The boundary between the historical and the legendary, in this sense, is always a thin one.

Law, Justice, and the Feud

The heroic age is a world of the feud, the legal settlement, and the honour-price. There is no state in the modern sense; kingship is personal and precarious; and justice is administered through a complex system of duels, wergild (man-prices), and outlawries. The oldest legal codes of the North — the Gulathing’s Law of western Norway (c. 950), the Frostathing’s Law of Trøndelag (c. 960), the Codex Regius of Grágás of Iceland (c. 1100), the Jutland Law of Denmark (1241) — preserve the older legal system of the heroic age, and many of the fornaldarsögur present legal disputes at the centre of the action.

The feud in heroic legend is a regulated affair. The killing of a man creates an obligation on his kin to take vengeance, and the obligation can be discharged by the killing of the killer or by the payment of a wergild, a sum whose amount is fixed by the rank of the slain. The Njáls saga of the thirteenth century is a study in feud, in which the obligation of the killer to pay wergild is twisted by the legal ingenuity of the heroes and heroines into a long chain of killings that finally culminates in the burning of Njáll’s house. The Gísla saga is another study of feud, in which the hero Gísli Súrsson is outlawed and hunted for thirteen years before he is finally killed in his brother’s house. Both sagas belong to the historical-legendary age of the Icelandic commonwealth rather than to the heroic age proper, but they preserve the same legal institutions and the same logic of feud that pervade the heroic tradition.

The honour-price of the heroic age is the mannjafnaðr or sakauki of the legal codes, the additional sum payable for insults and injuries that are not strictly killings. The Gulathing’s Law preserves the elaborate set of fines for cutting off a man’s hand, blinding him, striking him in the face, pulling his hair, accusing him of níð (a ritual insult), and other offences. The system is the most fully developed in the medieval Germanic world, and it is the legal background to the long sequences of feud-and-settlement in the heroic and historical sagas.

The Hero in Old Norse Religious Practice

The cult of the ancestor-hero is one of the most striking features of the pre-Christian North. The great kuml or haugr (burial mound) of the chieftain or king was a cult centre at which the descendants offered sacrifice and from which the dead could be called out to fight alongside the living. The clearest example is the Haugr of Herlaug described in the Gautreks saga, in which the dead king of the Naumdals refuses to leave his howe at the arrival of the Christian king Olaf Tryggvason (c. 1000) and sits within with his retinue and his treasure, and the saga says that when the mound was opened long after, only ashes were found within, since the king had passed to the realm of the dead by his own death within the mound.

The cult of the valkyrie is also visible in the heroic tradition. The Völuspá of the Poetic Edda lists the valkyries who come to the aid of heroes in the long wars of the world. The völva (seeress) of the heroic saga is a figure of the same kind, a woman who can see the future and prophesy the doom of the heroes. The most famous völva in the heroic tradition is the völva of the Völuspá, but there are völvur in the Hervarar saga, the Hrólfs saga kraka, the Norna-Gests þáttr, the Völsunga saga, and the Þorsteins saga Víkingssonar. The völva is the religious specialist of the heroic world, and her function is to deliver the prophecies that the heroes cannot escape.

The sacrifice of the heroic age is a public act. The Gautreks saga describes the Blót of the Swedish king Víkarr, who is hung from a tree and stabbed with a spear by his own followers at the command of Odin. The Ynglinga saga of Snorri Sturluson describes the Dísablót (the sacrifice to the female spirits) at the great temple of Uppsala. The Sacrifice at Lejre, attested by the Danish chronicler Thietmar of Merseburg in the early eleventh century, was a festival of the Danish kings at which nine human beings were sacrificed to ensure the prosperity of the kingdom. The archaeological record of the great ship-burials — at Oseberg, Gokstad, Tune, and Borre in Norway, at Vendel, Valsgärde, and Old Uppsala in Sweden, at Hedeby in Denmark, and at Sutton Hoo in England — confirms that the funeral of a king was a public act of cult.

The Hero in Old Norse Scholarship

The modern study of the Old Norse heroic tradition begins with the Icelandic-Danish philology of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The first complete edition of the Völsunga saga was published by P. A. Munch and C. R. Unger in 1854. The Hervarar saga was edited by George Stephens in 1864. The Hrólfs saga kraka was edited by C. R. Unger in 1873. The first critical edition of the Poetic Edda was that of Sophus Bugge (1867), and the standard modern critical edition of the Eddic poems is that of Gustav Neckel and Hans Kuhn, with the Eddic poems cited in the Neckel-Kuhn numbering.

The German school of saga scholarship, founded by Wilhelm Grimm (Deutsche Mythologie, 1835), Karl Müllenhoff (Sagen, Märchen, and Lieder der Herzogthümer Schleswig, Holstein und Lauenburg, 1845), and Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen (Die Edda, 1812), constructed the comparison of the Norse and the continental Germanic tradition. The Hildebrandslied, the Waldere, the Nibelungenlied, the Klage, the Kudrun, the Gudrunlied, and the Dietrichsepik were systematically compared with the Norse material. The Icelandic school of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Sigurður Guðmundsson (the first president of the Althing after the restoration of the Icelandic parliament in 1845), Jón Árnason (compiler of Íslenzkar þjóðsögur og ævintýri, 1862–1864), and Jón Sigurðsson (editor of many of the Fornaldarsögur in the Íslenzk fornrit series), set the foundations of the modern study of the saga tradition.

The English-language scholarship of the early twentieth century was dominated by the great editions and translations of the Viking Society (founded in 1882): W. G. Collingwood and J. Stefánsson’s translation of the Völsunga saga (1908), Lee M. Hollander’s translation of the Poetic Edda (1928), Anthony Faulkes’s critical editions of the Prose Edda (1977, 1979, 1987, 1998), and Diana Whaley’s translations of the fornaldarsögur (1990s–2010s). The University of Iceland has published a continuous series of critical editions of the Íslenzk fornrit since 1933, and the new Skaldic Project at the University of Sydney and the University of Iceland (directed by Kari Ellen Gade and Jonas Wellendorf) has produced a complete critical edition of the skaldic corpus in eight volumes (2012–2024).

The Heroic Tradition in Modern Reception

The Old Norse heroic tradition has been a continuing source of literary and artistic inspiration from the late Middle Ages to the present. The Nibelungenlied of c. 1200 is the earliest major reception, and from the fourteenth century onward, the legend has been reworked in German, Norse, Danish, Swedish, and Icelandic poetry, drama, and prose. The Norse kings’ sagas of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries — the Heimskringla of Snorri Sturluson, the Morkinskinna, the Fagrskinna, the Knýtlinga saga, the Hversu Nóregr byggðist — preserve the older traditions of the royal houses and embed the heroic stories into a continuous narrative of the Scandinavian kingdoms.

The Renaissance and Baroque writers of Denmark, Sweden, and Iceland returned to the heroic tradition in the form of historical drama and the official histories of the royal houses. The national-romantic writers of the nineteenth century — Esaias Tegnér of Sweden (whose Frithiofs saga, 1825, is a sustained romantic reworking of the Icelandic fornaldarsögur), N. F. S. Grundtvig of Denmark (the great translator of the Njáls saga and the Eddic poems), Adolf Thomsen of Norway, and Jónas Hallgrímsson of Iceland — made the heroic tradition the centrepiece of the new national literatures. The painters of the Danish Golden Age and the Norwegian national-romantic period illustrated the Eddic poems and the heroic sagas on a monumental scale: Lorenz Frölich, J. L. Jensen, P. N. Arbo, C. G. Wennerberg, C. F. Sørensen, Eilif Peterssen, Halfdan Egedius, and the Icelandic painter Þórarinn B. Þorláksson.

The music of the heroic tradition has its foundation in the rímur cycles of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the operatic works of Richard Wagner (1813–1883). Wagner’s Ring cycle (Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, Götterdämmerung) is the most sustained single artistic reworking of the Völsung tradition in any modern language, and it has profoundly influenced the way in which the Norse heroic tradition is received in popular culture. The operas of the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg (whose incidental music to Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, 1875, draws on the Norwegian folk tradition), the symphonies of Jean Sibelius (whose En saga, 1892, and The Bard, 1913, evoke the Eddic and folk tradition), the tone poems of Carl Nielsen (whose Saga-drøm of 1908 is built on themes from the heroic sagas), and the choral works of Hugo Alfvén (whose Gustaf Fröding cycle of 1930 is built on Swedish folk and heroic material) all draw on the same well of tradition.

The modern reception of the heroic tradition includes the fantasies of William Morris (the Story of Sigurd the Volsung, 1876), the mythopoeic fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien (whose Legendarium is built on the Eddic, Kalevala, and Arthurian traditions), the fantasy literature of C. S. Lewis, Peter S. Beagle, Stephen R. Lawhead (whose Pendragon Cycle is built on the Arthurian and the heroic tradition), the video-game series of Santa Monica Studio (the God of War franchise draws on the Völsung and the Eddic tradition), the films of Richard Fleischer and Uli Edel on the Nibelungen, the novels of the Icelandic writers Halldór Laxness, Svava Jakobsdóttir, and Einar Már Guðmundsson, and the neo-pagan practice of Ásatrú in Iceland, Scandinavia, Britain, Germany, and the United States. The tradition is alive and well, and it continues to furnish the modern imagination with one of its deepest and most enduring sources.

The Hero and Modern Scholarship: New Directions

The opening of the twenty-first century has seen a new wave of scholarship on the Old Norse heroic tradition. The re-dating of the Eddic poems by Joseph Harris and Carol Clover has placed the composition of many of the heroic poems in the Viking Age, and the application of oral-formulaic theory to the poems by John Miles Foley has shown how the Eddic corpus is a system of formulae and themes rather than a set of independent compositions. The archaeological revolution of the last thirty years — the excavation of the Sutton Hoo ship-burial, the new finds at Vendel and Valsgärde, the great Viking Age cemetery at Hrísbrú in Iceland, the runic inscriptions of the Karlevi stone, the Rök stone, and the Jelling stones — has made it possible to anchor the heroic tradition in a real material world.

The gendered reading of the heroic tradition has been transformed by the work of Jenny Jochens, Margaret Clunies Ross, Judy Quinn, and Cara K. Corsaro, who have shown that the women of the heroic sagas are not merely passive objects but active agents whose decisions drive the action of the tales. The comparative approach to the heroic tradition, drawing on the comparative mythology of the Indo-European school (founded by Adalbert Kuhn and developed by Georges Dumézil), has located the Norse hero-tales in a much wider Indo-European pattern of dragon-slaying, treasure-curse, and dynastic doom. The reception-history approach, exemplified by the work of Heinrich Beck and Lars Lönnroth, has traced the transmission of the heroic tradition from the Migration Period to the present day. The digital humanities revolution, with the great Skaldic Project of the University of Sydney, the Ménestrel project of the University of Oslo, and the ORL (Old Norse Royal Legendary) project, has made the heroic tradition accessible to a global scholarly audience for the first time.

The heroic age, in the twenty-first century, is being re-read. The old ethnic interpretations have given way to a more nuanced view of the tradition as a literary system with roots in a real past but a continuous life of its own. The dragons of the Fafnir legend, the valkyries of the Sigurd cycle, the cursed sword Tyrfing, the doomed kings of the Hrólfs saga kraka — all of these figures are now recognised as the property of a single literary culture that has shaped the literature, the music, and the visual art of the Western world for more than a thousand years.