Sigurd (Old Norse Sigurðr) is the greatest hero of Germanic legend. He killed the dragon Fafnir, bathed in its blood, understood the speech of birds, won a vast and cursed treasure, and woke the sleeping valkyrie Brynhild from her ring of fire. He was betrayed, deceived with a potion of forgetfulness, and murdered by the men he had sworn to call brothers. His story, told in the Poetic Edda, the Völsunga saga, and the German Nibelungenlied (where he is called Siegfried), became the most influential legend of northern Europe — inspiring Wagner’s Ring cycle and, through it, much of modern fantasy.
The Völsungs
Sigurd belonged to the Völsungs, a family of heroes descended from Odin himself. The Völsunga saga, written in Iceland in the thirteenth century from older poems, begins generations before his birth.
His great-great-grandfather was Sigi, a son of Odin. His grandfather Völsung built a great hall around a tree called Barnstokkr. At the wedding of Völsung’s daughter Signý, a one-eyed stranger in a hooded cloak — Odin — walked in and drove a sword into the tree up to its hilt, saying that whoever could pull it out should have it as a gift. Only Völsung’s son Sigmund could draw it. The episode anticipates the sword in the stone of Arthurian legend (see The Sword in the Stone).
The story of Sigmund is one of the darkest in the saga: the destruction of his family by Signý’s husband, his years of hiding in the forest as an outlaw, his life as a werewolf with his son Sinfjötli, and his terrible revenge. In his old age, Sigmund married Hjördís. He was killed in battle when Odin appeared before him and his sword shattered against the god’s spear. Dying, he told Hjördís to keep the fragments: they would be made into a great sword for their son, who was not yet born.
Birth and Upbringing
Sigurd was born after his father’s death and raised at the court of King Hjálprek in Denmark, where Hjördís had remarried. His foster-father was Regin, a smith — skilled, clever, and cunning, but also sinister.
Regin urged Sigurd to win glory and treasure. With Odin’s help, Sigurd chose a horse, Grani, descended from Odin’s own eight-legged horse Sleipnir. Then Regin told him the story of a treasure guarded by a dragon.
The Otter’s Ransom
Regin explained that he had two brothers, Otr and Fáfnir. Otr liked to spend his days as an otter, fishing in a waterfall. One day the gods Odin, Loki, and Hœnir passed by, and Loki killed the otter with a stone. That evening they stayed with Regin’s father, Hreiðmarr, and showed him the otter skin. Hreiðmarr recognized his son and demanded compensation: the gods must fill the skin with gold and cover it completely.
Loki went to the dwarf Andvari, who lived as a pike in a waterfall, and forced him to hand over his hoard of gold. Andvari tried to keep back one small gold ring, Andvaranaut, but Loki took it too. Andvari cursed the ring and the gold: they would be the death of anyone who owned them.
The gold covered the otter skin — except for a single whisker. Odin used the ring to cover it. The curse began to work at once. Fafnir killed his father Hreiðmarr for the treasure, took it to the heath at Gnitaheiðr, and turned into a dragon to guard it. Regin received nothing.
The Sword Gram
Regin forged a sword for Sigurd, but when Sigurd tested it on the anvil, it broke. So did a second. Then Sigurd asked his mother for the fragments of his father’s sword. From them Regin forged Gram, a sword so sharp that it split the anvil to its base and cut through a tuft of wool floating down a river.
Before attacking the dragon, Sigurd first avenged his father, defeating the sons of the king who had killed Sigmund.
The Slaying of Fafnir
Sigurd killed Fafnir by digging a pit in the dragon’s path to the water and stabbing it from below. Before he died, the dragon warned him about the curse on the gold and about Regin’s treachery. Tasting the dragon’s heart’s blood, Sigurd understood the language of birds and learned that Regin planned to kill him, so he killed Regin first and took the treasure. The whole story is told in Sigurd and Fafnir: The Dragon-Slayer of the North.
Brynhild
Riding south with the gold, Sigurd came to a mountain where a fire burned around a wall of shields. Inside lay a warrior in armour, asleep. He cut the mail from the sleeper and found a woman — the valkyrie Brynhild (or Sigrdrífa in the Eddic poem Sigrdrífumál). She had been put to sleep by Odin, pricked with a sleep-thorn, as punishment for giving victory to the wrong king in battle. Odin had decreed that she must marry, and she had sworn to marry only a man who knew no fear.
Brynhild taught Sigurd rune-lore and wisdom, and the two pledged themselves to each other.
The Tragedy of the Gjúkungs
Sigurd rode on to the court of King Gjúki, whose sons Gunnar, Högni, and Guttormr became his sworn brothers. Their mother, the sorceress Grímhildr, wanted Sigurd for her daughter Guðrún. She gave him a potion of forgetfulness, and he forgot Brynhild entirely and married Guðrún.
Then Gunnar wished to marry Brynhild. But Brynhild would marry only the man who rode through the fire around her hall, and Gunnar’s horse would not go through it. So Sigurd, taking Gunnar’s shape by magic, rode through the fire on Grani and wooed Brynhild in Gunnar’s name. For three nights he lay beside her with his sword Gram between them.
The deception led to a quarrel between Brynhild and Guðrún, to the revelation of the truth, and finally to Sigurd’s murder. The story is told in Brynhild: The Valkyrie Who Loved Sigurd.
The Death of Sigurd
Brynhild, humiliated and heartbroken, demanded Sigurd’s death. Gunnar and Högni could not break their oaths of brotherhood, so they persuaded their younger brother Guttormr, who had sworn no oath, to kill him. Guttormr stabbed Sigurd in his bed; Sigurd, dying, threw his sword and cut Guttormr in half. Brynhild laughed once, loudly, when she heard Guðrún’s wail — and then killed herself and was burned on Sigurd’s pyre.
The Fate of the Treasure
The cursed gold passed to the Gjúkungs, who sank it in the Rhine. Guðrún married Atli (Attila the Hun), who invited her brothers to his court and killed them to learn where the treasure lay. Gunnar, thrown into a snake pit, played the harp with his toes until he died, and never revealed its hiding place. Guðrún took a terrible revenge on Atli. The Rhinegold was never recovered.
Siegfried and the Nibelungenlied
In the German Nibelungenlied (c. 1200), Siegfried is a prince of the Netherlands who has killed a dragon and bathed in its blood, making him invulnerable — except for a spot between his shoulder blades where a linden leaf fell. He woos Kriemhild (Guðrún), helps Gunther (Gunnar) win the warrior queen Brünhild, and is killed by the grim vassal Hagen (Högni), who strikes him in his vulnerable spot while he drinks from a spring. The second half of the poem tells Kriemhild’s revenge at the court of Etzel (Attila).
History Behind the Legend
The Sigurd legend has roots in real history. The Burgundian kingdom on the Rhine, ruled by a king named Gundaharius (Gunnar/Gunther), was destroyed by the Huns in 437 CE. Attila died in 453 on his wedding night, and rumour said his new bride had killed him. These events became the core of the legend of the Burgundians’ destruction and Guðrún’s revenge. Sigurd himself has been connected with various Frankish kings, including Sigebert I of Austrasia, who married a Visigothic princess named Brunhild and was murdered in 575, but no identification is certain.
Legacy
The Sigurd legend inspired Richard Wagner’s four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (1876), William Morris’s epic poem Sigurd the Volsung (1876), and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún. Tolkien’s reworking of the cursed ring, the dragon’s hoard, and the reforged broken sword in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings owes a great deal to the Völsung legend. Carvings of Sigurd’s story appear on the twelfth-century portals of the Hylestad stave church in Norway and on the Ramsund carving, a rock inscription in Sweden from around 1030.
Last reviewed: September 2026.