Sigurd, Siegfried in the German tradition, is the supreme hero of Norse legend, and his story stands at the heart of the whole northern heroic cycle. Fatherless and raised by the cunning smith Regin, he reforges the shattered sword of his father and, with it, slays the dragon Fafnir, who guards a great hoard of gold.
Roasting the dragon's heart and accidentally tasting its blood, he gains the power to understand the speech of birds, who warn him of Regin's treachery, and he takes the cursed treasure, gold that carries doom to everyone who holds it. He wakens the valkyrie Brynhild from her ring of fire, but the tragedy is set in motion by a potion of forgetfulness that makes him win her, unknowingly, for another man; the resulting web of betrayal ends in his murder. His tale survives in the heroic lays of the Poetic Edda and the prose Volsunga Saga, and it is the ultimate source both of the Middle High German Nibelungenlied and of Wagner's Ring. Sigurd is the northern archetype of the doomed hero, peerless in courage, undone not by any enemy he cannot beat but by the curse on the gold and the fate woven around him.