Sigurd

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.

Sigurd is the Norse name for a hero who also survives under a second identity, Siegfried, in the Middle High German Nibelungenlied, and the two are best understood as regional descendants of one shared Germanic legendary tradition that split apart as it spread and was written down centuries apart in different languages.

The Old Norse versions, preserved in the Poetic Edda and the prose Volsunga Saga, and the German version differ on real points: the order of events, the motives given to the main characters, and especially the treatment of Brynhild, whose role and backstory are handled quite differently between the two traditions. Comparative philologists have used exactly these divergences to reconstruct something of the shared older legend behind both, on the reasoning that where the Norse and German versions agree, the material is likely to be old, and where they diverge sharply, one or both traditions have reshaped it to fit local taste and later literary convention.

The dragon Fafnir, the hoard, and the general shape of a doomed hero entangled with two women and a family feud recur in both, which is taken as evidence of a common source, while the specific texture of each surviving version reflects centuries of separate transmission before either was written down in the form now read.