The Volsung Saga fucks. It is an awesome little book, representing what might be the earliest entry in the literary genre that would later be called Sword and Sorcery.
… I’m being disingenuous. I just thought that was a good hook. The earliest manuscript of Volsunga Saga dates to around the 13th century while the Anglo-Saxon heroic poem Beowulf had appeared a few hundred years before that, between the 8th and 11th centuries.
Like Volsung Saga, Beowulf bares all the hallmarks of Sword and Sorcery (monsters, magic, light bondage, badass dudes setting the wrongs of the world to right with a fistful of honed steel) — but Volsung Saga is something different. Something deeper, richer, infinitely more complex— and infinitely more tragic.
J.R.R. Tolkien is fully in the debt of both Volsung Saga and Beowulf, but the Children of Hurin arc in The Silmarillion is entirely a reworking of the Volsung material. The Children of Hurin arc is the darkest chapter of Tolkien’s entire corpus— in other words, it is a fitting homage to its source.
The Volsung Saga lets you know why they called the Dark Ages dark—
Check it out:
Sigurd's dilemma
Regin adopted Sigurd, last of the Volsungs, as a prisoner of war. Regin groomed the Volsung hero from boyhood for the task of killing the dragon Fafnir.
In another life, Fafnir had been Regin’s brother. Fafnir took the Inherittance of the Nibelung Brothers and disappeared beneath the earth to hide behind his helm of terror. Fafnir turned from man to Dragon and waits now in an iron vault, sleeping atop the Nibelung Treasure.
Regin tells Sigurd not to worry; he will forge a sword equal to the task of killing the dragon.
When the sword is complete, Sigurd tests it. The sword breaks.
Rinse and repeat. Again, the sword breaks. It’s not that Regin is a bad smith; it’s that Sigurd is a total badass.
Regin tries again; this time he makes the perfect blade, which the Volsung hero names ‘Gram’.
Forging a sword is no small feat, no light endeavor. Regin was willing to forge three entire blades just to make sure Sigurd went against Fafnir. This is significant; Regin really wanted his brother dead.
At Regin’s urging, Sigurd scouts out the dragon’s lair and sets a trap.
And when Sigurd the dragon-slayer at last slays the dragon Fafnir…
"Regin stood and looked down at the ground for a long time. Then afterward he said with much emotion: 'You have killed my brother, and I am hardly blameless in this deed.
Regin asks Sigurd if he will cut out the dragons heart and roast it for him.
Sigurd obliges.
When Sigurd tastes the juices of the dragon’s heart to ensure that it’s cooked, he finds that he can understand the speech of birds. The birds in a nearby tree are calling him a fool; doesn’t he know that Regin is going to kill him?
This idea comes up often enough in the Icelandic Sagas that it might have been a cultural institution, or at least a sort of best practice: you don’t let people live after they kill your family. Nor do you let people live after you’ve killed their family.
If Regin kills Sigurd, it’s because he has to.
Instead, Sigurd decapitates Regin— because he has to.
Take a second to think about how grim and strange all of this is:
Regin invested years in getting Sigurd to kill Fafnir; Regin regrets the deed, but not so much that he won’t roast and eat his own brother’s heart- only to be murdered by his own ward, a ward he had spent years setting up for betrayal.
Though Volsung Saga was written down in the 13th century, it contains information which goes back to the time of Attila the Hun; the collapse of the Roman frontier during the migration period, and the rise of the Gothic States in Spain and Gaul— events took place in the 4th and 5th centuries. The leys that were stitched together to form Volsung Saga had been handed down for over 900 years before taking the form we know them in.
Beneath it’s primal substance, Volsung Saga courses with primal grief. As much as it is a chain of tribal memories eroded by long stretches of time and forgetting, it is also a heavily encrypted mnemonic device built on an armature still older than the events it describes— an armature written into the stars in the sky.
Fafnir as Draco
Is Volsung Saga the original ‘Dragon Guarding A Princess’ myth? It’s certainly one of them—
Only after killing Fafnir is Sigurd translated into the world inhabited by Brynhild the Valkyrie— a world where everything has an unreal aspect, one governed by the laws of magic.
Draco is the 8th largest constellation in the sky. From time immemorial the Dragon has hung in the Northern sky, guarding the approach to that still point around which the whole sky appears to rotate: True North.
As a circumpolar constellation, Draco never sets beneath the horizon after about 60 degrees latitude in the Northern Hemisphere. Countries like Sweden, Norway, and Iceland occupy these high latitudes; countries that were home to those who cultivated the Volsung Saga.
The constellation of Draco is confronted every night by a far-famed hero— Herakles, the monster-slayer of Greek Myth:
Was the Greco-Roman image of Hercules and the Dragon co-opted by the Nordic court poets and re-interpreted as the Volsung hero Sigurd facing off with the dragon Fafnir? If so, then Volsung Saga encodes the Polar Myth. Leaning on other internal evidence, we find that this is almost certainly the case.
Brynhild's Wavering Flames
When Sigurd and King Gunnar come to Brynhild’s gold-roofed hall perched on a cliff at the edge of the world, her Citadel is surrounded by wavering flames. Only a dauntless hero would dare leap into the fire and ride across the Wavering Flames of Brynhyld.
At the end of the poem Brynhild immolates herself on Sigurd’s funeral pyre; apparently she has lost her immunity to fire. Perhaps she was brought down to the terrestrial sphere when she was wed to Gunnar, having lost her god-like status when she lost her virginity, as told in the 14th-century Nibelungenlied— or perhaps her Wavering Flames were never flames at all.
Perhaps Brynhild’s gold-roofed hall at the roof of the world repressents the polar axis; while her ring of wavering flames represents the Northern Lights.
The Valkyrie Brynhild gate-keeps the rainbow bridge of Brifrost, the road to the land of Asgard, home of the Gods. She guards the Warrior’s Way to transcendence, the road to High Magic, inside her gold-roofed palace.
And Fafnir guards the way to Brynhild-
The Sigurd/Brynhild/Fafnir/Polar Axis complex encoded in the Volsung Saga is explicated in an earlier myth: that of Hercules at the Garden of the Hesperides.
In the Garden of the Hesperides
Of the many legends attached to mighty Hercules, the twelve impossible labors assigned to him by King Eurystheus of Tiryns are perhaps the most widely-known.
More star-codes: some say each of his twelve labors represents a month of the year and a sign of the zodiac. Hercules is thus the sun itself, embarking on it’s Sisyphean course.
There is a similar belief attached to the legend of King Arthur and the Round Table. Here, Arthur is the Sacrificial Sun King and the Round Table represents is the Celestial Equator. Each of Arthur’s best Knights represents a sign of the zodiac.
The eleventh task of Hercules, corresponding with the sign of Aquarius, is to fetch the Sacred Apples from the Holy Tree at the center of the Garden of the Hesperides.
‘Hesperides’ means something like ‘Daughters of the Sunset’, or ‘Nymphs of The West’. The Garden of the Hesperides is a realm of unending twilight, not unlike certain months in the Arctic.
According to the 1st century mythological compendium called the Bibliotheca of Apollodorus, only the Chained Titan Prometheus could tell the way to the Garden of the Hesperides.
Hercules travelled to the Caucasus Mountains to liberate the primeval titan from torture and bondage. After killing the great eagle that feasted every day on Prometheus’ regenerating liver and severing the chains of Hephaestus, Prometheus tells Hercules that the Garden he seeks may be found among the Hyperboreans— at the extreme north of the world.
There, Hercules finds Atlas holding up the Planetary Axis.
In the version of the story found in the Library of Pseudo-Apollodorus, Hercules goes all Sigurd and kills the mighty hundred-headed dragon to seize the golden apples.
After Hercules returns to Hellas with the golden apples, Pallas Athene comes to retrieve them,
...[for] it was not lawful that they should be laid down anywhere.
Pallas Athene is like Byrnhyld— a patroness of heroes.
And the golden apples that cannot be contained on earth are like the Nibelung treasure in the Volsung Saga — whoever held the it was condemned to reap no reward from it.
Here it is, my master thesis:
The eyes of the hundred-headed dragon Ladon were all the stars in the sky; the golden apples suspended on the tree in the Garden of the Hesperides were no less than the sun, the moon and the planets, a treasure that could never be possessed; and I the Great Tree the dragon guarded was no less than the planetary axis—
We can find all the elements of Hercules in the Garden of the Hesperides reflected in the Volsung Myth.
Back To India
There is a possible connection between the Norse Eddas and the sanskrit Vedas.
The vedas are also informed by the polar myth. The parallels are so striking that the idea of a direct, living chain of custody between the Indian subcontinent and early Scandinavian culture demands investigation.
Well—
Rob Sepher beat me to it. I don’t usually like to condone this man’s work because he takes exactly zero pains to centrifuge the National Socialist (see: straight up fucking nazi) undertones out of his work, but it’s a good way to seal this up for now:
…Would you like to read more about Brynhyld?
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