The Volsung Saga fucks. It is really an awesome little book, representing what might be the earliest entry in the literary genre that would later be called Sword and Sorcery. Beowulf might be earlier, but there is decidedly less sex, decidedly less sorcery, and decidedly less political and romantic intrigue in the Anglo-Saxon slug-fest.
Tolkien is fully in Volsung Saga’s debt.
Sure, Beowulf has got a gold-guarding dragon— and Tolkien produced his own translation of that one— but the ‘Children of Hurin’ arc in the Silmarilion is, in it’s essense and in many of its particulars, a re-working of the Volsung material.
Reading Volsung Saga lets you know why they call 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.
It 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 meaningful; 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.
Beneath the grim subject matter and crude presentation, Volsung Saga is a real enigma.
It was recorded in the 13th century, but it contains informaton which goes back to Attila the Hun, the migration period,the collapse of Roman Imperialism, the rise of the Gothic States in Spain and Gaul- the 4th and 5th centuries, that’s like…
900 years of the Volsung Saga.
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.
Layers: Sati 'The Chaste'
Brynhild is a chaste woman, a warrior and a shield-maiden pledged to a peerless man; a man she finds in Sigurd. Through an act of deception, though, she is wed to a lesser man. In retaliation, Brynhild has Sigurd killed because she cannot bear the humiliation she endures. This only causes her more grief, and she throws herself onto Sigurd’s funeral pyre.
Brynhild is burnt alive with the corpse of Sigurd, and the star-crossed lovers are finally wed in the fire.
There are notable similarities between the Norse/Germanic tragedy of Sigurd and Brynhyld and the Sanskrit tragedy of Sati and Shiva:
Is Brynhild based on the Hindu Goddess Sati?
The Mahabhagavata Purana presents Sati as a fierce warrior. ...[] Sati, as Kali, went to the sacrifice and split herself into two entities- one real but invisible, another just chhaya- shadow or clone. Chhaya Sati destroyed the sacred event by jumping into the sacrificial fire, while the 'real' Sati was reborn as Parvati.
Another tradition holds that the charred body of Sati was carried around the universe by a grieving Shiva, and whereever her remains fell, a shrine to the mother goddess was instituted.There are 76 such sites, called Shakti Pithas, still in use.
Humiliation, self-immolation, and warrior women…
I will admit that trying to fit a Brynhild-shaped peg into a Sati-shaped hole requires some imagination. It would be easier to write off the similarities if there weren’t other outstanding features of Vedic literature that appear to have contaminated the Norse Eddic material (Vedic and Eddic even sound similar!). We’ve touched on this before, but there is more to say about it.
Before we get there, though, I want to talk about how the Volsung Saga encodes the Polar Myth—
Brynhild's Wavering Flames
When Sigurd and Gunnar come to Brynhild’s gold-roofed hall perched on a cliff at the edge of the world, the Valkyrie’s Citadel is surrounded by wavering flames. Only a dauntless hero would dare leap into the fire and ride across the Wavering Flames of Brynhyld.
When Brynhild immolates herself on Sigurd’s pyre, she is no longer immune to fire. Perhaps she was brought down to the terrestrial sphere when she was wed to Gunnar— or perhaps her Wavering Flames were never flames at all.
My theory is that Brynhild’s ring of wavering flames represent the Northern Lights, while Brynhild’s gold-roofed hall is the polar axis. The Valkyrie gate-keeps the rainbow bridge of Brifrost, the road to the land of Asgard, home of the Gods. Brynhild guards the Warrior’s Way to transcendence, the road to High Magic, inside her gold-roofed palace.
And Fafnir guards the way to Brynhild-
Fafnir as Draco
Is Volsung Saga the original ‘Dragon Guarding A Princess’ myth?
Only after slaying Fafnir is Sigurd translated into the world Brynhild inhabits— a place where all the scenery has an unreal aspect.
If Brynhild’s Wavering Flames are the Northern Lights, and her citadel is at the roof of the world, the constellation Draco must be Fafnir, the Great Dragon who guards the way to The North Pole, and the Gold-Roofed Citadel of Brynhild.
Draco is the 8th largest constellation in the sky, and it is circumpolar. 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.
The Sigurd/Brynhild/Fafnir/Polar Axis complex was built on an earlier template; one that is written across the sky itself.
Notice that the constellation Hercules is right in front of Draco. Hercules is like Sigurd; a legendary monster slayer. In one tradition, Hercules killed the great dragon Ladon to win the golden apples from the Great Tree at the center of the Garden of the Hesperides.
In the Garden of the Hesperides
More star-codes: legend has it mighty Hercules was assigned twelve impossible labors by King Eurystheus of Tiryns.
One interpretive scheme holds that each task as represents a month of the year and a sign of the zodiac. Hercules would thus represent the cyclic or Sisyphean course of the sun.
A similar belief prevails regarding the legend of King Arthur and the Round Table. Here, Arthur is the Sacrificial Sun King and the Round Table is the Celestial Equator— with each of Arthur’s Knights representing a sign of the zodiac.
For his eleventh task, the one corresponding with the sign of Aquarius, Hercules must 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 would be a realm of unending twilight, not unlike certain months in the Arctic.
According to the Bibliotheca of Apollodorus, only the Chained Titan Prometheus knew 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 one version of the story, Hercules tricks Atlas into retrieving the apples while Hercules holds the world on his shoulders. In the version found in the Library of Pseudo-Apollodorus, Hercules goes all Sigurd and kills the mighty hundred-headed dragon to seize the golden apples with his own hands.
After Hercules returns to Hellas with the golden apples, Athene comes to retrieve them, for
... it was not lawful that they should be laid down anywhere.
Is this not like the Nibelung treasure of the Volsung Saga? It never abided in one place for long, and whoever held it was condemned to reap no reward from it.
Is this not like the stars in the sky? For the stars to make landfall would violate every law that maintains the homeostasis on which all life on earth depends—
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—
and we can find all these elements reflected in the Volsung Myth.
Back To India
We opened this disertation on the symbolic folds within Volsgung Saga with the tragedy of Sigurd and Brynhild to demonstrate 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?
Discover more from Dungeonposting
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
