N his 1939 lecture ‘On Fairy-Stories’, J. R. R. Tolkien looked back at his childhood reading and singled out one story, among all the classics of children’s literature, which awoke in him a profound sense of literary desire. To his youthful mind, he says, treasure islands and tales of Alice in Wonderland had little appeal; Arthurian legends were better; but ‘best of all [was] the nameless North of Sigurd of the Völsungs, and the prince of all dragons. Such lands were pre-eminently desirable.’

Sigurd of the Völsungs—Sigurd the dragon-slayer—was one of the greatest heroes of Germanic legend, the inheritance of ancient story and song from which Anglo-Saxon and Norse poetry sprang. In origin, Sigurd’s is not a children’s story at all: it’s a dark tale of lust and greed, revenge, incest and murder. The Völsung legend spans generations of heroes, who all meet violent ends at the hands of the gods or their malicious enemies. It also contains some of the most memorable female characters in medieval literature: the proud Valkyrie Brynhild, punished for disobedience by imprisonment on a mountain within an impenetrable ring of flame, and Gudrún, loving wife turned vengeful mother, who sends her own sons to their deaths to avenge their sister’s murder and at last, desolate, casts herself into the waves.

Unsurprisingly, not much of this made its way into the children’s story-book where the young Tolkien first came across it: Andrew Lang’s The Red Fairy Book of 1890. But even in that sanitised form, there was enough to give the boy a taste for dragons, and to whet his appetite for the ‘nameless North’. The story of Sigurd left an indelible mark on Tolkien’s imagination, and its traces can be found all over Middle Earth. The language he uses in ‘On Fairy-Stories’ —‘the prince of all dragons’ —echoes some similar comments made a few years earlier in another lecture: Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics (1936), where he speaks of Sigurd as ‘the prince of the heroes of the North, supremely memorable’, his dragon-slaying ‘the chief deed of the greatest of heroes.’ Tolkien’s language in both lectures suggests that for him there was something superlative, pre-eminent, about the Sigurd legend, both among the other stories of northern literature and in his own literary formation. His encounter with Sigurd and the dragon was the beginning of what was to become a life-long fascination with the literature of the medieval north.

In the 1930s, around the time he was working on the first versions of these two lectures, Tolkien was also writing his own version of the legend of the Völsungs. Never published in his lifetime, it was edited long after his death by his son, Christopher Tolkien, as The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún (2009). It’s a strange and compelling sequence of poems, written in a particularly demanding form of alliterative metre which many modern readers will find difficult to follow, let alone enjoy. But it’s worth persevering with—a work with a fierce, uncompromising beauty of its own, and an insight into Tolkien’s thinking in one of the most intensely creative periods of his life as a scholar and a poet. The two lectures of the 1930s in which he muses on the power of the Sigurd story were both to become famous and influential steps forward in 20th-century scholarship, field-defining in the study of their respective subjects, the fantasy genre and the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf. The other product of Tolkien’s thinking in this period was to become more famous still. The Hobbit—like Sigurd’s story—is a tale of a dragon, a cursed treasure-hoard, and the terrible greed it awakens in the hearts of men and dwarves.

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O understand Tolkien’s fascination with the Sigurd legend, we need to consider what he meant by that evocative phrase, ‘the nameless North’. To him, as to many other writers medieval and modern, it’s as much an idea as a real time or place. Roughly speaking, it means a loosely-defined region of northern Europe—Germany and Scandinavia, the lands around the Baltic and the Rhine—in the fourth and fifth centuries. It’s a world of forests, mountains, and rivers, populated by half-forgotten kings of the Burgundians, Goths and Huns. Stories of this northern world come down to us filtered through the minds of much later Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic writers, living far away from this time and place, but looking back to it as a kind of ancestral homeland. Their idea of it came partly from their inheritance of oral poetry, a hoard of legends and stories they believed their ancestors had carried with them out of the northern forests. But it was just as much the recreation of their own imaginations, seen from the perspective of medieval Christians living in a society far removed from those violent, monster-filled times.

In this world, Sigurd was one of the brightest and best. As Tolkien points out in Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics, dragon-slayers are not plentiful in Germanic legend, and Sigurd is the only one who found lasting fame in the Middle Ages. He was much more famous than Beowulf, who is the subject of only one epic poem; though today many people have heard of Beowulf who’ve never heard of Sigurd, in the Middle Ages it was the other way around. Even the poet of Beowulf was in thrall to the Sigurd story—it’s a compliment to the young Beowulf to have the tale of Sigurd sung for him, a hint of the greatness he might aspire to.

A summary of the story may help. The Völsung legend is long and complex, starting some generations before Sigurd, and carrying on to the sons and daughters of the principal characters. Sigurd’s father, Sigmund, has his own legend; he too is a great but beleaguered hero, who at various times lives as an outlaw, werewolf, and king. He has a child by his own sister, and is at last killed in battle by the direct intervention of Odin. Then the story turns to young Sigurd, born after his father’s death. Sigurd is educated by the dwarf smith Regin, who urges Sigurd to kill a dragon, Fáfnir, and win his treasure-hoard of gold. But Regin is deceitful—Fáfnir is Regin’s own brother, transformed into dragonish shape, and the young hero is an unwitting pawn in his tutor’s game. The treasure he wins by killing Fáfnir, obtained through treachery, brings trouble with it.

The dragon-gold wins Sigurd fame, but also awakens terrible jealousy and greed. Fresh from the triumph of victory over the dragon, he loves and is loved by two women, and that proves his downfall. He is tricked into marrying Gudrún because her family desires his glory and gold, though she loves him dearly. Brynhild, whom Sigurd has rescued from the ring of fire, marries Gudrún’s brother, but cannot bring herself to love a lesser man when it is Sigurd she really wants. She incites her husband to murder him, and Gudrún grieves helplessly as her brothers slay her husband at her side. Brynhild kills herself on Sigurd’s funeral-pyre; Gudrún lives to marry again and to watch her children grow up and die, before she too dies by her own hand.

In the Middle Ages the story of Sigurd was told in art and literature across northern Europe. In written form, it survives in multiple versions in Old Norse: in a cycle of poems in the Poetic Edda, in summary form in the Prose Edda, and in the 13th-century Völsunga saga. A related version of the legend is the subject of the Nibelungenlied, the great epic poem of medieval German literature. Sigurd’s story also appears in visual art, carved on runestones and grave-markers, on standing crosses and church doors.

In England knowledge of the legend waned after the Anglo-Saxon period, but in the second half of the 19th century there was a great upsurge of interest in Sigurd’s story, part of the Victorian fascination with all things medieval. Around this time, Richard Wagner made the Nibelungenlied the basis of his own version of the legend in the Ring cycle. The medieval texts were translated into accessible editions: Völsunga saga was first published in English translation in 1870, a collaboration between William Morris and the Icelandic scholar Eiríkur Magnússon, and a few years later Morris also published a long epic poem, Sigurd the Volsung, which tells the story in his characteristically lush and archaic alliterative style. Morris called the Völsung legend ‘the Great Story of the North, which should be to all our race what the Tale of Troy was to the Greeks’, and his two versions of the story gave it lasting popularity.

Morris was an early influence on Tolkien, and in his enthusiastic promotion of this northern epic we can see the spark which fired Tolkien’s love for the legend. After Andrew Lang, it was through Morris that Tolkien was led to the Völsung story: as a teenager he bought a copy of Morris’s translation of Völsunga saga with some school prize-money, and began to teach himself Old Norse in order to read the text in the original. From Lang, to Morris, and then to the real thing, each step took young Tolkien further into the ‘nameless North’. If the first lure of this northern world to him was that it contained the promise of dragons, he came to find in it other attractions too. It offered an insight into the deep history of the Germanic languages which became his life-long study; it could help to explain features which Anglo-Saxon and Norse literature have in common, supposedly through their shared origins in these northern lands. And it was a place of adventure, tragedy, and glory, where there were not only dragons, but heroes mighty enough to slay them—a world where gods and great men walked the earth together.

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ANY aspects of Tolkien’s Middle Earth which might seem medieval in a general way can in fact be traced to specific moments in the legend of the Völsungs. In The Hobbit, especially, there are numerous elements clearly inspired by Sigurd’s story. Of course, this includes the dragon. Tolkien’s Smaug is directly indebted to Sigurd’s Fáfnir: both are sly, talkative dragons who have to be outwitted not only by force but by clever words, and Sigurd, like Bilbo, manages to dodge the dragon by spinning riddles about his own name. ‘Noble beast’ and ‘motherless boy’ he calls himself, as Bilbo disguises himself as ‘Ring-winner’ and ‘Barrel-rider.’ Tolkien adds, ‘This of course is the way to talk to dragons, if you don’t want to reveal your proper name… No dragon can resist the fascination of riddling talk.’ That eminently useful knowledge he had learned from Sigurd.

Sigurd’s story must also have inspired the helpful, communicative birds which swoop through the last chapters of The Hobbit, where ravens carry messages and a thrush reveals how to shoot at the weak point in Smaug’s body. A crucial moment in Sigurd’s life—beloved of medieval artists—comes after he has killed the dragon and is roasting its heart on a spit. Accidentally touching his thumb to his lip, he tastes the dragon’s blood, which gives him the power to understand the language of birds. He overhears birds speaking about him, warning him of a threat to his life, and directing him onwards to the next stage of his journey.

Perhaps most significant of all is Gandalf. Gandalf, who has a name borrowed from the Poetic Edda, shares some important characteristics with the Norse god Odin, father of the gods, as he features in the Sigurd legend. Odin turns up again and again to help the Völsung line, wandering the world in the form of an old man, hooded and cloaked to disguise his identity. He suddenly appears to intervene in the lives of his favoured heroes, and then just as suddenly disappears again: he plants a sword in the hall of the Völsungs for Sigmund to find, and procures for Sigurd the finest of horses. Gandalf’s physical appearance, his unexpected eruptions into the peaceful lives of the hobbits, and the inscrutable and enigmatic nature of his actions all owe a debt to this conception of Odin.

All this might have found its way into The Hobbit as Tolkien worked on his own version of the Völsung story, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún. This work is not just a poem but a kind of scholarly wrestling with the medieval sources, a sustained and complicated engagement. The Völsung legend is a tale which has passed through many hands, and is not so much one story as a web of interconnected narratives, made up of multiple poems and songs which became linked over time. The number of versions in which it survives testifies to its popularity, but also means that there are inconsistencies at key points in the story. It’s a very powerful legend, in the drama of the dragon-slaying and the intensity of the relationships between the characters; but it’s also a scholarly puzzle, irresistible to those who enjoy such things, and both the power and the puzzle appealed to Tolkien.

His version of the story is as much an attempt to solve the puzzle as it is to capture the power of the poetry. The poems which make up his version are not straightforward translations, though in places they follow the Norse sources closely; instead, they are a reworking of the story, trying to unify the disparate sources into one coherent whole. All the surviving medieval texts for this legend are to some extent composite, pieces of a jigsaw for which we don’t have the guiding picture—snatches of song and story which don’t all agree. Tolkien used his version in part to work out for himself what the overall picture of the legend might once have looked like, in its fullest and original form; he connects parts of the story together in ways that can best explain the motivations and choices of the characters. As a work of scholarly hypothesis, if nothing else, it’s a bold and inventive work.

It’s bold too in its poetry, in the unusual effect it attempts to create. It’s an experiment in writing alliterative verse, not in the long loping lines of medieval English alliterative poetry but in the taut, compressed metre of the Poetic Edda. As Tolkien himself characterised the difference between these two approaches to alliterative verse, ‘Old Norse poetry aims at seizing a situation, striking a blow that will be remembered, illuminating a moment with a flash of lightning... Old English verse does not attempt to hit you in the eye. To hit you in the eye was the deliberate intention of the Norse poet.’ In Tolkien’s one reference to these poems, in a 1967 letter to W. H. Auden, he recalls that in writing them he was ‘trying to learn the art of writing alliterative poetry’, and Old Norse is a particularly difficult art to learn; but in the extreme compression and vigorous energy of its verse, his Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún succeeds in bringing the lightning-flash effect into English poetry. Between its metrical ambition and its scholarly deftness, it’s a remarkable achievement.

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ND there’s one aspect of Tolkien’s engagement with the story which is bolder still. He introduces into his version his own interpretation of the Völsung legend, not found in any of the Norse sources. His Sigurd is not just a great hero, but a unique figure with a divinely-appointed destiny, chosen for him, and brought to fruition, by the planning of Odin. Tolkien begins his story not as the Norse sources do, with Sigurd’s ancestors, but back in mythological deep time, with a version of the Norse creation myth. Even in the world’s beginning, the gods foresee its end—their own destruction at Ragnarök. The monstrous forces in the world, which for a time the gods can tame and imprison, will overcome them in the end.

But as Tolkien tells it, they see a spark of hope: a prophecy that the world can be saved at Ragnarök if a particular type of hero can fight for the gods:

If in day of Doom

one deathless stands,

who death hath tasted

and dies no more,

the serpent-slayer,

seed of Ódin,

then all shall not end,

nor Earth perish.

 

On his head shall be helm,

in his hand lightning,

afire his spirit,

in his face splendour.

The Serpent shall shiver

and Surt waver,

the Wolf be vanquished

and the world rescued.

That hero will be Sigurd—created to fulfill this prophecy, and guided from birth to death by Odin’s intervention so that all its conditions can be met.

This is not in the Norse sources, as Tolkien well knew. The idea that human heroes will fight at Ragnarök is, however; that’s why Odin brings dead warriors from the battlefield to feast in Valhalla, to fight on the side of the gods at the end of the world. But this thread of hope—this flash of light in the apocalyptic darkness—is his own invention. In the notes he wrote to accompany the poem, he acknowledges this:

‘one, Sigurd son of Sigmund, is to be the chief of all, their leader on the Last Day; for Ódin hopes that by his hand the Serpent shall in the end be slain, and a new world made possible. None of the Gods can accomplish this, but only one who has lived on Earth first as a mortal, and died. (This motif of the special function of Sigurd is an invention of the present poet, or an interpretation of the Norse sources in which it is not explicit.)’

This prophecy of Tolkien’s invention casts Sigurd as a Christ figure: a hero both divine and mortal, who dies but conquers death to return on the Last Day as the Saviour of the world. There are overt Christian resonances not only in the idea but in Tolkien’s choice of language: ‘who death has tasted and dies no more’ recalls St Paul: ‘Christ being raised from the dead dies no more; death hath no more dominion over him’. These echoes of Biblical language recur elsewhere in the poem, as at Sigurd’s birth:

Wind was wailing,

waves were crying,

Sigrlinn sorrowful,

when a son she bore.

Sigurd golden

as a sun shining,

forth came he fair

in a far country.

That last phrase alludes to a prophecy of Isaiah, which speaks of ‘the man from a far country’ who will carry out a divine purpose planned since the beginning of time. The image of Sigurd as a golden sun-bright figure, which appears throughout the poem, owes something to William Morris’s imagining of his hero, but more to the idea of Sigurd as a kind of solar deity—a sun-god figure who dies but is reborn, resurrected.

HERE was some medieval precedent for aligning Sigurd, flawed hero as he is with his tangled romantic life, with Christ himself: scenes of Sigurd killing the dragon appear on early carvings in a Christian context, which may show his triumph being cast as a battle between good and evil, like Christ’s own battle against the Satanic dragon. But what Tolkien does with it is his own invention, a fascinating decision to colour this tragic pagan story with a touch of Christian hope. The effect is to give a new kind of unity to the whole story, with all its disparate parts: ‘the hope of Odin’, the one spark of light which promises a future after the devastation of Ragnarök.

We can see a hint of what he may have intended here by returning to Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics. In that lecture, Tolkien uses Norse mythology, especially the idea of Ragnarök, to explore why the poet of Beowulf chose to place battles against monsters at the centre of his story. The dragon-fight of Beowulf, Tolkien argues, is a significant battle in part because it is an echo of a cosmic battle, between the gods and the monsters. The poet of Beowulf was a Christian, but Tolkien argues that he still saw the world as essentially a battle against monsters—a story of ‘Man alien in a hostile world, engaged in a struggle which he cannot win while the world lasts’. The pagan gods may have gone, but ‘the monsters do not depart, whether the gods go or come. A Christian was (and is) still like his forefathers a mortal hemmed in a hostile world.’

That battle against the monsters is against the forces of chaos, evil, and darkness, and it cannot be won within the mortal world. Every human victory can only be temporary; life on earth is a long defeat. Yet within a Christian understanding, Tolkien argues in this lecture, ‘The tragedy of the great temporal defeat remains for a while poignant, but ceases to be finally important... for the end of the world is part of the design of Metod, [the Old English name for fate or God], the Arbiter who is above the mortal world.’

It’s this idea which Tolkien explores with his retelling of the Sigurd story: that defeat, death, and failure can be a necessary part of a divine plan. In the Norse sources Sigurd’s story is a tragedy, a tale of grief, betrayal, and loss. But Tolkien, like the poet of Beowulf, brings to his pagan material a Christian perspective, and so his poem looks beyond the immediate disaster. It is not a tragedy, where human greed and jealousy get the final word; it is a story of a divine purpose fulfilled, bearing a promise from beyond the walls of the world. This world is a dark place, full of evil and suffering; and yet he suggests there are shafts of light and hope, perceived though not clearly understood by mortal eyes. Somewhere, out of sight, a force of good is at work, which governs all and will not allow evil to triumph—even if all mortals can see is defeat and death.

This idea too finds an echo in The Hobbit. It’s a sombre thought for a children’s book, and yet—like Tolkien’s own childhood encounter with the Sigurd legend—it offers young readers a distant echo of a story ancient and profound. As Thorin lies dying, his last words recall those with which Tolkien describes Sigurd’s death. Thorin tells Bilbo: ‘I go now to the halls of waiting, to sit beside my fathers, until the world is renewed’, and of Sigurd in Valhalla, we’re told:

There feasts he long

at his father’s side,

for War waiting,

the World’s chosen.

That final war is to be a final victory, and the world’s rebirth.