The Völsunga saga (or Saga of the Völsungs) is a legendary saga, a late 13th century Icelandic prose rendition of the origin and decline of the Völsung clan.
It is largely based on epic poetry of the historic Elder Edda.
Elder Edda is the modern attribution for an unnamed collection of Old Norse anonymous poems, which is different from the Edda written by Snorri Sturluson, the Icelandic historian, poet, and politician.
The Saga of the Volsungs is a compilation of a number of stories taken from various Viking poems. The earliest of these tell the genealogy of the hero of the main part of the saga, one Sigurd of the Volsungs.
The saga can be divided into five phases:
1. the preliminary generations;
2. Sigurd and his foster family;
3. Sigurd and the Gjukingar;
4. Gudrun and the Budlingar;
5. Gudrun's last marriage.
Structurally, Völsunga saga is a sprawling Generational Saga, starting with Sigi, supposedly a son of Odin, who commits murder of a slave. For this, he is banished from his homeland (the identity of which is never disclosed), eventually becoming a sea-rover and conquering himself a kingdom. Sigi’s son Rerir is the father of Völsung, who marries a Valkyrie and from whom the lineage receives its name, the Völsungs. Rerir’s son, Völsung, builds a mighty palace around a tree, his son Sigmund, who pulls a sword placed there by Odin from the tree – and in doing so starts another blood feud. And finally it is Sigurd, Sigmund’s son (with his twin sister Signy) who is, as a result, a “full-blooded Volsung” and who kills a dragon, gains its treasure and its wisdom (by eating its heart), and who causes all sorts of trouble by being so -heroic. For example, he wins the heart of Brynhild, a “shield maiden,” but then, because of magic, marries her friend, a rival princess named Gudrun. We hope, these spoilers does not ruin your impression of this book and you will read it and learn much more details then we have here.
All the descendants of Sigi, male or female, are of excessive strength, courage, and willpower. Yet for all their heroism, they are, in every new generation, haunted by bad luck and a tendency to come to horrible and untimely ends, and their history is chock full of bloodbaths and grisly tragedies — most frequently, the betrayal of in-laws, the perennial curse of the Völsungs. None of them dies a peaceful death, and only a few die in honorable battle – more often they are backstabbed, murdered, or even commit suicide.
With every new generation, there arises a son who is even more prodigious and formidable than his father, until the lineage reaches its climax with Sigurd, Sigi’s great-great-grandson, who reaches the pinnacle of heroism when he kills the dragon Fafnir, and thus earns fame unparalleled by any mortal hero before or after him — and not to forget, the enormous treasure of the dragon. But Sigurd does not escape the Völsung’s curse: An intrigue causes him to get caught up in a love triangle between two beautiful and proud women, each from a powerful heroic clan in their own right — Brynhild of the Budlungs, a Valkyrie who is his first love, and Gudrun of the Gjukungs, also known as Niflungs, whom he marries. Sigurd ends up being murdered by his in-laws, the brothers of Gudrun, and no son of him survives to pass on the Völsung name.
But the Niflungs seem to have inherited the curse of the Völsungs with Sigurd’s murder, as they are lured to their death by Atli, Brynhild’s brother and Gudrun’s second husband, who in turn wants to get his hands on the treasure.
The last chapters are dedicated to Gudrun, whose sufferings are still not over, as she must live to see Svanhild, her daughter from Sigurd and the last Völsung alive, being unjustly killed by King Jörmunrekkr, and the vengeance Gudrun exacts comes at a high price.
Amid the episodic richness of plot and the intricacy of its strands, the primary and recurring theme of the Volsunga Saga is power. Through the stories of its many characters, the Volsunga Saga closely examines in various ways the many forms of power, the consequences of having or not having power, and the responsibilities and obligations conferred on individuals by power. Within the saga framework, the Volsunga Saga depicts such emotions and impulses as love, jealousy, rage, fear, revenge, and loyalty in a fundamental, raw state that is usually refined or obscured in later societies.
Two of the main themes of the saga are the male responsibility of rewarding friends and punishing acts of shame, and the female responsibility of goading for revenge. Together these create much of the contention in the saga.
The Saga of the Volsungs narrates the origin and decline of the Volsungs. The saga includes marvels like werewolves and talking dragons, sorceresses, spells, forgetting potions, and Odin appears repeatedly at the margins of the story influencing its outcome, but it also includes historical figures including Atilla the Hun and events such as the destruction of the Burgundians in the fifth century. Thematically it examines the simultaneous necessity for and destructive nature of revenge, masculine and feminine behavoir, and the need for punishment of wrongs. In the preserved manuscript version, another theme emerges from its own temporal moment – the ways in which a tribal society is altered by the influence of outside trends, in this case represented by continental literature in the form of the romance.
We mentioned werewolves and dragons, which lead us to the theme of shapeshifting. There are two types of it in the saga: human to human act of shapeshifting and human to animal. First one is all about Signy, who exchanges forms with a sorceress in order to visit her brother, Sigmund (Why? Read it the book!). This instance of shapeshifting exhibits a typical narrative trope wherein a human resorts to magical means in order to achieve some personal or individual desire. Shapeshifting here is characterized by choice, an intentional act. In contrast, the instance of human to animal shapeshifting introduces a complication to this act of shapeshifting, as humans take on animal shape unwillingly, unintentionally, or at times seemingly uncontrollably, as it happened with Fafnir, who transformed from man to dragon (or snake). Due to the acquisition of the cursed treasure, he became so ill-natured that he set out for the wilds and allowed no one to enjoy the treasure but himself.
Perhaps, it seems to be really familiar. And you are right, because we all know J. R. R. Tolkienand he took a lot of things from Skandinavian poems and especially from The Saga of the Volsungs to make his own creation – The Hobbit and the Lord of the Ring, two of the most popular books in the world nowadays.
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