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In the famous myth which serves as the basis for the Volsunga Saga and the Nibelungenlied, the dragon Fafnir steals the Valkyrie Brynhild and keeps her shut up in a castle on the Glistening Heath, until some champion shall be found powerful enough to rescue her.
Völsunga Saga, though it paraphrases in full the passages relating to the magic sleep, removes much of the mystery surrounding her by providing her with a genealogy and family connections; while the Nibelungen Lied goes further still in the same direction by leaving out the magic sleep. The change is a natural result of Christian ideas, to which Odin's Wishmaidens would become incomprehensible.
Every student of poetry may make the comparison for himself, and decide for himself whether the old or the new is better. Again, in the final fight and massacre in the hall of Atli, I cannot but prefer the Slaying of the Wooers, at the close of the "Odyssey," or the last fight of Roland at Roncesvaux, or the prose version of the "Volsunga."
It has been more recently edited by Dr. Bugge, together with Völsunga and others. Death of Angantyr. Transmission of Legends. Müllenhoff's views are given in the Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum, vol. x.; Maurer's in the Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, vol. ii. For Golther's views on the Volsung cycle see Germania, 33. The Dragon Myth. See also Hartland, Science of Fairy-Tales.
We shall next perhaps be invited to believe that the authors of the Volsunga Saga obtained the conception of Sigurd from the "Thirty-Nine Articles." It is true that these deities, Athene and Apollo, are wiser, purer, and more dignified, on the whole, than any of the other divinities of the Homeric Olympos. They alone, as Mr. Gladstone truly observes, are never deceived or frustrated.
Then follows a fragment on the death of Sigurd. In addition to the poems in the Elder Edda, an account of the story is given by Snorri in Skaldskaparmal, but it is founded almost entirely on the surviving lays. Völsunga Saga is also a paraphrase, but more valuable, since parts of it are founded on lost poems, and it therefore, to some extent, represents independent tradition.
Think of the forces at work in producing a poem like ‘Sigurd.’ Think of the mingling of the drudgery of the Dryasdust with the movements of an imaginative vision unsurpassed in our time; think, I say, of the collaborating of the ‘Völsunga Saga’ with the ‘Nibelungenlied,’ the choosing of this point from the Saga-man, and of that point from the later poem of the Germans, and then fusing the whole by imaginative heat into the greatest epic of the nineteenth century.
According to Snorri's paraphrase, Sigurd gives the ring to Brynhild when he goes to her in Gunnar's form. For the rest of the story we must depend chiefly on Gripisspa and Völsunga. The latter tells that Grimhild, the mother of the Giukings, gave Sigurd a magic drink by which he forgot Brynhild and fell in love with Giuki's daughter.
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