Sigurd in the Art of the Viking Age

The youthful adventures of Sigurd the Volsung, before his fateful meetings with Brynhild and the sons of Gjuki, have given plenty of opportunities for argument and the weaving of contradictory theories. To some it has seemed that here we find ourselves with the tangled remains of a myth; to others that we are dealing with the elaborated version of a widespread folk-tale. The complex series of hypothetical lays and sagas traced out by scholars to form the ancestry of the Old Norse version of the story has become a spider’s web of bewildering possibilities, a rather depressing prologue to what at first sight seems merely a rousing story of a young hero who kills a dragon. The question of literary antecedents and the problems of textual history have been fully and ably followed up, particularly by Heusler and Schneider; in this brief study I intend to approach the subject from a different direction.