The Saga of the Dragon-Slayer: Völsunga Saga

Sometime around the year 1270, in Iceland, an anonymous writer sat down to record a story that did not belong to Iceland at all. It was a tale from the Continent, from the deep, half-remembered past before Iceland was even settled — the story of the Völsung family, their feuds, their loves, and their doom. The result was Völsunga saga, one of the most celebrated works of a genre modern scholars call the fornaldarsögur, or 'legendary sagas.'

Legendary sagas are different from the more famous Sagas of Icelanders, which describe farmers and feuding families in the years after Iceland's settlement in the 870s. Instead, these sagas reach further back and further afield, set on the European mainland in a hazy, pre-Icelandic age. Their purpose was not strict historical record but lively storytelling — narratives meant to entertain while casting Scandinavia's pagan past as proud and heroic.

Völsunga saga stands out among these legendary tales for a specific literary feature: it quotes verse, as sagas often do, but the verse it quotes is Eddaic — the older, more mythic poetic form associated with gods and legendary heroes, distinct from the skaldic verse favored in the kings' sagas and the Sagas of Icelanders. This choice of poetic form signals the saga's ambition: it is reaching into the oldest layers of Norse legend.

At the heart of that legend stands Sigurd, the dragon-slayer, whose story is bound up with cursed treasure, tragic love, and the destruction of his family line. The material Völsunga saga draws upon is the same broad legendary tradition that, on the Continental side, produced the German Nibelungenlied — the epic of the Nibelungs. Icelandic and German storytellers were, in effect, reaching for the same ancient well of legend and drawing up different vessels of it.

The saga was composed in Old Norse, the vernacular language of Iceland and Scandinavia, at a time when most of learned Europe still wrote its histories in Latin. This was itself significant: sagas represent one of medieval Europe's great vernacular literary traditions, told in the everyday language of the people who composed and heard them, rather than the language of the church and the university.