Sigemund’s dragon in Beowulf originally belonged to Sigurd, but was transferred to Sigemund when the two came to be linked as father and son. Others have said that there is no reason to suppose that the author of the Old English poem had ever heard of Sigurd. Some have said that Sigemund and Sigurd were originally wholly independent heroes; others, that one hero became divided into two.
My father accepted that his view was necessarily speculative, but nonetheless favoured it strongly.
‘We cannot tell if Old English knew of a famous son of Sigemund. But in favour of the highly probable answer “it did not” are these considerations.
‘In the first place, great heroes (wreccena maerost), especially if untrammelled by history, are apt to generate sons who carry on or duplicate their father’s deeds, to satisfy the desire for more, or to introduce new elements, or to link with other tales.
‘In the second place, no such son is anywhere mentioned in Old English.
‘And in the third place, when such a son appears, his function is solely to connect with and become a chief character in the Burgundian story, to bring the gold into it – and where he exists he has his father’s dragon and gold exploits attached to him. But in Old English these are not yet detached from Sigemund.’
My father did not discuss in his lecture notes other and strongly divergent opinions on this subject, apart from some remarks on the view that Sigemund’s dragon in Beowulf is a dragon of a very different sort from Sigurd’s, and that in fact they were unconnected. ‘But it is a dragon,’ he wrote. ‘And dragons are not common as essential actors in Germanic stories – in spite of the impression given by their being prominent in the Volsung stories and Beowulf. It is highly unlikely – however different in detail – that there should be no connexion between Sigemund’s wyrm and Fafnir.
‘This of course is immeasurably strengthened if we believe that in order to connect with the Gu?here (Gundahari, Gunnar) stories a son was given to Sigemund (naturally his name begins with Sige- ), but that this stage, presumably reached in Low or High Germany first, was not reached in Old English (which probably drew from archaic sources, and did not reflect the state of the legend contemporarily in Scandinavia and Germany about the year 800 or later).’
He thought also that the origin of the re-forging of the great sword Gram (Gramr) – carried by both father and son – is to be found here. The fact that the second element in the son’s name is not constant seemed to be significant. In Old Norse he is Sigur?r, derived from a deduced earlier form Sigiwar?, in Old English Sigeweard, later Siward; whereas the German name is quite distinct: Siegfried (Sifrit) corresponds to an Old English Sigefri?. That the element mund in the father’s name is constant points, he thought, to its being the older form.
His belief that, as he said, we are in the presence of the duplication of a hero and his marvellous sword of strange origin – as opposed to the view that the father and the son were once entirely distinct and unconnected beings – leads to the conception, in his words, of a legendary hero of supreme valour and beauty, whose name began with the element Sige- ‘victory’. The gleaming eyes of Sigurd (the Lay of the Volsungs VIII.29, IX.26,59) are probably an original trait. In all probability his most renowned exploits concerned a dragon and a hoard, and – possibly – a mysterious, half-supernatural bride.
Questions fundamental to the genesis of the legend are how it came about that the ‘Dragon-hero’ intruded into the story of Attila and the Burgundians, why the treasure-hoard of this hero was called the Hoard of the Nibelungs, and why the Burgundians themselves came to be called the Nibelungs. In the only lecture-notes of my father’s on these matters, or at any rate in the only ones that survive, he indicated his own views very briefly (and not at all points in a way easy to interpret), no doubt because his primary concern was with the Sigemund passage in Beowulf. I shall not therefore enter into any close account of the numerous attempts to solve these baffling and tantalizing questions, but do no more than sketch out some essential aspects. I have also of necessity avoided reference to the German tradition, represented primarily by the Nibelungenlied, except where its evidence is essential even within these limits.
A widely held but by no means unchallenged theory rests upon the interpretation of the name Nibelung (Niflung) as etymologically related to a group of Germanic words meaning ‘darkness’ or ‘mist’ (modern German retains the word Nebel ‘mist’). This is brought into connection with certain things said about the Nibelungs. Snorri Sturluson said of the grandsons of King Gjuki that they were ‘black as a raven in the colour of their hair, like Gunnar and Hogni and the other Niflungar’; and in a much earlier (ninth century) poem they are called hrafnblair ‘raven-black’: in the Lay of the Volsungs (VII.10) it is said: ‘As ravens dark were those raven-friends’.
An essential element in this theory is the figure of Hogni, as he appears in German tradition. In the Nibelungenlied his name is Hagen, and he is not the brother of the Burgundians but their kinsman and vassal. Ferocious and cruel, hating Siegfried and indeed his murderer, he is very unlike the Norse Hogni. In the Thi?rekssaga, a large compilation made in Norway, in Bergen, about the middle of the 13th century, but based on stories then current in North Germany, Hogni, as he is named in this work, is the half-brother of the Burgundians, for a fairy or incubus slept with his mother, and the offspring of the union was Hogni. In the Thi?rekssaga his appearance is troll-like, and he is said to have been all over dark, with black hair and black beard. Especially notable is the fact that the name Hagen/ Hogni does not alliterate on G, showing that he did not originally belong to the Burgundian clan at all.
An important evidence appears at the beginning of the Nibelungenlied. When Siegfried arrived at the Burgundian court at Worms Hagen looked down from a window at the magnificent knight who had ridden in with a fine company; and guessing who it was he told King Gunther a story concerning a great exploit of Sigurd. With the air of a casual insertion, Hagen’s story is briefly reported in the poem in a very obscure fashion, and I will refer here only to features essential for this purpose.
Siegfried was one day riding alone past a mountain, and he came upon many men gathered round a huge treasure which they had carried out of a cavern. For reasons that are not clearly explained Siegfried came into conflict with ‘the bold Nibelungs’, the two princes named Nibelung and Schilbung, and slew them, and their friends. He fought also with a dwarf named Alberich, and subdued him, but did not kill him: he had the hoard taken back into the cavern whence it had come, and made Alberich the guardian of the treasure. He was now the lord of ‘Nibelungeland’, the possessor of the great hoard, and for the rest of the first part of the Nibelungenlied he has the support of warriors from Nibelungeland, who are called Nibelungs. But in the second part of the German poem, which is held to rest on a quite different poetic source, the name ‘Nibelungs’ is applied, very strangely and on a first reading of the poem most disturbingly, in a totally different sense: it now means the Burgundians, just as it does in Norse.
Hagen also knew, and told this to Gunther, that Siegfried had slain a dragon and bathed in its blood, from which his skin grew so horny that no weapon would bite it. But this is in no way associated with the Nibelung hoard.
In the Nibelungenlied the hoard is associated with a dwarf, and a cavern in a mountain. What is the significance of the Dwarves?
