August 17, 2026
Last time we left a smith talking softly to a boy about dragons. Today the boy goes to the heath, and the most famous dragon-slaying in the North happens — and the killing is not the strange part.
The strange part is the conversation.
Fafnir was enormous, and he was predictable. Every day he crawled the same track down to water, and Sigurd and Regin found it. Sigurd dug a trench across the path and lay down in it to wait, so that the dragon would pass over him and he could strike upward, into the soft place.
It was Regin's plan, and it had a flaw Regin did not mention: what comes down out of a dragon is not only weight. Bellows notes that in the Völsunga saga Sigurd asked about this — what happens if the blood drowns me? — and the smith answered with a sneer about cowardice. Then an old man appeared beside the trench and told the boy to dig further trenches to carry the blood off. Sigurd dug them. The old man was Odin, doing what he has done all series long: turning up one-eyed at the hinge of a story to say the one useful thing.
The dragon crawled. The sword went in. And then Fafnir — dying, thrashing, venom still running off him — opened his mouth and asked a question.
"Youth, oh, youth! | of whom then, youth, art thou born? Say whose son thou art, Who in Fafnir's blood | thy bright blade reddened, And struck thy sword to my heart." — Fáfnismál, Bellows translation (1923)
Sigurd lied. He had been taught that a dying man's curse has power if it can find a name to fasten to, so he gave a riddle instead: "The Noble Hart | my name, and I go / A motherless man abroad." Then, four stanzas later, unable to stand being unknown, he tells the truth anyway — "Sigurth my name, | and Sigmund's son, / Who smote thee thus with the sword." He is very young. You can hear it.
What follows is the passage that keeps this poem alive. Fafnir does not curse him. Fafnir warns him.
"In all I say | dost thou hatred see, Yet truth alone do I tell; The sounding gold, | the glow-red wealth, And the rings thy bane shall be." — Fáfnismál, Bellows translation (1923)
He says it once, and then — this is the part that gets me — he says it again, later, in almost the same words, as if repetition might work where sense did not: "I counsel thee, Sigurth, | heed my speech, / And ride thou homeward hence." Go home. Leave it. And he throws in the one piece of intelligence Sigurd actually needs: "Regin betrayed me, | and thee will betray, / Us both to death will he bring."
Every word of it is accurate. The gold does kill him. Regin does plan to. The dragon on the pile of cursed treasure is the only honest party on that heath.
Sigurd's answer is the shrug of a nineteen-year-old who intends to live forever:
"Some one the hoard | shall ever hold, Till the destined day shall come; For a time there is | when every man Shall journey hence to hell." — Fáfnismál, Bellows translation (1923)
Somebody's going to own it. Everybody dies. Why not me, why not later.
Between the warnings, Fafnir explains himself, and it comes out closer to an obituary than a boast. He wore the ægishjálmr, the fear-helm, lying on his gold: "Mightier seemed I | than any man, / For a fiercer never I found." Seemed. He knew the difference. He breathed venom and nothing dared come near — a creature describing the terms of its own solitude.
Sigurd's reply is the cruelest line in the poem, and the truest:
"Glittering worm, | thy hissing was great, And hard didst show thy heart; But hatred more | have the sons of men For him who owns the helm." — Fáfnismál, Bellows translation (1923)
The terror-helmet works. That is the problem with it. It buys you a life where nothing comes close except what comes to kill you.
Then Regin, who had been elsewhere during the fighting, strolls back and greets the victory as though he had attended it. He cuts out his brother's heart, drinks the blood, and asks Sigurd to roast the heart for him while he sleeps — a request with a knife in it.
Sigurd cooks it on a spit. He touches it to see whether it is done, burns his finger, and puts the finger in his mouth. And with Fafnir's heart-blood on his tongue he can suddenly understand the birds in the thicket.
"There sits Sigurth, | sprinkled with blood, And Fafnir's heart | with fire he cooks; Wise were the breaker | of rings, I ween, To eat the life-muscles | all so bright." — Fáfnismál, Bellows translation (1923)
They are talking about him. They are also, cheerfully, talking about Regin — "Less by a head | let the chatterer hoary / Go from here to hell" — and Sigurd, who would not believe a dying dragon, believes some nuthatches immediately and takes off the smith's head.
Note what actually saved him. Not the sword; the accident. He got the truth twice — once from Fafnir, once from the birds — and only heard it the second time, by scalding himself with a heart he was cooking for somebody else.
He eats the heart, drinks the blood of both brothers, and rides down into the iron-beamed lair under the earth, where he fills two chests with gold and takes the fear-helm for his own. Grani, his horse, will not move until Sigurd is on his back — the gold is not too heavy; the ride is simply not the horse's idea.
And the birds keep singing, because they have one more thing to tell him:
"A hall stands high | on Hindarfjoll, All with flame | is it ringed without; Warriors wise | did make it once Out of the flaming | light of the flood. "On the mountain sleeps | a battle-maid, And about her plays | the bane of the wood; Ygg with the thorn | hath smitten her thus, For she felled the fighter | he fain would save." — Fáfnismál, Bellows translation (1923)
A ring of fire. A sleeping warrior-woman inside it, put down by Odin's own thorn for choosing the wrong man to let live. Sigurd is carrying a cursed hoard and a helmet of terror, and he has just been given directions.
New tellings arrive by newsletter first — no dragon-blood required.
Sources: Fáfnismál, in The Poetic Edda, trans. Henry Adams Bellows (1923), with reference to Benjamin Thorpe (1866); Völsunga saga details as noted in Bellows' commentary, and Snorri's Prose Edda, trans. Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (1916). Retelling © Jennifer Sage.
Next in The Old Tellings: he rides to Hindarfjoll and cuts a sleeping warrior out of her mail with a sword — and she wakes speaking a hymn to the day. She is called a victory-bringer, and a translator's honest mistake turned that word into a name. The Valkyrie in the fire-ring, and the runes she teaches, come next.