October 19, 2026
If you've read the earlier telling of Sigurd and Fafnir, you've heard the part everyone knows: the trench, the sword, the dying dragon's honest warning, the burned thumb. That was number twenty, and I'm not going to walk the same road twice.
But the Fafnismol is a forty-four-stanza poem, and a telling of its best-known pages leaves a lot of it in the dark. Here is the rest. It is stranger than the famous part, and in some ways sadder.
Start at the very beginning, where the hero lies and gets caught.
Sigurth won't give his name, "because it was believed in olden times that the word of a dying man might have great power if he cursed his foe by his name." So the dying dragon asks, and the boy answers with a story:
"The Noble Hart | my name, and I go A motherless man abroad; Father I had not, | as others have, And lonely ever I live." — Fafnismol 2, trans. Bellows (1923)
It is a good lie, because it is nearly the truth. His father was dead before he was born; the boy has never had one. But Fafnir, who is busy dying, still has the energy to see through it:
"If father thou hadst not, | as others have, By what wonder wast thou born? (Though thy name on the day | of my death thou hidest, Thou knowest now thou dost lie.)" — Fafnismol 3, trans. Bellows (1923)
Bellows' note is honest that the manuscript lost the last two lines of this stanza, and that the parenthetical is a reconstruction from the prose of the Volsungasaga. Still: the dragon's first reaction to a hero's pretty story is to poke the obvious hole in it. And the hero, who has never in his life been asked a hard question by anyone smaller than a god, folds on the next stanza: "Sigurth my name, | and Sigmund's son, / Who smote thee thus with the sword."
I'd say it's the only time in the poem the dragon wins an argument. It's early. It's the last time he's given a chance to.
Then the poem does something odd, and the editor will not let it pass. Fafnir says a proverb that is hard to follow, about the fate of the Norns, a headland, and a man who rows against the wind. Sigurth, who has just killed him, and who has just heard that the gold will be his death, asks who the Norns are, "who are helpful in need, / And the babe from the mother bring."
Bellows is blunt about this: "Stanzas 11-15 are probably interpolated, and come from a poem similar to Vafthruthnismol," and "Sigurth has no possible interest in knowing what Norns are helpful in childbirth, but interpolations were seldom logical." He is right. A boy standing over a mortally wounded dragon, and the first thing he thinks to ask is about midwives.
Fafnir answers anyway, and I'm glad he does:
"Of many births | the Norns must be, Nor one in race they were; Some to gods, others | to elves are kin, And Dvalin's daughters some." — Fafnismol 13, trans. Bellows (1923)
There are more Norns than the three beneath the tree. There always were. Some are of the gods, some of the elves, and some are daughters of Dvalin, "chief of the dwarfs." The fates of the North are not one committee but a crowd, and where you were born decides which of them gets you.
Then the second question, which is the one that makes the interpolation worth keeping: where will the gods and Surt "sword-sweat mingle"? And the dying dragon answers like a man who has read the end of the book:
"Oskopnir is it, | where all the gods Shall seek the play of swords; Bilrost breaks | when they cross the bridge, And the steeds shall swim in the flood." — Fafnismol 15, trans. Bellows (1923)
Oskopnir, "Not-Made." Bellows suggests it is another name for the battlefield the Vafthruthnismol calls Vigrith. So, in the middle of the dragon's death-scene, the poem opens a little door onto Ragnarok, the broken rainbow-bridge, the swimming horses, and then shuts it again, and Fafnir goes back to being a dying worm with a warning. It doesn't fit. It is somehow exactly right. Everyone in this story is on a bridge that is about to break.
Here is the part number twenty skipped entirely, and I think it is the heart of the poem.
Regin has been "at a distance" the whole fight. He comes back while Sigurth is wiping the blood from his sword, and he is the first to speak: "Hail to thee, Sigurth! Thou victory hast." He praises the boy as the most fearless man on earth. And then, a few lines later, with the dragon not yet cold, he says:
"My brother fierce | in fight hast slain, And somewhat I did myself." — Fafnismol 25, trans. Bellows (1923)
And somewhat I did myself. The sword was his. He forged it. So the credit is his, or some of it.
Sigurth does not let it go by.
"Afar didst thou go | while Fafnir reddened With his blood my blade so keen; With the might of the dragon | my strength I matched, While thou in the heather didst hide." — Fafnismol 26, trans. Bellows (1923)
And then the young man says something that is not in the dragon's part of the poem and not in the Norn riddles. It sounds like a man trying to explain himself to himself:
"Better is heart | than a mighty blade For him who shall fiercely fight; The brave man well | shall fight and win, Though dull his blade may be.
"Brave men better | than cowards be, When the clash of battle comes; And better the glad | than the gloomy man Shall face what before him lies." — Fafnismol 28–29, trans. Bellows (1923)
Bellows says these two stanzas are "almost certainly interpolated" from something like the Hovamol, and that "even the faithful Volsungasaga fails to paraphrase stanza 29." Fine. They aren't his. They're borrowed wisdom, brought in for the occasion. I like them anyway. Better the glad than the gloomy man. It's hard to think of a stranger thing to say over a murdered dragon, or a man with his brother's blood on his hands, who is about to ask you to cook a heart.
Next comes the cooking, which you know. What you may not know is how it is answered.
When the thumb touches the tongue and Sigurth understands the birds, the poem hands him seven of them (or one bird speaking seven times; the editors argue). Bellows' note on this is almost funny: "There are almost as many guesses as there are editions." The manuscript numbers the speakers II, III, and IV in the margin; the Volsungasaga gives a different bird to each speech. He himself suspects a single bird in the original, "speaking stanzas 34 and 37."
What the birds say is simple. Regin is lying. Kill him first. They say it six different ways, with a sort of chirpy ruthlessness:
"There Regin lies, | and plans he lays The youth to betray | who trusts him well; Lying words | with wiles will he speak, Till his brother the maker | of mischief avenges."
"Less by a head | let the chatterer hoary Go from here to hell; Then all of the wealth | he alone can wield, The gold that Fafnir guarded."
"Wise would he seem | if so he would heed The counsel good | we sisters give; Thought he would give, | and the ravens gladden, There is ever a wolf | where his ears I spy." — Fafnismol 33–35, trans. Bellows (1923)
There is ever a wolf where his ears I spy. Bellows glosses it as the proverb for "there must be fire where there is smoke." The wolf here isn't a monster. He's a rule of thumb, and the rule is: if you see the ears, there's something under the brush. A bird sees a boy asleep on a dragon-hoard, and tells him the thing he already half knows.
And then one of the birds points out how thoroughly stupid the alternative would be:
"Most foolish he seems | if he shall spare His foe, the bane of the folk, There Regin lies, | who hath wronged him so, Yet falsehood knows he not." — Fafnismol 37, trans. Bellows (1923)
Sigurth's answer is the shortest, coldest speech he makes in the poem. "Not so rich a fate shall Regin have / As the tale of my death to tell; / For soon the brothers both shall die." Then, in prose, the whole business in one sentence: "Sigurth hewed off Regin's head, and then he ate Fafnir's heart, and drank the blood of both Regin and Fafnir."
I want to say something about that sentence. It is a murder done on the strength of what the birds said, which Sigurth could not have verified, from a man who had, as far as the poem tells us, not yet done anything. Whether Regin was in fact going to betray him, we have only the word of the animals, and of the dragon, who warned him twice. Everyone in this poem is telling the truth. Everyone is also useful to somebody. I think the poem is really about that: not who is lying, but who gets believed, and what it costs to be right.
The last birds change the subject, and the poem splits like a branching road.
"Bind, Sigurth, the golden | rings together, Not kingly is it | aught to fear; I know a maid, | there is none so fair, Rich in gold, | if thou mightest get her.
"Green the paths | that to Gjuki lead, And his fate the way | to the wanderer shows; The doughty king | a daughter has, That thou as a bride | mayst, Sigurth, buy." — Fafnismol 40–41, trans. Bellows (1923)
That is one bird, pointing to a hall and a king's daughter. Then another bird, in the next breath, points somewhere else entirely:
"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." — Fafnismol 42–43, trans. Bellows (1923)
Bellows thinks these are two stories. "Stanzas 40-41 apply solely to Guthrun," he writes, "and suggest that Sigurth will go straight to Gunnar's hall. Stanzas 42-44, on the other hand, apply solely to Brynhild, and indicate that Sigurth will find her before he visits the Gjukungs." The difference between the two roads, he says, "involved a fundamental difference in the final working out of Brynhild's revenge." In plain words: the poem has two endings stitched together, and the editor who bound them did not choose, so the hero is told to ride to both. The Volsungasaga compresses the whole passage to a single bird: "Wiser were it if he should then ride up on Hindarfjoll, where Brynhild sleeps, and there would he get much wisdom."
The prose ends with the gold. The door is iron, "the gate-posts… of iron, and the gates; of iron, too, were all the beams in the house, which was dug down into the earth." He fills two chests. He takes the fear-helm and a golden mail-coat and a sword named Hrotti, and loads them all on Grani — "but the horse would not go forward until Sigurth mounted on his back."
I keep returning to that last detail. The horse won't walk under the weight of the gold alone. It needs a man on its back to make the load feel like something it's carrying toward somewhere. And the man, dazzled and enriched and a good deal less innocent than he was an hour ago, climbs up and rides toward the fire.
New tellings come to the newsletter before anyone else. May the birds you listen to tell you more truth than flattery; may your boasts be shorter than your work; and may your horse always carry you where the gold cannot.
Sources: Fafnismol (the Ballad of Fafnir), with Bellows' introductory note and notes, translated by Henry Adams Bellows, The Poetic Edda (1923). Public domain. Retelling © Jennifer Sage.
Next in The Old Tellings: the poem that follows with no gap in the manuscript, and which Bellows calls "unquestionably the most chaotic of all the poems in the Eddic collection." A tower of shields on a mountaintop, with a banner above it. A sleeper in a mail-coat that has grown to the flesh. A young man with a sword, cutting the armor away from the neck down, and a woman sitting up and asking what bit through the byrnie. Next week: the Sigrdrifumol, and a sleep that Othin decreed no one could break.