The Story of the Volsungs (volsunga Saga); with Excerpts from the Poetic Edda

“Yea, and thy deeds shall thou know, and great shall thy gladness be;As a picture all of gold thy life-days shalt thou see,And know that thou too wert a God to abide through the hurry and haste;A God in the golden hall, a God on the rain-swept waste,A God in the battle triumphant, a God on the heap of the slain:And thine hope shall arise and blossom, and thy love shall be quickened again:And then shalt thou see before thee the face of all earthly ill;Thou shalt drink of the cup of awakening that thine hand hath holpen to fill;By the side of the sons of Odin shalt thou fashion a tale to be toldIn the hall of the happy Baldur: nor there shall the tale grow oldOf the days before the changing, e'en those that over us pass.So harden thine heart, O brother, and set thy brow as the brass!””

— Unknown

“supernatural elements, including the schemes of one-eyed Odin, a ring of power, and the sword that was reforged, the tale was kept alive in oral tradition.””

— Unknown

“During the summers they traveled widely through the forests, killing men for booty.””

— Unknown

“This is my third rede, That thou at the Thing Deal not with the fools of folk; For unwise man From mouth lets fall Worser word than well he wotteth.””

— Unknown

“No one can say exactly when the process of combining the different historical, legendary, and mythic elements into a Volsung cycle began, but it was probably at an early date. By the ninth century the legends of the Gothic Jormunrek and those of the destruction of the Burgundians had already been linked in Scandinavia, where the ninth-century “Lay of Ragnar” by the poet Bragi the Old treats both subjects. Bragi’s poem describes a shield on which a picture of the maiming of Jormunrek was either painted or carved and refers to the brothers Hamdir and Sorli from the Gothic section of the saga as “kinsmen of Gjuki,” the Burgundian father of King Gunnar.The “Lay of Ragnar” has other connections with the Volsung legend. The thirteenth-century Icelandic writer Snorri Sturluson identifies the central figure of the lay, whose gift inspired the poem in his honor, with Ragnar Hairy Breeches, a supposed ancestor of the Ynglings, Norway’s royal family. Ragnar’s son-in-law relationship to Sigurd through his marriage to Sigurd’s daughter Aslaug (mentioned earlier in connection with stave church carvings) is reflected in the sequence of texts in the vellum manuscript: The Saga of the Volsungs immediately precedes The Saga of Ragnar Lodbrok. Ragnar’s saga, in turn, is followed by Krákumál (Lay of the Raven), Ragnar’s death poem, in which Ragnar, thrown into the snakepit by the Anglo-Saxon King Ella, boasts that he will die laughing. The Volsung and Ragnar stories are further linked by internal textual references. It is likely that the The Saga of the Volsungs was purposely set first in the manuscript to serve as a prelude to the Ragnar material. The opening section of Ragnar’s saga may originally have been the ending of The Saga of the Volsungs. Just where the division between these two sagas occurs in the manuscript is unclear. Together these narratives chronicle the ancestry of the Ynglings”

— Unknown

“It is noteworthy that about the year 1200, the Nibelungenlied, with its poetic version of the Siegfried story, was written, probably in Austria. At approximately the same time or within seven decades, The Saga of the Volsungs was compiled in Iceland with far fewer chivalric elements than its German counterpart.Almost all the Old Norse narrative material that has survived”

— Unknown