The Great Tales

#HoaryNorthernWinter continues with the final showdown with the Huns and the fall of the House of the Gjukings. While we're on the subject, we'll look more deeply into the ancient conflict with the Huns that scarred the pysche of Germanic storytellers for a thousand years.

#HoaryNorthernWinter continues as we come to one of the most famous scenes in the Volsunga Saga: the Quarrel of the Queens, the moment when everything breaks for Sigurd and the Gjukings. Atilla the Hun makes an appearance.

We continue #HoaryNorthernWinter as we resume the Volsunga Saga and find out what happens to our great dragon-slaying hero when he comes to the Hall of the Gjukings and is offered certain magical draughts...

The story of Sigurd the dragon-slayer is one of the most celebrated tales in all of European literature—but it doesn't come to us in a single, authoritative form. Instead, it spreads like a root system across languages, centuries, and cultures: Old Norse sagas and Eddic poetry, Middle High German epic, Scandinavian ballads, and medieval German song. In this episode, we begin mapping that rhizomatic network, introducing the major sources that preserve the Völsung-Nibelung tradition before diving deep into three extraordinary poems from the Icelandic Codex Regius.

Greatest among the Norse and Germanic tales is the Völsunga saga – the story of Sigurd the Dragon Slayer, the cursed ring of Andvari, and how a powerful family of storied warriors went up (literally) in flames. Let the #HoaryNorthernWinter begin!