Fáfnir the Dragon

What Fáfnir became is not the dragon imagined today. The sources call him ormr, a word meaning serpent, and describe him crawling: he leaves the gold along a fixed path to drink at the water and returns by the same. There are no wings in any verse. Nor is there fire, and this is worth saying plainly because it is the most repeated error about him: what Fáfnir blows is venom. Fáfnismál says so without hedging, and the venom falls like rain along the path and poisons the land of Gnitaheiðr, a moor nobody crosses any more. What he does wear is the Ægishjálmr, the helm of terror, a piece of Andvari's hoard, and in the poem itself he boasts of having borne it over the sons of men: none dared come near him. That is where his reputation for invulnerability comes from, not from protective runes that no source grants him. And he keeps something important of what he was: he understands, remembers and speaks.

The dispossessed brother did not forget. Regin became a smith and a tutor, and raised a boy named Sigurd, posthumous son of Sigmundr, with a plan that took years to ripen. He forged him a sword, Gram, remade from the shards of the one his father had borne, and told him the story of the gold casting him as the avenger of a wrong that was really Regin's own. Then he sent him to Gnitaheiðr. The detail that decides the fight is geographical, not heroic: since Fáfnir crawls along a fixed path to the water, Sigurd digs a trench in that path and hides inside it to strike from below, at the belly, where the scales do not cover. Völsunga saga adds that an old man appeared and advised him to dig further trenches so the blood would run off and not drown him; that old man is Óðinn, and his intervention is what turns an ambush into a feat. Sigurd waited, and when the ormr passed above him, he drove the sword upward.

Mortally wounded, Fáfnir does not roar: he asks. The whole poem that bears his name is the conversation that follows. He wants to know who has killed him and of what lineage he comes, and Sigurd evades his name, for a dying man was thought able to curse whoever named himself. Then he warns him, with no apparent rancour, that the gold he has just won will kill him too, and explains matters about the Norns and the end of the world. He is a monster who dies giving lessons, and that scene is what sets Fáfnir apart from nearly any earlier dragon. What follows proves him right: Regin asked Sigurd to roast the heart for him, Sigurd burned his thumb and, sucking it, tasted the blood, and so understood the speech of the birds, who warned him Regin meant to kill him. Sigurd killed Regin. Of the modern dragon it is worth saying where it comes from: the Fafner who sings and breathes fire in Wagner's opera, premiered in 1876, is a giant and no son of Hreiðmarr, and Tolkien's Smaug inherits from Fáfnir precisely what the sources do grant him, which is the conversation.