Fáfnir the Father-Slayer

Fáfnir is the son of Hreiðmarr and the brother of Regin and Ótr; Reginsmál adds two sisters, Lyngheiðr and Lofnheiðr. What he was, the sources do not clearly say. Völsunga saga describes Regin as «dvergr of vöxt», of dwarfish stature, and Snorri calls Hreiðmarr a man skilled in magic, so calling Fáfnir a dwarf is a reasonable reading rather than something the text states. What the sources do tell is how the ruin began. Óðinn, Hœnir and Loki were travelling together when Loki killed with a stone an otter that was eating a salmon beside a waterfall, and took the skin as a trophy. The otter was Ótr, who took that shape to fish. That night the three asked for lodging, unknowingly, at his father's house, and on showing the skin they found themselves seized. Hreiðmarr set an exact compensation: fill the skin with gold and then cover it outside until not one hair remained in sight.

It was Loki who paid the ransom, and where he got the gold matters as much as the gold itself. He went down to a waterfall where Andvari lived, moving through the water in the shape of a pike, and caught him in a net. Andvari handed over his whole hoard except one ring, Andvaranaut, which he wished to keep because with it he could grow rich again; Loki wrested that from him too. As he lost it, Andvari cursed the gold: whoever owned it would die by it. The curse began to work that same night. When the otter skin was covered, one whisker was left in sight, and Óðinn had to lay the ring itself upon it to settle the debt down to the last detail Hreiðmarr had demanded. The father kept everything. Fáfnir and Regin claimed their share of the wergild, since the compensation was for their brother too, and Hreiðmarr refused them. There, and in no spell, begins what follows.

Fáfnir killed Hreiðmarr in his sleep, with a sword and without warning. It was a patricide for money, and the sources offer him no mitigation: no spell, no possession, no provocation. Then he denied Regin the share their father had denied him, and drove him from the house; Regin left without inheritance and with a grudge that would take years to collect. Fáfnir carried off the hoard to the moor of Gnitaheiðr, far from everything, and there lay down upon the gold to guard it. That act is at once the end of this story and the beginning of the other. Völsunga saga and Fáfnismál agree that it was stretched over the treasure, not in a rite nor under anyone else's spell, that he ceased to be what he was. This stretch is better left unadorned by what came after, because it is exactly where the tale turns most uncomfortable and most human: here Fáfnir is still the son of a man he has just killed, and not yet the monster of the moor.