Siegfried and Sigurd are closely related dragon-slayer heroes, but they are not identical characters in interchangeable stories. Siegfried is the German form best known from the medieval Nibelungenlied; Sigurd is the Old Norse form found in Eddic poetry and the Völsunga saga. Both heroes possess extraordinary strength, become connected to a cursed treasure, cross the fate of a formidable woman, and die through betrayal. The route between those shared points differs enough that mixing the traditions can distort both.
Siegfried or Sigurd: which name is correct?
Both are correct within their own language and source tradition. The German Nibelungenlied, written down around 1200, calls the hero Sîvrit or Siegfried. Old Norse sources call him Sigurðr, usually anglicized as Sigurd. The names descend from related Germanic traditions that circulated and changed for centuries before the surviving manuscripts were produced.
| Element | German Siegfried | Old Norse Sigurd |
|---|---|---|
| Major prose/poetic source | Nibelungenlied | Völsunga saga and Eddic poems |
| Dragon episode | Recounted as an earlier feat; bathing in dragon blood makes his skin invulnerable except at one spot | Central narrated adventure: Sigurd kills Fafnir from a pit and tastes the dragon’s heart |
| Distinctive equipment | Tarnkappe, a concealment cloak that also grants strength | Gram, the reforged sword of his father Sigmund |
| Woman at the tragedy’s center | Kriemhild, with Brunhild central to the fatal court conflict | Gudrun, with Brynhild central to the fatal oath and deception |
| Death | Hagen stabs the marked vulnerable spot during a hunt | Guttorm kills Sigurd after being urged on by Gunnar and Högni |
Siegfried in the Nibelungenlied
The German poem introduces Siegfried as a prince of Xanten, son of Siegmund and Sieglind. He travels to the Burgundian court at Worms because he has heard of Kriemhild, sister of kings Gunther, Gernot, and Giselher. The court already knows stories of his earlier exploits: he won the Nibelung treasure, overcame its guardians, obtained the Tarnkappe, and killed a dragon. Bathing in the dragon’s blood hardened his skin, but a linden leaf fell between his shoulders and left one small place untouched.
That dragon killing is important background, not the poem’s central narrated quest. The main plot concerns marriage, loyalty, status, and deception at court. Gunther wants to marry Brunhild, a queen who will accept only a man able to defeat her in contests of strength. Hidden by the Tarnkappe, Siegfried secretly helps Gunther win. The deception continues after the marriage, and Siegfried receives Kriemhild as his wife.
Years later, a bitter quarrel between Kriemhild and Brunhild exposes the secret. Brunhild believes Siegfried has dishonored her, and Hagen, Gunther’s vassal, decides to remove him. Pretending that he wants to protect Siegfried in battle, Hagen persuades Kriemhild to mark the hero’s vulnerable spot on his clothing. During a hunt, Hagen murders him at a spring by driving a spear through the mark.
The poem does not end with the dragon slayer’s death. Its second half follows Kriemhild’s transformation from grieving widow into an agent of terrible revenge. Siegfried’s murder therefore initiates the destruction of the Burgundian court rather than closing a self-contained heroic biography.
Sigurd and Fafnir in Norse tradition
The Völsunga saga gives the dragon episode far more narrative space. Sigurd is the posthumous son of the hero Sigmund and is fostered by the smith Regin. He reforges the broken pieces of his father’s sword into Gram. Regin tells him about a hoard once seized from the dwarf Andvari and now guarded by Regin’s brother Fafnir, who has become a dragon through greed and violence.
Sigurd digs a pit in Fafnir’s path and thrusts upward with Gram as the dragon crawls over him. After the killing, Regin asks Sigurd to roast Fafnir’s heart. Sigurd touches the meat to test whether it is cooked, burns his finger, and puts it in his mouth. The taste of the dragon’s blood enables him to understand the speech of birds. They warn that Regin intends to betray him, so Sigurd kills Regin and takes the hoard, including the ring associated with Andvari’s curse.
This version does not give Sigurd the linden-leaf vulnerability familiar from the German poem. Its magical consequence is knowledge: tasting the heart opens animal speech and reveals danger. Sigurd later awakens or meets the shield-maiden Brynhild, exchanges vows with her, and then becomes entangled in the family of Gjuki through memory-altering drink, marriage to Gudrun, and a deception that allows Gunnar to win Brynhild.
Why is the hero betrayed?
In both traditions, an apparently invincible hero is destroyed inside a network of oaths and relationships. No monster defeats him in open combat. The fatal weapon is privileged knowledge—Hagen learns the location of Siegfried’s unprotected skin, while the Norse conspirators exploit household loyalty and persuade Guttorm to strike Sigurd.
The causes are not identical. In the Nibelungenlied, the queens’ dispute over rank exposes the deception used to secure Brunhild’s marriage, and Hagen frames murder as service to his king. In the Norse cycle, broken or manipulated vows involving Sigurd, Gudrun, Gunnar, and Brynhild produce a tragedy in which memory, identity, and honor have all been compromised. Reducing either version to “jealousy” loses the political and ethical machinery around the death.
The cursed hoard and the Nibelungs
Treasure connects the hero’s private fate to the collapse of families and kingdoms. The German poem’s Nibelung hoard becomes Kriemhild’s inheritance and then a source of conflict when Hagen sinks it in the Rhine. The Norse tradition traces the gold to Andvari and makes the ring’s curse explicit. In neither version is wealth a neutral reward for killing a dragon. Possession brings prestige and leverage, but it also draws betrayal forward.
Did Siegfried have a historical model?
The legends contain distant memories of the migration-period world, especially the destruction of the Burgundian kingdom on the Rhine in the fifth century. Historical rulers and events may have contributed names or narrative frameworks as stories circulated. That does not establish a single historical dragon slayer named Siegfried. Medieval heroic tradition routinely combined memories from different centuries, relocated figures, and reorganized kinship to make a compelling tragedy.
How Wagner changed the story
Richard Wagner’s nineteenth-century opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen synthesized medieval German and Old Norse materials rather than simply staging one source. His Siegfried kills the dragon Fafner, tastes its blood, understands the Woodbird, passes through fire to Brünnhilde, and becomes part of a new mythic architecture built around the ring and the gods. Those elements have shaped modern popular memory so strongly that Wagner’s version is often projected backward onto the Nibelungenlied.
Wagner is an important reception, but he is not a medieval eyewitness or a neutral translation. Reading the source families separately makes his creative choices more visible and preserves the distinctive logic of each tradition.
Primary texts to compare
The public-domain English translation of the Nibelungenlied at Project Gutenberg presents the German court tragedy, including the reports of Siegfried’s dragon blood and Hagen’s murder at the spring. The Völsunga saga at Project Gutenberg follows Sigurd’s education by Regin, the killing of Fafnir, the birds’ warning, and the later Brynhild-Gudrun tragedy.
Siegfried and Sigurd endure not because one version supplies the “real” story, but because related communities reshaped the same heroic inheritance. The German poem turns the dragon slayer into the absent center of a court’s destruction; the Norse saga makes the dragon encounter a threshold into dangerous knowledge. Together, the variants show how myth changes while keeping a recognizable tragic core.