Norse mythology

Heroes & mortals — Norse mythology

The Norse hero does not escape his fate, he fulfils it: Sigurd kills the dragon Fafnir, wins the hoard and dies betrayed, exactly as the prophecy said. Each entry follows a heroic line through the Völsunga saga, the heroic poems of the Edda and the Scandinavian chronicles, and marks where the Norse version parts company with the continental Germanic tradition, in which Sigurd becomes Siegfried. The category is deliberately narrow: the North hands down far fewer individual heroes than the dozens of Greek figures, and many of the surviving names — Helgi, Starkad, Ragnar — appear only in a late saga or an isolated chronicle, so each attestation has to be checked before an entry is opened.