The Legend of Brynhild

Brynhild is the paramount figure of Germanic legend, but she has been subordinated more often than not to the male object of her passion. Her story is thus normally referred to as the legend of Sigurd or, in German circles, the legend of Siegfried. The title of this book is intended to make the point that the legend sings principally of the woman, not the man, a view that I argue specifically at the beginning of Chapter 2. My task has been to examine the sometimes fragmentary and always refractory medieval accounts of Brynhild with a view to extracting from them a better appreciation of her personality. This task made it necessary to reopen the long-standing debate on the textual relationships of the major literary documents (Poetic Edda, Vǫlsunga saga, Pioreks saga, and Nibelungenlied). As a consequence the book has become a general reassessment of the so-called Nibelung question, a good part of which it attempts to summarize and elucidate.