Brunhilda

 Nobody names their daughter Brunhilda anymore.  Yet the name is familiar, perhaps as the cartoon witch "Broomhilda," or more likely a fat lady opera singer in a winged Viking helmet wailing away in some parody of Wagner's "Ring of the Nibelungen."

 

 

But the real Brunhilda was a formidable personage, a queen of Francia in the early Middle Ages who not only ruled beside her husband but was regent for her son, grandson, and great-grandson over the following decades.  She became a symbol of great cruelty (at least to her enemies) and was said to have been responsible for the deaths of ten Frankish kings and lots of ordinary folks.

Brunhilda was a Visigothic princess, growing up in the sixth century in what is now Spain. At that time Spain was Christian (this predates the rise of Islam), but Arian Christian, that is Arians did not believe in the Trinity.  There was only one God, they believed, and Jesus was divinely inspired but not God Himself.  However, in 567 Brunhilda married Sigibert, king of Burgundy and Austrasia (that is, the eastern part of what's now France, going into Switzerland) and converted to trinitarian (Catholic) Christianity, her new husband's religion.

Marrying a princess was a new experience for the line of Merovingian kings (of which Sigibert was one).  The kings had mostly taken low-born women as their wives and given them little authority, which has proven very irritating to modern historians of medieval women, as we often have very little information on these wives.  But not long after Sigibert married Brunhilda, Sigibert's brother Chilperic decided to marry a princess himself and chose Brunhilda's sister.

For reasons that, after 1450 years, aren't exactly clear, Chilperic soon tired of his Visigothic bride, and he and his mistress Fredegund decided to kill her. Fredegund, who had started life as a slave, was now crowned queen of Neustria (basically western France).  Brunhilda was distraught over her sister's murder for reasons that are quite clear, and she and Fredegund immediately became sworn enemies.  Their rivalry went on for decades.

The next forty or fifty years of Brunhilda's life were filled with plots, treachery, betrayals, and murders that put A Game of Thrones to shame. You can read all the thrilling details in the Historia by the sixth-century author Gregory of Tours.  She did manage to outlive Fredegund as well as establishing a number of monasteries (and having a few bishops killed).  But in her early 70s she was finally captured by her enemies and put to death by being dragged and pulled apart by wild horses.  (The Merovingians, like the Romans before them, thought "cruel and unusual punishment" was a swell idea.)

But Brunhilda was not forgotten.  Memory of her lingered for six centuries, until around 1200 she appeared in two different though clearly related epic tales, the Volsung Saga of Scandinavia and the Nibelungenlied of Germany.  In the first she was a daughter of Odin, served as a Valkyrie, and she had an affair with Siegfried the Dragonslayer (notice the Sig-) before he married someone else.  In the latter she was queen of Iceland and a real athlete, whom Siegfried defeated in a sporting competition before she married someone else.  Soon Attila the Hun appears (let's just say it's complicated).  In both versions of the story Brunhilda was responsible for lots of betrayals and dead bodies.  Wagner loved it.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

For more on medieval queens and kings, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

 

Siegfried the Dragon-Slayer

 The story of Siegfried the Dragon-Slayer is a very old Germanic story that, in the Middle Ages, got attached to several other old stories, and in the nineteenth century was picked up by Richard Wagner for his massive "Ring" opera cycle (that's Wagner down below, click here for more on nineteenth-century efforts to reimagine medieval culture).  Literary scholars have a field day figuring out how all the parts of the Siegfried story might fit together.

 

The core of the story is that the hero Siegfried killed a dragon (also called a worm or a serpent), tasted the dragon's blood, and now was able to understand the language of birds.  A bird warned him that the dragon's friends and/or relatives were seeking revenge.  The dragon's horde of gold entered into it too.  There are many medieval images of someone with a sword in one hand licking the fingers of the other hand, with a bird perched in the tree above him.  These are Siegfried images.

But what happened to the story then?  One has to do some sort of mental archaeology to follow all its twists and turns.   The fullest medieval account is in the thirteenth-century Icelandic "Saga of the Volsungs."  Here Siegfried (Sigurd in Norse) enters the story well along, as a descendant of the (pagan) Norse god Odin.  It turns out that the dragon is the brother of Siegfried's foster father, who first encourages Siegfried to kill his brother, then wants to kill Siegfried to get revenge for the brother he himself wanted dead, but Siegfried kills him first.  Nice family interaction.  You will note that this saga was written long after Iceland had become Christian, and a constant theme is the horror of family feuds (conveniently set in long-ago pagan times).

Then we have historical events getting drawn into the Siegfried story, including Attila the Hun, the Merovingian-era kings of Burgundy, the Merovingian queen Brunhild (originally from Visigothic Spain), and the Carolingian-era Burgundian lords named Nibelung (Volsung in Icelandic).  There were also some ninth- and tenth-century epic tales that survive now only in fragments, whose heroes got attached to the Siegfried story,  These varied historical and fictional accounts seem to have circulated all during the early Middle Ages, different authors playing mix-and-match with pieces of them, until they emerged in the two great thirteenth-century epic tales, the "Saga of the Volsungs" in Norse and the "Nibelungenlied" in German.  Although Wagner tried to combine them (working in some material from the Norse Eddas while he was at it), the two versions were very deliberately written to reject parts of the story found in the other.

In the "Saga," as already noted, Siegfried enters the story rather late.  He kills the dragon and has a hot affair with Odin's daughter Brunhilda (who is actually his aunt, but we won't go into that), well before he marries.  In the "Nibelungenlied," however, the story starts with Siegfried, a rather reckless but Christian prince, who had killed a dragon and gotten its gold sometime in the past and had never met Brunhilda in his life.  In this version everyone is wealthy, courteous, and courtly--though soon it will all change.

Both versions have Siegfried marry a princess, then be killed by his brothers-in-law, because they have been stirred up against him by his oldest brother-in-law's wife, Brunhilda.  Having left the story, he plays no further role except as a reason for long-term revenge plots, which lead to just about everyone being dead.  Both the Norse and the German versions have this central plot, but it's handled very differently.

In the Norse version, Brunhilda wanted Siegfried dead because he had forgotten her, and she was wildly jealous.  She laughs to learn he's dead, but then commits suicide.  In the German version, she's very irritated with Siegfried's princess, who mocks Brunhilda by saying she (Brundhilda) had had sex with Siegfried thinking he was her own husband (she hadn't), and Brunhilda decides to get revenge by having Siegfried killed.  (She herself stays alive.)

In both versions, Siegfried's widow (Gudrun in the Norse version, Kriemhild in the German) is married off to Attila the Hun to get her out of the way.  When her brothers come to visit, there is a great battle with great slaughter, and Gudrun sides with her brothers in the Norse version.  In the German version, Kriemhild instead helps kill them.  The courtliness of the early parts of this story is long gone.

The brave young warrior who kills a dragon and gets the gold has shown up in various stories for 1500 years, and he seems to have started with Siegfried.  In the hands of two great thirteenth-century poets, he became the starting point about the horrors of betrayal and revenge.

There are various translations of both versions.  I like Jesse L. Byock's translation of the "Saga" and A. T. Hatto's translation of the "Nibelungenlied," both available from Penguin Books.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For more on medieval epics, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.