Denis's Author Blog
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The Enduring Story of Siegfried
Found this blog through clicking to follow the author on Twitter. It has rekindled an old passing interest I had from school days in what I would term non mainstream Myth. I often wondered why Germanic never had the same attention as Norse and Greek tales in the Anglo-Saxon world, although I understand there is a lot of overlap between the northern beliefs.
Anyway, the author had me with the ‘beer drinker’ description (although not so much nowadays, age and responsibility comes to us all).
Toward the end of my college years, it came time to select a topic for capstone research. Despite my university’s focus on relatively recent works, I found myself gravitating toward medieval epics outside of the English canon. This was likely informed by a lifelong love for fantasy—when I’m really passionate about something, I want to get to the root of it.
It was the famous Sigemund passage in Beowulf that led me to two other epics: the Icelandic Völsunga Saga and the German Das Nibelungenlied. Both stories revolve around the same hero, and tell more or less the same tale. They’re not alone, either—the legendary Siegfried is attested to in Þiðrekssaga, the Poetic Edda, Biterolf und Dietleib . . . the list goes on.
Whether or not Siegfried was based on a real person is debated. Some have suggested he was based on a sixth century Frankish ruler…
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