page_title: Sigurd
section_title: Other traditions and attestations
hierarchical_section_title: Sigurd / Continental Germanic traditions and attestations / Other traditions and attestations
caption_attribution_description: &#160;&#160; This media shows the cultural heritage monument with the number 16825 in South Tyrol.Deutsch: Schloss Runkelstein — Dietrich, Siegfried und Dietleib This file was uploaded with Commonist. &#160;Info EXIF data regarding date and time may be inaccurate.
context_page_description: Sigurd or Siegfried is a legendary hero of Germanic mythology, who killed a dragon and was later murdered. It is possible he was inspired by one or more figures from the Frankish Merovingian dynasty, with Sigebert I being the most popular contender. Older scholarship sometimes connected him with Arminius, victor of the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. He may also have a purely mythological origin. Sigurd's story is first attested on a series of carvings, including runestones from Sweden and stone crosses from the British Isles, dating from the eleventh century.
  In both the Norse and continental Germanic tradition, Sigurd is portrayed as dying as the result of a quarrel between his wife and another woman, Brunhild, whom he has tricked into marrying the Burgundian king Gunnar/Gunther. His slaying of a dragon and possession of the hoard of the Nibelungen is also common to both traditions. In other respects, however, the two traditions appear to diverge. The most important works to feature Sigurd are the Nibelungenlied, the Völsunga saga, and the Poetic Edda.
context_section_description: The Icelandic Abbot Nicholaus of Thvera records that while travelling through Westphalia, he was shown the place where Sigurd slew the dragon (called Gnita-Heath in the Norse tradition) between two villages south of Paderborn.
  In a song of the mid-thirteenth-century wandering lyric poet Der Marner, "the death of Siegfried" (Sigfrides [...] tôt) is mentioned as a popular story that the German courtly public enjoys hearing, along with "the hoard of the Nibelungs" (der Nibelunge hort).
  The chronicles of the city of Worms record that when Emperor Frederick III visited the city in 1488, he learned that the townspeople said that the "giant Siegfried" (gigas [...] Sifridus des Hörnen) was buried in the cemetery of St. Meinhard and St. Cecilia. Frederick ordered the graveyard dug up—according to one Latin source, he found nothing, but a German chronicle reports that he found a skull and some bones that were larger than normal.
caption: Fresco of the heroes Dietrich von Bern, Siegfried, and Dietleib. Runkelstein Castle, near Bozen, South Tyrol, c. 1400.
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