Sigurd is the central hero of William Morris’s The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs.
Morris’s 1876 poem retells the heroic material associated with the Völsunga saga and the Poetic Edda. Its narrative follows Sigurd’s ancestry, upbringing, slaying of the dragon Fafnir, discovery of the Valkyrie Brynhild, and tragic involvement with the Niflung or Burgundian family. The poem then continues into the destruction of the heroic world surrounding him.
Sigurd is the Norse form of the hero better known in German tradition as Siegfried. Although the names and details vary among sources, both figures are connected with a dragon-slaying, a cursed treasure, and a tragic relationship with a warrior woman. Morris’s work is a Victorian literary adaptation, not a literal translation of a single medieval text.
Morris wrote it with Eiríkr Magnússon, who helped him translate Icelandic sources.