ring, but had to give it up to cover the last hair. Then Fafni, one of
the two remaining sons, killed his father, first victim of the curse,
for the sake of the gold. He carried it away and lay guarding it in
the shape of a snake. But Regin the smith did not give up his hopes of
possessing the hoard: he adopted as his foster-son Sigurd the Volsung,
thus getting into his power the hero fated to slay the dragon.

The curse thus becomes the centre of the action, and the link between
the two parts of the story, since it directly accounts for Sigurd's
unconscious treachery and his separation from Brynhild, and absolves
the hero from blame by making him a victim of fate. It destroys in turn
Hreidmar, the Dragon, his brother Regin, the dragon-slayer himself,
Brynhild (to whom he gave the ring), and the Giukings, who claimed
inheritance after Sigurd's death. Later writers carried its effects
still further.

This narrative is also told in the pieces of prose interspersed through
_Reginsmal_. The verse consists only of scraps of dialogue. The first
of these comprises question and answer between Loki and the dwarf
Andvari in the form of the old riddle-poems, and seems to result
from the confusion of two ideas: the question-and-answer wager, and
the captive's ransom by treasure. Then follows the curse, in less
general terms than in the prose: "My gold shall be the death of two
brothers, and cause strife among eight kings; no one shall rejoice in
the possession of my treasure." Next comes a short dialogue between
Loki and Hreidmar, in which the former warns his host of the risk he
runs in taking the hoard. In the next fragment Hreidmar calls on his
daughters to avenge him; Lyngheid replies that they cannot do so on
their own brother, and her father bids her bear a daughter whose son
may avenge him. This has given rise to a suggestion that Hjördis,