Fafnir was the most famous dragon of Norse legend — a being who began as a man (or dwarf), was driven by greed to murder his own father for cursed gold, and was so consumed by avarice that he transformed into a monstrous, venom-breathing dragon to guard his hoard, until he was slain by the hero Sigurd. His story is the great Norse tale of how greed turns a person into a monster.
The Son Who Became a Dragon
Fafnir (Old Norse Fáfnir) was originally not a dragon at all, but one of the three sons of Hreidmar — brother to Regin the smith and to Otr, the man slain in otter-form. When the gods paid Hreidmar a great weregild of cursed gold (the treasure of the dwarf Andvari) to atone for Otr's death, Fafnir was seized by an overpowering greed for the hoard. He murdered his own father Hreidmar to take the gold for himself, and then drove away his brother Regin, keeping the entire cursed treasure. So consumed was he by his avarice and his obsession with guarding the gold that he transformed — whether by the curse, by his own corrupted nature, or by a magic helm of terror — into a vast, venomous, scaly dragon (or great serpent), and slithered out to a desolate heath where he lay coiled upon his hoard, breathing poison, letting no one near.
The Greed That Was a Curse
Fafnir's transformation is one of the most powerful images in all of myth: a man so consumed by greed that he literally becomes a monster, a dragon whose entire existence is reduced to coiling upon his gold and destroying anyone who approaches. He embodies the curse of Andvari's gold in its purest form — the treasure that turns its possessor into a being of pure, solitary avarice, cut off from family, humanity and joy, with nothing left but the hoard and the poison. The Norse word for a dragon's lair-bound greed, and the very image of the gold-hoarding dragon that has echoed through all later fantasy, descends from Fafnir lying upon his cursed treasure.
The Slaying by Sigurd
Fafnir met his end at the hands of the hero Sigurd (Siegfried), guided by his foster-father, the smith Regin — Fafnir's own dispossessed brother, who hungered for the gold and for revenge. On Regin's counsel, Sigurd dug a pit in the path Fafnir took to drink, and when the great dragon crawled over it, Sigurd thrust his sword Gram up into the beast's soft underbelly, dealing the death-wound. As Fafnir lay dying, he and Sigurd spoke, the dragon warning the hero that the cursed gold would be his doom too. Sigurd then roasted and tasted the dragon's heart — and upon touching the blood to his lips, he suddenly understood the language of birds, who warned him that Regin meant to betray and kill him; so Sigurd slew Regin and took the hoard for himself.
The Dragon of Greed
Fafnir endures as the most famous dragon of Norse myth and one of the most influential in all of literature — the man-turned-dragon, the hoarder of cursed gold, the embodiment of greed as a force that transforms a person into a monster. His slaying by Sigurd is a defining episode of the Volsung saga and the model for countless later dragon-slayings, and his story carries a timeless warning: that the lust for gold can consume a soul utterly, turning a man into a venomous beast who lives only to coil upon a treasure that brings him neither joy nor peace, only the certainty of his doom.
He murdered his father for the cursed gold and let his greed turn him into a venom-breathing dragon coiled upon the hoard — until a hero's sword found his soft belly from below.