Resumen de Die mythische Vorgeschichte des Nibelungenhorts
While the origin of the “Nibelungenhort” within the German tradition re-mains nebulous, the northern transmission offers evidence for a veritable prehistory. It leads back to an era of myth, during which the godly triads wandered the grounds of Midgard. Without provocation, it would seem, Loki kills one of three brothers, who is in the form of an otter hunting for salmon in a waterfall. Forced to pay compensation by Otter’s father and the two remaining brothers, Loki commits another act of violence by compelling Andvari, a dwarf living in the waterfall in form of a pickerel, to hand over the treasure and a ring as höfuðlausn. This treasure, burdened with a deadly curse, starts to reveal its disastrous force, which leads to the annihilation of the most famous of all northern Germanic families, the Völsungs. This mythical prehistory is anchored within the northern saga transmission and is visible there in many places. The iconographical sources are of particular significance. They can be used as proof that this prehistory was already known to all Scandinavians, as traces of it can be found just as much among Viking settlements in England as in Sweden. These same sources also demonstrate that this transmission dates back to the beginnings of the Viking Age. The prehistory of the “Nibelungenhort” gains yet another temporal dimension if one takes into account the evidence of migration period bracteates: they show Loki killing the otter as a synoptic motif on the “Drei-Götter-Brakteaten”, as the primordial Original Sin of this god, prece-ding the killing of Balder. But even without these sources, the mythical prehistory of the “Nibelungenhort” appears to be so engrained within the northern transmission that the theory of a late, high medieval remythication of the Völsunga saga must be reconsidered.
