SOURCE: Mitchell, Stephen A. “Origins and Influences.” In Heroic Sagas and Ballads, pp. 66-73. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.

In the following excerpt, Mitchell discusses early Eddic poems from which the Volsunga Saga and other Scandinavian heroic prose narratives derive.

… The saga writers were informed about Nordic mythology through many different conduits (for example, Snorra Edda, Icelandic ‘learned history’), and one of these was surely eddic poetry. This traditional narrative verse was the vehicle by which heroic adventures were recounted before the existence of the extant fornaldarsogur, as in the case of Hálfr of Hálfs saga ok Hálfsrekka and Sigurðr of Volsunga saga. For many of the heroes whose careers and adventures fill the Icelandic fornaldarsogur, origins can be postulated which stretch beyond the realm of the historical in even its most extended definition—where such a reference might indicate nothing more concrete than a...