tests their courage, and finding it wanting makes Sigmund kill both:  the expected hero must be a Volsung through both parents.  She therefore visits Sigmund in disguise, and her third son, Sinfjoetli, is the child of the Volsung pair.  At ten years old, she sends him to live in the wood with Sigmund, who only knows him as Signy’s son.  For years they live as wer-wolves in the wood, till the time comes for vengeance.  They set fire to Siggeir’s hall; and Signy, after revealing Sinfjoetli’s real parentage, goes back into the fire and dies there, her vengeance achieved: 

“I killed my children, because I thought them too weak to avenge our father; Sinfjoetli has a warrior’s might because he is both son’s son and daughter’s son to King Volsung.  I have laboured to this end, that King Siggeir should meet his death; I have so toiled for the achieving of revenge that I am now on no condition fit for life.  As I lived by force with King Siggeir, of free will shall I die with him.”

Though no poem survives on this subject, the story is certainly primitive; its savage character vouches for its antiquity. Voelsunga then reproduces the substance of the prose Death of Sinfjoetli mentioned above, the object of which, as a part of the cycle, seems to be to remove Sinfjoetli and leave the field clear for Sigurd.  It preserves a touch which may be original in Sinfjoetli’s burial, which resembles that of Scyld in Beowulf:  his father lays him in a boat steered by an old man, which immediately disappears.

Sigmund and Sinfjoetli are always close comrades, “need-companions” as the Anglo-Saxon calls them.  They are indivisible and form one story.  Sigurd, on the other hand, is only born after his father Sigmund’s death. Voelsunga says that Sigmund fell in battle against Hunding, through the interference of Odin, who, justifying Loki’s taunt that he “knew not how to give the victory fairly,” shattered with his spear the sword he had given to the Volsung.  For this again we have to depend entirely on the prose, except for one line in Hyndluljod:  “The Father of Hosts gives gold to his followers;... he gave Sigmund a sword.”  And from the poems too, Sigurd’s fatherless childhood is only to be inferred from an isolated reference, where giving himself a false name he says to Fafni:  “I came a motherless child; I have no father like the sons of men.”  Sigmund, dying, left the fragments of the sword to be given to his unborn son, and Sigurd’s fosterfather Regin forged them anew for the future dragon-slayer.  But Sigurd’s first deed was to avenge on Hunding’s race the death of his father and his mother’s father. Voelsunga tells this story first of Helgi and Sinfjoetli, then of Sigurd, to whom the poems also attribute the deed.  It is followed by the dragon-slaying.