The Saga of the Volsungs/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Ending Fatigue: The massacre of the Niflungs and Gudrun's vengeance on Atli clearly form the climax of the story. Then the narrative continues to recount Gudrun's life after that event, notably the death of Svanhild and Gudrun's revenge on Jörmunrekkr. While these are dramatic events in their own right, they don't surpass what went before, and consequently come across as rather anticlimactic. The narrative seems to be aware of this and tells these events in much less detail than the preceding, but still the author obviously felt the need to include them.