Introduction
Andvari was a dwarf who lived beneath a waterfall in the shape of a pike, guarding a great hoard of gold he had accumulated.
Family
- No further family relationships recorded in this tree.
The Curse of the Ring
When the trickster god Loki, needing gold to pay a weregild demanded by Hreidmar, forced Andvari to surrender his entire hoard, Andvari tried to keep back a single ring, Andvaranaut, which had the power to breed more gold. Loki took the ring too, and Andvari, in fury, cursed it and all the gold to destroy whoever possessed it thereafter — a curse that plays out across the rest of the Volsunga Saga, killing Fafnir, Regin, Sigurd, and ultimately much of the House of Gjuki.
The Volsunga Saga and the Poetic Edda preserve the Norse-Icelandic form of this legend; the German Nibelungenlied recounts substantially the same events under different names (Sigurd as Siegfried, Brynhild as Brünnhilde, Atli as Etzel/Attila), reflecting a shared Germanic legendary tradition rather than a single fixed text.