Introduction
Gunnar was the eldest son of Gjuki and Grimhild, king of the Burgundians after his father, and brother to Hogni and Gudrun.
Family
Deception, Murder, and Revenge
Unable to ride through Brynhild's wall of enchanted flame himself, Gunnar relied on Sigurd — under Grimhild's potion and disguised in Gunnar's shape — to win her on his behalf. When Brynhild later learned the truth, her fury and Grimhild's scheming together pushed Gunnar to conspire in Sigurd's murder, carried out by his younger half-brother Guttorm to avoid breaking Gunnar's own oath of blood-brotherhood with Sigurd. Years later, invited to the Hunnish court of Atli (his sister Gudrun's second husband) under false pretenses, Gunnar was captured and killed by being thrown into a pit of venomous snakes, playing a harp with his feet to the very end in a final act of defiance.
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.