Introduction
Hjordis was Sigmund's second wife, married to him in his old age. She was pregnant with Sigurd when Sigmund fell in his final battle.
Family
Preserving the Sword
After Sigmund's death, Hjordis gathered the shards of his broken sword — shattered against the spear of a disguised Odin — and kept them safe through her later remarriage, eventually passing them to her son. Those shards would be reforged by Regin into Gram, the sword with which the grown Sigurd would kill the dragon Fafnir.
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.