VOLSUNGASAGA!!!!!!!!!!!!

Besides the fact that that word means absolutely nothing to some of you. . .

How many of you have heard of J. R. R. Tolkien? Good, put your hands down. He's the guy who wrote The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, etc. Well, what a lot of people don't know is that he was also a great medieval literary scholar. In fact, he was one of the most influential contributors to the study of Beowulf, the Old English poem of monsters and heroes.

That's part one of what you need to know. Here's the second part.

There is an Old Norse saga called Volsungasaga (The Saga of the Volsungs) which involves a hero (Sigurd) slaying a dragon (Fafnir) and taking the cursed gold, ending up in the middle of the most epic Medieval cat fight, and tragically dies. Tolkien encountered the story at a young age in the form of Andrew Lang's Fairy Books. He incorporated the story into his fantasy literature (the legend involves dragons, a cursed ring, and other motifs Tolkien adapted) and always considered it a great work, listing Fafnir as the only other true dragon in medieval literature, next to the one that is in Beowulf.

Now for the exciting part. Remember how I said the saga is in Old Norse. Well. . .

TOLKIEN TRANSLATED IT!!!! AND THE BOOK FORM OF THE TRANSLATION IS COMING OUT IN MAY!!!!!!!!

Check out the website.

I had never heard of the translation before, which is surprising, given all the detail I went into in my thesis. Noting that Tolkien translated the work would have been worthy of note.

But anyway, I WANT TO BUY THE BOOK!!!!!!!

Just to let you know. . .