Fafnir: the dwarf thief who became a dragon

Fafnir was born a dwarf in Svartalfheim and died a dragon in chains. Between those two states he spent a long career travelling the Nine Realms after anything that caught his eye, filling a storeroom in Midgard with plunder and earning a reputation among both the Aesir and the Vanir as a persistent nuisance. Mimir knew him by name and by habit. When Kratos and Atreus finally found him, he was a beast bound in his own house by the dwarven king Mótsognir, and the change had done nothing whatever to improve his temper.

A thief with a storeroom#

Fafnir was a dwarf like Brok and Sindri, and like them he was a maker's child, but the trade he took up was acquisition. He was known to travel to different realms after any treasure that interested him, and the practice made him notorious well outside his own kind. Mimir, who had spent long years at Odin's side and heard everything worth hearing, remembered Fafnir chiefly as a nuisance among the Aesir and the Vanir.

The proceeds went into a storeroom in Midgard, stocked with pieces carried back from every realm he had visited. It did not stay full. A Reaver company called the Hræzla Farmaðr found the hoard and stripped it of nearly everything, leaving a single chest behind. Fafnir had spent a career taking things that belonged to other people, and in the end the same was done to him with far less ceremony.

One item out of that collection outlived the rest in memory. Fafnir had once ventured into Niflheim for a whetstone, a journey into the poisoned realm of mist for a sharpening stone. Sindri later sent Kratos and Atreus to retrieve it, and remarked that it must have been quite a whetstone to be worth going in after.

The mirror and the change#

How a dwarf came to wear a dragon's body was never settled with certainty. Mimir offered one guess, that Fafnir's habit of lifting artefacts with magical properties had finally caught up with him, or that he had taken a trinket from the wrong Vanir goddess and been paid for it in kind. A lore marker at the place where he was later chained points at something more specific. Among the things Fafnir had stolen was a Vanir mirror, and a glance into it was enough to turn the one who looked into a dragon.

If that account is the true one, then Fafnir's ruin was the exact shape of his life. He took a thing he did not understand out of the hands of people who understood it perfectly, carried it home to his hoard, and looked at it. Whatever the trigger, the transformation was permanent, and it left one of the realms' more accomplished burglars in a body far too large for the work.

Chained in his own house#

Mótsognir, son of Ivaldi and self-made king of a stretch of Midgard, had gone hunting a legendary dwarven armour after a dream convinced him it would spare his people a gruesome death. Its making called for three ingredients, one of them harvested from dragons, and the king had three of them taken and bound. Fafnir was one. He was found and captured in his own former home, chained in the storeroom he had spent a lifetime filling.

Kratos and Atreus came upon him there, and Atreus was startled when Mimir identified the chained beast by name. He was freed, which Mimir treated with a certain dryness, observing that becoming a dragon had done nothing to improve Fafnir's terrible attitude. The other captives fared much the same way. Mótsognir himself had vanished at Konunsgard before his armour was ever finished, killed by Hel-Walkers behind a hidden room off his own throne.

The family that came apart#

Fafnir's father was Hreidmar, remembered in Svartalfheim for two things. He was one of the great armourers of that realm, and his sons all ended as dragons. When Odin wanted him to design armour for the Einherjar, Hreidmar agreed and then built a fatal flaw into the work, so that the breastplates snapped like stale bread at the lightest blow. About a dozen Einherjar died before the Allfather understood what had been done to him. Hreidmar was caught trying to escape through a realm travel gate and executed.

His brother Otr shared Fafnir's fate twice over, first in becoming a dragon and then in being taken on Mótsognir's orders. Otr broke his chains once, escaped, and turned back with the intention of burning Veithurgard and taking revenge on his captors. He was recaptured and bound to a magical anchor that could only be undone by destroying three runes cut into it. Kratos and Atreus disabled the anchor, and the dragon thanked them and flew off. Faye had known a dwarf called Otr and told his story to her son, though whether the dwarf in the tale and the dragon in the chains were the same creature was never established. Of the three sons of Hreidmar, Otr is the one who is not remembered turning into a dragon in any telling of the old story, and in the Nine Realms he did it anyway.

What Fafnir was#

Nothing in the record casts Fafnir as a monster made by circumstance. He was disliked before he changed shape, and the change made him larger without making him different. Mimir's summary of him after his release, that the dragon was as unpleasant as the dwarf had been, is close to the whole of his character. What sets him apart from the ordinary run of the realms' beasts is that he chose his own destruction one theft at a time, and that his hoard, his shape and his captivity were all consequences of the same appetite.