ABSTRACT
The history of the great Volsung Treasure and of the fates of those involved with it is the Germanic equivalent of the Greek story of the Trojan War and, as the accounts of the Trojan War look back to the local Bronze Age (however difficult it may be to establish the detail of how they do so), so the Germanic story looks back to the Age of Migration, roughly 350-600 AD, when Germanic-speaking groups were moving across the Rhine and settling within the old Roman empire (a process equally open to various interpretations). During this time, practices with a long history in northern Europe, notably rich burials of which that at Sutton Hoo, Suffolk, is the best known, reappear, and they are part of the psychological world of the stories represented here.
