Brunhild the Dragonslayer: A Review
by Britta Kallin
Brunhild the Dragonslayer is the English translation of the Japanese book Ryugoroshi no Brunhild by Yuiko Agarizaki, published in 2022. The book is a “light novel” (a type of young adult literature in Japan), and includes a prologue, four chapters, an epilogue, and an afterword. The English translation by Jennifer Ward was published in 2024. It is the third in a series, loosely connected to the two other novels written by the same author: Brunhild and Kriemhild and Brunhild the Dragon Princess. All three are available as manga and a book version.
The novel is partially inspired by Nibelungen and Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle, which reached foreign shores in the late 19th and 20th centuries. These works spread the tale of Brunhild, her father who abandoned her on a rock, her spouse Siegfried who rescued her, and his fight with dragons from the middle of Europe to other continents. The myth of Brunhild and Siegfried is at the center of Germanic ethnonational narratives. In the stories featuring Brunhild, she is conceptualized as a strong, young woman who battles patriarchal rule; a fearless fighter who tries to resist her father’s and her husband’s rule, and who had mythical dragons on her side.
Agarizaki’s plot draws from this mythology, incorporating references to the fruit of knowledge, salvation, the Kingdom of Eternity, the garden of Eden, Lucifer, and God. Several references to Christian religion are also scattered throughout the text, though very few characters can speak the “True Language,” or “words of power granted by God” (11), which only “chosen people” understand. The omniscient narrator of Agarizaki’s novel tells the story of Brunhild’s father, Siegebert Siegfried, who defends his people against the influx of evil dragons and is considered a hero back home. He is the only one who knows how to use the Balmung cannon, a deadly cannon that can kill dragons with poison gas. Opera performances in this fictitious country show how Fafnir, an evil dragon, was defeated. The assault ship with which Brunhild’s father travels is called the Fredegund. By chance, the sixteen-year-old Brunhild meets Sigurd Siegfried, her seventeen-year-old brother, who was raised by their father and whom she befriends. Brunhild battles evil dragons, nearly dying in the process. She eventually recovers, though she loses the right side of her chest and an arm. Brunhild has the power of a dragon and can regrow parts of her body, with her recovered limb “covered by white [dragon] scales” (105). Her father’s friend and right hand, Sachs, a colonel in the Norvelland army, attempts a reunion between daughter and father so they can reconcile their differences, but Brunhild wants to kill her father because she considers him a “monster” (46).
Intriguingly, while Agarizaki’s light novel draws on traditional Norse mythology and medieval Germanic tales, it also combines the plot with more contemporary social issues and political groups. For instance, Brunhild gives a presentation in front of an environmental organization called Typhon, a “fanatical religious group” (64) that worships dragons. This story thus weaves together the premodern (Christian religion) and contemporary (environmental organization), the mythological (the Nibelungen myth) and the realistic (modern weaponry), the mimetic (a girl that can shapeshift into a dragon) and the fantastic (dragons). The references to German names and terms continue when Sigurd brings Brunhild word from outside the hospital, referring to the newspapers that described her fight with the dragons and a recent hit “Der Flügel” as “a masterpiece of fiction” (97). Finally, Brunhild attempts to kill her father with a bomb which explodes but does not kill him because he ingested Balmung and is now like a godlike being who cannot be killed. Brunhild then transforms into a giant silver dragon and, despite her legendary dragon-killing sword Falchion, still finds her father impossible to defeat. Finally, she uses her father as a shield when her brother fires at her, an act that ultimately kills both Brunhild and her father at the same time. The only survivor from their family is her brother Sigurd.
In the afterword, the author explains that they wanted to write a story about love and justice but that the characters took on their own features during the writing process, with the plot of the story changing over time. Unfortunately, it became a somewhat bleak tragedy. For this reader who teaches German language and culture, it is particularly interesting to see how the Germanic names were used in this Japanese novel in English translation to evoke certain mythical references that have different associations in Japan, the US, and Germany. In our globalized world, the rewritten story of Brunhild in Agarizaki’s Brunhild the Dragonslayer is still as enchanting as ever.
Yuiko Agarizaki, Brunhild the Dragonslayer, Yen Press LLC, 2024. 172 pp. https://yenpress.com/series/brunhild-the-dragonslayer
About the Author
Dr. Britta Kallin received her PhD in German Literature from the University of Cincinnati (2000) and she joined the School of Modern Languages faculty at Georgia Tech as Assistant Professor of German in the same year. She had previously taught three summers of intensive German in the Middlebury College Summer School in Vermont. Since 2008, Dr. Kallin has served as Associate Professor of German in the School of Modern Languages.