Fafnir is shown to return to his original giant form while delivering his death-speech to Siegfried. It is clear that much of Tolkien's work was inspired by Northern Myth. Many parallels can be drawn between Fafnir and Smaug, from "The Hobbit", as well as between Fafnir and Glaurung, the first dragon in Middle Earth. Who is slain by Turin. The exchange between Bilbo and Smaug nearly mirrors Fafnir's and Sigurd's. The main difference being that Sigurd's conversation occurs after the death blow has been struck. This is most likely due to dramatic effect, as Bilbo has much more at stake when
Investigations into Germanic Mythology concluding in part that it was not more widely received because it was not fully available in one of the three international languages of scholarship: English, German or French. A German translation was being prepared in 1889 by literary historian, Phillip B. Schweitzer, who died in a skiing accident shortly thereafter. A French translation planned by a group of scholars in Lund in 1891 was never completely realized. Rydberg himself knew that his mythology would be regarded as "folly" to the German philologists, who, as adherents to the school of nature-mythology, regarded him as a heretic, in regard to his