December's recommendation: Volsunga saga et al.

There's no third work in Norse literature that quite makes a set with the Poetic and Prose Eddas; instead, I've chosen to end this year with the most famous of their sagas.

The "et al" is there because what I'm really recommending here is the story, not its specific incarnations. It's the Saga of the Volsungs. It's a Faroese ballad. It's a set of poems in the Poetic Edda, interrupted by the Great Lacuna. It's the Nibelungenlied. It's Wagner's Ring Cycle. It's told throughout the Germanic world, in many different forms.

It even appears in Diana Wynne Jones' novel Eight Days of Luke, which I really ought to have saved for this year, so I could pair it with appropriate primary source material.

I don't think there are any versions of it that end well. But what do you expect out of Germanic literature? Sigurd (or Siegfried, or some other form of the name) meets Brynhildr (or Brunnhilde) and betrays her by marrying Gudrun (or Kriemhild), which in the end leads to his death. Of course, that was foretold -- usually by Brynhildr. It's hard to discuss the plot of this recommendation, since it varies depending on the text, sometimes rather wildly. Some versions include the part where Sigurd kills the dragon Fafnir. Some versions include the ring of the dwarf Andvari, a cursed ring whose literary grandchild I'm sure you're all familiar with. The saga rendition is a bit of a sprawling thing, beginning with Sigurd's ancestor Volsung (hence "the Volsungs," his descendents), and ending with the squabbling of Gudrun's family (the Niflungs, or Nibelungs in German). But that's how Norse sagas tend to be.

The thing to remember here is that the Eddas are mostly about the gods, about deeds far and above what even the most heroic human might accomplish. This tale is about people, living with the volume of their lives dialed up to eleven. It takes a certain skill to mimic that in modern fiction without the result seeming ridiculous, but it can be done. Sadly, it doesn't seem to have been done; the closest thing I've found to an adaptation in fiction, barring Eight Days of Luke mentioned above, is Tom Holt's Expecting Someone Taller, which drags the aftermath of that story into the modern day. But Holt, of course, is working in a humorous mode, and while perfectly valid as an approach, it's pretty far from the original.

With so many versions of this story, and such limited familiarity on my part with translations, I won't try to recommend one. I will say, though, that I find the Volsunga saga much more congenial than the Nibelungenlied, so if you want my advice, try that one first.