Þiðrekssaga af Bern

Þiðreks saga af Bern ('the saga of Þiðrekr of Bern', also Þiðrekssaga, Þiðriks saga, Niflunga saga or Vilkina saga, with Anglicisations including Thidreksaga) is an Old Norse chivalric saga centering the character it calls Þiðrekr af Bern, who originated as the historical king Theoderic the Great (454–526), but who attracted a great many unhistorical legends in the Middle Ages. The text is either a translation of a lost Low German prose narrative of Theoderic's life, or a compilation by a Norwegian or Icelandic scholar based on German material. It is a pre-eminent source for a wide range of medieval Germanic legends.

The identification of this Nordic Þiðrekr af Bern with an heroic interpretation of the Ostrogothic king Theoderic has been recently challenged and rejected by some historians and philologists in epic literature.

The name Vilkinasaga was first used in Johan Peringskiöld's Swedish translation of 1715. Peringskiöld named it after Vilkinaland, which the saga says was an old name for Sweden and Götaland.

The saga contains many narratives found in other medieval tales about Theoderic, but also supplements them with other narratives and provides many additional details. It is not clear how much of the source material might have been orally transmitted and how much the author may have had access to written poems. The preface of the text itself says that it was written according to "tales of German men" and "old German poetry", possibly transmitted by Hanseatic merchants in Bergen. Contrary to the historical reality of Theoderic's life, most of the action of the saga is set in Northern Germany, situating Attila's capital at Susat (Soest in Westphalia) and the battle situated in the medieval German poem Die Rabenschlacht in Ravenna taking place at the mouth of the Rhine. This is part of a process operative in oral traditions called "localization", connecting events transmitted orally to familiar places, and is one of the reasons that the poems collected by the saga-writer are believed to be Low German in origin.

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