I'm reading Jackson Crawford's translation of the Poetic Edda, and have been wondering why Sigurd is referred to more than once as a Hun or Hunnish? (This is from the Niflung Cycle-- I don't have the book with me at the moment and can't remember specifically which poem I'm thinking of, but it's one of the ones that deals with his murder by Gudrun's brother.)
My initial expectation going into this section was that Sigurd was Norse, so it was a little jarring to read.
"Hun" and "Hunnish" are perhaps poor translations, because we think of Attila and the Huns he ruled. The Nordic "Hunaland" refers to Frisia, and probably especially the area north of Groningen in the Netherlands:
The identification isn't certain, but there are many indications that Hunaland and the Hunni were in that general area.
Bede notes that some people in Germany have not yet become Christian: "Sunt autem Fresones, Rugini, Danai, Hunni, Antiqui Saxones, Boructuari; sunt alii perplures hisdem in partibus populi paganis adhuc ritibus servientis." This includes the Frisians, in the western part of Frisia, the Danes in Denmark, the Saxons to the south of Denmark, and the Boructuari in north Westphalia. The Rugini are often assumed to be those who lived on the island of Rügen in the Baltic.
The Hunni are often assumed to be the Hugas, who lived next to or in Hugmercki, in Groningen Province.
Kormáks saga suggests that Hunaland is on the North Sea coast, next to Denmark: "húnalands og handan hugstarkr sem Danmarkar", "Hunaland and beyond the strong Danes".
German (as opposed to Nordic) Sigurd is usually placed in Westphalia (i.e., Niederland) or Carolingia (i.e., Carolingian Frankia). Niederland is more or less adjacent to the Nordic Hunaland, and both Hunaland and Niederland were in Charlemagne's Frankia, so the German Sigurd isn't that different in origin from the Nordic Sigurd.
For more on Hunaland, see:
Sorry for the late response.
Tl; dr: we don't know with certainty, but the original (Old Norse) text does indeed not explicitly say that he is 'of the Huns (Huna in Old Norse), but adjective 'hunnish (húnskr in Old Norse)'.
I also confirm that the use of this adjective to Sigurðr seems to be limited in two poems in the Niflung Cycle among Poetic Eddas, namely in Sigurðarkviða hin skamma ('The short lay of Sigurðr', stanzas 4 and 10) and in Atlamál hin groenlenzku ('The Greenlandic Poem of Atli', though Atli himself was not related to modern Greenland in any sense, stanza 100).
The main problem of translating/ interpreting this adjective is that we don't have enough usages to identify the meaning of the word with the 'ethnic' adjective of the Huns (I don't want to explore further into to what extent the ethnic concept of the Eddic texts corresponded with the modern one here). To give some examples, the land as well as the farmstead (the camp?) of the Huns are called Húnmörk (stanza 13) and garði<garðr Húna (stanza 12) in Atlakviða ('The Lay of Atli'), another poem in Poetic Eddas.
Philologists have traditionally suggested another interpretation (translation) of this adjective, not 'hunnish', but 'of southern [land origin]' for long (la Farge & Tucker 1992: 124, s.v. húnskr), and some modern translation of Poetic Edda adapt this alternative interpretation.
AFAIK only other major usage of húnskr in Poetic Edda/ Old Norse text out of Sigurðr is found in St. 26 of Guðrúnarkviða in fyrsta ('The First Lay of Guðrún'), húnskrar þioðar, and this phrase can be interpreted correctly either of the meanings of the adjective, since the Huns belonged to the southern peoples for the eyes of the Scandinavians.
References:
+++
(Edited): fixes typos.
