The Nibelungenlied: The Lay of the Nibelungs (Oxford World's Classics)

by Cyril Edwards

  The supernatural elements found in the first half of the lay are for the most part lacking in the second half, with the exception of the water-sprites, the wise women who foretell to Hagen the fate of the Nibelungs. Instead a whole host of new characters are introduced. The marriage between Kriemhilt and Etzel is promoted by Rüedeger, Margrave of Pöchlarn, a powerful and magnanimous Austrian exile at Etzel’s court. Also in exile at the court are Dietrich of Bern and his retinue of warriors. Foremost among these is old Hildebrant, Dietrich’s master-at-arms. Both Dietrich and Hildebrant figure in the oldest surviving German heroic poem, the Old High German Hildebrandslied, whose manuscript dates from the early ninth century. (In the Hildebrandslied, however, Dietrich and Hildebrand are on opposite sides.)

  As the lay moves towards the final catastrophe, Volker of Alzey, the bloodthirsty minstrel, comes to play a prominent role on the Burgundian side. King Gunther now shakes off his weakness and becomes a heroic figure. Other characters on the Hunnish side make brief appearances in the battles: these include Blœdelin, Etzel’s brother, and Irinc, Margrave of Denmark. Ultimately, though, it is the central characters, Kriemhilt, Hagen, and Gunther, who determine the outcome and the doom of the Nibelungs.

  An Heroic Poem in Courtly Times

  Near the beginning of Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein or The Knight with the Lion there is a brief catalogue of the leisure pursuits which are popular at the court of King Arthur, and which we may take as an accurate reflection of courtly culture c.1200:

  When they had eaten that Whit Day, / many a man took such pleasure / as then suited him best of all. / Some conversed with the women, / some exercised themselves, / some danced, some sang, / some ran, some leapt, / some listened to the playing of string instruments, / some shot at the target, / some spoke of love’s sorrows, / some of valour. / Gawein attended to his arms.6

  Almost all of these activities are to be found in the Nibelungenlied, and typify the way in which the lay, as written down in the late twelfth century, reflects the courtly world. Even two of the games that Prünhilt sets as challenges to Gunther in Iceland, leaping and shooting, are present here, though in the Seventh Adventure they have the ring of parody.

  The warfare practised in the Nibelungenlied is in some respects also state-of-the-art. The couched lance, the lance held underarm, was developed from the late eleventh century onwards.7 The one-on-one joust and the massed charge known as the bohort are other features that develop in the twelfth century, primarily in tournaments. The battle between Hagen and Gelpfrat in the Twenty-sixth Adventure is a two-stage process, well known from tournaments and from the Arthurian romance: first the knights joust on horseback, then this leads into a sword-fight on foot.

  Yet there are echoes of an older, more heroic world, particularly in the second part of the lay. The slaying of the child Ortliep is not an incident that would occur in courtly romance, nor indeed is the killing of Kriemhilt. Dragons often figure in Arthurian romance, as in Hartmann’s Iwein, but bathing in the dragon’s blood seems also to hark back to an older age. The consequence of the bathing in the blood is Sivrit’s supernatural strength; both this and the corresponding physical prowess of Prünhilt mark these as characters who would be out of place in contemporary courtly literature. The supernatural is far from being absent in the courtly romance, where giants, dwarves, fairies, and invisibility are frequently met with, but there is a different feel, a different atmosphere when it occurs in the heroic epic. The prophecy of the water-sprites, for example, which leads to Hagen’s brutal attempt on the life of the chaplain, is integral to the sense of wyrd, of inexorable fate, familiar to the reader of Beowulf, of the Hildebrandslied, and of Icelandic sagas such as the great tale of revenge, the Saga of Burnt Njal.

  Sivrit’s childhood and upbringing epitomize the dichotomy between the heroic and the courtly ethos. In the Second Adventure we learn: ‘They very rarely let the boy ride without a guard. Sigmunt and Siglint ordered that he be elegantly dressed. The wise men of the court, knowledgeable in matters of reputation, also took care of him.’ (strophe 25). The son of Sivrit and Kriemhilt is given similar care at court: ‘They took great care over his upbringing, as was his due.’ (stophe 716). This sheltered upbringing at the royal court contrasts sharply with the account of Sivrit’s youth given by Hagen in the Third Adventure, which portrays Sivrit as the hero who sets off alone in search of adventure, a migratory motif common in heroic epic (and in fairy-tale). The Eighth Adventure, which describes Sivrit’s return to the land of the Nibelungs and his conquering of the giant and the dwarf-king Albrich, is clearly an attempt by the narrator to compensate retrospectively for the lack of an earlier account of Sivrit’s heroic youth. It does little to further the plot.

  Another way in which the courtly ethos exerts its influence is in the portrayal of love. After some youthful dalliance with unnamed ladies of the court, Sivrit’s ‘thoughts turned to noble love’ (strophe 47). hôhe minne, ‘noble love’ or, more literally, ‘lofty love’, is courtly love, fin amors, love at a distance, and there can be no doubt that the portrayal of the early relationship between Sivrit and Kriemhilt was influenced by this central concept of courtly culture. Courtly love ceases at the point of marriage, and Sivrit’s punishment of Kriemhilt, when he beats her for being too loose-tongued, is not a motif to be found in the courtly romance.

  In the Twenty-seventh Adventure Volker the fiddler shows his musical skills at Pöchlarn, performing Minnesang, the courtly love-lyric: ‘Bold Volker, with his fiddle, walked over and stood courteously before Gotelint. He fiddled sweet melodies and sang her his songs.’ The relationship between Volker and Gotelint, Margrave Rüedeger’s wife, is one of admiration from a distance, and bears a resemblance to the relationships to be found in the wooing songs of Minnesang. This scene contrasts sharply with the bloody use Volker later makes of his fiddle in battle against the Huns: ‘Do you hear the melodies, Hagen, which Volker is fiddling amongst the Huns over there, all those who go to the doors? It is red rosin he rubs on his fiddle’s bow!’ (strophe 2004).

  The Nibelungenlied owes its origins to oral poetry. For a long time, for some five centuries if not more, the ancient tales to which the poet refers in the first strophe had been circulating in oral form, and we cannot be certain when they first made their entry into writing. These origins colour not only the plot and ethos, but also the lay’s style. Albert Lord and Milman Parry’s studies, based on Homer and Balkan traditional poetry, read like a template for the performer of this poem, who must also, to an extent we cannot now determine, have been its shaper:

  The poetic grammar of oral epic is and must be based on the formula. It is a grammar of parataxis and of frequently used and useful phrases. Usefulness in composition carries no implication of opprobrium. Quite the contrary. Without this usefulness the style, and, more important, the whole practice would collapse or would never have been born. The singer’s mode of composition is dictated by the demands of performance at high speed, and he depends upon inculcated habit and association of sounds, words, phrases, and lines. He does not shrink from the habitual; nor does he either require the fixed for memorization or seek the unusual for its own sake.8

  This style, so heavily dependent on parataxis and repetition, is far from alien to the Anglo-American oral tradition. It is preserved, for example, in the border ballads, and in much folk-song of Anglo-Irish origins which can still be heard today.

  None of the manuscripts of the Nibelungenlied preserves a melody, but this may be because very few melodies for German epics or lyrics are recorded before c.1300. (A notable exception is the Carmina Burana manuscript, dating from c.1230.) The melody of the fifteenth-century Jüngeres Hildebrandslied (Later Hildebrandslied) has been suggested as a possibility for the Nibelungenlied.9 Even today, in the Balkans, war epics, orally composed, are performed with musical accompaniment on a single-stringed instrument, and it is tempting to suggest that the same held for the Nibelungenlied. The MHG poet’s performance is usually referred to as �
��singen unde sagen’ (‘singing and saying’), which certainly points to a musical recitation.

  The Reception of the Nibelungenlied

  The latest of the complete manuscripts of the Nibelungenlied (MS d) was written between 1504 and 1516 by Hans Ried, the meticulous scribe of the ‘Ambraser Heldenbuch’, a customs officer in the employ of Emperor Maximilian I. In the middle of the sixteenth century some strophes from the now lost MS c were published. In 1692 there is a reference to the Nibelungenlied in Hans Jacob von Wagenfels’ Ehren-Ruff Teütsch-Lands, describing Seyuridt’s journey to Gunther’s land.10 This apart, the lay disappeared from sight for some 200 years. The same fate befell the whole of medieval German literature.

  In 1755 the Swabian doctor, mystic, and private scholar Jacob Hermann Obereit (1725–98) found the thirteenth-century manuscript which was later to be designated C in the library of the Count of Hohenems.11 The Swiss scholar and critic Johann Jakob Bodmer (1698–1783) played a key role in the restoration of the Nibelungenlied to public attention, publishing the final part of the lay in 1757.12 It was Bodmer who first drew the comparison with Homer, likening the poem to the Iliad.

  The first complete edition was published by Bodmer’s pupil, Christoph Heinrich Müller (or Myller), in 1782. Goethe had seen Bodmer’s copy of the lay in Zurich in 1779, and had Müller’s edition sent to him, but it lay unread for over twenty years, until 1808/9, when he read extracts to the Weimar literary circle. Goethe’s belated interest was inspired by the patriotic movements of the early nineteenth century. His interest in the poem persisted over the next two years, and he wrote an introduction to the 1827 translation of Karl Simrock (1802–76), the most successful of the many nineteenth-century translations, which was published posthumously.

  The late eighteenth-century reception of the poem was not uniformly enthusiastic. Müller had dedicated his edition, which included other medieval poems, to the Prussian king Frederick the Great (1712–86), from whose pen stems the most famous derogatory remark about the Nibelungenlied: in a letter to Müller dated 22 February 1784, Frederick wrote that his anthology was not worth ‘a shot of powder’.13 This remark, though, has to be seen in the broader context of the animosity towards the German language at the Francophile Prussian court. French was Frederick the Great’s native language, in which he wrote execrable poetry, which not even Voltaire could redeem. The king once told the scholar and critic Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700–66) that he had never read a book in German, and that he spoke the language comme un cocher (‘like a coachman’).14 On another occasion Frederick remarked: ‘A German singer! I should as soon expect to get pleasure from the neighing of my horse.’ Frederick read German books in French translation. As for the spoken language, he opined: ‘Je ne parle allemand qu'à mes chevaux’, a remark echoed by Voltaire in a letter from Potsdam in 1750: ‘I live here as in France. Only French is spoken; German is for soldiers and horses—you only need it when travelling.’15 (Even Goethe’s sister Cornelia wrote her diary and correspondence in French.16) All this did not deter Frederick the Great from writing his treatise De la Littérature Allemande, published in 1780. As one of his biographers drily remarked: ‘Seldom can a writer have been so profoundly ignorant of his subject.’17

  Another detractor was the prolific playwright August Friedrich Ferdinand von Kotzebue (1761–1819), who held the Nibelungenlied to be ‘simply a foolish fairy tale, lacking spirit, feeling, and imagination’.18 One suspects that Kotzebue had not read the poem to its bitter end. These negative voices were, however, very much in the minority. The last quarter of the eighteenth century saw a sea-change in attitudes to the German language and its medieval past, brought about by a combination of factors: the rise of classical German literature, with Goethe and Schiller in the forefront; the medievalism of early Romantic authors such as Tieck, Schlegel, and Novalis; the reaction to the Napoleonic invasion and the concomitant growth in German nationalism; the restoration of the prestige of the German language and the growth of academic interest in it fostered by the grammarian Johann Christoph Adelung (1732–1806), and his predecessors Gottsched and Justus Georg Schottelius (1612–76).

  The early nineteenth century saw three editions by Friedrich von der Hagen (1807, 1810, and 1816), which were enthusiastically reviewed by the brothers Grimm, Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm (1786–1859). The Grimm brothers were to become seminal figures in the nineteenth-century reception of medieval literature, Jacob as the greatest philologist and grammarian of his age, and as editor of the first great German dictionary; Wilhelm as an editor of a great many medieval texts. The Grimms worked together in complete harmony throughout their long lives, most famously, of course, collecting and editing their definitive collection of fairy-tales.

  The Grimm brothers’ enthusiasm proved infectious. August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845), in his Berlin lectures of 1802, held the Nibelungenlied to be superior to the Iliad, because of the magnitude of its passions, characters, and plot.19 He argued in 1812 that it should be a major text for the education of German youth. This nationalistic reception of the poem reached one of its early high points in 1815, when Johann August Zeune (1783–1853), a geographer and director of the Berlin institutes for the blind, published his own translation in small format as a ‘Feld- und Zeltausgabe’ (‘battlefield and tent edition’), to be carried into war by ‘courageous patriotic warriors’; Zeune held lectures on the Nibelungenlied to packed audiences in Berlin, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, and Worms. From 1800 onwards the lay occupied a firm place in the public imagination, as well as being taught in universities and schools.

  Alongside this popular reception, the academic study of the work prospered. The classicist Karl Lachmann (1793–1851) was to become the major figure in the foundation of the new discipline of medieval German studies, editing the works of Wolfram von Eschenbach and the lyrics of Walther von der Vogelweide. For the Nibelungenlied, he relied characteristically on a base manuscript, a single codex, MS A, in his edition of 1826. Disputes followed concerning the relative value and date of the three central manuscripts, known as A, B, and C. It was the edition by Karl Bartsch (1832–88), based on manuscript B, which won the day and which remains, with only minor revisions, the most widely studied text. Some forty complete manuscripts and fragments of the Nibelungenlied now survive, which points to a considerable interest throughout the Middle Ages. Its popularity was thus greater than that of Hartmann von Aue’s Arthurian romances, though not as great as the Parzival and Willehalm of Wolfram von Eschenbach. In the last decade four new fragments of the Nibelungenlied have been discovered. These point to lost originals; it is often the case that fragments prove to be older in date than those manuscripts which preserve an entire text. Editing the text is thus likely to prove a never-ending task.

  The Romantics and the nationalist movements of the nineteenth century, as we have seen, played a key part in the projection of the Nibelungenlied as a ‘Nationalepos’. This culminated in 1896, when the patriotic writer Adolf Bartels referred to Germany as ‘Nibelungenland’, and the Iron Chancellor, Bismarck, was dubbed ‘the iron Siegfried’ (der eiserne Siegfried) by the poet Hermann Hoffmeister.20 While none of the central characters in the lay is identified as German, this has not prevented the Nibelungenlied being employed again and again for nationalistic purposes, and the early twentieth century saw the continuation and consolidation of this abuse. In 1909 Reichskanzler Fürst von Bülow, in an address to the Reichstag on relations between Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, appealed to the concept of ‘Nibelungentreue’ (‘the loyalty of the Nibelungs’), establishing this concept of loyalty to the death as practised above all by Hagen, and most notoriously applied to Stalingrad in 1943. The other side to Hagen was also exploited. Hindenburg in 1919 likened the German defeat on the Western Front to the murder of Siegfried by Hagen. This ‘Dolchstoßlegende’, the myth of ‘the stab in the back’, was to become central to Nazi propaganda.21

  This exploitation of the poem for propagandistic purposes rose
to a new peak in the Third Reich, with its emphasis on what were perceived as ‘heroic’ values. (The 1940 and 1944 editions of the text by Helmut de Boor (1891–1976) are not free from this distortion.22)

  Christabel Bielenberg (1909–2003), that extraordinarily courageous British eyewitness to the implementation of Nazi ideology, could not quite believe it. In the spring and summer of 1939 she was ‘shuttl[ing] back and forth’ between Berlin and England: ‘Sometimes as I travelled back to England I wondered what in heaven’s name I was at, wandering pop-eyed in a world about which I knew so little … ordinary citizens, fat as butter, kidding themselves they were descendants of Siegfrieds and Sieglindes.’23 Hermann Göring was particularly prominent in the attempted equation of Nazi and ‘heroic’ values. In the pre-war correspondence between Göring and Lord and Lady Londonderry, the latter addressed the ex-pilot as ‘My dear General der Flieger Siegfried’ to tell him how much his photograph had been admired at a big political reception at Londonderry House. Flattered—and probably amused—he could not resist signing a return letter ‘Hermann Göring (Siegfried)’.24

  Siegfried in particular was central to the Third Reich’s cult of the hero, and there was even a movement to substitute a Siegfried cult for Christianity, spearheaded by one Siegfried Reuter, who, in his book Sigfrid oder Christus, appealed to his fellow Germans to turn back from Christianity to the old semi-divine figure, apostrophizing Siegfried in terms appropriate to a solar deity. Siegfried was intended to be the godhead of a new ‘Germanic’ religion, free of Semitic associations. Perhaps the oddest of these attempts to exploit the poem came from the lips of Rudolf Hess, who declared, before his ill-fated landing by parachute in Scotland: ‘I want to be the Hagen of the party!’25 This casting of the Nazi cause in a heroic light was all-pervasive, and lasted beyond Stalingrad until the final days of the Third Reich.