My reading list did not escape entirely unscathed from my reading of The Brothers Grimm, and one of the works I added was The Nibelungenlied, which is described as ancient German epic poetry. A few qualifications are immediately in order. First, while the oral tradition for the tale is almost certainly older, the written version likely arose in maybe the eleventh or twelfth century, making this not exactly ancient compared to something like, say, the Instructions of Amenemope, written about five thousand years earlier. Furthermore, the English translation I found – there weren’t many options available – does not make any attempt to reflect the work’s original poetic nature, instead relaying the story in prose, and it is therefore difficult to discern how faithful a representation the text is of the original German significance and eloquence. As usual, people like to compare this to a German version of the Iliad, which, at this point, I’m coming to realize is more a failure of imagination in most cases than it is a valid comparison. It’s used all the time because far more people are familiar with Homer’s epics than if we were to compare The Nibelungenlied to an ancient Indian text.
A closer comparison would be with something coming out of the region of “northernness” with which Tolkien was preoccupied, such as the Eddas or the Volsunga Saga. Indeed, separating one culture from another at various points in history in this region of the world is a fuzzy proposition at best, as Carlin explores at some length in his recent Hardcore History series “Twilight of the Aesir,” which followed up on “Thor’s Angels.” I even discerned, in my reading, some similarity or resonance with the Cath Maige Tuired. Several characters appear in The Nibelungenlied who appear in other pieces like the Eddas, so it is clear there was communication of some kind between the various peoples, cultures, and subcultures involved. This complicates matters of provenance, and the translator of my version notes how some chapters appear pulled from other sources or added in later than the rest of the text, sometimes by centuries.
We are thus left with significant questions regarding the provenance of The Nibelungenlied, and the validity of this particular transliteration. While the basic plot, characters, and other story elements surely transferred from the German poem, how much context, meaning, and nuance was lost or mangled? I am therefore hesitant to draw significant conclusions about the work itself based on the transliteration, but I’ll draw a few for the purposes of this review. Most significant: why was Seigfried murdered? Yes, a question is my conclusion, because it is the question around which my entire understanding of the story pivots.
Most of the characters in The Nibelungenlied appear fully-formed, drawn from other works, legends, and tales in the same or related traditions. Seigfried is an Achilles-figure, a ruler of a people called the Nibelungs who at one point are implied to be semi-mythical fairy-type folk, but later appear to be simply another, rather affluent kingdom. The first portion of The Nibelungenlied involves him attempting to woo his would-be bride, which he achieves. For reasons which I did not fully comprehend, one of his fellow warriors, another great knight, tricks his wife into revealing the spot on Seigfried’s back where he didn’t bathe in dragon’s blood and can therefore be slain, and then proceeds to arrange a “hunting accident.”
Part of the reason is clear, or seems clear at the time, which has to do with assistant Seigfried lent another king in wooing a warrior-queen to be his bride. The events that follow through to the book’s conclusion obfuscate this initial reason, though, and leave me questioning if that’s really what happened. You see, the remainder of the story of one of the widow pursuing vengeance against her husband’s murderer. She remarries to a semi-pagan northern king (meaning the areas we might today call “Viking”), and she eventually contrives for her husband’s murderer to visit her new court, where she can have her vengeance. Throughout, the implied narrator makes it plain that her desire for vengeance is extreme, unreasonable, and that she is more motivated by greed for the gold which was stolen from her around the same time than out of grief over her husband’s death.
I’m left with that core question because, while trying to burn her brother, several other relatives, and numerous other, allied knights alive in order to do the same to her husband’s murderer is a bit unreasonable, I largely finished the book having a difficult time seeing why she is depicted as being in the wrong. Nor does it seem to be a medieval sexism kind of thing, as the narrator is begrudgingly approving of Brunhild, a warrior-queen who bests all but the very greatest knights in various feats of arms. Is the reader actually supposed to believe all this vengeance is really about the sunken gold? Because, in the moment, the gold is treated more like a footnote, a minor incident that just happens to be a side effect of Seigfried’s murder.
I don’t have an answer to the question, and short of learning to read the various ancient German dialects in which the poem was originally written, I don’t have a clear path to answer it for myself in a satisfying way. Nor am I now so enamored with The Nibelungenlied that I care to explore the matter in much more depth – it is an interesting and worthwhile read, but between the dilution induced by the transliteration process, and the high degree of similarity in tone and mores with other “northern” works, it struggles to rise above them in comparison. The Grimms might have believed The Nibelungenlied a key element in a unifying idea of “Germanness,” but to me it reads as another brick in a larger conception of “northernness.”
IGC Publishing 