Numbers in brackets are endnotes. Citations from the poem specify the Âventiure
and the stanza (not line numbers).
Translations of quoted phrases are my own.
Lists of “the
greatest” songs or films or dinner dishes are always a bit silly, but they do
reflect taste. I fancy I do not stray
very far from common judgements, if, in surveying European medieval literature,
I present the blue ribbon for lyric poetry to the Occitanians, the prize for
drama to the British mystery plays, and that for epic to the Germans. The Nibelungenlied, Tristan and Isolde, and Parzifal, all
written within a few years of each other
at the beginning of the thirteenth century are, for me, far more beautiful and richer
in mythic implications and inventive rhetoric than the Roland, The
Cid, or the verse narrations of King Arthur’s career by Wace and Laȝamon.
Three different
registers, or layers, of what might be called concurrent systems of values may
be distinguished in the Nibelungenlied, a fact which is doubtless due
in part to the long period during which
the story was transmitted before our text was composed. Yet it is also a reflection of the complex
nature of human psychology where the incongruous, the contradictory, and the
mysterious commonly occur. In fact the
play of these simultaneous systems animates the poem and they seem to harmonize
just as such dissonances seem altogether natural in lived experience.
The first of these
registers is the archaic one familiar from early myths and folk-tales. Here morality is unrecognized; all that
exists are the primal facts, birth and death, love and aggression. This is the level of myth, encountered also
in dreams and in the preoccupations we see exaggerated in psychopathology. Kronos’ eating his children, Śiva’s
self-castration, the human sacrifice of the Aztec and Mayan worlds represent
the aggressive side of this polarity, while Zeus’s rapes, Krishna’s multiple
lovers and wives, and the Nahuatl Tlazōlteōtl, the "Deity of Dirt"
are associated with the erotic side. In
the Nibelingenlied episodes like Brunhild’s hanging Gunther on the wall on
their marriage night and Hagen’s brutal murder of Kriemhild’s son employ this
elemental imagery. Religion, politics,
and ideology of all sorts are foreign to the dramas of psychological power that
dominate here.
While all archaic
myths seek to harmonize eros and thanatos, the heroic epics of a
somewhat later age emphasize social and human values, most particularly the
valor and integrity of the male warrior
and the beauty and virtue of his female love objects. On this level then, the most praised
characteristics have to with the
order of society and are clearly differentiated
by gender. Whereas neolithic communities
were more likely to emphasize fertility and the life and death cycle of
vegetation and animal life, including humans, a later regal or imperial order
celebrated first of all the value of men in war. Contemporary American ceremonies for
Veteran’s Day, Memorial Day, and the 4th of July indicate that such
values have considerable authority yet.
Similarly, the celebration of women as servers and “peace-weavers,” very
much secondary to the male power, is familiar from Beowulf, though in
the Nibelungenlied neither Brunnhild nor Kriemhild conforms to that
model, each retaining archaic aspects of frightening female potency.
In the later
Middle Ages, around the time of this poem’s composition, aesthetic values, an
appreciation for beauty and for expertise as a lover, begin to accompany
martial skills and war in the heroic formula.
Galahad and Lancelot are lovers as well as fighters. No longer is power alone impressive;
elegance, taste, and sensitivity are
expected as well, reaching a high point three centuries after the Nibelungenlied
in authors like Castiglione. Thus the
superlatives associated with Siegfried from his first introduction include both
prowess on the battlefield and “elegant clothes.” [1] He is “strong enough that he could bear arms
well” [2], but he also knew how to make love so well that it did honor to any
lady who might respond [3]. The
munificence of the court magnifies every detail. The poet says he knew of no court so
extravagant [4]. The expenditures
increase the mystique of the court as they do today when discussing high
society or Hollywood affairs.
It is not,
however, money alone, that impresses the poet.
The plenitude made possible by wealth adds grandeur, but the display
must be refined and discriminating. This
concern for discernment in all areas of life including relationships with women
is sometimes inextricably mingled with
the general praise of extravagance, a quality often conflated with nobility
itself, so that true beauty and even true virtue seem to thrive only along with
power, both political and economic.
One set of values
is prominent in its absence: Christianity is hardly mentioned. The fact that the heroic Etzel remains a
pagan is irrelevant. He is as cultivated
and worthy as the Christian nobles. The
lack of even formulaic concession of the need to live a Christian life and the
primacy of the goal of salvation is all the more striking during a period in
which Christianity was hegemonic in Europe and the great majority of writing
concerned religious themes. The poet
describes Siegfried’s death, it is true, in distinctly Christian terms despite the hero's enthusiastic profession of war. After all, he is struck on the sign of the
cross and dies a martyr who has remained “true” while Hagen has acted
dishonorably and thus immorally [5]. He
delivers a dying complaint “you vicious cowards, what good has my service done
since you have killed me. I was always
true, for that I paid, you have done evil to your own kinsman.” [6] For all the imagery of the crucifixion
surrounding his murder, [7] the accusation against Hagen is not based on sin or
the Ten Commandments but rather on
ancient rules governing family and hospitality. He, however, displays exemplary feudal loyalty in seeking to defend his mistress Brunnhild and he remains
a highly admired, even heroic, figure to the end. Similarly, the revelation of Hagen’s guilt by
Siegfried’s bleeding corpse, while it may be rationalized as a Christian
miracle, is identical to pagan practices and Kriemhild’s leaving him in the
coffin for three days before opening,
while it reminds the reader of Christ once again, does not make the heroic
Germanic warrior into a pacifistic Christ.
In fact, the
vision of the poem reflects not the ultimately the hope of Christianity which
looks forward to the eventual arrival of a messiah but rather the notoriously
pessimism of Northern European mythology. The
treacherous and tragic killing of Siegfried motivates the action and the final
disaster of the slaughter of the Nibelungs (at this point identified with the
Burgundians) hangs suspended over all the action just as the Götterdämmerung
haunts Germanic mythology. On the
opening page Kriemhild was said to be “a beautiful woman," but one "for whom many brave
men must die” [8] and the poem ends with the understated words “here is the end of the story, this is the
trouble of the Nibelungs.” [9] Any
reader of Old English poetry will recognize the stress on stoic endurance,
hardship, suffering, and the recognition that life’s battle will always, in the
end, be lost. Fortitude is required to
live in this harsh world as Bryhtwold says so memorably in “The Battle of
Maldon:” “Mind must be the harder, heart the keener, spirit the larger, as our
strength lessens.”
These value
systems – the elemental, the heroic, and the aesthetic – trace a diachronic
development that retained earlier cultural levels as society evolved, just as
archaeologists find one layer beneath another in excavations. Yet the listener or reader may also consider
them synchronically, as simultaneous, if sometimes dissonant, psychological
elements. A warrior may at once feel a primal
instinct for survival, a drive toward valor motivated by pride, and a wish to
appear beautiful and sophisticated. Likewise, less dramatically, a modern person may feel simple lust or aggression at the same time as pride
in profession and a wish to be stylish. The
fact that the Nibelungenlied gives full rein to each of these tendencies
allows the creation of fully three-dimensional figures, realistic in their
behavior even if their setting is in part mythological fantasy and the courts
in which they live altogether different from our apartments and ranch homes,
and the tournaments they enjoy foreign to all but rodeo cowboys today. We are moved the more reading the Nibelungenlied
by the acceptance of various and even incompatible value systems among its
characters because we ourselves live amid similar contradictions.
1. “Mit kleiden
zieren” 2.26.
2. “Sterke, daz er
wol wâfen
truoc.” 2.27.
3. “Er begúndé mit
sinnen werben sœníu wîp/ die trȗten wol
mit éren des küenen Sîvrides lîp” 2.27.
4. “Ich wæn’ ie
ingesinde sô grôzer mîlte gepflac”
(2.41).
5. 16.981.
6.
“Dô sprach der verchwunde: "jâ ir bœsen zagen, 989
waz helfent mîniu dienest, daz ir
mich habet erslagen?
ich was iu ie getriuwe: des ich
engolten hân.
ir habt an iuwern mâgen leider übele getân.” (16.989).
7. The phrase “bread
and wine” occurs a few stanzas later in 928.
8. “Si wart ein scœne
wîp,/ dar umbe muosen degene vil
verlíesén den lîp” (1.2).
9. “Hie hat daz mære
ein ende: daz ist der Nibelunge nôt”
(39.2379).
