Construction of Values in the Nibelungenlied

 

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 4^th 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).