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).  

Der von Kürenberg

Little is known of the first of the Minnesingers, called the Kürenberger (der von Kurenberc) apart from an approximate date (fl. mid-twelfth century) and a general region along the Danube somewhere near Melk and Linz. His work survives only in the fourteenth century Codex Manesse (the Grosse Heidelberger Liederhandschrift). Unlike later lyricists, he uses the same strophic form as the Nibelungenlied. He and Dietmar von Aist are often said to be independent of influence from the Occitanian Troubadours, though this judgement rests on a rigid notion of courtly love. To me Kürenberg seems to play with the courtly conventions that some later poets simply reproduced.

I have not attempted to reproduce Kürenberg’s strophes exactly. The caesurae have all but vanished in my effort to make something readable in English, but I am no looser than my author in attention to form. Slant rhymes and errant syllables are not uncommon in the MHG, though of course they would have been less obtrusive, even imperceptible in musical performance. I have used iambic tetrameters and pentameters for the most part, rhyming abcb.


“Wîp vil schœne . . .”

O lovely lady, come with me,
and highs and lows I’ll share with you
my whole life long I’ll love just you
your loving a lesser I won’t allow.


“Aller wîbe wünne . . .”

Most marvelous of ladies, still a maid,
I send in loving notes the praise you’re due.
You know I’d be there, but I am discreet.
I doubt your mind, while mine is fixed on you.


Though the first of these quatrains is pared down to a largely timeless declaration of love with only a hint of rivalry, the second includes some aspects of the common conventions of the love poetry of the times, the extravagant praise of the beloved, the communication by messages, and the nosy figures hostile to love, while maintaining the lover’s total devotion.


“Ich stuont mir nehtint spâte . . .”

“Last night alone I stood upon the tower.
I heard a knight whose voice rang out in song.
A song of Kurenberc’s rose from the crowd –
If he stays here he will be mine ere long!”

“So quick bring me my armor and my horse!
A lady forces me to ride away!
She wants me to submit to her and serve.
Without my love I swear she’ll have to stay.”


The critique of courtly manners is suggested first by the woman’s aggressive desire to dominate a man who has made no gesture in her direction. Seeking independence rather than love-service, he must depart, reversing the ordinary pattern of devotion to the female in conscious self-subordination .


“Jô stuont ich nehtint spâte . . .”

“Last night I stood beside your bed,
but didn’t wish to break your rest.”
“For that may you be cursed!” she said.
“Am I a boar to gore your breast?”


Compare the opening words to those of the previous song. This lyric provides one of the clearest examples of the transformation of convention. In the very dawn-time of vernacular love poetry, the courtly tradition rises not alone but accompanied by a range of variations that may validate, extend, or emphasize the original convention, but also may twist or distort it, most commonly by denial, reversal, inversion, or parody. While the knight is decorous and respectful, as proper at any rate as one can be while slipping up on someone’s bedside, the woman is freer. Using colloquial language and a dramatic image, she expresses what can only be disappointed lust. The effect is surely comic.


“Swenne ich stân aleine . . .”

I stand in nightgown all alone
and think of you, my noble knight.
I blush the shade of rose mid thorns
and muse upon my lonely plight.


The lovely simplicity of this lyric resembles the fragment traditionally attributed to Sappho Δέδυκε μὲν ἀ σελάννα. One thinks also of the Mughal miniatures showing lone women experiencing love-longing.


“Ich zôch mir einen valken . . .”

I trained my falcon longer than a year.
When I had tamed him well to suit just me
and gilded all his plumage tastefully,
he rose right up and flew to some far tree.

Since then I’ve seen that lovely bird in flight
with silken bonds still on his feet above.
His feathers shone so grand, so red and gold!
May God bring love to those who long to love!


The falcon is an appropriately aristocratic image, but again here, the lover/bird, though trained for a solid year, resists her control and flies away. His absence may be only temporary. Line four, in which I have jettisoned some information to seize a rhyme by translating “in anderiu lant” as “some far tree,” suggests service in war, perhaps a crusade, after which he may return to her. The gilded feathers have much the same implication of the expression “a bird in a gilded cage." The final line reminds me of the hauntingly lovely chorus of the Pervigilium Veneris “Cras amet qui nunquam amavit; quique amavit cras amet” ("Let he who never has loved find love tomorrow, and let the lover love tomorrow").


“Wîp unde vederspil . . .”

All females and all falcons may be trained.
They come to one who knows how to entice.
A handsome knight did thus attract a dame.
My spirit soars with love to paradise.


In this quatrain the falcon has become the woman, a clear example of the early transformation of Minnesang convention.


“Der tunkele sterne . . .”

A faint star knows just how to hide.
Learn how my dear when I am near
to gaze upon another man.
No one must guess you are my dear.


Here the emphasis on “tougen minne” or hidden love allows Kürenberg to play with the widespread figure comparing the lady to a star. Reversing the usual implication that suggests her bright preeminence casting rivals into shadow, here she is advised to seek obscurity to conceal her relationship.