The Nibelungenlied: The Lay of the Nibelungs (Oxford World's Classics) (2 page)

Half a century ago it was possible to write with some confidence of ‘the poet of the
Nibelungenlied
’, or the ‘Last Poet’, while accepting his anonymity and the fact that we know virtually nothing of his identity. Recent research has oscillated between accepting this older, monolithic view of a single author responsible for fashioning the epic as we know it, and acknowledging the debt that the lay owes to oral poetry. The possibility of reconstructing the archetype of the
text has been more or less abandoned. Thus, when this introduction refers to ‘the poet’, it is no more than a matter of convenience. The language of the manuscripts points to the south-eastern German-speaking area. The poet’s intimate knowledge of the Danube area suggests that he was of Austrian origin, while his criticism of Bavarian robbers points away from Bavaria. The poet may have been a cleric, though there is little apart from his literacy to suggest this. That literacy was not the sole prerogative of the clergy
c
.1200 is evident from what the anonymous poet’s near-contemporaries, Hartmann von Aue and Wolfram von Eschenbach, tell us about themselves. Hartmann identifies himself as a
dienstman
, a
ministerialis
exercising administrative functions at a Swabian court, and the prologue to his Arthurian romance
Iwein or The Knight with the Lion
stresses the possibility that a knight may be learned, even though this may be unusual. Wolfram, almost certainly tongue-in-cheek, places even greater emphasis upon his knightly rank, claiming in
Parzival
: ‘I don’t know a single letter of the alphabet.’

The second half of the twelfth and the first half of the thirteenth century saw an extraordinary flowering of literary activity in the German vernacular, based for the most part in the courts of the aristocracy (hence its German name,
die höfische Blütezeit
). This fertile period is sometimes referred to as ‘the Middle High German (MHG) classical period’. Central to this activity were two new genres, the courtly love-lyric (
Minnesang
) and the Arthurian romance. The great lyric poets included Walther von der Vogelweide and Heinrich von Morungen. Gnomic, political, and religious lyrics were also composed and sung. The three major narrative poets were Hartmann, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and Gottfried von Strassburg, the author of the greatest medieval version of the story of Tristan and Isolde; all three were writing between
c
.1180 and 1220. The oldest surviving religious play in German, the Muri Easter Play (
Osterspiel von Muri
), also dates from this period.

An older genre also flourished alongside these newcomers, the heroic epic. Oral in origin, these epics found their way into writing in the thirteenth century, many of them in the same manuscripts as the courtly romances. A number of epics had at their core Dietrich of Bern (historically Theodoric the Ostrogoth, of Verona),
¹
who plays a
central role in the final stages of the
Nibelungenlied
. The Thirty-eighth Adventure introduces (and kills off) a large number of characters who would have been familiar to the audience from the Dietrich epics, in particular
Biterolf und Dietleib
, which accords a prominent role to Rüedeger.
Biterolf
was probably first written down in the 1250s, in the Austrian or Styrian area familiar to the
Nibelungenlied
poet, but may well have been circulating earlier in oral form. The audience would have delighted in recognizing old friends from these epics. They were, like the
Nibelungenlied
itself, anonymous, a constituent element of the genre. The
Nibelungenlied
stands head and shoulders above the Dietrich epics in terms of literary quality. We possess evidence of the popularity both of the lay, and of other heroic epics, before the date of the earliest manuscripts, in Wolfram’s
Parzival
, where, in the eighth book, the cowardly Sir Liddamus argues for discretion being the better part of valour: ‘What kind of Wolfhart would I make? … Even if it never won your favour, I would rather act like Rumolt, who gave King Gunther his advice when he left Worms to go to the Huns—he urged him to baste long cutlets and turn them round in the cauldron.’
²
Landgrave Kingrimursel recognizes the allusion to ‘Rumolt’s counsel’ in the
Nibelungenlied:
‘you say you act like that cook who advised the bold Nibelungs, who set off, undeterred, for where vengeance was wrought upon them for what had happened to Siegfried in the past.’ Liddamus goes on to refer to other characters well known from the Dietrich epics, Sibeche and Ermenrich.

Wolfram’s juxtaposition of characters from the
Nibelungenlied
and the Dietrich epics dates from the first decade of the thirteenth century, as we can deduce from references in
Parzival
to events in 1203 and 1204.
³
Wolfram’s allusions yield no certainty as to whether he knew of the
Nibelungenlied
in oral or in written form, but they hint at his knowledge of the whole plot, and presume that Wolfram’s audience was familiar with the lay in something like the version we find in the earliest manuscripts a quarter of a century later.

The
Nibelungenlied
is divided into thirty-nine ‘adventures’ or chapters. (This division and the adventures’ titles are well preserved in the manuscripts, with the exception of the First Adventure.) In the first two adventures we are introduced, in parallel, to the two central protagonists of the first half of the lay, Kriemhilt and Sivrit. The First Adventure tells us of Kriemhilt, Princess of Burgundy, a kingdom which has as its capital Worms on the Rhine.
⁴
Kriemhilt, daughter of Queen Uote, is under the guardianship of her brothers, the three kings of Burgundy, Gunther, Gernot, and Giselher. A prominent figure at the Burgundian court is Hagen of Tronege, vassal and chief adviser to the kings.

The Second Adventure introduces us to Sivrit, Prince of the Netherlands, and tells of his courtly upbringing. In the Third Adventure he rides to Worms, intending to win Kriemhilt for his bride, and from then on Sivrit’s fortunes are intertwined with those of the Burgundians. He is particularly close to King Gunther, who proves to be a weak king, a
roi fainéant
, much in the same mould as King Arthur in the Arthurian romances of the twelfth-century French poet Chrétien de Troyes and their MHG adaptations by Hartmann von Aue and Wolfram von Eschenbach, or King Marke in the various medieval versions of the tale of Tristan and Isolde. Also in the Third Adventure Hagen gives us a retrospective account of Sivrit’s upbringing, telling of his superhuman strength and its origins, and of his acquisition of the priceless hoard of the Nibelungs, a race of dwarves resident somewhere to the north of the Netherlands.

Like Sivrit, Gunther is soon intent on wooing. He seeks for his bride Prünhilt, Queen of Iceland, an Amazonian figure of supernatural strength. She and Sivrit are parallel, equally dominant personalities, who have an aura of myth about them, and the lay does indeed hint at their prior knowledge of one another.
⁵
The wooing expedition to Iceland ultimately proves successful, but only because Sivrit has
recourse to supernatural means: his massive strength and his cloak of invisibility. Once established as queen in Burgundy, Prünhilt quarrels with Kriemhilt over the relative rank of their two husbands, and this dispute over precedence leads to a conspiracy to kill Sivrit.

The second half of the lay tells of the vengeance Kriemhilt seeks to take upon the murderers of Sivrit. She marries for a second time, her husband now being Etzel, King of the Huns. Although Etzel owes his historical roots to Attila the Hun, he proves to be another weak king. Hagen shifts from being a brutal murderer to a stoic hero (or anti-hero), the ‘hope of the Nibelungs’. The name Nibelungs is transferred to the Burgundians, as they make their fatal journey to Hungary. Kriemhilt undergoes a character change, transformed from the innocent maiden of the early adventures to a ‘she-devil’.

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.

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).