The Nibelungenlied: The Lay of the Nibelungs (Oxford World's Classics) (4 page)

A great number of nineteenth-century stage plays were also inspired by the poem. Most significant of these was the
Die Nibelungen
by Friedrich Hebbel (1813–63), a ‘German tragedy in
three parts’ planned in 1855. The first performance of the complete trilogy was in Weimar in 1861, with Hebbel’s wife Christine playing the parts of both Brunhild and Kriemhild. The trilogy was much in favour in the Third Reich. Its reputation then suffered a decline, but has enjoyed several revivals recently.
²⁹

Wagner’s initial interest in the
Nibelungenlied
found expression in a whole series of borrowings from the Dresden Royal Library and in his acquisition of no fewer than four editions and translations of the poem, namely, the MHG editions of Hermann Leyser (1811–43) and Alois Joseph Vollmer (1803–76), and the translations into Modern German of Gustav Pfizer (1807–90) and Karl Simrock. His original plan was to write a single work, a ‘grand heroic opera’, to be titled
Siegfrieds Tod
(
Siegfried’s Death
). It begins with Siegfried’s betrayal of Brünnhilde through his complicity with the Gibichungs (Wagner’s Burgundians), and ends with the Gibichungs’ betrayal of Siegfried and his death at Hagen’s hands. Siegfried is joined in death by Brünnhilde, his demise serving to bolster the gods’ morally compromised rule. As such, the libretto, which dates from November 1848, follows the conventions of the Romantic neo-medieval operas of the period, dealing with the themes of love, betrayal, and vengeance and ending with a
Liebestod
lifted straight from
Der fliegende Holländer
(
The Flying Dutchman
), which Wagner had composed in 1843.
Siegfrieds Tod
— later revised as
Götterdämmerung
, the fourth and final part of
Der Ring des Nibelungen
—is the section of the finished work most heavily indebted to the
Nibelungenlied
. Demonstrable borrowings include Siegfried’s belligerent arrival at Gunther’s court (Third Adventure), the oath that the hero swears in an attempt to clear his name (Fourteenth Adventure), the betrayal of his vulnerable spot (Tenth Adventure), and the whole sequence of events surrounding his murder at Hagen’s hands (Sixteenth Adventure). Conversely, the famous scene in which Prünhilt and Kriemhilt confront one another on the steps of the minster at Worms (Fourteenth Adventure) had already inspired the encounter between Elsa and Ortrud in front of Antwerp Cathedral in Act Two of
Lohengrin
(completed in 1848 and first staged under Liszt in Weimar in 1850).
Lohengrin
owes the core of its plot to the story of Loherangrin in Wolfram’s
Parzival
.

The appeal of the poem, with its medieval trappings, began to wane as soon as Wagner started to develop anarchical leanings and turned to myth as an expression of necessary revolutionary change. He could not use history to invoke his vision of the future: myth alone could embody the cosmic clash between the forces of reaction and a more humane and enlightened regime. It was in order to excavate what he believed was the mythic substratum of all the available material that Wagner began to delve more deeply into the Scandinavian versions of the legend, versions which, in keeping with the scholarly thinking of his time, he regarded as more archaic and, hence, as more prototypically ‘German’ than the thirteenth-century
Nibelungenlied;
Wagner himself uses the word ‘urdeutsch’ in this context. The essential ‘Germanness’ of the Nibelung legend was one of the few constant factors in his attitude to the
Ring
, and one that derives ultimately from Fichte’s belief in the great German Revolution that would liberate the whole of humanity. In turn, this interest in Siegfried’s prehistory led Wagner to preface
Siegfrieds Tod
with
Der junge Siegfried
, recounting his mythical hero’s youthful adventures, and ultimately to add
Das Rheingold
and
Die Walküre
, describing in detail the gods’ corrupt rule and Wotan’s attempts to find a free and ‘purely human’ hero able to cleanse the world of the curse-laden ring. The four poems were completed by December 1852, the music not until November 1874. The cycle as a whole was first staged in Bayreuth, in the theatre that Wagner had had specially built for the work, in August 1876.

The second—and related—reason for Wagner’s changing attitude to the
Nibelungenlied
stems from his increasing interest in the scholarly debates of the time: he read not only the primary MHG and Old Icelandic texts in translation, but also the writings of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Georg Gottfried Gervinus (1805–71), Karl Lachmann, Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen, Ludwig Ettmüller (1802–77), Carl Wilhelm Göttling (1793–1869), and Franz Joseph Mone (1796–1871), many of whom sought to reconstruct a prototypical Nibelung myth inspired by the Romantic belief in the essential oneness of the surviving versions of the narrative. Echoing Lachmann and Jacob Grimm, Wagner now came to see Siegfried as a sun-god destroyed by the powers of darkness embodied in the Nibelungs, his death a part of the eternal cycle of death and rebirth. If the gods’ rule had originally been consolidated by Siegfried’s
death, those same gods were now to be superseded, a development bound up in part with Wagner’s reading of Hegel, and in part with his own increasing involvement in the revolutionary movements of 1848–9 and their disenchanting aftermath. The frustrations attendant upon the first Bayreuth Festival of 1876 left Wagner feeling betrayed. If Siegfried had once been the embodiment of the New Man and the
Ring
a lesson in revolutionary thinking, the passing years brought about a change in Wagner’s perception of the tetralogy. His second wife, Cosima (1837–1930), reports a conversation with him in 1882, only months before his death, in which he discusses the end of the cycle: ‘He is pleased with it all, so heathen and so Germanic! … He recalls Gobineau [the racist thinker Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, 1816–82] and the Germanic world which came to an end with this work.’ By now Siegfried was no longer the man of the future, but was consigned to a phase in the history of the world’s evolution, re-auditioning for his role in the
Nibelungenlied
, while the
Ring
as a whole was felt to describe a phase in world history that pre-dated the degeneration of the species, reflecting a pristine Germanic Paradise that could never be regained. Myth had again become history.

The
Nibelungenlied
has met with decidedly mixed fortunes in what has often been termed
the
medium of the twentieth century, cinema. The first director to tackle the subject was the Austrian Fritz Lang (1890–1976), intended by Goebbels to be the creator of National Socialist cinema before he fled the Third Reich in 1933. Lang’s two-parter was made in the Babelsberg studios and their grounds in Berlin, in 1923–4. It is one of the great works of the silent era of Weimar cinema. The opening title dedicates the film ‘to the German people’, in huge Gothic print. Its script was by Thea von Harbou (1888–1954), Lang’s then wife, who was later to become a member of the Nazi party. The first part,
Siegfrieds Tod
(
Siegfried’s Death
), was re-released in a sound version in 1933, reflecting the iconic significance of Siegfried in the Third Reich. Significantly, the second part,
Kriemhilts Rache
(
Kriemhilt’s Revenge
), with its final massacre of the Nibelungs, was not re-released; the Nazis had little interest in a film that concentrated on defeat. Lang’s two-parter remains for the most part true to the medieval poem, though it does draw for its early
scenes on Richard Wagner. An accusation of racism has been levelled against the second part, Lang himself admitting that he wanted to portray ‘the world of the wild Asiatic hordes of the Huns’.
³⁰

It is the monumental, geometrical style of the films’ sets and the Expressionist camerawork that make Lang’s two-parter a masterpiece, in particular the beautiful forest scenes with their concrete trees. As Manvell and Fraenkel put it: ‘The dragon in
Siegfried’s Death
remains one of the best-realized of screen monsters, controlled by a team of operators stationed both inside and beneath the monster, which was some twenty metres long.’
³¹
Its only rival in pre-war cinema is
King Kong
(1932).

In 1966–7 Harald Reinl (1908–86), a prominent and versatile representative of what came to be regarded by the young lions of New German Cinema as ‘Opas Kino’ (‘Grandad’s Cinema’), directed a colour remake of Lang’s films, with the hammer-thrower Uwe Beyer playing Siegfried and Herbert Lom taking the part of Etzel. It would be a kindness to describe Reinl’s film as mediocre, but worse was yet to come. The end of the 1960s and the early 1970s witnessed the nadir in the history of German film. The majority of cinemas turned themselves into
Bahnhofskinos
, ‘station cinemas’, showing an unvaried diet of soft-or hard-core pornographic films. Thus it came about that in 1971 Adrian Hoven directed an ill-conceived remake of the first Lang film, shown as part of a double bill:
Ich eine Groupie
prefacing
Siegfried und das sagenhafte Liebesleben der Nibelungen (Siegfried and the Legendary Love-life of the Nibelungs)
. Hoven’s film follows the plot very loosely; it incorporates more bathing scenes than were the norm in the Middle Ages, with Kriemhilt and her maidens in various stages of undress, and engaging in lesbian activities. The film ends with Siegfried’s death being averted, which at least had the advantage of precluding a sequel.

The new millennium has seen the filming of the saga enter a new genre, with the fantasy film directed by Uli Edel (2004), like Reinl’s film an international co-production. Max von Sydow, who played the lead in the greatest film with a medieval subject, Ingmar Bergman’s
The Seventh Seal
(1957), plays Eyvind the smith, Siegfried’s foster-father—not a figure familiar from the saga. A sample of the dialogue will suffice to convey the film’s banality. Brunhilde has initiated Siegfried into love, and invites him to Iceland:

SIEGFRIED:
How will I find you in Iceland? There must be lots of Brunhildes there.

BRUNHILDE:
Yes, but only one who is Queen of Iceland.

Yet despite the vicissitudes of its reception, more people now read the
Nibelungenlied
than at any time in its history, and its place in world literature is secure.

T
HIS
translation is based on the edition by Karl Bartsch in the ‘Deutsche Classiker’ series, which first appeared in 1870; it was revised by Helmut de Boor in 1940, and after de Boor’s death in 1976 reprinted with a revised introduction and bibliography by Roswitha Wisniewski (1979, 1988). Bartsch based his text on manuscript B (St Gall, Stiftsbibliothek, cod. 857). Other editions and facsimiles have been adduced, and their variant readings very occasionally preferred, as indicated in the notes. On several occasions Bartsch’s readings have been preferred to those of de Boor.

The strophe numbers in the margin derive from the Bartsch/de Boor edition and are intended to aid the student who wishes to read the text in conjunction with the Middle High German. The same applies to the division into thirty-nine ‘Adventures’.

The style of the lay is uneven and was in some measure archaic, even at the time when it was written down. Transposing it into modern English prose inevitably means some loss of the timbre of the original. This translation tries to stay as close as possible to the MHG text. Heroic epic brings with it its own characteristic diction, and there are limits to the extent to which it is possible to bend the style in the direction of modern idiom, living as we do in what few people would venture to describe as a heroic age.

Some stylistic devices defy the translator altogether. That known by the Greek term
apo koinu
, the linking of two clauses by the same subject, is one such. For example, in strophe 2271 a literal rendering would be: ‘Then he wanted to leap at him, but Hildebrant, his uncle, would not permit him grasped him firmly to him.’ Hildebrant is the subject of both main clauses. Postposed epithets are less of a problem. In strophe 2325 Dietrich is described as
der helt guot
(literally: ‘the hero worthy’). This appellative introduces two further problems. The noun
helt
has been rendered as ‘hero’, even if on occasions this clashes with actions which are far from heroic. The lay has a large number of such designations at its disposal, of which the most frequently recurring, apart from
helt
, are
degen, ritter, recke
, and
wîgant
. The terms
degen
and
ritter
are generally rendered as ‘knight’, although that better befits
ritter
, the new rank of
miles
that
evolved in the twelfth century,
¹
whereas
degen
is a more archaic word. The terms
recke
and
wîgant
are rendered as ‘warrior’ and ‘fighting man’; like
helt
, they had by 1200 an archaic ring to them. Modern English simply does not have sufficient synonyms in this field. The same problem applies, to a lesser extent, to laudatory epithets such as
guot, küene, snel, balt, gemeit, ûz erwelt:
‘worthy’, ‘bold’, ‘brave’, ‘courageous’, ‘valiant’, ‘gallant’, ‘excellent’. These are often qualified by the adverb
vil
(‘very’, ‘most’). These epithets and appellatives are an integral part of the style of the lay.

Sometimes the syntax of the translation has had to move away from the original; rhyme-compulsion often determines the order of the MHG clauses or sentences. The short sentences, the constant use of parataxis, are part and parcel of the original style, and are retained wherever possible.

Karl Bartsch,
Das Nibelungenlied
, Deutsche Classiker des Mittelalters, 3, 3rd edn. (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1872).