Better than Wagner
The Nibelungenlied is the grandmother of all medievalist fantasy and of superhero comics
Bettina Bildhauer
There is not much about being human that one cannot learn from the Nibelungenlied (Song of the Nibelungs). This epic poem is the Northern European myth of power and revenge, distilling centuries of wisdom about psychology and politics into a simple but tragic story: the tale of Siegfried, a hero who comes to power purely through his own strength and daring, and is crushed by the political elite. His widow, Kriemhild, then takes on the members of the establishment who killed him, and step by step slaughters them all because they refuse to give up one of their own. The grandmother of all medievalist fantasy and of superhero comics, the Nibelungenlied has it all in terms of a gripping yarn, too: it gives you the treasure, the dragon, the most valiant knights, the most beautiful ladies, the invincible hero, the spectacular battles, the mysteries, the mermaids, and the dead.
If I have begun by shamelessly giving away the tragic ending in order to elicit interest, I am only copying one of the poem’s favourite techniques. The real thrill of the epic is not in finding out what happened, but how and why it happens – why a hero and an entire dynasty are brutally murdered. It probably started out as a way of explaining the near-extinction of the Germanic tribe of the Burgundians by Roman troops in the 430s, and was refined over centuries of oral storytelling before being finally written down around 1200. So first, why does Siegfried die? In short (and unfairly reducing the Nibelungenlied’s kaleidoscopic account), because he unsuccessfully stages something between a coup and a terrorist threat against the kingdom of the Burgundians. This kingdom, situated on the upper Rhine around Worms, not yet in the wine-growing region of modern France, is a well-run place, governed by King Gunther with the help of his two brothers and his adviser Hagen. (Their sister Kriemhild is not given much political say, but will claim it for herself later.) But then a young pretender – the bold Siegfried – strides in and demands all the Burgundians’ lands and possessions, on the grounds that he is physically more powerful than them. And so he is: he has famously fought and overcome the worst possible opponents – the terrible dragon and mighty dwarfs guarding the treasure of the mysterious people of the Nibelungs. This has made him physically invincible, too: bathing in the dragon’s blood renders his skin impenetrable, and he has won an invisibility cloak that lends him supernatural force.
There is nothing within this society’s conventions, based on inherited leadership, that it can do against the threat of pure violence. Like all societies, it is vulnerable to individuals who refuse to play by the rules. The kings manage to pacify Siegfried with rhetorical promises and by giving him the beautiful Kriemhild as his wife, but ultimately, there is no alternative to dispatching the autocratic intruder. Like most superheroes, Siegfried has one vulnerable spot: in this case, it is a patch between his shoulder blades (on which a lime leaf had fallen when he bathed in the dragon’s blood). It is his wife who, with the best intentions of protecting her husband, betrays this secret to Hagen. And Hagen does what he has to do to defend his country: he kills Siegfried, trying to make it look like an accident although everyone involved knows exactly what is going on.
But killing Siegfried has not at all eliminated the threat to the Burgundians (who, in an interesting instance of swapped identities, are for some reason from now on called Nibelungs). As Kriemhild takes it upon herself to avenge her husband, whom she had dearly loved, the poem’s psychological exploration of bereavement and aggression goes even deeper than its political analysis. Since Freud, we have come to regard grief as a temporary state to be overcome; remaining melancholically obsessed with the past is considered pathological. Freud observed that many bereaved people initially try to take in whomever they have lost as part of themselves: they might start wearing the dead person’s clothes or scent, or imitating typical gestures. But we expect that this physical stage of grief should be overcome as quickly as possibly through a conscious acknowledgement of the loss and moving on.
Freud, who has done so much to keep the ancient myths of Oedipus and Electra in public consciousness, never accorded their medieval equivalents a similar status, despite inheriting his first name from Siegfried’s father. (Scattered references make clear, however, that he was very familiar with the medieval tales, as were most of his patients. There is a lovely dream alluding to an Old Norse version of the legend, for instance: one of his patients, a medical practitioner himself, compares the stethoscope he uses to examine a female patient to the sword that Siegfried had laid between himself and Brunhild to prevent them from sleeping with each other when sharing a bed.) Had Freud based his theories on medieval legends, he might have been less critical of physical and protracted ways of grieving, like that of Kriemhild. When Siegfried dies, she takes his loss into her heart and becomes like him. But she has no intention of “getting over” him by acknowledging this bereavement and moving on. To her, that would be not only impossible, but also a betrayal. Remembering the dead to Kriemhild means physically holding on to them.
The only way in which she can envisage overcoming her loss is also corporal: by passing the loss to somebody else. As if there were only one pain, she thinks she can get rid of her grief by inflicting it on the perpetrators. This is behind her desire for revenge: rather than the psychoanalytical “talking cure”, the only cure for Kriemhild is hurting somebody else. Kriemhild succeeds, to an extent: she remarries Attila the Hun (here called Etzel), the most powerful man on earth, just so that she can exact her revenge. Many years later, she invites her brothers to a feast, and then demands that they hand Hagen over to her. When they refuse to do so, she has them killed in ever more gruesome stages, finally having her brother King Gunther executed, and decapitating Hagen herself. But the Nibelungenlied would not be the Nibelungenlied if this were a straightforward success. Rather than finally moving on, Kriemhild herself is now “hewn to pieces” for having, as a woman, dispatched the valiant warrior Hagen in such an undignified way.
This magnificent story, crudely summarized here, is now brought to an English-speaking audience in a new translation by Cyril Edwards, the most faithful to date to the Nibelungenlied (which is of course in itself not the original form of the myth). In 1836, Heinrich Heine wonderfully encapsulated its style: “It is a language of stone, and its verses are like slabs of rhyme. Here and there, from the cracks, red flowers burst like blood-drops, or long ivy hangs down like green tears”. Unlike the romances about King Arthur and his knights written around the same time, the Nibelungenlied makes no efforts at an appealing, flowing narrative style. Instead, its aesthetics resemble those of a film by Quentin Tarantino: one impressive scene after the other, held together not so much by logical continuity as by memorable vignettes of violence, pain and some unexpected beauty and humour.
Edwards manages to retain the chunky quality of the original, in his short sentences, set side by side without the help of conjunctions in determining their relation to one another. This works quite well because modern English is still so close to medieval German – they belong to the same language family, as if as nephew and aunt. Translations, however, have to be true not only to the source text but also to the target audience. While Edwards’s surpasses Burton Raffel’s sloppy 2006 verse translation in every way (beauty as well as truth to the source in terms of style and accuracy), it is not as reader-friendly as the existing standard translation by A. T. Hatto. Although Hatto’s work is now forty-six years old, its somewhat old-fashioned style suits the medieval text well, and its readability remains unsurpassed even in modern German translations. Just compare the way in which Siegfried is introduced in both versions. Hatto, like a good bricklayer, had joined the slabs of the German text into a smooth narrative:
Down the Rhine, in the splendid, far-famed city of Xanten in the Netherlands, there grew up a royal prince, a gallant knight named Siegfried, son of Siegmund and Sieglind.
Edwards keeps the dry wall of slabs:
There grew up in the Netherlands at that time a noble king’s son, whose father was called Sigmunt, his mother Siglint. This was in a prosperous citadel, well known far and wide, low down by the Rhine – it was called Xanten. Sivrit was the name of that bold, worthy knight.
There is of course something to be said for either approach. Edwards’s faithful translation, like the Nibelungenlied itself, can get tiresome in his invocation of the characters’ excellent qualities – everyone is so noble, bold, strong, mighty, beautiful and brave that one longs for variations. The short sentences make for a disjointed style in both Middle High German and modern English. Edwards’s decision to retain the original syntax as far as possible is not quite as intrusive as in his translation of the romance Parzival, as the syntax here is simpler, but it leads to odd turns of phrase such as “it is told us” for “we are told”. Hatto, on the other hand, smoothes out much of the crude, in-your-face style of the Nibelungenlied. For a taste of the original style in English, Edwards’s is now the best translation; for a taste of the original story, it is still Hatto’s.
Like Hatto’s Penguin translation, this Oxford World’s Classics version is a cheap paperback for a wide market (presumably, largely students), but with quite scholarly additional materials and notes. Edwards’s comments do not represent the latest research, but serve their purpose and are of course more up-to-date than Hatto’s. The volume is thoroughly edited, though Oxford University Press managed to duplicate a page of the self-advertisements in the back. Students and academics looking for the translation of a particular passage will thank the editors for referencing the stanza numbers in the margins.
The Nibelungenlied cannot be discussed without mentioning its nationalist appropriation in Germany, by the Romantics, Wagner’s Ring cycle, Fritz Lang’s 1924 silent film, the Nazis and many others; and Edwards duly mentions them in the notes. Since the Romantics “discovered” the poem in the second half of the eighteenth century, it has been styled as a national epic – despite the fact that versions of it clearly existed in various forms across Northern Europe and are still available, for instance, in Icelandic, Swedish and Norwegian texts and carvings.
The productive contradiction at the heart of the nationalist appropriation was that Germany identified both with Siegfried as an innocent victim of treachery and back-stabbing (this was a powerful narrative used to explain Germany’s defeat in the First World War), and with his killers, the Nibelungs/Burgundians, who heroically refuse to give up one of their own. This Nibelungentreue (loyalty of the Nibelungs) was often demanded by the Nazis. Far from discouraging identification, the fact that the characters are actually from Burgundy, Iceland and the Netherlands, rather than identified as German, allowed Germans to associate themselves with different sides as it suited. By casting both Siegfried and the Nibelungs as victims rather than perpetrators – despite their violence – Germans managed to maintain a positive if somewhat schizophrenic self-image.
More recent reworkings of this national myth in Germany portray a self-critical nation. Edwards mentions Uli Edel’s 2004 film Ring of the Nibelungs (also known as Sword of Xanten), which was broadcast on British television. This is a pan-European co-production which never once mentions Germany, and aims at an international market as a Tolkienian and Rowlingian fantasy tale. It shows the national hero traumatized and self-doubting, and vanquished by forces he never quite understands. In a veiled allegory of German experiences with their more recent past, this Siegfried has lost his identity because he cannot remember the war in which his parents died, and whether they were guilty or not. But as soon as he manages to remember and reclaim his heritage in a grandiose way, he becomes too powerful and is squashed. The fantasy of recovering a memory of a past that is not as horrible as expected is exposed as such; and despite his brief moment of grandeur, Siegfried remains an unconvincing and unsuccessful action hero.
Since then, the German comedian Tom Gerhardt has even more thoroughly debunked the national hero in the clever parody Siegfried (2005). The bumbling Siegfried here befriends a smart pig that keeps him out of trouble, conveniently allowing the death and revenge plots to be omitted. This actually renders many of the knight’s characteristics in the Nibelungenlied itself very well – his overbearing power, his naivety, his false friends, his unintentional aggression – but also allows a harmless, fluffy imagination of Germany without the doom and horror. In The Charlemagne Code (Die Jagd nach dem Schatz der Nibelungen, 2008), which rides the same bandwagon as The Da Vinci Code, the legend has been fully modernized and only serves as a backdrop for a contemporary treasure hunt.
Every culture gets the version of a legend it deserves. If Germany’s history, or at least its relationship to its medieval past, can be told as a history of the reception of the Nibelungenlied, what does it say about early twenty-first-century Britain that it has produced this translation? First, the fact that translator and publisher stress faithfulness to the “original” betrays a belief in texts as historical monuments rather than stories in flux that can be told and retold at any time; a faith in facts rather than wisdom. Curiously, Hatto’s freer translation is closer to the medieval spirit of the Nibelung legend, which, as the many medieval variants show, did not require slavish adherence to a previous version.
Besides, that Edwards’s is a prose rather than verse translation says something about the unflagging rise of prose as a narrative medium. At the time when the Nibelungenlied was written down, “prose literature” was pretty much a contradiction in terms. Fiction, even lengthy narratives, were written (and presumably told orally) with rhyme and rhythm; such artistic language was part of the pleasure. Moreover, many of these stories were sung (hence the modern title, Song of the Nibelungs; different medieval manuscripts actually label the tale The Book of Kriemhild or The Nibelungs’ Suffering; Edwards goes for the archaic Lay). The melody of the Nibelungenlied has not survived, but from similar songs, we can imagine what it sounded like. Particularly striking if rendered in music is the extra beat in the last (eighth) half-line of each stanza, which creates an emphatic full stop. This is often the punchline – in which either a joke or another violent act is delivered. For example, when Hagen kills Kriemhild and Etzel’s son at a banquet, the fact that this sparks off a battle among the guests is announced in one such final half-line:
Dô sluoc daz kint Ortlieben / Hagen der helt guot,
– x – x – x – / x – x – x
daz im gegen der hende / ame swerte vlôz daz bluot.
x – x – – x – / – – x – x – x
und daz der küneginne / daz houbet spranc in die schôz.
– x – x – x – / – x – x – – x
dô huop sich under degenen / ein mort vil grimmec unde grôz.
– x – x – x – – / – x – x – x – x
Edwards translates this as follows:
Then Hagen, the worthy hero, dealt the child Ortliep such a blow that the blood shot back along the sword up to his hand, and the boy’s head flew into the queen’s lap. Grim and massive slaughter began then among those knights.
Finally, that this is a World’s Classics edition reassuringly shows that there is still a wide English-speaking audience for world literature, at least in translation. The student-friendliness, however, indicates that a large part of this audience may now be found at universities. While stories of King Arthur, the grail and Robin Hood are commonplace parts of popular culture, the Nibelung legend is still little known in the anglophone world (except to Wagnerians). But a narrative of such splendour and importance deserves a wide audience outside the walls of the academy, too.
Cyril Edwards, translator and editor
THE NIBELUNGENLIED
The Lay of the Nibelungs
244pp. Oxford University Press. Paperback, £10.99 (US $14.95).
978 0 19 923854 5
Bettina Bildhauer is a lecturer in German at the University of St Andrews. She is the author of Medieval Blood, published in 2006, and co-editor, with Anke Bernau, of Medieval Film, 2009.
If I have begun by shamelessly giving away the tragic ending in order to elicit interest, I am only copying one of the poem’s favourite techniques. The real thrill of the epic is not in finding out what happened, but how and why it happens – why a hero and an entire dynasty are brutally murdered. It probably started out as a way of explaining the near-extinction of the Germanic tribe of the Burgundians by Roman troops in the 430s, and was refined over centuries of oral storytelling before being finally written down around 1200. So first, why does Siegfried die? In short (and unfairly reducing the Nibelungenlied’s kaleidoscopic account), because he unsuccessfully stages something between a coup and a terrorist threat against the kingdom of the Burgundians. This kingdom, situated on the upper Rhine around Worms, not yet in the wine-growing region of modern France, is a well-run place, governed by King Gunther with the help of his two brothers and his adviser Hagen. (Their sister Kriemhild is not given much political say, but will claim it for herself later.) But then a young pretender – the bold Siegfried – strides in and demands all the Burgundians’ lands and possessions, on the grounds that he is physically more powerful than them. And so he is: he has famously fought and overcome the worst possible opponents – the terrible dragon and mighty dwarfs guarding the treasure of the mysterious people of the Nibelungs. This has made him physically invincible, too: bathing in the dragon’s blood renders his skin impenetrable, and he has won an invisibility cloak that lends him supernatural force.
There is nothing within this society’s conventions, based on inherited leadership, that it can do against the threat of pure violence. Like all societies, it is vulnerable to individuals who refuse to play by the rules. The kings manage to pacify Siegfried with rhetorical promises and by giving him the beautiful Kriemhild as his wife, but ultimately, there is no alternative to dispatching the autocratic intruder. Like most superheroes, Siegfried has one vulnerable spot: in this case, it is a patch between his shoulder blades (on which a lime leaf had fallen when he bathed in the dragon’s blood). It is his wife who, with the best intentions of protecting her husband, betrays this secret to Hagen. And Hagen does what he has to do to defend his country: he kills Siegfried, trying to make it look like an accident although everyone involved knows exactly what is going on.
But killing Siegfried has not at all eliminated the threat to the Burgundians (who, in an interesting instance of swapped identities, are for some reason from now on called Nibelungs). As Kriemhild takes it upon herself to avenge her husband, whom she had dearly loved, the poem’s psychological exploration of bereavement and aggression goes even deeper than its political analysis. Since Freud, we have come to regard grief as a temporary state to be overcome; remaining melancholically obsessed with the past is considered pathological. Freud observed that many bereaved people initially try to take in whomever they have lost as part of themselves: they might start wearing the dead person’s clothes or scent, or imitating typical gestures. But we expect that this physical stage of grief should be overcome as quickly as possibly through a conscious acknowledgement of the loss and moving on.
Freud, who has done so much to keep the ancient myths of Oedipus and Electra in public consciousness, never accorded their medieval equivalents a similar status, despite inheriting his first name from Siegfried’s father. (Scattered references make clear, however, that he was very familiar with the medieval tales, as were most of his patients. There is a lovely dream alluding to an Old Norse version of the legend, for instance: one of his patients, a medical practitioner himself, compares the stethoscope he uses to examine a female patient to the sword that Siegfried had laid between himself and Brunhild to prevent them from sleeping with each other when sharing a bed.) Had Freud based his theories on medieval legends, he might have been less critical of physical and protracted ways of grieving, like that of Kriemhild. When Siegfried dies, she takes his loss into her heart and becomes like him. But she has no intention of “getting over” him by acknowledging this bereavement and moving on. To her, that would be not only impossible, but also a betrayal. Remembering the dead to Kriemhild means physically holding on to them.
The only way in which she can envisage overcoming her loss is also corporal: by passing the loss to somebody else. As if there were only one pain, she thinks she can get rid of her grief by inflicting it on the perpetrators. This is behind her desire for revenge: rather than the psychoanalytical “talking cure”, the only cure for Kriemhild is hurting somebody else. Kriemhild succeeds, to an extent: she remarries Attila the Hun (here called Etzel), the most powerful man on earth, just so that she can exact her revenge. Many years later, she invites her brothers to a feast, and then demands that they hand Hagen over to her. When they refuse to do so, she has them killed in ever more gruesome stages, finally having her brother King Gunther executed, and decapitating Hagen herself. But the Nibelungenlied would not be the Nibelungenlied if this were a straightforward success. Rather than finally moving on, Kriemhild herself is now “hewn to pieces” for having, as a woman, dispatched the valiant warrior Hagen in such an undignified way.
This magnificent story, crudely summarized here, is now brought to an English-speaking audience in a new translation by Cyril Edwards, the most faithful to date to the Nibelungenlied (which is of course in itself not the original form of the myth). In 1836, Heinrich Heine wonderfully encapsulated its style: “It is a language of stone, and its verses are like slabs of rhyme. Here and there, from the cracks, red flowers burst like blood-drops, or long ivy hangs down like green tears”. Unlike the romances about King Arthur and his knights written around the same time, the Nibelungenlied makes no efforts at an appealing, flowing narrative style. Instead, its aesthetics resemble those of a film by Quentin Tarantino: one impressive scene after the other, held together not so much by logical continuity as by memorable vignettes of violence, pain and some unexpected beauty and humour.
Edwards manages to retain the chunky quality of the original, in his short sentences, set side by side without the help of conjunctions in determining their relation to one another. This works quite well because modern English is still so close to medieval German – they belong to the same language family, as if as nephew and aunt. Translations, however, have to be true not only to the source text but also to the target audience. While Edwards’s surpasses Burton Raffel’s sloppy 2006 verse translation in every way (beauty as well as truth to the source in terms of style and accuracy), it is not as reader-friendly as the existing standard translation by A. T. Hatto. Although Hatto’s work is now forty-six years old, its somewhat old-fashioned style suits the medieval text well, and its readability remains unsurpassed even in modern German translations. Just compare the way in which Siegfried is introduced in both versions. Hatto, like a good bricklayer, had joined the slabs of the German text into a smooth narrative:
Down the Rhine, in the splendid, far-famed city of Xanten in the Netherlands, there grew up a royal prince, a gallant knight named Siegfried, son of Siegmund and Sieglind.
Edwards keeps the dry wall of slabs:
There grew up in the Netherlands at that time a noble king’s son, whose father was called Sigmunt, his mother Siglint. This was in a prosperous citadel, well known far and wide, low down by the Rhine – it was called Xanten. Sivrit was the name of that bold, worthy knight.
There is of course something to be said for either approach. Edwards’s faithful translation, like the Nibelungenlied itself, can get tiresome in his invocation of the characters’ excellent qualities – everyone is so noble, bold, strong, mighty, beautiful and brave that one longs for variations. The short sentences make for a disjointed style in both Middle High German and modern English. Edwards’s decision to retain the original syntax as far as possible is not quite as intrusive as in his translation of the romance Parzival, as the syntax here is simpler, but it leads to odd turns of phrase such as “it is told us” for “we are told”. Hatto, on the other hand, smoothes out much of the crude, in-your-face style of the Nibelungenlied. For a taste of the original style in English, Edwards’s is now the best translation; for a taste of the original story, it is still Hatto’s.
Like Hatto’s Penguin translation, this Oxford World’s Classics version is a cheap paperback for a wide market (presumably, largely students), but with quite scholarly additional materials and notes. Edwards’s comments do not represent the latest research, but serve their purpose and are of course more up-to-date than Hatto’s. The volume is thoroughly edited, though Oxford University Press managed to duplicate a page of the self-advertisements in the back. Students and academics looking for the translation of a particular passage will thank the editors for referencing the stanza numbers in the margins.
The Nibelungenlied cannot be discussed without mentioning its nationalist appropriation in Germany, by the Romantics, Wagner’s Ring cycle, Fritz Lang’s 1924 silent film, the Nazis and many others; and Edwards duly mentions them in the notes. Since the Romantics “discovered” the poem in the second half of the eighteenth century, it has been styled as a national epic – despite the fact that versions of it clearly existed in various forms across Northern Europe and are still available, for instance, in Icelandic, Swedish and Norwegian texts and carvings.
The productive contradiction at the heart of the nationalist appropriation was that Germany identified both with Siegfried as an innocent victim of treachery and back-stabbing (this was a powerful narrative used to explain Germany’s defeat in the First World War), and with his killers, the Nibelungs/Burgundians, who heroically refuse to give up one of their own. This Nibelungentreue (loyalty of the Nibelungs) was often demanded by the Nazis. Far from discouraging identification, the fact that the characters are actually from Burgundy, Iceland and the Netherlands, rather than identified as German, allowed Germans to associate themselves with different sides as it suited. By casting both Siegfried and the Nibelungs as victims rather than perpetrators – despite their violence – Germans managed to maintain a positive if somewhat schizophrenic self-image.
More recent reworkings of this national myth in Germany portray a self-critical nation. Edwards mentions Uli Edel’s 2004 film Ring of the Nibelungs (also known as Sword of Xanten), which was broadcast on British television. This is a pan-European co-production which never once mentions Germany, and aims at an international market as a Tolkienian and Rowlingian fantasy tale. It shows the national hero traumatized and self-doubting, and vanquished by forces he never quite understands. In a veiled allegory of German experiences with their more recent past, this Siegfried has lost his identity because he cannot remember the war in which his parents died, and whether they were guilty or not. But as soon as he manages to remember and reclaim his heritage in a grandiose way, he becomes too powerful and is squashed. The fantasy of recovering a memory of a past that is not as horrible as expected is exposed as such; and despite his brief moment of grandeur, Siegfried remains an unconvincing and unsuccessful action hero.
Since then, the German comedian Tom Gerhardt has even more thoroughly debunked the national hero in the clever parody Siegfried (2005). The bumbling Siegfried here befriends a smart pig that keeps him out of trouble, conveniently allowing the death and revenge plots to be omitted. This actually renders many of the knight’s characteristics in the Nibelungenlied itself very well – his overbearing power, his naivety, his false friends, his unintentional aggression – but also allows a harmless, fluffy imagination of Germany without the doom and horror. In The Charlemagne Code (Die Jagd nach dem Schatz der Nibelungen, 2008), which rides the same bandwagon as The Da Vinci Code, the legend has been fully modernized and only serves as a backdrop for a contemporary treasure hunt.
Every culture gets the version of a legend it deserves. If Germany’s history, or at least its relationship to its medieval past, can be told as a history of the reception of the Nibelungenlied, what does it say about early twenty-first-century Britain that it has produced this translation? First, the fact that translator and publisher stress faithfulness to the “original” betrays a belief in texts as historical monuments rather than stories in flux that can be told and retold at any time; a faith in facts rather than wisdom. Curiously, Hatto’s freer translation is closer to the medieval spirit of the Nibelung legend, which, as the many medieval variants show, did not require slavish adherence to a previous version.
Besides, that Edwards’s is a prose rather than verse translation says something about the unflagging rise of prose as a narrative medium. At the time when the Nibelungenlied was written down, “prose literature” was pretty much a contradiction in terms. Fiction, even lengthy narratives, were written (and presumably told orally) with rhyme and rhythm; such artistic language was part of the pleasure. Moreover, many of these stories were sung (hence the modern title, Song of the Nibelungs; different medieval manuscripts actually label the tale The Book of Kriemhild or The Nibelungs’ Suffering; Edwards goes for the archaic Lay). The melody of the Nibelungenlied has not survived, but from similar songs, we can imagine what it sounded like. Particularly striking if rendered in music is the extra beat in the last (eighth) half-line of each stanza, which creates an emphatic full stop. This is often the punchline – in which either a joke or another violent act is delivered. For example, when Hagen kills Kriemhild and Etzel’s son at a banquet, the fact that this sparks off a battle among the guests is announced in one such final half-line:
Dô sluoc daz kint Ortlieben / Hagen der helt guot,
– x – x – x – / x – x – x
daz im gegen der hende / ame swerte vlôz daz bluot.
x – x – – x – / – – x – x – x
und daz der küneginne / daz houbet spranc in die schôz.
– x – x – x – / – x – x – – x
dô huop sich under degenen / ein mort vil grimmec unde grôz.
– x – x – x – – / – x – x – x – x
Edwards translates this as follows:
Then Hagen, the worthy hero, dealt the child Ortliep such a blow that the blood shot back along the sword up to his hand, and the boy’s head flew into the queen’s lap. Grim and massive slaughter began then among those knights.
Finally, that this is a World’s Classics edition reassuringly shows that there is still a wide English-speaking audience for world literature, at least in translation. The student-friendliness, however, indicates that a large part of this audience may now be found at universities. While stories of King Arthur, the grail and Robin Hood are commonplace parts of popular culture, the Nibelung legend is still little known in the anglophone world (except to Wagnerians). But a narrative of such splendour and importance deserves a wide audience outside the walls of the academy, too.
Cyril Edwards, translator and editor
THE NIBELUNGENLIED
The Lay of the Nibelungs
244pp. Oxford University Press. Paperback, £10.99 (US $14.95).
978 0 19 923854 5
Bettina Bildhauer is a lecturer in German at the University of St Andrews. She is the author of Medieval Blood, published in 2006, and co-editor, with Anke Bernau, of Medieval Film, 2009.
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