The Nibelungenlied: The Lay of the Nibelungs (Oxford World's Classics) (3 page)

The
Nibelungenlied
owes its origins to oral poetry. For a long time, for some five centuries if not more, the ancient tales to which the poet refers in the first strophe had been circulating in oral form, and we cannot be certain when they first made their entry into writing. These origins colour not only the plot and ethos, but also the lay’s style. Albert Lord and Milman Parry’s studies, based on Homer and Balkan traditional poetry, read like a template for the performer of this poem, who must also, to an extent we cannot now determine, have been its shaper:

The poetic grammar of oral epic is and must be based on the formula. It is a grammar of parataxis and of frequently used and useful phrases. Usefulness in composition carries no implication of opprobrium. Quite the contrary. Without this usefulness the style, and, more important, the whole practice would collapse or would never have been born. The singer’s mode of composition is dictated by the demands of performance at high speed, and he depends upon inculcated habit and association of sounds, words, phrases, and lines. He does not shrink from the habitual; nor does he either require the fixed for memorization or seek the unusual for its own sake.
⁸

This style, so heavily dependent on parataxis and repetition, is far from alien to the Anglo-American oral tradition. It is preserved, for example, in the border ballads, and in much folk-song of Anglo-Irish origins which can still be heard today.

None of the manuscripts of the
Nibelungenlied
preserves a melody, but this may be because very few melodies for German epics or lyrics are recorded before
c
.1300. (A notable exception is the
Carmina Burana
manuscript, dating from
c
.1230.) The melody of the fifteenth-century
Jüngeres Hildebrandslied
(
Later Hildebrandslied
) has been suggested as a possibility for the
Nibelungenlied
.
⁹
Even
today, in the Balkans, war epics, orally composed, are performed with musical accompaniment on a single-stringed instrument, and it is tempting to suggest that the same held for the
Nibelungenlied
. The MHG poet’s performance is usually referred to as ‘singen unde sagen’ (‘singing and saying’), which certainly points to a musical recitation.

The latest of the complete manuscripts of the
Nibelungenlied
(MS d) was written between 1504 and 1516 by Hans Ried, the meticulous scribe of the ‘Ambraser Heldenbuch’, a customs officer in the employ of Emperor Maximilian I. In the middle of the sixteenth century some strophes from the now lost MS c were published. In 1692 there is a reference to the
Nibelungenlied
in Hans Jacob von Wagenfels’
Ehren-Ruff Teütsch-Lands
, describing Seyuridt’s journey to Gunther’s land.
¹⁰
This apart, the lay disappeared from sight for some 200 years. The same fate befell the whole of medieval German literature.

In 1755 the Swabian doctor, mystic, and private scholar Jacob Hermann Obereit (1725–98) found the thirteenth-century manuscript which was later to be designated C in the library of the Count of Hohenems.
¹¹
The Swiss scholar and critic Johann Jakob Bodmer (1698–1783) played a key role in the restoration of the
Nibelungenlied
to public attention, publishing the final part of the lay in 1757.
¹²
It was Bodmer who first drew the comparison with Homer, likening the poem to the
Iliad
.

The first complete edition was published by Bodmer’s pupil, Christoph Heinrich Müller (or Myller), in 1782. Goethe had seen Bodmer’s copy of the lay in Zurich in 1779, and had Müller’s edition sent to him, but it lay unread for over twenty years, until 1808/9, when he read extracts to the Weimar literary circle. Goethe’s
belated interest was inspired by the patriotic movements of the early nineteenth century. His interest in the poem persisted over the next two years, and he wrote an introduction to the 1827 translation of Karl Simrock (1802–76), the most successful of the many nineteenth-century translations, which was published posthumously.

The late eighteenth-century reception of the poem was not uniformly enthusiastic. Müller had dedicated his edition, which included other medieval poems, to the Prussian king Frederick the Great (1712–86), from whose pen stems the most famous derogatory remark about the
Nibelungenlied:
in a letter to Müller dated 22 February 1784, Frederick wrote that his anthology was not worth ‘a shot of powder’.
¹³
This remark, though, has to be seen in the broader context of the animosity towards the German language at the Francophile Prussian court. French was Frederick the Great’s native language, in which he wrote execrable poetry, which not even Voltaire could redeem. The king once told the scholar and critic Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700–66) that he had never read a book in German, and that he spoke the language
comme un cocher
(‘like a coachman’).
¹⁴
On another occasion Frederick remarked: ‘A German singer! I should as soon expect to get pleasure from the neighing of my horse.’ Frederick read German books in French translation. As for the spoken language, he opined: ‘Je ne parle allemand qu'à mes chevaux’, a remark echoed by Voltaire in a letter from Potsdam in 1750: ‘I live here as in France. Only French is spoken; German is for soldiers and horses—you only need it when travelling.’
¹⁵
(Even Goethe’s sister Cornelia wrote her diary and correspondence in French.
¹⁶
) All this did not deter Frederick the Great from writing his treatise
De la Littérature Allemande
, published in 1780. As one of his biographers drily remarked: ‘Seldom can a writer have been so profoundly ignorant of his subject.’
¹⁷

Another detractor was the prolific playwright August Friedrich Ferdinand von Kotzebue (1761–1819), who held the
Nibelungenlied
to be ‘simply a foolish fairy tale, lacking spirit, feeling, and imagination’.
¹⁸
One suspects that Kotzebue had not read the poem to its bitter end. These negative voices were, however, very much in the minority. The last quarter of the eighteenth century saw a sea-change in attitudes to the German language and its medieval past, brought about by a combination of factors: the rise of classical German literature, with Goethe and Schiller in the forefront; the medievalism of early Romantic authors such as Tieck, Schlegel, and Novalis; the reaction to the Napoleonic invasion and the concomitant growth in German nationalism; the restoration of the prestige of the German language and the growth of academic interest in it fostered by the grammarian Johann Christoph Adelung (1732–1806), and his predecessors Gottsched and Justus Georg Schottelius (1612–76).

The early nineteenth century saw three editions by Friedrich von der Hagen (1807, 1810, and 1816), which were enthusiastically reviewed by the brothers Grimm, Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm (1786–1859). The Grimm brothers were to become seminal figures in the nineteenth-century reception of medieval literature, Jacob as the greatest philologist and grammarian of his age, and as editor of the first great German dictionary; Wilhelm as an editor of a great many medieval texts. The Grimms worked together in complete harmony throughout their long lives, most famously, of course, collecting and editing their definitive collection of fairy-tales.

The Grimm brothers’ enthusiasm proved infectious. August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845), in his Berlin lectures of 1802, held the
Nibelungenlied
to be superior to the
Iliad
, because of the magnitude of its passions, characters, and plot.
¹⁹
He argued in 1812 that it should be a major text for the education of German youth. This nationalistic reception of the poem reached one of its early high points in 1815, when Johann August Zeune (1783–1853), a geographer and director of the Berlin institutes for the blind, published his own translation in small format as a ‘Feld- und Zeltausgabe’ (‘battlefield and tent edition’), to be carried into war by ‘courageous patriotic warriors’; Zeune held lectures on the
Nibelungenlied
to packed audiences in Berlin, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, and Worms. From 1800
onwards the lay occupied a firm place in the public imagination, as well as being taught in universities and schools.

Alongside this popular reception, the academic study of the work prospered. The classicist Karl Lachmann (1793–1851) was to become the major figure in the foundation of the new discipline of medieval German studies, editing the works of Wolfram von Eschenbach and the lyrics of Walther von der Vogelweide. For the
Nibelungenlied
, he relied characteristically on a base manuscript, a single codex, MS A, in his edition of 1826. Disputes followed concerning the relative value and date of the three central manuscripts, known as A, B, and C. It was the edition by Karl Bartsch (1832–88), based on manuscript B, which won the day and which remains, with only minor revisions, the most widely studied text. Some forty complete manuscripts and fragments of the
Nibelungenlied
now survive, which points to a considerable interest throughout the Middle Ages. Its popularity was thus greater than that of Hartmann von Aue’s Arthurian romances, though not as great as the
Parzival
and
Willehalm
of Wolfram von Eschenbach. In the last decade four new fragments of the
Nibelungenlied
have been discovered. These point to lost originals; it is often the case that fragments prove to be older in date than those manuscripts which preserve an entire text. Editing the text is thus likely to prove a never-ending task.

The Romantics and the nationalist movements of the nineteenth century, as we have seen, played a key part in the projection of the
Nibelungenlied
as a ‘Nationalepos’. This culminated in 1896, when the patriotic writer Adolf Bartels referred to Germany as ‘Nibelungenland’, and the Iron Chancellor, Bismarck, was dubbed ‘the iron Siegfried’ (
der eiserne Siegfried
) by the poet Hermann Hoffmeister.
²⁰
While none of the central characters in the lay is identified as German, this has not prevented the
Nibelungenlied
being employed again and again for nationalistic purposes, and the early twentieth century saw the continuation and consolidation of this abuse. In 1909 Reichskanzler Fürst von Bülow, in an address to the Reichstag on relations between Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, appealed to the concept of ‘Nibelungentreue’ (‘the loyalty of the Nibelungs’), establishing this concept of loyalty to the death as practised above all by Hagen, and most notoriously applied to
Stalingrad in 1943. The other side to Hagen was also exploited. Hindenburg in 1919 likened the German defeat on the Western Front to the murder of Siegfried by Hagen. This ‘Dolchstoßlegende’, the myth of ‘the stab in the back’, was to become central to Nazi propaganda.
²¹

This exploitation of the poem for propagandistic purposes rose to a new peak in the Third Reich, with its emphasis on what were perceived as ‘heroic’ values. (The 1940 and 1944 editions of the text by Helmut de Boor (1891–1976) are not free from this distortion.
²²
)

Christabel Bielenberg (1909–2003), that extraordinarily courageous British eyewitness to the implementation of Nazi ideology, could not quite believe it. In the spring and summer of 1939 she was ‘shuttl[ing] back and forth’ between Berlin and England: ‘Sometimes as I travelled back to England I wondered what in heaven’s name I was at, wandering pop-eyed in a world about which I knew so little … ordinary citizens, fat as butter, kidding themselves they were descendants of Siegfrieds and Sieglindes.’
²³
Hermann Göring was particularly prominent in the attempted equation of Nazi and ‘heroic’ values. In the pre-war correspondence between Göring and Lord and Lady Londonderry, the latter addressed the ex-pilot as ‘My dear General der Flieger Siegfried’ to tell him how much his photograph had been admired at a big political reception at Londonderry House. Flattered—and probably amused—he could not resist signing a return letter ‘Hermann Göring (Siegfried)’.
²⁴

Siegfried in particular was central to the Third Reich’s cult of the hero, and there was even a movement to substitute a Siegfried cult for Christianity, spearheaded by one Siegfried Reuter, who, in his book
Sigfrid oder Christus
, appealed to his fellow Germans to turn back from Christianity to the old semi-divine figure, apostrophizing Siegfried in terms appropriate to a solar deity. Siegfried was intended
to be the godhead of a new ‘Germanic’ religion, free of Semitic associations. Perhaps the oddest of these attempts to exploit the poem came from the lips of Rudolf Hess, who declared, before his ill-fated landing by parachute in Scotland: ‘I want to be the Hagen of the party!’
²⁵
This casting of the Nazi cause in a heroic light was all-pervasive, and lasted beyond Stalingrad until the final days of the Third Reich.

It is through Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle that most non-medievalists now know of the
Nibelungenlied
. Ironically, Wagner’s operas are derived not for the most part from the MHG lay, but from the Old Icelandic
Völsunga saga
, which Wagner read in von der Hagen’s translation of 1815.
²⁷
Wagner also drew on
iðreks saga
and the
Poetic Edda
.
²⁸
The first documented evidence that Wagner was interested in the
Nibelungenlied
dates from January 1844, when—a year into his appointment as assistant conductor at the Royal Court Theatre in Dresden—he began to borrow primary and secondary texts on the subject from the city’s Royal Library. In pursuing his studies, he was responding to a call from several contributors to the
Neue Zeitschrift für Musik
and, more immediately, to the
Kritische Gänge
of the German writer on aesthetics, Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807–87), all of whom advocated the
Nibelungenlied
as the basis of a new German national opera. The idea of writing such a work was very much in the air at this time, and among the composers who are known to have considered an opera based on the poem are Felix Mendelssohn (1809–47), Robert Schumann (1810–56), Niels Gade (1817–90), and Franz Liszt (1811–86).