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Updated: August 22, 2024
In the German Nibelungenlied all is modernised; the characters are Christian, the manners are chivalrous, and Marchen older than Homer are forced into a wandering mediaeval chronicle-poem. The Germans, in short, had no early poet of genius, and therefore could not produce a true parallel to ILIAD or Odyssey.
But it would require a separate volume to set forth the arguments in favour of a partial mythological origin of the Nibelungenlied.
We know the heroic epic in different languages throughout a period which extends roughly from the eighth to the twelfth centuries. The earliest example is the English Beowulf; among the latest are the German Nibelungenlied and some of the French Chansons de Geste, which belong to the end of the twelfth century.
There are perhaps greater poems in literature than the "Nibelungenlied", but few so majestic in conception, so sublime in their tragedy, so simple in their execution, and so national in their character, as this great popular epic of German literature. It forms the basis of Lachmann's edition. It is a parchment MS. of the middle of the thirteenth century, belonging to the monastery of St. Gall.
In our "Nibelungenlied", however, it is no longer Attila, but Kriemhild, who is the central figure of the tragedy. Etzel, as he is called here, has sunk to the insignificant role of a stage king, a perfectly passive observer of the fight raging around him. This change was brought about perhaps by the introduction of Dietrich of Berne, the most imposing figure of all Germanic heroic lore.
It exhibits the intimate blending of the German and Christian elements, and their full development in splendid productions, for this was the period of the German national epos, the "Nibelungenlied," and of the "Minnegesang." This was a period which has nothing to compare with it in point of art and poetry, save perhaps, and that imperfectly, the heroic and post-Homeric age of early Greece.
We will recall that the events detailed in the first part of the lay of the Volsungs are vaguely alluded to in the Nibelungenlied, which assures us that the connexion we have thus drawn is a correct one. Myth or History? We come now to the vexed question as to whether the Nibelungenlied is mythical or historical in origin.
In the mediaeval epic there is little talk about emotion, but in the Nibelungenlied and in some of the Icelandic sagas the woman is, like Helen in the Homeric epic, the motive and source of all the action.
Morris, in an original pagan version, or else, as the Nibelungenlied, recast during the early Middle Ages the North tells us nothing of the venal paramour, but knows nothing also beyond the wedded wife; more independent and mighty perhaps than her counterpart of classical Antiquity, but although often bought, like Brynhilt or Gudrun, at the expense of tremendous adventures, cherished scarcely more passionately than the wives of Odysseus and Hector.
In the "Nibelungenlied" it becomes the real cause of Siegfried's death, for Brunhild plans to kill Siegfried to avenge the public slight done to her. She has no other reason, as Siegfried swears that there had been no deception. Brunhild appeals to us much less in the "Nibelungenlied" than in the Norse version.
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