by Simon Winder
The operas are, of course, very much creatures of the nineteenth century. There is no real dating available for the Nibelungenlied itself. The version we have is from the end of the twelfth century but we know nothing about the author except that he probably performed it at courts on the Danube. It incorporates a whole world of far more ancient material, but we will never know what or from where. When introduced, Siegfried is described as being from Xanten. Although barely referred to again – and quite probably meaning just ‘somewhere far down the Rhine’ – this tiny piece of flavouring has been eagerly battened on to by the modern town of Xanten (‘The Pearl of the Rhine’) which has streets named after Siegfried, a Siegfried museum and a Nibelungen-Express trolleybus for the idle and infirm to be driven around the quite small town centre. The Siegfried museum (like the similar one in Worms) has a seriousness, depth and sense of purpose that embarrass their equivalents on literary subjects in the English-speaking world. When I was there, as a spectacular extra a room had been dedicated to Nazi junior-school textbooks on the ‘Wandering Years’: the centuries during which various Germanic tribes had settled Europe. The brilliance of the exhibition lay in its trapping the visitors into bracing themselves for some vicious enormity. You pick nervously through all these illustrations of heavily moustached wagon-masters and their womenfolk with elaborate headdresses; through the images of blond young men fighting, building houses or working in a forge: but, of course, there was almost nothing specifically Nazi about them in themselves – it was what the teachers and pupils brought to them, both in conversation and in the assumptions of their gaze, that poisoned the pictures and this cannot be recovered.
The Siegfried story is clearly set somewhere very ancient, even to the teller. Some of it can be linked to real events in the early fifth century, in the last days of the Roman Empire, but it is an unreliable guide as it is also fascinated by magic and epic feats of a purely fictional kind. The idea of there existing a great treasure which was sunk by Hagen in the Rhine could easily be true as so many of the riches of the towns would, as Huns and others roared through, have been hidden and then lost. It is also a curious echo of how, until the Rhine was narrowed, embanked and speeded up in the nineteenth century, it was always a serious source of gold, with many lives devoted to the ghastly work of panning. There is great material in the story on the importance of feuds and the staggering damage they could do to families as layer upon layer of male relatives are swept in and destroyed by some initially trivial insult. The suggestion that some courts – what with feuding, hunting, duelling and war – must have at times consisted mostly of widows and nuns seems not implausible.
Only bits of the story are looted by Wagner but a far more wholehearted appropriation is Fritz Lang’s two-part movie epic Die Nibelungen (1924), which remains one of the most enjoyable pinnacles of silent cinema and which can be watched with relish almost indefinitely, by me at any rate. The Xanten museum even has a big model of the dragon used for marketing the film in Berlin when it first came out. The actor playing Siegfried looks absurd but he allows the viewer to time-travel close to Victorian traditions of stage ham – and he does look great in the famous movie still with the fatal spear in his back. Setting him aside, Die Nibelungen is a miracle of art direction – never have the early Middle Ages looked more early and more Middle Aged: knights, castles, dwarves, boats, dragons, all perfect. Its love of Art Deco geometric patterning means that some scenes have a flapper/cocktail-bar mid-1920s flavour, which does no harm. The spectacular scene where Kriemhild and Brunhild, both claiming to be queen, refuse to give way to one another on the great sweep of steps up to Worms Cathedral and thereby initiate the events that bring down the dynasty and gruesomely destroy almost everyone in the entire film makes the real cathedral’s steps (a functional handful) seem deeply disappointing.
After that tangential paragraph promoting a film, I need to return to the era of the Nibelung story. There can be no doubt that in the centuries after the Roman Empire collapsed, populations dropped and economies shrank. But there are amazing continuities – most importantly the clear ascendancy of Christianity, which absorbs and subverts all kinds of woolly invader and keeps its structure throughout. Places such as Cologne never seem to have lost their religious, cult and administrative function. The lingua romana diverged across the former Empire and received admixtures from Germanic and Arabic, but in, say, the ninth century Christian Andalusians and Parisians would have still been able to understand each other, one believing the other to be a bit quaint, and the church liturgy in Latin would have sounded very old-fashioned but not presented real difficulties. For various invaders who did not use Latin, it was very easy to snatch some quaking monk prisoner and train him up to become an interlocutor. Germanic was then spoken further south than now and the modern Belgian–French border reflects that, with a messiness which would have been wholly familiar over a millennium ago, when Germanic proto-Flemish was still the language of places such as Boulogne and Dunkirk. Equally lingua romana seems to have been spoken extensively in now entirely Germanic places such as Trier, with any number of wars and minor migrations shifting people around to create borders still seriously contested into the 1950s.
Gigantic buildings continued to dot the landscape – Roman baths, palaces, churches. Xanten is a curiously pure example, where the abandoned Roman town is next to the medieval town. Bit by bit the former was dismantled to conjure up the latter – through many mysterious centuries of patient transfer of old stones, which still now fill cellars and foundations. In parallel with this monks were doing a similar work of preservation by the constant writing and rewriting out of Latin texts. These were always rotting away but through copying and recopying across the centuries some of the key documents of the Ancient World kept just ahead of the mould and damp as the scriptoria monks scribbled away. In a sense these monks were labourers as much as those digging the fields. Without their effort nothing would have survived – we would be wholly ignorant of Tacitus and his friends. One curiosity was the role of Irish monks, particularly at Charlemagne’s court. When the Irish had been converted to Christianity they had no written language of their own, so took the shaping and purity of letters particularly seriously. On the more slipshod mainland all kinds of bad practices had drifted in, and the Irish were brought in to overhaul writing systems and impose crystalline grammar.
The thread by which we get access to even post-Roman texts is terrifyingly thin. The wonderful Rule of Saint Benedict, one of the most humane and thoughtful of all texts, written down in the sixth century, has two variants. The variant I am reading in translation only exists because of a single copy made at Charlemagne’s court, just possibly from Benedict’s original, which was in turn copied by a monk, whose work is now in the great abbey at St Gallen in Switzerland. Everyone should read every word, once a month or so, and think about their implications. I am always brought up short yet oddly attracted to Benedict’s contemptuous description of the magically named ‘gyrovagues’ – the very worst monks, ‘never remaining in the same place, indulging their own desires and caught in the snares of greed’.
The call of the oliphant
German nationalist historians of the nineteenth century were obsessed by a sense of shame that it was the fate of German-speakers to live for centuries in a fractured mass of small and medium states, in shameful contrast to the more powerful and unified states of England and France. Like some endless, morose, post-game pub dissection of a ruinous football match, historians would relentlessly pick over exemplars of past greatness and past failure. What lay at the heart of German disunity? Which emperor, with better follow-through and smarter coaching, could have put Germany at the top of the Premier League? This was in some ways an entirely positive argument. It put particular images on banknotes and specific statues in town squares, led to restored and rebuilt palaces, crypts and castles, and unleashed many weeks’ worth of grand opera and many square miles of mural. Each emperor effectively received a final score bas
ed on how much new territory in the east he brought under Christian control, how much he tried to centralize and how consciously German he was in his priorities. Figures such as Henry the Fowler, Otto the Great and Frederick Barbarossa loomed large. But even those who were rightly anxious about a unified modern Germany could find heroes – the drunken incapacity of the uncrowned Emperor Wenzel making a terrific contribution to centrifugal German regionalism, for example. But under all circumstances, the greatest hero always remained the same: Charlemagne.
You can get a strong sense of the awe around Charlemagne at the Great Minster in Zürich. This extraordinary church was picked almost clean during the Reformation. The coral-like accretions of religious figures and visual stories were all pulled down, scraped off and destroyed, leaving the church as a model for Zwingli’s vision of the believer’s direct relationship with God: every intercessor, every pictorial distraction a snare and falsity. The one exception permitted was to keep a gigantic late-medieval statue of Charlemagne – the notional founder of the building.
In an inspired move, during restoration work in the 1930s, it was decided to take down Charlemagne, put up a copy and retire the original to the crypt. The result amounts to a freakish and wholly unexpected cult site. The glowering, ceiling-high statue is a mass of corrosion, pock-marking, ancient lichen and facial repairs. Eaten at by centuries of smoke and guano, nearly killed off by a huge fire in the eighteenth century, this Charlemagne is a figure who demands respect. It seems a shame not to have ritual bowls filled with floating flowers, guttering oil lamps, temple guards in smart outfits, worshippers pressing their foreheads to the cold stone floor – plus a few bits of bunting and perhaps something dreadful involving animals.
Charlemagne, who persuaded the Pope to crown him the new Roman Emperor in a great ceremony on Christmas Day in the propitious year of 800, had such a deep impact on those around him and took such fundamental decisions that we still remain aware of him when all the Chilperics and Carlomans are long forgotten. As Charles I, he and his son Louis I had such cultic resonance that even in the final throes of French kingship in the nineteenth century they were still being invoked by Louis XVIII and Charles X.
By making himself Holy Roman Emperor he was genuinely refounding the earlier empire, the monumental remains from that period still scattered about him, along the Rhine and Mosel. The window of opportunity was small and happenstantial: in the still-continuing Eastern Roman Empire Irene was empress and, as she was a woman, this was interpreted by the Pope and Charles as implying there was a job vacancy. When she died a couple of years later, her successors continued to view themselves rightly as the true Roman emperors and Charlemagne’s successors as a barbarian Goon Show – but it was too late. This new Western Roman Empire lasted for almost exactly a thousand years and was ended only by Napoleon, who before his own crowning as Emperor of the French came to stand and mull before Charlemagne’s throne in Aachen, in the engagingly stagey way at which he excelled. Once Charlemagne was declared Emperor his successors were always Western Europe’s most senior ruler, however ragged and embarrassing their real circumstances.
Charlemagne’s super-status reflected his bursting the bonds of mere regional chieftaincy. His inheritance was already an extraordinary one. His grandfather Charles Martel had destroyed a serious Muslim invasion of France and was in his lifetime viewed as a great Christian hero. His father, Pepin the Short, had made himself King of the Franks, the Frankish kingdom being an ancient, sprawling and complex entity, directly if stormily linked to Roman Gaul. Charlemagne’s birthright included most of modern France, all of the Netherlands and much of what is now western Germany. But by his anti-pagan campaigns in the east, into areas such as Saxony and Carinthia, he initiated a new phase in the campaign to make Europe Christian, and aligned with Rome rather than Constantinople.
It is hair-raising how thin the thread is by which we know about Charlemagne’s actions – a handful of chronicles, letters and a couple of biographies (one by the enjoyably named Notker the Stammerer), which are fascinating, but frustratingly without any means by which they can be double-checked. Einhard, who worked closely with Charlemagne for many years, wrote his life so that the events of the present would not be ‘condemned to silence and oblivion’ – and it is definitely a problem that the many other almost blank reigns of these centuries appear desolate and poorly managed simply because historians have no vivid sources. Even with what we do have about Charlemagne it is often impossible to know if some tall tale, monk’s failure of memory or ancient lie has become for ever enshrined in our narrative. Notker is particularly useless as many of his best turns of phrase are simply lifted direct from Roman writers, and he has an anecdote about Charlemagne and cheese so boring it is not worth the vellum it was written on. But some of the stories are vivid and often plausible. There are some great phrases – the Avars are ‘that race of iron and diamond’ – and Charlemagne comes up with new names for the months: February = ‘Mud-month’, May = ‘Joy-month’, etc. In later memory, Charlemagne’s position was also made sacrosanct by the popularity of The Song of Roland – an epic poem in Old French which found its final form in the eleventh century, where he came to stand for a specific form of ancient greatness. A Norman bard sang about Roland and Charlemagne at the Battle of Hastings to urge the troops on to heroic deeds, which clearly worked.
The continuity of the office of Emperor over the following ten centuries meant that Charlemagne’s principal residence, Aachen, has survived. Despite irregular bouts of being smashed up, extended and redecorated in often poor taste, Charlemagne’s chapel and throne are still there. A pedantic but important point is that the ceremonies at Aachen were around being crowned ‘King of the Romans’, whereupon the lucky winner then had to go to Rome to be made Emperor by the Pope – an arrangement which was sometimes not possible, and which would break down completely in the 1500s. In the later split in Charlemagne’s former empire which made France a separate place, it was the non-French ruler who remained ‘King of the Romans’ even if in practice this would now mean ‘King of the Speakers of Various German Dialects’.
For anybody even a bit interested in medieval history, it is a struggle not to faint with excitement in the Aachen Treasury. A wonderful advertising print has survived, made in Cologne in 1615, to whip up tourist interest: in a series of little pictures it boasts of the amazing things to be gawped at. The baby clothes of Jesus! The loin cloth worn on the Cross! The cloth John the Baptist’s head was placed on! The clothes worn by Mary when Jesus was born! There is also an engraving from a few years later showing a fashionable crowd looking at the displayed relics, which were last shown in 2014 and even then attracted a crowd of some hundred thousand pilgrims. The Big Four are only the start, however – there is also a giant gold hand (which has a debased Buddhist flavour) containing part of Charlemagne’s skeleton and such wonders as an early Gospel from the court of Charlemagne or one of his immediate successors, with charming paintings of the Four Evangelists writing away in their togas. I need to stop – but who could not be delighted by a real oliphant? The key moment in The Song of Roland revolves around when the oliphant should be sounded. Sadly, later pedants have established that while the one in the treasury is indeed a hunting horn carved from an elephant tusk, it was made in Sicily some two centuries after Charlemagne’s death and cannot be Roland’s. But still. Best of all is an ivory book cover with scenes from the life of Jesus – if not belonging to Charlemagne, certainly made not long after. Each time I see it, there is something magical in the way that the ivory on the cover is worn – rather like the step at the Maastricht shrine. It is a side effect of generations of hands holding the prayer book it once protected and an oddly intimate link between ourselves and the people who stood in the same place, it feels, really quite recently.
Like most of his family, Charlemagne came from the modern German–Dutch–Belgian border area. He both inherited a huge swath of land and extended it through campaigning into the east, fighti
ng the pagan Saxons in great raids down the Ruhr valley. He also wrecked the Avar Empire, which had controlled Central Europe for some two centuries, bringing back to Aachen ‘fifteen oxcarts’ of Avar treasure. However, to think of Charlemagne as the acknowledged ruler of everywhere between the Pyrenees and Denmark, the mountains of Bohemia and central Italy, would be a mistake. Many of these places must have had a very indirect relationship with him and we know little about the many aristocrats who would have done the day-to-day work. But in his extraordinarily long and restless life he did shift around, imposing his will – sometimes only temporarily – from Spain to the Baltic. Just as his grandfather Charles Martel had ended serious Arab incursions into France, so Charlemagne carved out new Christian areas in Central Europe and fought back the ‘Northmen’. With these last, it gets a bit awkward as an accidental side effect of his annual campaigns to kill Saxons meant that, unknown to him, he had wrecked the principal military organization that had been absorbing the military ambitions of the Danes. Now that Saxony lay in ruins – with a scattering of anxious Frankish missionaries trying to buck up handfuls of highly irritable Saxon survivors with the Good News – the Danish chiefs suddenly had time on their hands and could lean back on their rough-hewn stools, wondering whether their berserkers might enjoy going abroad for a bit. Charlemagne had not been buried long before his children and grandchildren learned a lot more about these seafaring tourists.