by Will Durant
Gunther, unmarried, hears of the Icelandic queen Brunhild; but she, he is informed, can be won only by one who excels her in three trials of strength; and if he fails in any, he forfeits his head. Siegfried agrees to help Gunther win Brunhild if the King will give him Kriemhild to wife. They cross the sea with the speed and ease of romance; Siegfried, made invisible by a magic cape, helps Gunther meet the tests; and Gunther brings the reluctant Brunhild home as his bride. Eighty-six damsels help Kriemhild prepare rich garments for her. In a double marriage of great pomp Gunther weds Brunhild, and Siegfried is joined to Kriemhild.
But Brunhild, seeing Siegfried, feels that he, not Gunther, was meant to be her mate. When Gunther goes in to her on their marriage night she repulses him, ties him in a knot, and hangs him up on the wall. Gunther, released, begs Siegfried’s aid; the hero, on the next night, disguises himself as Gunther, and lies beside Brunhild, while Gunther, hidden in the darkened room, hears all and sees nothing. Brunhild throws Siegfried out of bed, and engages him in a bone-crunching, head-cracking combat quite without rules. “Alas,” he says to himself amid the fight, “if I lose my life by the hand of a woman, all wives evermore will make light of their husbands.” Brunhild is finally overcome, and promises to be a wife; Siegfried retires unseen, bearing away her girdle and her ring; and Gunther’ takes his place beside the exhausted queen. Siegfried makes a present of the girdle and ring to Kriemhild. He brings her to his father, who crowns him King of the Lowlands. Using his Nibelungen wealth, Siegfried clothes his wife and her maidens more richly than ever women were robed before.
Some time later Kriemhild visits Brunhild at Worms; Brunhild, jealous of Kriemhild’s finery, reminds her that Siegfried is Gunther’s vassal. Kriemhild retorts by showing her the girdle and ring as proof that Siegfried, not Gunther, had overcome her. Hagen, gloomy half brother to Gunther, rouses him against Siegfried; they invite him to a hunt; and as he stoops over a brook to drink, Hagen pierces him with a spear. Kriemhild, seeing her hero dead, “lay senseless in a swoon all that day and night.” She inherits the Nibelung treasure as Siegfried’s widow, but Hagen persuades Gunther to take it from her. Gunther, his brothers, and Hagen bury it in the Rhine, and take oath never to reveal its hiding place.
For thirteen years Kriemhild broods over vengeance upon Hagen and her brothers, but finds no opportunity. Then she accepts the marriage proposal of the widowed Etzel (Attila), King of the Huns, and goes to Vienna to live as his queen. “So famed was Etzel’s rule that the boldest knights, Christian or heathen, drew ceaselessly to his court…. One saw there what one never sees now-Christian and heathen together. Howso diverse their beliefs, the King gave with such free hand that all had plenty.” There Kriemhild “ruled virtuously” for thirteen years, seeming to forgo vengeance. Indeed she asks Etzel to invite her brothers and Hagen to a feast; they accept despite Hagen’s warning, but come with an armed retinue of yeomen and knights. While the royal brothers, Hagen, and the knights enjoy the hospitality of the Hun court in Etzel’s hall, the yeomen outside are slain at Kriemhild’s command. Hagen is told of it, and springs to arms; a terrible battle ensues in the hall between the Burgundians and the Huns (perhaps recalling their actual war of 437); with his first blow Hagen strikes off the head of Ortlieb, the five-year-old son of Kriemhild and Etzel, and he flings the head into Kriemhild’s lap. When nearly all the Burgundians are dead Gernot, brother of Kriemhild and Gunther, asks Etzel to let the surviving visitors escape from the hall. The Hun knights wish it, Kriemhild forbids it, the slaughter goes on. Her youngest brother, Giselher, who was an innocent lad of five when Siegfried fell, appeals to her: “Fairest sister, how have I deserved death from the Huns? I was ever true to thee, nor did thee any hurt; I rode hither, dearest sister, for that I trusted to thy love. Needs must thou show mercy.” She agrees to let them escape if they will deliver Hagen to her. “God in heaven forbid!” cries Gernot; “liefer would we all die than give one man for our ransom.” Kriemhild draws the Huns from the building, locks the Burgundians in it, and has it set on fire. Maddened with heat and thirst, the Burgundians cry out in agony; Hagen bids them assuage their thirst with the blood of the slain; they do. Some emerge from the flaming and falling timbers; the battle continues in the courtyard until of the Burgundians only Gunther and Hagen remain alive. Dietrich the Goth fights and overcomes Hagen and brings him bound to Kriemhild. She asks Hagen where he has concealed the Nibelung treasure; he refuses to tell her as long as Gunther is alive; Gunther, also captive, is slain at his sister’s bidding, and his head is brought to Hagen. But Hagen defies her: “Now none knows where the hoard is save God and I alone; that to thee, devil-woman, shall never more be known.” She seizes his sword and strikes him dead. Then Hildebrand the Goth, one of her warriors, surfeited with her blood lust, slays Kriemhild.
It is a terrible tale, as red with gore as any in literature or beneath. We do some injustice to it by taking its direst moments from their context of feasting, jousting, hunting, and womanly affairs; but this is the central and bitter theme—a gentle maiden changed by the experience of evil into a ferocious murderess. Strangely little of Christianity is left in the story; it is rather a Greek tragedy of nemesis, without the Greek reluctance to let violence come upon the stage. In this stream of crime almost all feudal virtues are submerged, even the honor of host to invited guest. Nothing could surpass the barbarism of such a tale, until our time.
V. THE TROUBADOURS
At the end of the eleventh century, when we should have expected all European letters to be colored by the religious enthusiasm of the Crusades, there developed in southern France a school of lyric poetry aristocratic, pagan, anticlerical, bearing the marks of Arab influence, and signalizing the triumph of woman over the chastisement laid upon her by the theory of the Fall. This style of verse moved from Toulouse to Paris to London with Eleanor of Aquitaine, captured the lion heart of her son Richard I, created the minnesingers of Germany, and molded the Italian dolce stil nuovo that led to Dante.
At the origin of the style stands Eleanor’s grandfather, William IX, Count of Poitou and Duke of Aquitaine. This reckless blade found himself at eleven (1087) the practically independent ruler of southwestern France. He joined the First Crusade and sang its victory; but, like so many nobles in his heresy-infected lands, he had scant respect for the Church, and made gay mockery of her priests. An old Provençal biography describes him as “one of the most courteous men in the world, and a great deceiver of ladies; and he was a brave knight and had much to do with love affairs; and he knew well how to sing and make verses; and for a long time he roamed all through the land to deceive the ladies.”23 Though married, he carried off the beautiful viscountess of Châtellerault, and lived with her in open scandal. When the bold bald bishop of Angoulême bade him end his wicked ways he replied, “I will repudiate the viscountess as soon as your hair requires a comb.” Excommunicated, he one day met the bishop of Poitiers. “Absolve me,” he said, “or I will kill you.” “Strike,” answered the bishop, offering his neck. “No,” said William; “I do not love you well enough to send you to paradise.”24 The Duke set a style of writing amorous poetry to noble dames. He suited the action to the word, led a short life and a merry one, and died at fifty-six (1137). He left to Eleanor his immense domain, and his taste for poetry and love.
She gathered poets about her at Toulouse, and willingly they sang for her and her court the beauty of women and the fever engendered by their charms. Bernard de Ventadour, whose poems seemed to Petrarch only slightly inferior to his own, began by praising the loveliness of the viscountess of Ventadour; she took him so seriously that her husband had to shut her up in his castle tower. Bernard, encouraged, turned to chant the splendor of Eleanor herself, and followed her to Rouen; when she preferred the love of two kings he emptied out his soul in a famous dirge. A generation later the troubadour Bertrand de Born became the bosom friend of Richard I, and his successful rival for the love of the most beautiful woman of her time, Dame Maenz of Martig
nac. Another troubadour, Peire Vidal (1167?-1215), accompanied Richard on crusade, returned intact, lived and rhymed in amours and poverty, and received at last an estate from Count Raymond VI of Toulouse.25 We know the names of 446 other troubadours; but from these four we may judge their loose melodious tribe.
Some were musical vagabonds; most were minor nobles with a flair for song; four were kings—Richard I, Frederick II, Alfonso II, and Pedro III of Aragon. For a century (1150–1250) they dominated the literature of southern France, and molded the manners of an aristocracy emerging from rustic brutality into a chivalry that almost redeemed war with courtesy, and adultery with grace. The language of the troubadours was the langue d’oc or roman of southern France and northeastern Spain. Their name is a puzzle; troubadour is probably from the roman word trobar, to find or invent, as obviously the Italian trovatore is from trovare; but some would take it from the Arabic tarraba, to sing.26 They called their art gai saber or gaya ciencia, “gay wisdom”; but they took it seriously enough to undergo a long period of training in poetry, music, and the forms and speech of gallantry; they dressed like the nobility, flaunted a mantle trimmed with gold embroidery and costly furs, rode often in knightly armor, entered the lists at tournaments, and fought with lance as well as pen for the ladies to whom they had pledged their lines, if not their lives. They wrote only for the aristocracy. Usually they composed music for their own lyrics, and hired minstrels to sing them at banquets or tournaments; but often they themselves would strum the lute and wring a passion through a song.
Probably the passion was a literary form; the burning longing, the celestial fulfillments, the tragic despair of the troubadours were poetic license and machinery; apparently the husbands took these ardors so, and had less sense of property than most males. Since marriage among the aristocracy was normally an incident in a transfer of property, romance had to come after marriage, as in French fiction; the amours of medieval literature are, with a few exceptions, tales of illicit love, from Francesca and Beatrice in the South to Isolde and Guinevere in the North. The general inaccessibility of the married lady generated the poetry of the troubadours; it is hard to romanticize desire fulfilled, and where there are no impediments there is no poetry. We hear of a few troubadours who received the ultimate favor from the ladies whom they had chosen for their lays, but this was a breach of literary etiquette; usually the poet had to sate his thirst with a kiss or a touch of the hand. Such restraint made for refinement; and in the thirteenth century the poetry of the troubadours—perhaps influenced by the worship of Mary—graduated from sensualism to an almost spiritual delicacy.
But they were seldom pious. Their resentment of chastity set them at odds with the Church. Several of them lampooned prelates, ridiculed hell,27 defended the Albigensian heretics, and celebrated the victorious crusade of the impious Frederick where the saintly Louis had failed. Guillem Adémar approved one crusade, but only because it removed a husband from his path. Raimon Jorden preferred a night with his beloved to any promised trans-mundane paradise.28
Forms of composition seemed more important to the troubadours than commandments of morality. The canzo was a song of love; the plante was a dirge for a friend or lover lost to death; the tenson was a rhymed debate on a question of love, morality, or chivalry; the sirvente was a song of war, feud, or political attack; the stxtine was a complicated rhyme sequence of six stanzas, each of six lines, invented by Arnaud Daniel and much admired by Dante; the pastourelle was a dialogue between a troubadour and a shepherdess; the aubade or alba, a song of the dawn, usually warned lovers that the day would soon reveal them; the serena or serenade was an evening song; the balada was a narrative in verse. Here is an anonymous aubade partly spoken by a twelfth-century Juliet.
In a garden where the white thorn spreads her leaves,
My lady hath her love lain close beside her,
Till the warden cries the dawn—ah, dawn that grieves!
Ah God! ah God! that dawn should come so soon!
“Please God that night, dear night, should never cease,
Nor that my Love should parted be from me,
Nor watch cry ‘Dawn’—ah, dawn that slayeth peace!
Ah God! ah God! that dawn should come so soon!
“Fair friend and sweet, thy lips! Our lips again!
Lo, in the meadow there the birds give song.
Ours be the love, and jealousy’s the pain!
Ah God! ah God! that dawn should come so soon!
“Of that sweet wind that comes from Far-Away
Have I drunk deep of my Beloved’s breath,
Yea, of my Love’s that is so dear and gay.
Ah God! ah God! that dawn should come so soon!”
Fair is this damsel and right courteous,
And many watch her beauty’s gracious way.
Her heart toward love is nowise traitorous.
Ah God! ah God! that dawn should come so soon!29
The troubadour movement in France came to an end amid the thirteenth century, partly through the increasing artificiality of its forms and sentiments, partly through the ruin of south France by the Albigensian Crusades. For in that troubled time many castles fell that had harbored troubadours; and when Toulouse itself suffered a double siege the knightly order in Aquitaine collapsed. Some singers fled to Spain, some to Italy. There in the second half of the thirteenth century the art of the love lyric was reborn, and Dante and Petrarch were scions of the troubadours. The gay science of their gallantry helped to mold the code of chivalry, and to turn the barbarians of northern Europe into gentlemen. Literature ever since has felt the influence of those subtle songs; and perhaps love now bears a finer fragrance from the incense of their praise.
VI. THE MINNESINGERS
The troubadour movement spread from France to southern Germany, and flourished there in the golden age of the Hohenstaufen emperors. The German poets were called Minnesänger, love singers, and their poetry coincided with the Minnedienst (love service) and Frauendienst (lady service) of contemporary chivalry. We know over 300 of these minnesingers by name, and have a plentiful legacy of their verse. Some of them belonged to the lower nobility; most of them were poor, and depended upon imperial or ducal patronage. Though they followed a strict law of rhythm and rhyme, many of them were illiterate, and dictated the words and music of their Lieder; to this day the German term for poetry—Dichtung—means dictation. Usually they let minstrels sing for them; sometimes they themselves sang. We hear of a great Sängerkrieg, or song contest, held at the Castle Wartburg in 1207; there, we are told, both Tannhäuser and Wolfram von Eschenbach took part.30* For a century the minnesingers helped to raise the status of woman in Germany, and the ladies of the aristocracy became the life and inspiration of a culture more refined than anything that Germany would know again till Schiller and Goethe.
Wolfram and Walther von der Vogelweide are classed as minnesingers because they wrote songs of love; but Wolfram and his Parzival may be better viewed under the heading of romance. Walther “of the Bird-Meadow” was born somewhere in the Tirol before 1170. Knight but poor, he made matters worse by taking to poetry. We find him at twenty singing for his bread in the homes of the Viennese aristocracy. In those youthful years he wrote of love with a sensuous freedom frowned upon by his rivals. His Unter den Linden is treasured to this day in Germany:
Unter den linden,
an der heide,
da unser sweier bette was;
du muget ir vinden
schone beide
gebrochen bluomen under gras.
Vor dem valde in einem tal—
tandaradei!—
schone sanc diu nahtegal.
Ich kam gegangen
zuo der ouwe;
do was min friedel komen e.
Da wart ich empfangen,
here frouwe!
Daz ich bin saelic iemer me.
Kiste er mich? Wol tusend stunt;
tandaradei!
Sehet, wie rot mir ist der munt.
/>
Do het er gemachet
also riche
von bluomen eine bettestat.
Das wirt noch gelachet
innecliche,
kum iemen an daz selbe pfat,
bi den rosen er wol mac—
tandaradei!—
merken wa mir’z houbet lac.
Daz er bi mir laege,
wesse ez iemen
(nu en welle Got!) so schamte ich mich
wes er mit mir pflaege,
niemer niemen
bevinde daz wan er und ich
unde ein kleinez vogellin—
tandaradei! —
daz mac wol getriuwe sin.31
Under the linden,
On the heather,
For us two a bed there was;
There could you see,
Entwined together,
Broken flowers and bruised grass.
From a thicket in the dale—
Tandaradei! —
Sweetly sang the nightingale.
I sped thither
Through the glade;
My love had reached the spot before.
There was I snared,
Most happy maid!
For I am blessed evermore.
Many a time he kissed me there—
Tandaradei!
See my lips, how red they are!
There he contrived
In joyful haste
A bower of blossoms for us both.
That must be still
A fading jest
For those who take the selfsame path
And see the spot where on that day—
Tandaradei!—
My head among the roses lay.
How shamed were I
If anyone
(Now Heaven forfend!) had there been nigh.
There we two lay,
But that was known
To none except my love and I,
And the little nightingale—
Tandaradei! —