The Nibelungenlied: The Lay of the Nibelungs (Oxford World's Classics)
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Nibelungenlied. English.
The Nibelungenlied: the Lay of the Nibelungs/
translated with an introduction and notes by Cyril Edwards.
p. cm.—(Oxford World’s Classics)
Written down by an anonymous poet c.1200.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978–0–19–923854–5 (pbk.: acid-free paper)
1. Epic poetry, German—Translations into English.
2. Nibelungen—Poetry. I. Edwards, Cyril W. II. Title. III. Title: Lay of the Nibelungs.
PT1579.A3E38 2010
83l′.21—dc22
2009024520
Typeset by Glyph International, Bangalore, India
Printed in Great Britain
on acid-free paper by
Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
ISBN 978–0–19–923854–5
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
The Nibelungenlied
The Lay of the Nibelungs
Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
CYRIL EDWARDS
OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
THE NIBELUNGENLIED
WRITTEN down by an anonymous poet c.1200, the Nibelungenlied (Lay of the Nibelungs) is the greatest medieval German heroic poem, a revenge saga on an epic scale, which has justly been compared with Homer and with the Old Icelandic Saga of Burnt Njal. Its origins reach back into the fifth century; it underwent a long genesis in the form of oral poetry before taking on written form. It proved hugely popular in the Middle Ages, with some forty manuscripts and fragments surviving. In the sixteenth century it disappeared from sight for 200 years. The poem grew to become central to the nationalist thinking of the Romantics, and in the twentieth century was appropriated by Nazi propagandists. The Nibelungenlied was a central inspiration for Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle and Fritz Lang’s two-part silent film, Siegfried’s Death and Kriemhild’s Revenge.
CYRIL EDWARDS is a Senior Research Fellow of Oxford University’s Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, and an Honorary Research Fellow of University College London. He is the author of The Beginnings of German Literature (Rochester, NY, 2002) and numerous articles on medieval love-lyrics, Old High German, and the supernatural. His translations include Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival and Titurel (Oxford World’s Classics, 2006) and Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein or The Knight with the Lion (Cambridge, 2007).
CONTENTS
Introduction
Note on the Text and Translation
Select Bibliography
Chronology
THE NIBELUNGENLIED
Appendix I: History and Legend
Appendix II: The Nordic Sources and the Problem of Genesis
Appendix III: The Metre of the Nibelungenlied
Explanatory Notes
Glossary of People and Places
A map of the Nibelungenlied
For Kate, most indefatigable of readers,
and in memory of George T. Gillespie and David R. McLintock
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
FIRST and foremost, I would like to thank my editor at Oxford World’s Classics, Judith Luna, for permitting me to take on this task, which has, on the whole, been enormous fun. As an undergraduate, I was weaned on the 1965 Penguin Classics translation of the Nibelungenlied by Arthur Hatto, and I am grateful for the assistance his version, and that of D. G. Mowatt (Everyman’s Library, 1962), have provided.
Undertaking such tasks, I have always felt the need to consult both colleagues and lay readers, to ensure both reliability and readability. I am most grateful to those I list below, but particularly to Kate Douglas. This is the third translation with which she has helped me, and there is no limit to her acuity. Other readers who helped were Katy Beebe, Jeff Ashcroft, Jennifer Hall, and Christine Ward. Heather Birt gave valuable advice on fiddling. Hauke Fill helped with Danubian place-names. Peter Drexler made available to me several film versions of the Nibelungenlied. Stewart Spencer wrote the section on Richard Wagner. Carolyne Larrington helped me through the Eddic morass. Paul Fouracre and Helena Carr guided me through the equally morassic Merovingian material. Kurt Gärtner assisted with Middle High German lexis. Karen Pratt made available to me Schlauch’s translation of The Saga of Ragnar Lodbrok—a rare book indeed. Frank Lamport helped me through his knowledge of Hebbel, and my colleague Kevin Hilliard with the eighteenth-century reception of the lay. Christine Glassner kept me abreast of recently found fragments of the Nibelungenlied and showed me the beautiful Melk fragments. Peter Christian and Rupert Wilson almost overcame my incompetence with computers, as I made my way up and through these thirty-nine steps.
Two reference books in particular have been of great assistance: D
avid Dalby’s Dictionary of the Mediœval German Hunt (Berlin, 1965) and George Gillespie’s Catalogue of Persons Named in German Heroic Literature (Oxford, 1973).
Finally I would like to thank my tutors who introduced me to the text, both now deceased, Ruth Harvey and Peter Ganz.
All errors are, as the cliché would have it, mine alone.
All Mankinde is of one Author, and is in one volume; when one Man dies, one Chapter is not torne out of the booke, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God emploies several translators; some peeces are translated by age, some by sicknesse, some by warre, some by justice; but Gods hand is in every translation; and his hand shall binde up all our scattered leaves againe, for that Librarie where every booke shall lie open to one another.
(John Donne, Devotions VII)
Being true to the author is all.
(Naveed Chaudhri)
INTRODUCTION
WRITTEN down by an anonymous poet c.1200, the Nibelungenlied, to give it its commonly used Modern German title, is the greatest medieval German heroic poem or lay, a revenge saga on an epic scale, which has justly been compared with Homer and with the Old Icelandic Saga of Burnt Njal. It tells of the heroic dragon-slayer Sivrit’s wooing of the beautiful Kriemhilt and King Gunther’s wooing of the Amazon-like Queen Prünhilt. The brutal murder of Sivrit by the fierce anti-hero Hagen, and the vengeance wreaked by Kriemhilt are recounted in bloody detail. Its origins reach back into the fifth century; it underwent a long genesis in the form of oral poetry before taking on written form. The poem proved hugely popular in the Middle Ages, with some forty manuscripts and fragments surviving. The latest of these is the Ambraser Heldenbuch, a huge two-volume compilation of romances and epics, now in the Austrian National Library, which was compiled between 1504 and 1516 for the emperor Maximilian I. After this last late medieval recording of the text the lay disappeared from sight almost entirely for 200 years. Rediscovered in 1755, the Nibelungenlied then became central to the nationalist thinking of the Romantics, coming to be regarded, anachronistically, as the ‘national epic’ of the Germans. This nationalistic abuse of the text culminated in its popularity in the Third Reich. The Lay of the Nibelungs was a central inspiration behind Richard Wagner’s monumental Ring cycle. Its greatest cinematic treatment is Fritz Lang’s two-part silent film, Siegfried’s Death and Kriemhild’s Revenge (1922–4), one of the high points of Weimar cinema.
The Poet and the Literary Context
Half a century ago it was possible to write with some confidence of ‘the poet of the Nibelungenlied’, or the ‘Last Poet’, while accepting his anonymity and the fact that we know virtually nothing of his identity. Recent research has oscillated between accepting this older, monolithic view of a single author responsible for fashioning the epic as we know it, and acknowledging the debt that the lay owes to oral poetry. The possibility of reconstructing the archetype of the text has been more or less abandoned. Thus, when this introduction refers to ‘the poet’, it is no more than a matter of convenience. The language of the manuscripts points to the south-eastern German-speaking area. The poet’s intimate knowledge of the Danube area suggests that he was of Austrian origin, while his criticism of Bavarian robbers points away from Bavaria. The poet may have been a cleric, though there is little apart from his literacy to suggest this. That literacy was not the sole prerogative of the clergy c.1200 is evident from what the anonymous poet’s near-contemporaries, Hartmann von Aue and Wolfram von Eschenbach, tell us about themselves. Hartmann identifies himself as a dienstman, a ministerialis exercising administrative functions at a Swabian court, and the prologue to his Arthurian romance Iwein or The Knight with the Lion stresses the possibility that a knight may be learned, even though this may be unusual. Wolfram, almost certainly tongue-in-cheek, places even greater emphasis upon his knightly rank, claiming in Parzival: ‘I don’t know a single letter of the alphabet.’
The second half of the twelfth and the first half of the thirteenth century saw an extraordinary flowering of literary activity in the German vernacular, based for the most part in the courts of the aristocracy (hence its German name, die höfische Blütezeit). This fertile period is sometimes referred to as ‘the Middle High German (MHG) classical period’. Central to this activity were two new genres, the courtly love-lyric (Minnesang) and the Arthurian romance. The great lyric poets included Walther von der Vogelweide and Heinrich von Morungen. Gnomic, political, and religious lyrics were also composed and sung. The three major narrative poets were Hartmann, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and Gottfried von Strassburg, the author of the greatest medieval version of the story of Tristan and Isolde; all three were writing between c.1180 and 1220. The oldest surviving religious play in German, the Muri Easter Play (Osterspiel von Muri), also dates from this period.
An older genre also flourished alongside these newcomers, the heroic epic. Oral in origin, these epics found their way into writing in the thirteenth century, many of them in the same manuscripts as the courtly romances. A number of epics had at their core Dietrich of Bern (historically Theodoric the Ostrogoth, of Verona),1 who plays a central role in the final stages of the Nibelungenlied. The Thirty-eighth Adventure introduces (and kills off) a large number of characters who would have been familiar to the audience from the Dietrich epics, in particular Biterolf und Dietleib, which accords a prominent role to Rüedeger. Biterolf was probably first written down in the 1250s, in the Austrian or Styrian area familiar to the Nibelungenlied poet, but may well have been circulating earlier in oral form. The audience would have delighted in recognizing old friends from these epics. They were, like the Nibelungenlied itself, anonymous, a constituent element of the genre. The Nibelungenlied stands head and shoulders above the Dietrich epics in terms of literary quality. We possess evidence of the popularity both of the lay, and of other heroic epics, before the date of the earliest manuscripts, in Wolfram’s Parzival, where, in the eighth book, the cowardly Sir Liddamus argues for discretion being the better part of valour: ‘What kind of Wolfhart would I make? … Even if it never won your favour, I would rather act like Rumolt, who gave King Gunther his advice when he left Worms to go to the Huns—he urged him to baste long cutlets and turn them round in the cauldron.’2 Landgrave Kingrimursel recognizes the allusion to ‘Rumolt’s counsel’ in the Nibelungenlied: ‘you say you act like that cook who advised the bold Nibelungs, who set off, undeterred, for where vengeance was wrought upon them for what had happened to Siegfried in the past.’ Liddamus goes on to refer to other characters well known from the Dietrich epics, Sibeche and Ermenrich.
Wolfram’s juxtaposition of characters from the Nibelungenlied and the Dietrich epics dates from the first decade of the thirteenth century, as we can deduce from references in Parzival to events in 1203 and 1204.3 Wolfram’s allusions yield no certainty as to whether he knew of the Nibelungenlied in oral or in written form, but they hint at his knowledge of the whole plot, and presume that Wolfram’s audience was familiar with the lay in something like the version we find in the earliest manuscripts a quarter of a century later.
The Plot and its Characters
The Nibelungenlied is divided into thirty-nine ‘adventures’ or chapters. (This division and the adventures’ titles are well preserved in the manuscripts, with the exception of the First Adventure.) In the first two adventures we are introduced, in parallel, to the two central protagonists of the first half of the lay, Kriemhilt and Sivrit. The First Adventure tells us of Kriemhilt, Princess of Burgundy, a kingdom which has as its capital Worms on the Rhine.4 Kriemhilt, daughter of Queen Uote, is under the guardianship of her brothers, the three kings of Burgundy, Gunther, Gernot, and Giselher. A prominent figure at the Burgundian court is Hagen of Tronege, vassal and chief adviser to the kings.
The Second Adventure introduces us to Sivrit, Prince of the Netherlands, and tells of his courtly upbringing. In the Third Adventure he rides to Worms, intending to win Kriemhilt for his bride, and from then on Sivrit’s fortun
es are intertwined with those of the Burgundians. He is particularly close to King Gunther, who proves to be a weak king, a roi fainéant, much in the same mould as King Arthur in the Arthurian romances of the twelfth-century French poet Chrétien de Troyes and their MHG adaptations by Hartmann von Aue and Wolfram von Eschenbach, or King Marke in the various medieval versions of the tale of Tristan and Isolde. Also in the Third Adventure Hagen gives us a retrospective account of Sivrit’s upbringing, telling of his superhuman strength and its origins, and of his acquisition of the priceless hoard of the Nibelungs, a race of dwarves resident somewhere to the north of the Netherlands.
Like Sivrit, Gunther is soon intent on wooing. He seeks for his bride Prünhilt, Queen of Iceland, an Amazonian figure of supernatural strength. She and Sivrit are parallel, equally dominant personalities, who have an aura of myth about them, and the lay does indeed hint at their prior knowledge of one another.5 The wooing expedition to Iceland ultimately proves successful, but only because Sivrit has recourse to supernatural means: his massive strength and his cloak of invisibility. Once established as queen in Burgundy, Prünhilt quarrels with Kriemhilt over the relative rank of their two husbands, and this dispute over precedence leads to a conspiracy to kill Sivrit.
The second half of the lay tells of the vengeance Kriemhilt seeks to take upon the murderers of Sivrit. She marries for a second time, her husband now being Etzel, King of the Huns. Although Etzel owes his historical roots to Attila the Hun, he proves to be another weak king. Hagen shifts from being a brutal murderer to a stoic hero (or anti-hero), the ‘hope of the Nibelungs’. The name Nibelungs is transferred to the Burgundians, as they make their fatal journey to Hungary. Kriemhilt undergoes a character change, transformed from the innocent maiden of the early adventures to a ‘she-devil’.