The Lay of the Nibelung Men

For this obscurity of authorship there is, in the case of the Nibelungenlied , more reason than with the other epics. What is conjectural with respect to the Iliad and the Chanson , is indubitable with respect to the Lied , viz. that both in its origin and in its construction it was composite, that the elements of which it is a union are in date, perhaps in place of origin, widely remote from each other. The Saga of the Niblungs, of which the Nibelungenlied is the finished poetical development, is a union of mythical and historical elements.
Now this older version was a tale of a dateless past, when men lived who were near in birth to Gods, and when Gods came down to earth as freely as they do in Homer. It is suffused with a glamour of the supernatural, with a weird magnificence, both of nature and of man. Its actors are led on, or thrust on, by inevitable doom, their fates are foretold to them, and they go clear-eyed to the consummation of all. There is no pettiness about any of them, they are all moulded on the heroic scale, and the light about them is not the light of common day. But the poet of the Nibelungenlied , as we have it (however it may have been with the lost original form of the lay), essayed a practically impossible task, namely, to bring the essential characters of the old Saga into the scenes and social atmosphere of the twelfth century, with the supernatural elements left out. Hence he makes a different story of the early life of Siegfried, which has the effect of making his parents’ fears for his safety, on his departure for Burgundy, unreasonable in the light of his past exploits. He makes a different tale of the slaying of the dragon, and of the winning of the Hoard, the amount of which he enormously exaggerates, while omitting all mention of the curse attached to it, though it does work in the poem. He has to construct a different Brynhild, and a different wooing, while he leaves unexplained Siegfried’s previous acquaintance with her, and her antipathy to him from the beginning. These flaws in construction are not all; the characters also suffer. Deeds of violence and wrong, which are accepted in the old Saga much as we accept the incidents of a fairy-tale, especially as the actors are not masters of their own fate, are now transferred to men and women who are made as amenable to our judgment as, say, our early Norman Kings, and who, moreover, live in a Christian land of minsters, monasteries and priests. Hence they cannot but lose in moral dignity; and it needs a mediaevally constituted mind to admire or respect a man simply on the score of his unflinching courage and fidelity to a cause which he has made a tainted cause. This weakness of treatment, which we may fairly say was inevitable for any poet, however great, who undertook to transfer the original story into so alien a setting, is confined to the first half of the poem, which ends with the death of Siegfried and its immediate sequel. In this first part he redeems his work from failure, and (with its inevitable limitations) makes it a triumphant success, by his charm of description, his beauty of execution, his fertility in the invention of incident, and the unfailing vivacity and energy with which it is described, and by his command of pathos and power to stir the deepest springs of sympathy. In the second part, where the poet has no longer to mutilate an old-world giant, in order to fit him to a latter-day bed of Procrustes, he treads surely and strongly, and proceeds unfalteringly to his goal, steadily rising with his theme to its magnificent climax. It is in this second part that the mythical element is largely superseded by the historical.