Among the idler parts of Nibelungen discussions perhaps the idlest are the attempts made by partisans of Icelandic and German literature respectively to exalt or depress these two handlings, each in comparison with the other. There is no real question of superiority or inferiority, but only one of difference. The older handling, in the Volsunga Saga to some extent, but still more in the Eddaic songs, has perhaps the finer touches of pure clear poetry in single passages and phrases; the story of Sigurd and Brynhild has a passion which is not found in the German version; the defeat of Fafnir and the treacherous Regin is excellent; and the wild and ferocious story of Sinfiötli, with which the saga opens, has unmatched intensity, well brought out in Mr Morris's splendid verse-rendering, The Story of Sigurd the Volsung.[109]
The German version.
But every poet has a perfect right to deal with any story as he chooses, if he makes good poetry of it; and the poet of the Nibelungenlied is more than justified in this respect. By curtailing the beginning, cutting off the coda above mentioned altogether, and lessening the part and interest of Brynhild, he has lifted Kriemhild to a higher, a more thoroughly expounded, and a more poetical position, and has made her one of the greatest heroines of epic, if not the greatest in all literature. The Gudrun of the Norse story is found supplying the loss of one husband with the gain of another to an extent perfectly consonant with Icelandic ideas, but according to less insular standards distinctly damaging to her interest as a heroine; and in revenging her brothers on Atli, after revenging Sigurd on her brothers by means of Atli, she completely alienates all sympathy except on a ferocious and pedantic theory of blood-revenge. The Kriemhild of the German is quite free from this drawback; and her own death comes just when and as it should—not so much a punishment for the undue bloodthirstiness of her revenge as an artistic close to the situation. There may be too many episodic personages—Dietrich of Bern, for instance, has extremely little to do in this galley. But the strength, thoroughness, and in its own savage way charm of Kriemhild's character, and the incomparable series of battles between the Burgundian princes and Etzel's men in the later cantos—cantos which contain the very best poetical fighting in the history of the world—far more than redeem this. The Nibelungenlied is a very great poem; and with Beowulf (the oldest, but the least interesting on the whole), Roland (the most artistically finished in form), and the Poem of the Cid (the cheerfullest and perhaps the fullest of character), composes a quartette of epic with which the literary story of the great European literary nations most appropriately begins. In bulk, dramatic completeness, and a certain furia, the Nibelungenlied, though the youngest and probably the least original, is the greatest of the four.
Metres.
The form, though not finished with the perfection of the French decasyllabic, is by no means of a very uncouth description. The poem is written in quatrains, rhymed couplet and couplet, not alternately, but evidently intended for quatrains, inasmuch as the sense frequently runs on at the second line, but regularly stops at the fourth. The normal line of which these quatrains are composed is a thirteen-syllabled one divided by a central pause, so that the first half is an iambic dimeter catalectic, and the second an iambic dimeter hypercatalectic.
"Von einer isenstangen: des gie dem helde not."
The first half sometimes varies from this norm, though not very often, the alteration usually taking the form of the loss of the first syllable, so that the half-line consists of three trochees. The second half is much more variable. Sometimes, in the same way as with the first, a syllable is dropped at the opening, and the half-line becomes similarly trochaic. Sometimes there is a double rhyme instead of a single, making seven syllables, though not altering the rhythm; and sometimes this is extended to a full octosyllable. But this variety by no means results in cacophony or confusion; the general swing of the metre is well maintained, and maintains itself in turn on the ear.
Rhyme and language.
In the rhymes, as in those of all early rhymed poems, there is a certain monotony. Just as in the probably contemporary Layamon the poet is tempted into rhyme chiefly by such easy opportunities as "other" and "brother," "king" and "thing," so here, though rhyme is the rule, and not, as there, the exception, certain pairs, especially "wip" and "lip" ("wife" and "body"), "sach" and "sprach," "geben" and "geleben," "tot" and "not," recur perhaps a little too often for the ear's perfect comfort. But this is natural and extremely pardonable. The language is exceedingly clear and easy—far nearer to German of the present day than Layamon's own verse, or the prose of the Ancren Riwle, is to English prose and verse of the nineteenth century; the differences being, as a rule, rather matters of spelling or phrase than of actual vocabulary. It is very well suited both to the poet's needs and to the subject; there being little or nothing of that stammer—as it may be called—which is not uncommon in mediæval work, as if the writer were trying to find words that he cannot find for a thought which he cannot fully shape even to himself. In short, there is in the particular kind, stage, and degree that accomplishment which distinguishes the greater from the lesser achievements of literature.
Kudrun.