The Nibelungenlied / Revised Edition

by Unknown

Copyright, 1901
By THE COLONIAL PRESS

SPECIAL INTRODUCTION

The "Nibelungenlied," as the great national epic of Germany, is not only one of the most important literary monuments that the German mind has produced in all periods of its history, but, in reality beyond this, it is also in its matter and its manner one of the world's great classics. It is this inherently because of the universal intelligibility of its story, for the broad human sympathy which must be felt with its characters and their motives of action, and for the sustained poetic treatment of the whole in the long poem. In all these respects the "Nibelungenlied," although German in its spirit and its environment, rises inevitably above the confines of nationality, and becomes, like other works that are in a true sense great, by virtue of its universality an integral part of that cosmopolitan body that we call the literature of the world.

Like the "Iliad," or any other popular epic whatever, the "Nibelungenlied" is, however, first and foremost a picture of the national life and the national soul. Its characters in this way are, consequently, both fundamentally and of necessity a part of their own special environment into which each, according to his individuality, fits; and the manners and customs, the religion and ethics, are first of all essentially German in order to embody them and to motive their actions to the public for which the poem was originally intended. What we are given in the "Nibelungenlied" is primarily then, at least in its exterior, a picture of German life in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The customs are those of the courts and castles of the place and time, the men and women are the knights and ladies who inhabit them; and if the real mainsprings of motive and action sometimes go back beyond the poet's own day and generation for reasons that shall presently be told, the thoughts and feelings of the characters under his hand betray on the surface no trace of it.

To an English reader there is astonishingly little in the "Nibelungenlied" in motive that is unintelligible or hopelessly remote. It is not that its manners of thought are our manners of thought, or its ethics our ethics. Its deeds, since the real story is an ancient inheritance, are tragic with battle, murder, and sudden death; but, in spite of all this, there is in us an innate appreciation of it and of its spirit that it is utterly impossible to feel in much literature that is not our own. This of course arises from the fact that it is, in a sense, our own, as, in part, at the beginning in very truth it was. The difference in its whole environment from us is still, in reality, not great, and we realize, consciously or unconsciously, that it is in many ways our own ancient past that is chronicled in the German poem.

For all these reasons it comes readily about that, in the light of the poet's master touch, the characters of the "Nibelungenlied" that he has left in such actuality in his verses are to us neither vague nor shadowy, but are real persons who live and act before us. This is in fact truer of the "Nibelungenlied" than of almost any other great poem of the kind, whatever its time and place of origin. Siegfried and Kriemhild, Hagen and Rudeger are not the mere creations and impersonations of a poet's imagination; they are to us real men and women who lived their lives and died their deaths as the poet has described them. That he has told his tale with wonderful literary skill as a whole and at times with marvellous appreciation of the value of the moment, is also to be stated. Because no doubt in part from the way in which the poem has come down to us, there is at times superfluous material that had better been left away, but in this fact, too, the poem differs but little from other popular epics.

As a whole, the "Nibelungenlied" is characterized by a literary unity of treatment by no means inconsiderable, and greater, in point of fact, than its origin would ordinarily promise. Its unity, however, is dramatic, rather than epic in the ordinary sense. This character it never loses throughout the whole long action. Deed follows deed, stroke upon stroke, until the final catastrophe is inevitably reached and the story is ended.

That this story in its origin is not narrowly German, but is Germanic property, should be borne in mind by its reader, since many of its episodes acquire thereby a broader significance, and the whole poem assumes a wider interest.

The earliest versions of the story of the Volsungs and Nibelungs, the Germanic "tale of Troy," that have come down to us are not from German territory, but from the Scandinavian North, although here, too, the scene of the principal action is on the Rhine and in the land of the Huns, which is vaguely conceived to be a part of the German country. Sigmund, the father of Sigurd, is a King in the land of the Franks; Sigurd is slain to the south of the Rhine, and in the Rhine is forever hidden the fateful hoard of the Nibelungs. The story in reality wandered out twice into the North from its original home in Germany: once apparently in the Viking age when the Northmen for the first time came into close contact with the other Germanic people on the continent and in the British Islands, a period long antecedent to the "Nibelungenlied;" and again five hundred years later, after the German poem had arisen, since it can be readily shown that this has been used as a source of a part of the material.