Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 69, No. 423, January 1851

by Various

Thus spake the deadly wounded, 'Ay! cowards false as hell,
To you I still was faithful; I served you long and well;
But what boots all! for guerdon, treason and death I've won:
By your friends, vile traitors! foully have you done.

Whatever shall hereafter from your loins be born,
Shall take from such vile fathers a heritage of scorn.
On me you have wreaked malice where gratitude was due;
With shame shall you be banished by all good knights and true.'

With blood were all bedabbled the flowerets of the field,
Some time with death he struggled, as though he scorned to yield,
Even to the foe, whose weapon strikes down the loftiest head
At last, firm in the meadow, lay mighty Siegfried dead."

The death of Siegfried is the catastrophe of the first part of the poem. Kriemhild laments the death of her peerless knight with a love more than the love of common women, and which feeds itself on the intense hatred of the murderer, and the inly-cherished expectation of revenge. The hoary old Siegmund returns home in silent sorrow, for he is too weak to offer resistance; and, to complete the matchless wrong, the thorough-working, never-hesitating Hagan takes unjust possession of "the Niebelungen treasure"—a famous hoard bestowed by Siegfried on his wife—thus depriving the fair widow of the means of external munificence, as he had formerly stopt her source of inward consolation. Not avarice, but policy, was Hagan's motive for this, as for all his crimes. He was never a villain without a reason.

"'A prudent man,' said Hagan, 'not for a single hour,
Would such a mass of treasure leave in a woman's power.
She'll hatch, with all this largess, to her outlandish crew,
Something that hereafter all Burgundy may rue.'"

A deep desire of revenge now takes possession of the once gentle mind of Kriemhild; and all the milk of her affections is metamorphosed into gall. The best things, it is proverbially said, when abused, become the worst; and so the revenge of Kriemhild, revealed in the second part of an essentially Christian poem, works out a catastrophe far more bloody than the warlike wrath of the heathen Pelidan, or the well-calculated retribution worked by the bow of the cunning Ulysses,—

"For Earth begets no monster dire
Than man's own heart more dreaded,
All-venturing woman's dreadful ire
When love to woe is wedded."

We have now finished a rapid outline of nineteen adventures of the Niebelungen Lay; and there are thirty such divisions in the whole poem. Our space forbids us to detail what follows with equal fullness; but the extracts already given will have been sufficient to give the reader a fair idea of the general character of the composition. A brief summary of the progress of the story, till it ends in the sanguinary retribution, may therefore content us.

For thirteen years after the death of Siegfried, Kriemhild remained a widow. At the end of that period a knightly messenger, Sir Rudeger of Bechelaren, came from Etzel, King of the Huns, requesting the fair sister of King Gunther to supply the place of his queen, "Dame Helca," lately deceased. Nursing silently the religion of sorrow, the widow at first refused steadfastly to give ear to any message of this description; Hagan also, with his dark far-seeing wisdom, gave his decided negative to the proposal, knowing well that, beneath the calm exterior of time-hallowed grief, the high-hearted queen, never forgetting by whose hand her dear lord had fallen, still nursed the sleepless appetite for revenge. The brothers of the king, however, his other counsellors, and Dame Uta, urged the acceptance of the proposal, with the hope thereby, no doubt, of compensating in some degree to the royal widow for the injury at whose infliction they had connived. But all this moved not Kriemhild; only the distinct pledge given by Rudeger that he would help her, when once the sharer of King Etzel's throne, to avenge herself of all her enemies, at length prevailed. She married a second husband mainly to acquire the means of avenging the death of the first. Under the protection of Margrave Rudeger therefore, and with bad omens only from the lowering brows of Sir Hagan, the widow of Siegfried takes her departure from Worms, and proceeding through Bavaria, and down the Danube—after being hospitably entertained by the good bishop Pilgrin of Passau—arrives at Vienna, where she receives a magnificent welcome from "the wide-ruling Etzel," and his host of motley courtiers, pranked with barbaric pomp and gold, that far outshone the brightest splendour of the Rhine. Polacks and Wallachians, Greeks and Russians, Thuringians and Danes, attend daily, and do knightly service in the court of the mighty King of the Huns. The marriage feast was held for seventeen days with all pomp and revelry; and after that the happy monarch set out with Kriemhild for his castle at Buda. There he dwelt "in proudest honour, feeling nor woe nor sorrow," for seven years, during which time Kriemhild bore him a son, but only one, whom the pious wife prevailed with her lord to have baptised after the Christian custom. Meanwhile, in her mind she secretly harboured the same deep-rooted determination of most unchristian revenge; and towards the dark Hagan delay only intensified her hatred. Accordingly, that she might find means of dealing back to him the blow which he had inflicted on her first husband, she prevailed on Etzel to invite her brothers, with their attendants, and especially Hagan, to come from the far Rhine, and partake the hospitality of the Huns in the East. This request, from motives partly of kindness, partly of curiosity, was at once responded to by all: only, as usual, the dark Hagan stands alone, and prophesies harm. He knew he had done a deed that could not be pardoned; and he foresaw clearly that, in going to Vienna, he was marching into a lion's den, whence, for him, certainly there was no return. But, with a hardihood that never deserts him, if for no other reason than that no one may dare to call him a coward, he goes along with the doomed band, the only conscious among so many unconscious, who were destined to turn the halls of Hunnish merriment into mourning, and to change the wine of the banqueters into blood. So far, however, his dark anticipations prevailed with his unsuspecting comrades, that they marched in great force and well armed; so that when, after encountering some bloody omens on the long road, they did at length encounter the false fair welcome of the injured queen, they were prepared to sell their lives dearly, and to die standing. No sooner arrived than they were well advertised by the redoubted Dietrich of Bern, (Verona,) then attached to Etzel's court, of the temper of their hostess, and of the deathful dangers that awaited them behind the fair show of regal hospitality. This information only steeled the high heart of Hagan the more to meet danger in the only way that suited his temper, by an open and disdainful defiance. He and his friend Volker, the "valiant gleeman," who plays a distinguished part in the catastrophe of the poem, doggedly seated themselves before the palace gate, and refused to do homage to the Queen of the Huns in her own kingdom; and, as if to sharpen the point of her revenge, displayed across his knees his good broadsword, that very invincible Balmung which had once owned no hand but that of Siegfried. This display of defiance was a fitting prelude to the terrible combat that followed. Though the knight of Trony was the only object of Lady Kriemhild's hatred, connected as he was with the rest of the Burgundians, it was impossible that the sword should reach his heart without having first mowed down hundreds and thousands of the less important subordinates. Accordingly, the sanguinary catastrophe of the tragedy consists in this, that in order to expiate the single sin of Hagan—proceeding as that did originally out of the false dealing of Siegfried, and the wounded pride of Brunhild—the whole royal family of the Burgundians or Niebelungers are prostrated in heaps of promiscuous slaughter with their heathen foemen, the Huns. The slaughter of the suitors, in the twenty-second book of the Odyssey, is ferocious enough to our modern feelings; but the gigantic butchery with which the Niebelungen Lay concludes out-purples that as far as the red hue of Sylla's murders did the pale castigation of common politicians. Eight books are occupied in describing the details of this red ruin, which a woman's revenge worked; and the different scenes are painted out with a terrific grandeur, that resembles more the impression produced by some horrid opium dream than a human reality. Victim after victim falls before the Titanic vastness of the Burgundian heroes—Gunther, and Gernot, and Gieselher, the valiant gleeman Volker, who flourishes his broadsword with a humorous ferocity, as if it were his fiddlestick, and, above all, the dark Hagan himself:

"Well grown and well compacted was that redoubted guest;
Long were his legs and sinewy, and deep and broad his chest.
His hair, that once was sable, with grey was dashed of late,
And terrible his visage, and lordly was his gait."