In Our Time - The Nibelungenlied

Episode Date: December 29, 2022

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss The Song of the Nibelungs, a twelfth century German epic, full of blood, violence, fantasy and bleakness. It is a foundational work of medieval literature, drawing on the myths of Scandinavia and central Europe. The poem tells of two couples, Siegfried and Kriemhild and Gunther and Brunhilda, whose lives are destroyed by lies and revenge. It was extremely popular in its time, sometimes rewritten with happier endings, and was rediscovered by German Romantics and has since been drawn from selectively by Wagner, Fritz Lang and, infamously, the Nazis looking to support ideas on German heritage.The image above is of Siegfried seeing Kriemhild for the first time, a miniature from the Hundeshagenschen Code manuscript dating from 15th Century.WithSarah Bowden Reader in German and Medieval Studies at King’s College LondonMark Chinca Professor of Medieval German and Comparative Literature at the University of CambridgeAndBettina Bildhauer Professor of Modern Languages at the University of St AndrewsProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programme. Hello, the Niebu Lunger Lede is a 12th century German epic, full of blood, violence, fantasy and bleakness, and it's a foundational work of medieval literature.

Drawing on the myths of Scandinavia and Central Europe, This song of the Niebelungs tells of two couples, Siegfried and Kremlin, and Gunther and Brunhilde, whose lives are destroyed by lies and revenge. The poem was extremely popular in its time, was rediscovered by German romantics, and has since been raided selectively by Wagner, Fritz Lang, and infamously the Nazis looking to support ideas on German heritage. With me to discuss the Niebelung elite are Sarah Bowden, reader in German and medieval studies at King's College London,

Mark Kinker, Professor of medieval German and comparative literature at the University of Cambridge, and Bettina Biltauer, Professor of Modern Languages at the University of St. Andrews. Bettina, it's worth taking a little time, not too much, to outline what is a very complicated story, but I'm sure you'll do it superbly in exactly the right time. Yeah, there's a lot of plot. So, it all starts with Krimel, the beautiful princess who lives in Worms on the Rhine, in Burgundy, Her brother is King Gunter and she has two other brothers as well

and she's the most beautiful in all the lands so a little bit further up north on the Rhine lives Siegfried of Xunten, famous dragon slayer, owner of the Nibelung Treasure and he decides to marry her. So he travels up to Worms, asks Gunter for her hand in marriage. Gunter agrees but only on the condition

that Siegfried help win him a wife first. And the one that Gunter wants to marry is Brunhild of Yenhardt of Yenka. Eisenstein, which is often translated as Iceland, who's a very strong queen who wants to compete with all her suitors. And Gunter isn't up to the task, but Siegfried is because he is, well, the dragon slayer and has supernatural powers. So he wins Brunthold for Gunter, but does so do using deceit, really, pretending to be Gunter, using his invisibility cloak. Brunhild is forced to go along with it, but really smells a rat. And this comes out

10 years later, she has been betrayed both in the fight in the competition to win her hand and actually in the wedding night. Siegfried snuck in his invisibility cloak and helped Gunter subdue his own wife. So as soon as is out in the open, Siegfried really becomes a very problematic character at court. The betrayal of Brunhelts comes out in the open. Brunel is not happy with how it's resolved. Hagen, who's the most powerful courtier at Worms, vows to take care of it by killing Siegfried, which is what he does.

So he murders Siegfried. Krimhill takes this very badly. Her husband is killed and she decides to avenge this against Hagen, the courtier, but also against her own brothers. So she sets out on this decades-long revenge spree, marrying King Attila the Han, who's known as Edsel in the poem, using his power to overcome the Burgundians,

inviting them to Edsel's court and then one by one slaying them, killing them off until they're old. She's a killer, didn't you? She's a killer. Well, that was very good. We're all set up for this tale, this 12th century tale. Thank you very much.

And it will unravel more as we go on. But can you remind us about the Nibelongers themselves? Who were they? Right. They started as dwarfish, surreal, supernatural people, I remember. So that was a promising start. In the first part of the plot, there are the sort of mysterious people,

the owner of the Nibelung treasure, which Siegfried wins over. historically it's a Carolingian family name that seems nothing to have nothing to do with the epic so we're not quite sure why they chose this name but in the second half of the story the Burgundians become known as the Niebelungs so it's one of the many instances in the plot

that just don't make sense and that keep us on our toes Are the Niebelungs the people who have the treasurer? Initially yeah but not for the second hell but just for the first half well yes the Burgundians steal the treasure so there is an argument that that's why they become known as the nivalungs and, yeah, it gets sunk in the rain where it's delays to this day waiting to be found.

Yes. So we have the treasure, and they change nature halfway through, as it were. Mark, what do we know when it was written and who wrote it? Yeah, this is going to be a lot less adventure-laden than what Bettina's just told us. We think, I stress we think, that the Nibolong and Littas we have it must have been written in the last decade of the 12th century, the 1190s, therefore, And we think at Passar, so in the southeast of the German-speaking world, right on the border between modern Bavaria and Upper Austria, right there on the Danube, and we think by a cleric at the court of the bishop, Bishop Volgir von Erla.

And I've said we think, because we don't have positive proof or hard evidence of that. But there are good reasons for thinking. So the first thing is that in the story, Passau is quite prominent as a place. It figures quite prominently as a sort of, way station on the route that various characters travel between the court of the Burgundians in Worms and the court of Attila Etzel in what's called Hunland, as it's known. The second thing is that the author appears to have had very good local knowledge because the description of the geographical location is very precise. The author says that Passau is the

place where the river Inn flows into the river Danube, mit flusset. So with a powerful current. And of course, geographically, topographically, that's absolutely true. And the third thing is that a bishop of Passau appears in the Nibylungen Lied. This is Bishop Pilgrim, he's called, and he features in the Nibberlungen Lied as the maternal uncle of Krimhilt and her brothers, the Burgundian kings. And Pilgrim is very probably based very loosely on an actual historical Bishop of Paso Pilgrim, the bishop in the late 10th century. but Bishop Piergroom would have actually been very prominent in the minds of an audience in Passau

in the late 12th century because they were cultivating his cult quite massively at that time It became a hit. It became a hit. In a medieval hit, there were literally hundreds of copies made. No, 37, I'm afraid. That's a lot. Sorry to support you.

But actually, for a work of this period, that's not bad. Genius added an art at the end of the same. Well, they must have thought that it needed... But still, let's say, let's take 37. 37, yeah. That's a good number for the time, isn't it? But certainly had a real popularity, as I understand it. It really did.

And, of course, it makes it into Scandinavian literature as well. You've got... You have the edict heroic lays of characters like Siegfried, Sigurth, as he's called, Gunnar, Edsela, Tilen and As Atli, and so on and so forth. They probably derive from an oral tradition, not directly from the Nibolung and Lidt, but you also have a saga prose tradition in Scandinavian literature in the later Middle Ages. And there it does appear that the authors of those Scandinavian prose versions were aware of the Nibbhulung and Liet.

So, yeah, the story really did travel. It certainly had legs. Probably there were oral traditions, oral heroic poems, going right the way back maybe to the 5th and 6th centuries, which commemorate, for example, the destruction of the Burgundians by the Huns. There is an historical core to that the Burgundians were a Germanic people who originally were settled around the Rhine at Vorms. They became a nuisance for the neighbouring Roman colonies. The Romans defeated and destroyed this Burgundian kingdom

with an army with Hanish mercenaries. That must be the historical event that is at the core of the events of the second part of the Nibberlung elite. After that, then, the Burgundians were resettled in what we now call Burgundy. Sarah, can we go back to the beginning to just refresh the listener's notion of who these Nibolungs are,

just before we set up on the next bit. Yeah, absolutely. So as Bettina said, the Nibolungs are mysterious shadowy figures. But actually, I think what's important for listeners to know is that in some ways they're not very important. We know this text is the Nibelung in need. But the Nibelongs, who in the first part of the text are these sort of supernatural, mythological, original owners of the treasure. But they don't really play any role.

They're not important. important figures. So who are there, these nibolongs who aren't important? Why have they got their name on the cover? Well, okay, some things to remember as with most medieval texts is that the title is something that is imposed on the text by later editors. So medieval texts tend not have titles. This text at the end, it says, this is this Nibolungen naught. So this is the torment, the fall, the sorrow of the Nibolungan. But at the end of the text, the Nibolungs, that's the name that's been given to the Burgundian court to King Gunter and his people. So by the end of the text, the second half of the text,

that refers to these Burgundians who are the people who we see in the second half of the text. So the Nibniblog has changed through it. When we meet them, they're dwarfish, supernatural creatures. Yes, but who really don't play a massive. And then by the end they're Burgundians. So it seems, I think, quite likely that that's a name that it's attached to the ownership of the treasure, to a certain extent. So if you get the treasure, you're a Nibol.

If you get the treasure you're a new belong. But I think what's important for readers to remember, really, is that actually it's... They are listeners, I'm really sorry, but they will be readers. What I think what's important for listeners to remember is that, is it actually who the... That's not what's most important about this story. And what is the most important thing?

For me, one of the things that's so important about this text is, or deceit, how deceit spirals out of control, how deceit leads to destruction. how all kinds of ways of behaviour that are determined by certain social codes and social norms can provoke, particularly if taken to extremes, can provoke terrible things. So it's like playing with the invisible cloak? Absolutely. Absolutely.

You know, exactly like that. So you play with an invisible cloak, which you think, hey, this is great, I've got a cloak. And I can make things happen by doing that. but then we're always reminded that by doing that you're deceiving somebody and by deceiving somebody you're potentially breaking or distorting certain social codes and social norms and then that makes everything go wrong you're talking about the background to what you're saying is that there's a sort of morality but the morality changes it isn't very strong is it no god no not at all

we do get we do get comments from the narrator in which he suggests that certain forms of behaviour are good and certain forms of behaviour are less good and this is a good thing to do and that's a bad thing to do. Who is this narrator? This narrator is an anonymous, omniscient first person voice. We refer to the Nibelungen poet,

I suppose. We don't know who that person was, as Mark was saying. The narrator, this is a written text, but the narrator frames the text as a moment of oral performance. So the narrator is obviously drawing on a whole range of oral traditions and legends in making this text.

So we, when we, when we read, this text, we are addressed by this narrator who guides to a certain extent, but not completely, the way in which we judge what happens and experience, what happens. There's some powerful men in this piece, but there are extraordinarily

stupendously powerful women. The two lead women in their way are terrifying. We have two main female characters. Brunhild, who is this sort of Amazonian queen of Iceland, or Eisenstein, yeah, this

land in the north and she has untold powers and untold physical strength and she is unmarried because in order to marry her male suitors have to beat her in various tasks of physical strength and wrestling yeah exactly and if they lose then she cuts their heads off and puts on a spike tough contest now she is defeated through trickery and brunhild kind of as bettina was saying realises that something is up so she's one and the other woman is the most beautiful woman in the world. Yes. And she, interestingly, Creamhild, so she's the sister of the king of Burgundy Gunter. And at the start of the text, she has power in that she's beautiful.

But otherwise she doesn't really have much agency. We don't see her doing. In the second half of the text, once her husband has died, she obtains a really interesting kind of agency and uses that agency in order to wreak revenge. It's revenge. Isn't it? It is revenge. Ferocious of revenge.

Ferocious revenge. But I think what's really interesting is the way she goes about it. She is shown to have an awareness of the sorts of agency that women can have. And it's very clear that women... Well, women can do different things to men. Men can go into battle. Men can rule in much more straightforward ways. Women have to strategize to make things happen differently.

And we see Creamheld exploiting. what she has as a woman. She exploits the fact that she's beautiful and that she can get married in order to marry a new powerful man who will help her wreak her revenge. So are these two, the back cubitina, and there are fantastical elements.

Now, can you tell us about those and see if we can... Yeah, there's lots of them. So Ziefred is a dragon slayer. There's a dragon in the story, and he bathes... Why does you slay the dragon? Not clear, because heroes do.

And then he bathes in the dragon's blood to get impenetrable skin. Also not clear why he gets the idea. Well, they're getting impenetrable skin It's quite something to happen He doesn't know that that has got to happen But then the leaf comes down from the tree It does, the lime leaf falls between his shoulder plates

Between the Harte And that's the one vulnerable place And that's where Hagen gets him in the end Because that doesn't get swordproof It's not covered in blood And therefore it remains just normal skin Not callous, scaly skin As he gets from the blood

So that's the dragon Then we've got the mermaids So when the Burgundians Cross the Danube to get to Edsel's court to meet their doom. The denube is very much flooded and they can't get across and Hagen steals the clothes of a bunch of mermaids

to get them to foretell the future and the mermaids tell them that they will all die in one of many instances of this foreshadowing. And then we've got, of course, the treasure, which is also magical. So it's countable. It's like an exact number of wagon loads having to travel three days back and forth,

but it also always exceeds counting. There's always some left over. even when Hagen sinks it in the Rhine, there's still loads left over for Krimel to like buy favours with. And it contains a wishing rod that would let you rule the whole world that the plot never makes much of for some reason. And it has that invisibility cloak, which allows Siegfried to become entirely invisible and Gunter to do the motions.

And some people think that the fantastical elements are remnants of older versions of the story that are kind of snuck into this modern courtly narrative. But I think that they're actually part of a strategy to always make us think about two separate contradictory things at the same time and really stretch our minds. We have to live in a word that's both very strategic and political, as Sarah was saying, you know, very realistic.

And then somehow these other elements are also part of it, and it's not commented on, and we kind of have to believe in them as well. Can I come to you again, Mark? How big a part does the treasure play? I've mentioned it as one of the many, or he's been mentioned as one of the many fantastical elements, but it seems to be reading through it was a superior,

and weightier matter altogether. Yeah, I mean, it does play a really important part. And I think you get to see the part that it plays, if you think of it in the context of gold and wealth, in the Nibberlung elite overall. I mean, anybody who reads it can't fail to notice these constant references to great courtly wealth luxury, you know, fine silks, gold brigades,

precious objects, gemstones, armor, weapons, so on and so forth. And all of that wealth and gold is not purely decorative. what you see, I think, in fact, is that wealth and gold circulate through the plot of the Nibbelung and lead. But there are two different kinds of wealth. The treasure is one of them. And these two different kinds, they kind of obey different logics, if you want to think about it like that. Because on the one hand, you've got this courtly wealth of fine clothes, gold, gemstones, jewelry. And that's always subject to a kind of logic of dissipation. It's there to be given away.

It's a way for the aristocratic elite just to show its status. And, of course, to make personal. political and social alliances. I mean, a really great example is very early on in the text. You've got this narrative of the character of Zekefleet is introduced. As a young man, you get the story of his upbringing. And, of course, a major rite of every young nobleman is his knight's accolade. He's made a knight.

And this is a kind of eight-day orgy of conspicuous consumption. You're told that, first of all, that Zekeflead is prepared with hundreds of companions. They're kitted out in all these splendid clothes. You're told that, of course, there's jousting and tournaments. and after every tournament, the jousting field is strewn with gemstones, which have become sort of loosened and knocked off the armour as the knights have been sort of knocking the stuffing out of each other. And after the whole festivities are over,

Ziegfried's parents give gold and horses and clothes to all of their guests. The narrator says, like there's no tomorrow, and the literal words, as if they weren't going to live a single day longer, so literally like there's no tomorrow. And so everyone goes home happy in a detail, and I think that the author must like is he mentions that even the minstrels who provided the entertainment didn't go away, empty-handed, everyone's happy.

So you've got that courtly wealth that follows this logic of dissipation. It's there to be given away. And the Nibblung and treasure is the opposite. It's got to be preserved. It's twice over in the story. It's stolen at exactly the point when someone is going to give it away. First of all, Ziegfried encounters the kings, Shiltung and Nibolung, the two kings of the Nibolung and with their men.

and they're planning to distribute the treasure and asks Siegfried to help. But he doesn't. What he does is he kills them and 12 giants and I think something like 400 heroes into the bargain, takes the treasure, hands it back to Alberich, the dwarf, the custodian. Under strict instructions, the treasure goes back inside the mountain where it always was.

There it is to stay. So that's the first kind of hoarding of the horde, if you like. I think the Nibberlung and Lee is trying to make a point with the treasure, which is that the author very shrewdly observes that Wealth is something ambivalent. On the one hand, it's socially constructive. You can make friends by giving it away. You can make people happy, the minstrels who go home with their reward.

But on the other hand, it's incredibly dangerous. You can buy armed forces to kill people with, and that has to be stopped. Sarah, can you, there seems to be a pool between the quarterly and the heroic. Can you address that? Yes, absolutely. I think in some ways we're coming back to what Bettina was saying, actually, when she was talking about the supernatural. and the fact that in this text there seem to be two kinds of worlds in a way,

one world in which strange things happen, one world in which you have dragons, in which you have giants, in which you have dwarves, and another world which is much more political, much more strategic, and which kind of circles around particular ruling courts, so like the one at Burgundy, but also Etzel's court in Hunland functions, in quite a similar. Huns, yes.

Yes, yes. Quite where this is isn't 100% clear, but it's on the other side of the Danube. And something often goes wrong when these two worlds meet. One thing that really seems to happen is that the courtly world sort of implodes when these characters who are more closely connected

with the supernatural, that's Siegfried and Brunhild, enter that world. Ziegfried and Brunheld are both characters who seem to belong to a different heroic kind of tradition. And we see that their assimilation into the courtly world in Voms doesn't quite work. Things go wrong. We see that first when Ziegfried actually arrives in Voms. And he doesn't behave in a courtly fashion.

No, he doesn't really know what to do. He sort of... He sort of turns up and says, you know, give me Creamhild. I want to marry her. And you don't really do that. And he sort of has to be assimilated gradually and we see things work out. The same happens with Brunhild. You know, she is assimilated, but she's...

assimilated through acts of terrible violence. Now then in the second half of the text, things change a little bit because the Burgundians, who are now called the Nibylungs, so Gunter and Hagen, his most important courtier and his brothers, and various others as well, when they go to Etzel's kingdom and when they know they're all going to be killed because of a prophecy that the mermaids tell them, when they go over the Danube, they begin to be described. in terms of embodying old-fashioned heroic characteristics. They begin to be described as a band of heroes. They begin to embody a certain way of hyper-masculine, hyper-violent behaviour,

but which is also based around very strong ethics of loyalty to each other, yes, and to their king and around a shared cause. Mark, what do you get at the reading the original that you don't get from a translation? You see that it's in verse, and the verse has a metre and a rhythm, which is really integral to the sense. So I'd get a bit technical, that the Nibberlungen lead is in long lines of verse, which have usually seven beats with a seizure at a break after the fourth. So the pattern is one, two, three, four, one, two, three.

So at the very first line, Unse is in Alten Mareen Wundersville-Gis said. And every Nibberlungen strophy, these lines are formed into strophies of four lines each, and the first three lines follow that pattern. The fourth line has an extra beat which gives the emphasis. So in the final line of the first trophy, von Kuehner reckon streets and mogetir no wonder, hear and sagin. And that lengthening gives emphasis and weight to what's said in the final line.

And that becomes crucial because in that final line very often the Nibnong and lead author puts these portents of doom. That's the place where they're put. So they round off a strophe with this extra beat. And just, maybe if I can just read one quatrain to give you an idea of, or give listeners an idea of how it works. This is the second strophe. This is the one that introduces Creamhill's character.

This beautiful girl grows up in Burgundy, and because of her, everyone is going to die. So you get from Creamhill to carnage in four lines. It wugs in Borgondon, then, a phil edelmagedin, that in all landen not shone as moch to see. Krimhild geheisen. She wa'art a shone weep. That last line, on that account, because of Krimhild being a beautiful woman,

many warriors were bound to lose their lives. And it's the rhythm and the meter that convey and reinforce these portents of doom. So that is something you get by reading it in the original that you feel the power of this verse. Yes. This question of the violence of women, would you like to take that on? So the people who are deceived and who are violated at the start are the women. So Krimelst starts off by saying she never wants to get married

because she has a bad dream about it and she knows it's going to end badly. And yet she's forced into marriage, however she does consent. Brunhild not so. And she is really sexually violated in her own. wedding bed. And that's the cause of a lot of the further conflicts. So although you have this heroic

masculine society that's in some way celebrated, it's never uncritically presented. The violence is always shown to be problematic. You can't really deal with an aggressor like Siegfried in a non-violent way. So the violence is necessary. Nobody really wants to be violent, but they have to be, right?

Why doesn't it have to be? Because you can't deal with somebody who is violent with courtly manners and just by kind of appeasing them, right? They try and it works to an extent. It works for 10 years and then it all erupts again. So there's a chain of violence that nobody quite wants and that sort of keeps that destiny flowing along

or keeps the plot flowing along and it ends badly for everyone. So ultimately you could see it as a pacifist text because it shows that the revenge never really satisfies anyone. It's a lot of talk of gold in the treasured. There's even more talk, I think, anyway. I haven't counted a word, a bit of blood. Yeah. They drink blood day, toast blood day, cause blood to have.

Do you want to talk about blood? I'd love to talk about blood. There's a lot of it again. And again, it's just so dramatic. It's visually dramatic. All these scenes of the blood trinkling down in the flowers, the heroes who are in the burning hole needing to quench their thirst with blood, that bath in dragon's blood again.

It's just a visually, really impressive image, and it brings home that violence. But it also allows us, again, to ask ethical questions, because it's really marking the boundary, literally the external limit between the hero and the monster, when secret bathers in the blood, he becomes, his own skin becomes scaly, like that of a dragon, right? And he starts, and the Bukhanians as well, when they drink this blood,

they start, like, losing all their manners, like, you know, you begin to wonder where it really is the difference between human and animal. Why do you think they wanted to shed so much blood in the poem, or so much so much bloodshed? To up the stakes. Mark, let's go back to the port. We're driving into this part one and part two. We're in, we're sort of in part two now, although some may not have, some may not quite have noticed, but we are, we're in part two. Can we drive it on?

Yeah, I think it's actually the hinge between the two parts is really interesting, I think, because this is the sort of adventure in which Krimad is persuaded to remarry after Siegfried's death. And I think it's really interesting because what it shows is precisely how it takes this really strong kind of addiction to your emotions or affect, like, you know, strong emotions like love, hate, grief which so consumed the characters that it destroys them and the society round about them. And that really drives the plot, and you get to see it really clearly at this hinge point, where in fact the plot's in the doldrums. You're told, you know, Ziegfrey's been murdered, three and a half years have gone by, the treasure has been stolen from Krimhild. Then she just decides to devote herself to Ziegfried's memory and her grief.

That's all she does is grieve, and she does it for 13 years, you're told. And it's that the plot's kind of run out. It's just marking time. There's nothing to do with this strong emotion, but just to say it goes on and on, year 13, year 14, year 15. What do you do? And to get the plot moving again,

what it seems to require is that for Krimel's very strong addiction, almost a monomania, to clash with another monomania. And that's provided in the shape and form of Rudiger, Etso's ambassador. He comes to the court with this offer of marriage. And his kind of monomania is that he's absolutely

single-mindedly focused on persuading Krimhild to marry, even though she doesn't want to. You get this clash of these two kind of monomanias, this absolute determination on Kremlin's part, never to marry again, only to grieve Siegfried, and this absolute determination on Rudiger's part to persuade her. And he succeeds, but in a way where you wonder actually whether in fact it's Kremlin who has won, because she receives Rudiger, all of her ladies-in-waiting dressed up in their courtly finery. This is one of these visual scenes that Bettina was mentioning. Krimel herself refuses to dress up. It says she wears her everyday clothes, so her widow's weeds. And Rudica can see that her dress is damp from the tears that she sheds for Ziegfried.

You know, this is now 17 years after his death. So she's there as this figure in this damp, drab frock. It just makes her resistance total. But finally, she agrees to the marriage, because in a private conversation, Rudiger promises that he will compensate her for any wrong that's ever been done to her in the past and she thinks, aha, excellent his wealth. That'll compensate for the treasure, I'll have a resource to get worries and get revenge. In a way she wins because she's found a new outlet for Project grief,

that's what it is. And it's that clash of these two emotions that gets the plot moving again. Sarah, in this world where people change so radically from being won't, is it possible to talk in any consistent way of heroes and villains? No, not really. And I think this goes back to that question of morality.

The most striking kind of difficulty around heroes and villains is this relationship between Kremeld and Hagen who is her sort of turns out to be her arch of Hagen, to put him back on the world. Of course, yeah. So Hagen is Gunter, King of Burgundy, Kremhild's brother.

And Hagen is his kind of chief courtier. He's in some way related to the Burgundian family. he's a very important figure. We know that he has a great heroic past. I mean killing people? Yes, but also performing great deeds of valour. We don't know what those are necessarily.

And we also know that he knows a lot, Hagen. He knows about Siegfried's past. He knows all the characters in the text. He seems to have relationships with them, although we're never quite sure what those relationships are. Now, Hagen is the person who kills Ziegfried. in the first part of the text. And in some ways in the first part of the text,

Kremehild seems to be our goodie. She's our beautiful princess, you know, married to the hero. Hagen is the man who murders the hero. But we've already seen that actually murdering the hero isn't an unproblematic act of evil. You know, we've been talking about the fact that Ziegfried, the only way that Ziegfried can be dealt with is through an act of violence. In the second half of the text, their characters sort of get. switched round in some ways.

Creamhild is wreaking this terrible revenge, and the narrator refers to her as a valandina or a she devil. Hagen becomes, is described regularly as a great hero and a very noble figure, and his loyalty to his king and his cause is often praised. Now, some critics, particularly in the past, have interpreted this contradiction by saying, well, this text is splicing together to mythic traditions. To a certain extent that's true. You know, this is a text that splices together these traditions.

But the fact, I think it does it a disservice to say, well, therefore, there are contradictions. Because this is a poet who's very clever. And I think he's interested in the shades of grey that always exist in human behaviour. When it comes out where it appears of intense Christian activity in many ways, Is this in any way Christian, Bettina? Well, it is critical of violence, so it's Christian in that way.

But people always think that the church had so much power in the Middle Ages that it dominated everything, at least in what we now call Europe. In this text, it's really more about values of heroism associated with the fictional literature with the epic. So loyalty to your Lord, loyalty to your family, especially the male members of the family, and this embracing of death, this fearless willingness to sacrifice yourself and to die. So that's the values that keep coming out, but they're also shown to be limited in the way that Sarah was describing.

It's not that the ones who are like the most gang-ho heroes are the goodies in a moral sense. They just follow one particular code of behaviour and that's shown to be as limited as the kind of courtly code of restraint and manners and being kind and forthcoming. So to be clear, for Isaac, anyway, you don't think there's a strong, obvious Christian theme in this? No, you'd think so because it was probably really really. written at the bishops court, but they were rulers in the end. They were members of the aristocracy. They were interested in power as much as everyone else. Okay. Mark, how did the first audiences cope with this, especially the fact that there's not a happy handling for a hero? Yeah. In fact, nobody's left in the end, but still, we can

come with to that. I mean, we get, of course, we've got no direct evidence for how audiences reacted. We just can't know that. But I guess we can glean a certain amount by looking at the early manuscripts. I think that we mentioned earlier, didn't we? To your great disappointment, there are 37 manuscripts. I'm so sorry that is actually a very good number. That's a good hall for it. It's a very good hall. Disappointment of the day, but

I'll put up with it. But not a bad number for a text of this period, so 37 we'll go with. And of course as is the way with all medieval manuscript texts, they vary, they transmit variant versions of the text. No two manuscripts are exactly the same.

But broadly the manuscripts that we have fall into three groups, they transmit three major versions of the text, which we call A, B and C, because medievalists don't have much imagination, so we just call them A, B, and C. And the C version is really interesting, because it's early. In fact, the oldest manuscript of the Nibberlung elite that we have, which is from about 1225, is from the C family. And that's a text that suggests that audiences wanted a less morally ambiguous version of the story. The tendency of the sea version is that it exculpates Krimhild. There's even a strophi in which the narrator says, Krimhild never wanted all this carnage. She would

have been content with just killing Hagen. The rest of it, you know, she didn't want. But she killed a lot of people. You've given the story where you might as well finish it. But that's, and the strophy goes on to say, it was all down to Hagen. It was the devil who instigated all this mass killing, where the devil is quite ambivalent, whether it means the devil or whether it's another way of describing Hagen. And so Krimhild is exculpated, all she wanted was Hagen's death in revenge for Ziegfried, nothing more. Hagen is made to appear consistently the villain.

He's always given the epithets der ungetrueva, man, the traitorous man, or the treacherous one, at every opportunity where other versions just have a neutral description. You know, his name was Hagen von Tronegger, his full name, or he was Gunter's vassel. the sea version inserts the traitorous man and so what you can see is there definitely was a desire for a version of the story which just becomes a very simple moral fable of an innocent woman wronged by a wicked and villainous man who possibly is in the kind of thrall of the devil

I mean it's interesting that one of the manuscripts of that sea group even gives it a title and as Sarah said the titles are often a modern imposition but sometimes medieval manuscripts do contain a title one of them actually calls it the book of Krimhild. She becomes the central focus and she's the woman wronged. Can you tell us, Sarah, come back to you again, how the manuscript which seemed to flourish in all the 37 Gophers that we've been talking about at that time,

disappeared, but how was rediscovered? Yeah, so the New Belong and Leeds, as you've been saying, sort of disappeared really at the end of the Middle Ages and was rediscovered in the mid-18th century. And then shortly after that, excerpts and some adapted excerpts were published by Johann Jacob Bodmer, who was a Swiss author and an academic, and was a really important figure in the sort of rediscovery of medieval German literature. And this was a time the late 18th, early 19th century, when interest in medieval literature was growing across the whole of Europe, influenced and shaped by romanticism and also by nationalism,

which was a really key movement in Europe at the time. So there was an interest in medieval literature, both as an expression of something natural, something kind of earthy and mythic in that sense, but also as being representative of a nation, representative of a people. So Bodmer described the Nibberlungen lead as the German Iliad. and from then on, through the 19th century,

it took on this sort of nationalist characteristic, which then in later years caused all kinds of problems. Yes. Bettina, how has this particular story been reworked? Let's start with the filmmakers. Yeah, as Sarah was saying, the trend continues. So it came to represent the German nation. It became the German Iliad, the German national epic,

harking back to a glorious past. And there's a deep contradiction in this in that both Siegfried became the archetypal German and his enemies, the Burgundians, became the archetypal German. So Siegfried was the one who was stabbed in the back, literally betrayed. We've got the first big film version from 1924, Fritz Lang's Nibelung, in which he's betrayed by this Alberich, who's an anti-Semitically portrayed character,

the owner of the Nibelung treasure. But then we also have the Burgundians who are sticking together loyally. and are fighting till the bitter end, and that becomes portrayed as a typically German value. Shockingly, the Nazis, of course, loved this and, you know, made a lot of it. There's an infamous speech by Herman Guring, where he encourages the troops outside Stalingrad to fight like the Nibelong.

So they really put the Nibelongli to work. The death of the last man. But shockingly, this continued as early as the 60s again. So after the Second World War, this nationalist appropriation was not dead, But Harald Reineer made another two-part epic film in which Hagen is portrayed as a sort of Hitleresque character, a little side-parting, little moustache, and the Germans are misled by him. But then they actually managed to exculpate themselves just do their loyalty in fighting bravely together. So the logic is by fighting the Second World War bravely, Germans have already redeemed themselves.

So it has a really horrific, again, nationalist message. When does Wagner fit into this? Well, some of the anti-Semitic portrayal of Alvarich goes back to Wagner's operas and Lange picks up these elements in his version. Then we get even later retelling. So in 2004, we have a two-part film version in which the battle is this time bit of, it's a sort of post-reunification story. So the battle is between a sort of Northern European Alliance and the East, the former Eastern Bloc. And then we get a Quentin Tarantino, international film version, Django Unchained, which features a black scene. Siegfried. So he reclaims this nationalist myth for a more international audience, going back to the

idea of an underdog fighting for, so Siegfried is a freed slave fighting for his wife, Brunhilde, who is still a slave? So that then raises the issues. Is violence ever justified if it's against slave owners, you know, if it's clearly for a morally good cause? Sarah, we're towards the end now. What's the status of the poem today? It's an interesting one, isn't it? I think Bettina's already pointed to the fact that it still has slightly controversial status in Germany today. It's a text that is read and taught really widely in the German speaking world and is also still the subject of creative adaptation and creative reinterpretation. But these new interpretations of the Niebel Long and lead are interested in the medieval text and its reception. So the newest

reworking of the text are interested in actually the way in which the Nebel Long and Lead are interested in, actually, the way in which the new belonging need can be used to sort of tell a history of Germany, can be used to sort of tell a history of the way in which the medieval is sort of adapted and retold throughout time. There have been a couple of new reworkings recently by some major literary figures, particularly Ulrich Dresna and Felicitas Hopper, two major female writers working in the contemporary German-speaking world. And they're both interested in the mutability of the text, but also in what we've been talking about, this kind of gapiness of the medieval text. It's openness and the way in which that openness makes it kind of peculiarly suited to adaptation,

to exertion, to the fact that you can, you know, as Petina was saying, as the Nazis did, you can say, okay, Ziegfried is an ideal figure, but actually also his enemies were also ideal figures, the way in which you can take certain images or moments out of the text. and use just them. Can we have a final word from you, Bettina? Yeah, it's also a tourism magnet. In Vaughan, it's big business. They have a festival, they have a drama, every day.

They have like festivals. They have two big museums. So it's something that is part of the lived local culture. And, yeah, a tourism business. Well, thank you very much. Thank you, Bettina. Bill Hauer, Sarah Bowden, and Mark Kinkar, and our studio engineer, Jackie Marjoram,

next week. It's the Irish rebellion of 1798, including Wolfton, the United Irishmen, French invasions and the Act of Union. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What didn't you say that you wanted to say? Petina, why am I start with you?

I think I wanted to say more about the narrative innovation, that it really keeps, it's almost like virtual reality. It always keeps an alternative version of the plot in your head. It keeps saying, yes, it will all end badly. But it could have gone differently. If only so-and-so hadn't done this, it would have gone better. So it's like it's a real exercise in flexibility of thinking by making you think through different repercussions of the narrative

and constantly keeping virtual options in your head. So it's really innovative as a literary work. Can I come in on that? Because one of the things that we sort of talked about is the way in which the narrator tells you all the time what's going to happen. You know, right from the start, he says, everyone's going to die, that bit that Mark read out. And that happens again and again. And there's this really, but there's this really key moment of prophecy, kind of in the middle of the text, with the

mermaids, where Hagen steals the clothes of the mermaids. And the mermaids actually give him two prophecies, which may or may not contradict each other. The first mermaid says, well, if you cross the Rhine, you're all going to get great honour. The second mermaid says, well, if you cross the Rhine, you're all going to die, except for the chaplain who will go back home to Vons. And the mermaids, they say, well, actually, the first prophecy was a lie. Now, Hagen kind of tests these prophecies out by crossing, as he crosses the Rhine, he throws the chaplain overboard and tries to kill him with an orb, but the chaplain manages to swim back to the other side. So what we see in this moment, in the way in which Hagen tests the prophecy, is that even people

saying, well, this is going to happen, isn't certain, that there's always that moment of doubt that you've always actually got a little bit of control over what's happening, and that there are always some kind of options and alternatives. Yeah, I think that's, I mean, to pick up on that, there's also that amazing episode in the very first adventure, in fact, where Krimod has his prophetic dream. You know, she dreams of a falcon that is torn to pieces by two eagles, and she tells the dream to her mother who interprets it and says, you know, the falcon is your husband, you know, who will be destroyed by two male enemies. And Krimhild says, bah, nonsense, she says, because I will never love a man.

It's really not quite clear whether what she means is the dream doesn't apply to me, because I've already decided I'm not going to do love, or that's the consequence well in that case. I'll have nothing to do with men. I mean, her mother then replies and says, you know, what a strange thing for a girl to say. You know, don't say that, darling. You know, love is lovely. A girl cannot be happy except through the love of a man, the mother says. But again, you got that real sense that the prophecy need not be fulfilled, the character could be so headstrong that they just wouldn't do what the prophecy lays down for them. I mean, you're right. There's always these hints at ways in which it didn't have to happen thus, which I think shows that it's

not oral heroic poetry or traditional heroic poetry anymore. We're a stage on in this literary world where there's this distance where you can actually get detached and say, but does it need to be like that? Animal? Yeah. I think we always need to think about the materiality. So this is written on animal skin, right? This is parchment. So again, as a cultural product that, you know, in part talks about animals, talks about monsters. It's already an act of supremacy as well. And then it's not read out. It's performed, right? It's a song. It was probably recited with some sort of melody or musical accompaniment, right? So that gives us an entire new dimension of richness as well. If you see it in that live situation where, you know, each reciter, each performer might have

given it a different spin, might have played up the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, humor a bit with the bit where Brunhael hangs Gunter on the nail in the wall in the wedding night when she doesn't want to sleep with him. So, you know, like you can read the same story in the same way that each of the 37 manuscripts is different. Also each performance situation will have been different. Staying with you, but you know, what's it like as a poem? Well, it has that quite strict stanza form. So Heinrich Heineau is a well-known modern writer describes it as a language of stone slabs, chunks, quadren, I think he says. So it's like it's really blocky.

Every stanza is a self-contained unit. Every chapter, which they're called adventure, Aventure is a self-contained unit. And you never get that flow. That's the trademark of authoritarian romances. So it's very much situation by situation, really memorable visual details, whereas the sort of psychological flow is really secondary.

Yeah, this is, I mean, we've already sort of spoken about alliteration and some of the other techniques used, but this is a poet who's also working very carefully with that form and thinking about, can I say in a line, what can I say in four lines? How can I make the connections between those lines? How can I make this a unit, as you're saying, a slab, but also part of the whole? And really playing very carefully with, you know, word order, with exactly what might rhyme.

And so there's a lot you can do, a lot of close reading that you can do, a lot of word painting and that sort of thing as well. Yeah, it's got this grandeur, I think, through this repetition of formulas, this metrical repetition, this underlining of, the fourth line all the time that, as I say, gives this very different sound world from the courtly romance, and which, as I must have sounded archaic and exotic to listeners. I mean, it's, it's not like anything, it's not like anything else that you would hear. It's not even like traditional heroic poetry, which is actually an alliterative metre, like Beowulf, for example, or the edict poems. It's completely sui generis in that respect. Absolutely. I want to talk a little

bit actually about the death of Creamhild at the end of the text, because we've been talking a bit about what women can do. We've been talking a lot about violence. And she wreaks revenge, not by killing people herself, but by having people killed, by making people fight. At the end of the text, she finally kills Hagen with Siegfried's sword. She actually wields it herself and kills him. And the response to that is remarkable. We have quite a peripheral figure, an old hero called Hildebrandt, who's actually fighting on Creamhill's side, so he's against Hagen. But he's outraged that such a great hero like Hagen has been killed at the hands of a woman von Enis Wibers Hendon, I think he says.

And so he then kills Kremhild himself. Mit swearing swartzwank. We've got this wonderful moment of alliteration where you can hear the sword kind of whizzing through the air. Can you say that again? It sounds good. Sweer and sweat swank, I think it is, isn't it? Yeah. I think that's right.

and it's great, isn't it? But he doesn't just kill her. He hacks her to pieces. She is totally... So the end of the text, really, is the dismemberment of Creamhild. The sense that her actions, at least in the eyes of Hildebrandt,

who sort of represents this old heroic tradition, are so horrifying that the only thing to do is to totally dehumanise her. I think we're coming back actually to what you're saying, Bettina, about that fine line between the animal and the human. that the only thing we can do with Cream Held is is to sort of chop her up to completely dehumanise her

and force her out of this space. Yeah, and she never has that satisfaction. She finally kills her, which she wanted for 26 years, and then she's hacked her pieces. She gets like one minute. The moment. The moment after. And then it stops.

Yeah. The end. Do you want to come in again? Yeah, I mean, this is, yeah, this, I don't know how I can. Start again at the beginning. I can possibly kind of compete with that. I was thinking, another thing I think is really fascinating. I enjoy is this kind of irony that the narrator really loves.

I mean, this sense of dramatic irony, which can be, well, not so much delicious as malicious irony. I mean, there's a trophy that I absolutely love where the Burgundians, Kremehose relatives have accepted the invitation. They're coming to Etzel's court where, of course, carnage awaits. They don't, well, they've got an idea because, of course, they've had the, you know, they've had the mermaid's prophecy. but Etzel is completely clueless and there's a wonderful strophy in which

Krimhild having received the news that her relatives are coming goes to the king and says and the line is we are right in my kliche, Frau Krimhild dosprach how completely sweetly Lady Krimhild then said and she says to her husband my relatives are coming, my kinsmen are coming

everything I ever wanted is now going to come to pass And then the dramatic irony is that Etzel is clueless. He says, that's wonderful, he says. I only wish I got the same pleasure of my relatives. I don't get to see them often enough. And he's completely, you know, he's completely sort of guileless. But it is this malicious irony at his expense, which again just shows this sense of humour,

which is slightly very black. Yeah. But also, again, this sort of sophistication of the text as well, that it really enjoys these moments of irony at certain characters' expense. it can get a distance from them. And it enjoys the suspense as well, doesn't it? Because we know, you know, everyone's going to die.

Then we have the prophecy, and then we have Haagen, making sure the prophecy comes true. But then the text takes ages, starting things. We have all these false starts to the slaughter. You know, it nearly happens here. Then it nearly happens here. Then it nearly happens here. And we think, oh, oh, it's all going to kick off.

And it doesn't quite kick off. And in the end, it only kicks off with a really horrible act of violence towards a child. where, you know, I think it says, well, Creamhilder knew that things couldn't start in any other way, and she has her and Etzel's child brought into the feast, and Hagen has already been provoked, and Hagen ends up killing the child. And it's the killing of the child

that then forces Etzl and his men to get involved in this situation, which actually previously wasn't their situation to get involved in at all. But by Hagen killing the child, it almost seems that that's the only way that Kremhild and Hagen know they've got to kick this thing, off and that's the way that they managed to make it happen in this really unpleasant situation. Can I come back to something

you said, Bettina, earlier on, which was it was performed? How is it performed and where was it performed? Again, it's conjecture, but we think, we imagine court feasts you know, festivities, occasions in which storytellers, minstrels were performing entertaining tales

to music for an audience who was part of a sort of bigger crowd. So but that kind of explains this detail that the poet's always very keen on saying at court festivities, the minstrels didn't go home empty-handed. But it's true, yeah, it probably was performed, it probably was intoned or sung as Bettina was saying,

but what's also interesting is that for a courtly audience is a totally different sound world to what they're used to from the courtly romance, which was also read aloud and performed. Because you've got this formulaic diction, which sounds very archaic, you've got this metre, this strophic form. It must be a completely different sound world

which evokes a kind of oldness, which is really different, say, from the modernity. What for them is the modern kind of sound world of the courtly romance. I mean, it must have been quite a strange experience, almost a kind of, you know, dealing with a kind of exotic strangeness. How comprehensible to German speakers today

is the text that came out in the 12th century? More comprehensible than people think. It's a bit like reading Shakespeare. It's kind of, you know, you have to get over the strangeness. but grammatically it's still the same. Once you get used to the regular sound changes, it's fine. Most modern Germans will read it in modern translation, but I think it is still accessible.

Thank you very much. I think I see the producer pouring at the door. Would anyone like tea or coffee? That brings you a day. Thanks to bring your standard with. Tea, please. Coffee. Coffee. It's a glass of water for amazing.

Thank you very much. That was terrific. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. quite too. Hello, I'm Brian Cops. And I'm Robin Inns, and we have a new series of the Infinite Monkey Cage, and on this series, we have been across the world, southern hemisphere and northern hemisphere, and we've been talking about what we've learned from COVID with Dame Sarah Gilbert. We've been to Los Angeles, NASA Jet Portland Laborati with Conan O'Brien. And we've been dealing with the science of aging. Very, very dear to your heart, of course, isn't it? Because we need to explain why you look like that. And we'll end up with our Christmas special with Tim Minchin on The Science of Wine. If you'd like to us, the Infinite Monkey Cave, we're on BBC Sound. now you can in fact listen to the whole series we'll also probably deal with the nature

of stars, the death of the universe, the birth of the universe and everything in between. In order to make a cow, you must first create a universe. You don't make a cow, do you? Can you make a cow? Can we make a cow from scratch? You're now nice again.