The Nibelungenlied

Everybody loves a medieval Germanic epic. Hell, whether you’re a 19^th century Bavarian opera writer getting ready to sow the cultural seeds of the Nazi party, or just a regular Joe who likes to spend his spare time reading about slaying, you’ll surely find something to entertain you in these grand, guttural tales of armour-clad glory. And most likely you’ll find it in the Nibelungenlied, which covers the field of German epics to pretty much the same degree that the country of Australia covers the Australian continent. Unlike the country of Australia, however, the Nibelungenlied is the work of a literate man – a literate man with a hankering to write something really violent.

My own love affair with the Nibelungenlied began when Deborah gave me a copy as an enticement to improve my German. This would have been a fine plan except that she got me the English translation, entirely defeating the purpose, and soon any thought of profiting linguistically from my reading experience was forgotten in the tumult of great Germanic warriors slaying, and other equally Germanic warriors being slain.

Indeed, you might say that slaying plays rather a large role in the Nibelungenlied, to the exclusion of other, lesser devices for plot development. You can get a fairly complete understanding of the story simply by browsing over the table of contents, where you’ll find chapter titles like, “How Rüdiger was slain”, “How Dietrich’s warriors were slain to a man”, and (spoiler alert!) “How Dancwart slew Bloedelin.” In fact, of the last eight chapters, where the real bloodletting really gets started, only two titles do not contain some conjugation of the word “slay”: “How they threw the corpses from the hall” and “How the Queen had the hall burned down.” Resist the temptation to skip over these “chick lit” chapters, though: I promise there’s still plenty of slaying for readers who take the trouble to find it!

Given that the story is basically comprised of 50 or so unpronounceable names arranged in slayer-slayee pairs, how did the anonymous author manage to spin it out into something that takes many hours to read, and probably as many weeks to recite to the accompaniment of harps in the ol’ mead hall? As far as I can tell, it’s through the following three literary flourishes, which any modern author would do well to learn.

1. Be obsessively, childishly emphatic.

One of the main problems with non-medieval-Germanic-epic writing is that it leaves so much room for doubt and speculation, which can shake the very foundations of a reader’s confidence. Take the following trembling excuse for an assertion, from Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice.

"Elizabeth had mentioned her name to her mother on her ladyship’s entrance."

If your mind is caught in the taught grip of uncertainty right now, you’re not alone. Is this the first clue the mother ever had about her ladyship’s identity, or is it possible that she already knew? Can we safely assume that the name Elizabeth told her mother was the right one? For that matter, what is her ladyship’s name? Short of turning back the page to check, there is absolutely no way to be sure.

Now, put your troubled mind at ease with the medieval German equivalent.

"King Liudegast told Siegfried that his name was King Liudegast. Thus did Siegfried learn the name of his adversary, King Liudegast."

That is a statement worth stating!

You can find the same cut-glass clarity throughout the book. In Chapter 16, How Siegfried was slain, Siegfried is fatally stabbed in the back by his treacherous friend Hagen. A modern writer might carelessly leave it to the reader to figure out how Siegfried felt about all this in his dying moments. Amused? Bored? Thirsty? A man could waste valuable time pondering that chestnut.

But the author of the Nibelungenlied spares us the trouble. “Siegfried was enraged” he clarifies. And then – just in case any reader should think that Siegfried was being a bit of a drama queen about the whole thing – adds, “as indeed he had good cause to be.”

I dare anyone to find so much as a shadow of ambiguity in these words.

2. Spend a lot of time talking about sewing jewels onto clothes.

Mussolini is supposed to have declared, “War is to the male what childbearing is to the female.” Judging from the occupations of the sexes as portrayed in the Nibelungenlied, a medieval Germanic Mussolini would have been better understood proclaiming that war is to the male what attaching gemstones to fabric is to females, since, aside from mourning their slain menfolk, this is pretty much all women do. The author describes the entire stone-stitching process in detail near the start of the book, and then, inexplicably, does exactly the same thing 30 pages later. He restrains himself for the rest of the narrative, but continues to remind us every couple of pages that the clothes everyone is wearing do indeed have gems sewn onto them, keeping the reader in a state of fraught suspense lest he launch into yet another lecture about how this came to be the case.

As to the question of why exactly the author feels the need to talk so much about the finery of the clothing in his story, the text itself provides the answer:

"The ladies wore magnificent brocades and altogether many fine robes so that a man who nursed ill will against any must have been a half-wit."

In other words, the symptoms of severe mental retardation include not only the failure to appreciate fine clothing, but also the holding of any negative feelings whatsoever towards the wearers of fine clothing. So, the narrator would have to be stupid not to devote a third of the book to discussions of fabric and jewels – quite literally.

3. Repeatedly blurt out the story’s ending in advance.

Good authors foreshadow. But great authors spell out the finale in pedantic detail every couple of paragraphs, so that even a shrewd reader who skips over the table of contents will have no more surprises waiting for him by the time he reaches the end of the first chapter. It’s all the fun of watching a movie with an annoying child who has seen the movie before and can’t restrain himself from showing off his superior knowledge, except that the child in question is an 800-year-old German minstrel who can’t be bribed or threatened or distracted away.

And by blurting out the ending, I’m not talking about putting in cryptic prophesies in the mouths of oracles, Oedipus Rex-style. Such predictions generally leave at least some room for uncertainty as to exactly how the predicted events will come to pass: a thoughtless oversight, according to the standards of our good minstrel. In Chapter 16 – which already bears the title “How Siegfried is slain”, remember – the author can’t restrain himself from rattling off the name of Siegfried’s future murderer and his cause of death a full three times in the first two paragraphs. And these spoilers are around the 32^nd, 33^rd, and 34^th explicit descriptions of the event since the start of the book.

Thus, when the author finally summons some up some dramatic flair in the following paragraph, letting Siegfried’s wife rail on about some dream she has had about flowers dyed in blood getting trampled by pigs, it’s a bit hard to savour the grim foreboding of the moment. Sure, it’s nice of our minstrel to try to set the scene a little, but he has been proclaiming to us for the entire book exactly what the dream means. Using subtle foreshadowing at this point is like making a public declaration to your friend a year in advance that you will be throwing a surprise party for her, sending weekly reminders that describe the surprise party in every particular, meeting her on the day of the party wearing sandwich boards that say “I am Taking You to a Surprise Party”, quickly briefing her once again on the essentials of the event – and then, one minute before going with her into a house festooned with giant “Surprise” banners, remarking knavishly “Why, I can’t think where all our friends have gotten to!”

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All that being said, I heartily recommend this book to everyone. Where else can you encounter euphemisms for killing that include "meting out pitiful wages" and "playing rough tunes", or listen to Kriemhild brag to Brunhilde that Kriemhild's husband raped Brunhilde on her wedding night? Short of actually visiting Germany, the Nibelungenlied is about as close as you can get to that simpler, more slaying-oriented world that we've spent the last 800 years trying to leave behind.