SOURCE: “The Reconciliation in the Nibelungenlied,” German Life and Letters, Vol. XXX, No. 2, January, 1997, pp. 138-49.

[In the following essay, McLintock explains that the Nibelungenlied is best approached aesthetically, for its literary qualities.]

Recent years have seen numerous interpretations of the Nibelungenlied. Scholars have sought to elicit its ‘meaning’ or ‘message’ and imagined they could divine the author's ‘intention’: he was contrasting ‘pagan’ and ‘Christian’ values, deploring revenge, finding fault with old-style ‘demonic’ heroism, or demonstrating the baleful effects of lay arrogance. Some of these readings, one suspects, would have been incomprehensible to the poet and his audience; others perhaps capture attitudes that they would have shared. Most tend to reduce the work to an exemplum; the epic, however, refuses to be compassed by neat interpretative schemes.¹ The poet was an artist, not a thinker, and if we wish to appreciate his poem we must approach it aesthetically. Admittedly we must beware of investing the word ‘poet’ with anachronistic connotations: the composer of the Nibelungenlied arranged and presented stories that belonged to his public; he did not appropriate them as a modern poet appropriates his material, or, indeed, as Gottfried or Wolfram appropriated theirs.²

What we admire in the epic is not its moral, social, or psychological insights, but its literary qualities—the power of its individual scenes and the grandeur of the total architecture to which they contribute. An essential feature of this architecture, obvious even to a reader who knows nothing of source-study, is the balance between the two main parts of the work, the first treating of Sivrit's death, the second of ‘der Nibelunge nôt’. Each half deals with a breach of faith; in the first it is that of Gunther with his friend Sivrit, in the second that of Kriemhilt with her brothers. The persecutors of the first part become the persecuted of the second. Yet the work is not a simple story of crime and punishment. Right and wrong, justice and criminality, are equally distributed, at least in version B, which is commonly believed to be closest to the work of the Last Poet. The Burgundian kings, who assented to the treacherous murder of Sivrit, defend themselves with dazzling heroism against a treachery equal to that of which they themselves had been guilty, displaying exemplary loyalty to each other and to their vassal Hagen.

The poet achieves this balance between the two halves, not allowing the work to degenerate into a mere story of revenge, partly by means of an important bridge-passage, Aventiure 19. In this section Kriemhilt is reconciled with her brothers, in particular Gunther; her perfidy in the second part arises from her violationg this solemn reconciliation, as the poet clearly states later (str. 1394). From now on she is justified only in pursuing Hagen for the murder of Sivrit. The same âventiure tells also of the theft of Kriemhilt's Hoard, to which Gunther gives his assent, and of its sinking in the Rhine. Not until str. 1742 does Kriemhilt learn of her brothers' complicity in the sinking of the Hoard, and from then on she has a new grievance against them, though hardly one commensurate with the vengeance she exacts. The two halves are thus kept discrete, but linked. Kriemhilt's grievance against Gunther over his part in her husband's murder is formally set aside, to be replaced by another, over the theft of the Hoard, at a later stage. It may be said that Gunther dies for the Hoard, as he had done in the earliest version of the story, though the final defiant refusal to reveal its whereabouts has passed to Hagen. Kriemhilt is never reconciled with Hagen. To her grievance against him for the murder of Sivrit is added another, for the stealing of the Hoard, which she is led to believe to be Hagen's work alone. These two grievances she herself links in her final confrontation with him. We may say, then, that each half is concerned with a wrong done to Kriemhilt by her brothers, and that the second half tells of her perfidy towards them. The two halves are linked by the Hoard, which comes to Burgundy as a consequence of the reconciliation, the suone, and is immediately stolen, ostensibly by Hagen; the whole work is unified by the enduring enmity between Kriemhilt and Hagen.

Such a reading of the work, based upon its structure, is of course open to objection. It might be held that Gunther is relatively unimportant by comparison with Hagen, and that our analysis accords him undue prominence.³ True, he is apparently indecisive, manipulated at will by Hagen, and he does follow Hagen's advice over the murder of Sivrit and the theft of the Hoard. However, he alone resolves upon the two momentous journeys which determine the action—the journey to Prünhilt and the journey to Etzel. Indeed, the latter is undertaken against Hagen's advice. Gunther also disregards Hagen's advice when he allows Kriemhilt to marry Etzel. Ductile though he appears, nothing can be done without his assent. The killing of Sivrit is planned and executed by Hagen, but the plan cannot go ahead until the King has dropped his opposition and shown interest in its feasibility (str. 874). It is true that Hagen proposes the reconciliation in order to get the Treasure to Burgundy, and that he subsequently steals it and sinks it in the Rhine, but Gunther arranges the reconciliation and later agrees to the robbery, while the proposal to sink the Treasure in the Rhine comes from his brother Gernot.

Hagen appears throughout as a ruthless man of action, manipulating others, untroubled by moral scruples, scornful of dissimulation (except for practical ends), clear-sighted in his assessment of political and military situations. An admirer of his type might call him ‘ein Realpolitiker mit dem Mut zum Verbrechen’. Gunther, by contrast, is afflicted by conscience whenever he is tempted to ignoble or criminal action, and he does not enjoy the triumph such action brings him. He begins to sorrow (str. 870) when Hagen holds out the prospect of aggrandizement through the liquidation of Sivrit, and he weeps (str. 991 f) together with those ‘die iht triuwe heten’ over the dying friend whom he has betrayed. With Gunther's tears we may conrast Hagen's exultation and his incomprehension of the general grief (str. 993). When Hagen suggests depriving Kriemhilt of the Hoard, the King has an access of squeamishness, but the vassal, knowing his master, is ready with the well-tried specific: ‘Lât mich den schuldigen sîn’ (str. 1131).

Hagen is Gunther's chief counsellor and chief executive; and we are inclined, since his counsel is so often heeded and its execution invariably efficient, to assign to him the principal blame for the crimes he commits. Yet, while he must bear the guilt for murdering the ferryman and the infant Ortliep as well as for trying to murder the chaplain, one might dispute the extent of his culpability in the two crimes for which Kriemhilt pursues him. Even if we were to regard Gunther and Hagen as equal partners in the murder of Sivrit, as is suggested by the two eagles, the two boars and the two mountains of Kriemhilt's dreams, it is arguable that less blame attaches to the man who, without thought of right and wrong, devised and executed the crime than to the one who gave the signal in full knowledge of the guilt that he was thereby incurring. The narrator (str. 876) seems to view the murder as Gunther's crime, implying that, by following his vassal in a course of monstrous treachery, he was violating a principle of kingship; and the dying Sivrit upbraids Gunther (str. 992) as the one who has done the harm. There is no exculpation for a king who is capable of resolute action but chooses to follow immoral advice. U. R. Mahlendorf and F. J. Tobin are surely right to insist that he is ‘by law a criminal and a murderer’,⁴ and Roswitha Wisniewski to see in him an example of the dominus sine virtute or the rex iniquus.⁵

Yet such a view of the morality of the work, it might be objected, is legalistic and facile. To say that after the suone there is no casus belli until Kriemhilt learns that her brothers ordered the sinking of the Hoard is to ignore the fact that they deny her justice by shielding her arch-enemy. Moreover, the audience is not kept in ignorance of their machinations and is bound to sympathize with her. Gunther fatuously believes in the efficacy of the reconciliation,⁶ and only Hagen seems to know how things really stand (str. 1457-64). On the other side too there are mitigating circumstances. The killing of Sivrit, while undoubtedly an act of treachery, is a response to a gross scandal resulting from a public insult to the Burgundian queen. How else can Gunther restore the honour of his house but by punishing the man who, however uncalculatingly, has brought it into disrepute? Certainly not, as Sivrit unhelpfully suggests, by chastising his wife. Should Gunther preside over the dissolution of his power, or should he follow Hagen in what may be the only practical course open to him? And should be stand by while Kriemhilt suborns his subjects, as she later suborns those of her second husand, or should he deprive her of the mean to suborn? Kriemhilt is not the woman to forgo her legitimate vengeance, nor Gunther the man to abdicate his legitimate power. Kriemhilt can secure justice only through perfidy; Gunther can vindicate his kingship only through treachery. Both are forced by circumstances to forsake the one virtue that all endorse, triuwe. Both are guilty, but avoidance of guilt would have meant abject surrender. One might say that the Nibelungenlied illustrates the impracticability of any code of behaviour in the real world except that of ruthless self-assertion—but let us not be tempted to foist yet another ‘intention’ upon the poet.

The effect of the suone in Aventiure 19 is, as we have seen, to put Kriemhilt in the wrong vis-à-vis her brothers, while the theft of the Hoard, also recounted in Aventiure 19, once more puts them in the wrong in relation to her. This section has two further important effects: first, it safeguards the role of the Hoard in the structure of the epic, since its theft furnishes Kriemhilt with a new grievance against her brothers as well as an additional ground for pursuing Hagen; secondly, it preserves the heroic integrity of the older of the two legends, the Fall of the Burgundians. Without it the Kings would be facing simple vengeance for the murder of their brother-in-law; with it they can still appear as victims of notissima perfidia Grimildae, enjoying the sympathy of Rüdiger and Dietrich and—at least to some extent—of the audience.

Norse tradition too knows of a reconciliation between brother and sister three-and-a-half years after the murder.⁷ This involves compensation and is effected with the aid of a draught brewed by their mother. While this brew is no doubt a Norse invention, the reconciliation itself is hardly likely to have arisen independently, though its function is different in the north, which preserved the old version of the Fall of the Burgundians. While in the south it ensures that the brothers face a perfidious Kriemhilt, in the north it assures them of a loyal Guðrun. Nor is the south alone in making the Fall of the Burgundians into a consequence of the murder of their first brother-in-law: the north too saw it partly as an act of revenge by their second brother-in-law for the death of his sister Brynhild⁸ (though this motive is hardly developed) and as a consequence of their having deprived themelves of the protection of Sigurð⁹ It is an over-simplification to speak of the vengeance-motive's supplanting the treasure-motive. Both are present in both branches of the tradition, the south emphasizing the former, the north the latter.

It is difficult to imagine a cyclic treatment of the two legends (which have three principal characters in common) without an intervening reconciliation. It seems likely that this bridge was constructed when the legends were first linked. If the story of Sigfrid's death never stood alone, we may surmise that from the beginning there was a reconciliation between his widow and her brother three-and-a-half years after the murder. The north chose to make the reconciliation irrevocable and thereby to preserve the old Fall of the Burgundians, while the south made it violable and thereby ensured the widow's revenge. In both branches of the tradition, however, the principal effect was the same: the Burgundians went bravely to their deaths, dying heroically as victims of treachery.

Yet how did the Kings retain the sympathy of poets and audiences in spite of their having done to death a man whom we are accustomed to call ‘der strahlende Held’? If Heusler is right in accrediting the second version of the Fall of the Burgundians to a Bavarian poet,¹⁰ we may surmise that the audience would have had little time for a foreign queen who ruined the generous Etzel, sacrificed his son, suborned his brother and violated the rules of Hunnish hospitality. If, with Hugo Kuhn, we see the reshaping of the legend as a Merovingian invention designed to accommodate the later career of the historical Brunhild, renamed Kriemhild,¹¹ we may ascribe the continued sympathy with the murderers to a Frankish ambience in which the Visigothic Brunhild was regarded as the enemy of legitimacy. The reason may have been simple literary conservatism: it was one thing to make the Kings fall victim to their sister's vengeance rather than to Attila's cupidity, but quite another to deprive them of their stature as heroes.

Yet there may be a literary cause other than mere conservatism. According to Heusler, the death of Sigfrid remained a preamble to the Fall of the Burgundians in both the second and third postulated stages. Perhaps Aventiure 20 of our epic contains all that earlier Bavarian audiences knew of the wrongs suffered by Kriemhilt. None of these reasons, however, seems sufficient to explain how centuries could pass without, apparently, any attempt to justify her revenge. Perhaps the answer lies in the state of the Sigfrid material throughout these centuries. In Heusler's scheme, the story of his death, related in the Frankish Lay of Brunhild, remained constant from the sixth century to the twelfth, when a ‘spielmännisch’ Lay of Sigfrid was composed. In the earlier lay the heroine suffered an irremediable wrong at the hands of Sigfrid, who was acting in the interest of his friend Gunther. She took vengeance on both by making Gunther have Sigfrid killed, thus ridding herself of the author of her indignity and depriving her unworthy husband of his powerful friend. Heusler believed that the Norse versions told substantially the original story: the change of shape, the ride through the flame, the chaste nuptial nights with the dividing sword. These, he thought, were replaced in the eleventh-century poem by the cloak of invisibility, the athletic contests and the conquest in the bed-chamber. This view has been powerfully challenged by Klaus von See,¹² who surmises that the wall of flame was a characteristically Norse motif presupposing a famous horse (which only Sigurð, not Sivrit, possesses). He argues too that the quarrel of the Queens was not original: its absence from the Edda is not, he thinks, due to a gap in the Codex Regius; from the occurrence of unusual vocabulary in the account of the quarrel both in the Volsunga Saga and in the corresponding passage of the Þidriks Saga he concludes that the quarrel entered the former work from Germany by way of the latter. The dividing sword, however, he regards as a blind motif surviving from the original fable, and he interprets it, on very slender evidence, as part of the ritual of a ‘Prokurationsheirat’ once performed by Sigfrid on behalf of Gunther.

We may suspend judgment on von See's arguments about the quarrel and the sword, but his criticism of Heusler's reliance on Norse sources as evidence of the earliest version is cogent. He suggests that the German and the Norse accounts of the wooing of Brunhild replace something much simpler (for him a ‘Prokurations heirat’), and he believes that this earlv simplicity is preserved in the Þidriks Saga (This would make North Germany a kind of legendary ‘Reliktgebiet’ between two centres of innovation, South Germany and Scandinavia.) In both branches of the tradition Brunhild is tricked into marrying Gunther with Sigfrid's (Sigurð's) help, given freely in the south, obtained by ruse (the philtre of oblivion) in the north. Since the philtre of oblivion is usually taken to be a Norse accretion to the story, we must presume that in the original lay, as in the epic, Sigfrid was a willing accomplice in deceit. How he won Brunhild for Gunther we do not know and, not knowing the means he used, we can do no more than guess at the nature of his offence against her. Perhaps he tricked her—but how? Perhaps he used force majeure. Perhaps he had promised her marriage, as apparently Sigurð had in the pidriks Saga, and then abandoned her for a better match. Perhaps she loved him and was spurned. Whatever the precise nature of his role, it clearly involved inflicting on Brunhild a gross indignity which made him, in her eyes, deserving of death; and at the heroic stage of the legend, when Brunhild had not yet become des tiuveles wîp but was still a heroic human figure, this role must have been at least ambivalent, if not positively distasteful. The original Sigfrid was probably not unlike the callous, self-seeking Sigurð of the Þidriks Saga. To say, with Heusler, that deceit practised against ‘the foreign woman' was not offensive to the Germanic world,¹³ or, with Neumann, that the defloration of a friend's wife at the friend's request attracted no opprobrium,¹⁴ is to imply that the Germanic warrior caste had little respect for the women their kings took to wife. Can we believe this?

The late K. C. King came very close to the view of Sigfrid that we have just advanced when he said that ‘he dies for a deed which at its best is questionable, at its worst little more than procuring’.¹⁵ King did not pursue this point, but he did emphasize the passive nature of Sigfrid's role in the wooing of Brunhild, saying: ‘The only active function he performs is to be called upon to act as the catspaw.’¹⁶ He distinguished between ‘stories about Siegfried’, in which the hero played an active role, and the account of his death, which in its early form was a ‘story about Brunhild’. King did not discuss the relative chronology of the Young Sigfrid material and the Lay of Brunhild and contented himself with the surmise that Sigfrid the dragon-killer and the ‘mysterious man of courage’ who won Brunhild were originally separate figures. It is conceivable that the Lay of Brunhild belongs to an earlier legendary stratum than the ‘stories about Siegfried’; the hero may have acquired his role as a dragon-killer from Sigmund, whose feats were known to the poet of Beowulf. King makes a striking comparison between Sigfrid and Dietrich, around whom similar fantastic stories grew up.¹⁷ Now, since Dietrich was originally a historical figure, we may be certain that he was fleeing from Otacher's spite for some time before he began to fight with dwarfs and giants. What gives us pause in the case of Sigfrid is our uncertainty about his origin. If he was not a historical figure at all, but, as Panzer thought, ‘eine heroisierte Märchengestalt’,¹⁸ he must have had supernatural attributes from the beginning. On the whole, however, a historical origin seems probable for both him and Brunhild, especially in view of the persuasive arguments of Hugo Kuhn. This would allow us to regard the undoubted fairy-tale elements in the extant versions as later accretions.

Let us assume—we can do no more—that the fairy-tale elements in the Sigfrid material are not original. If we strip them away from the story of his death, we arrive at a fable which Neumann has summarized as follows:

Ein starker Fremdling, mächtiger Besitzer eines Hortes (Siegfried), hat sich am Hofe des Königs festgesetzt und dessen Schwester geheiratet. In einem zwielichtigen Vorgang hilft er mit Erfolg, daß der König eine fremdartige Königin (eine Hild) erringt. Ohnehin wegen seiner Macht beargwöhnt, wird er nichtsahnend Anlaß zu einem Streit der beiden Frauen, bei dem es um die Frage geht, wer den mächtigsten Mann hat. Die Königin, in der Tiefe ihrer Ehre und damit ihres Seins getroffen, rächt sich, indem sie den Mann der Gegnerin, den Hortbesitzer, dessen Überlegenheit einen Zustand des Gleichgewichts verhindert, durch Meuchelmord beseitigen läßt. Was folgt, liegt für uns im Dunkeln; in jedem Falle endet das Geschehen in der inneren Niederlage des Königs, der sich zum Mord aufreizen ließ.¹⁹

In the heroic world trickery is allied with treachery, justifiable perhaps against a treacherous foe, contemptible if employed against the unsuspecting or vulnerable. In the world of fairy-tale it is associated with magic and is used by men to prevail over malevolent supernatural forces. In order to prevail they must learn a magic secret or secure the aid of a benevolent superhuman being. The ascendancy of human beings is short-lived, and the natural order soon reasserts itself. When the superhuman Sigfrid befriends Gunther and employs his magic to win the malevolent Brunhild for him, he incurs no blame, since he is siding with humans against the supernatural. When Brunhild, bereft of her supernatural strength, uses human trickery to avenge herself, the sympathy is not with her, but with her victim, whose human friends have turned false under her malevolent persuasion. The irruption of fairy-tale motivation into the Sigfrid-Brunhild material resulted in something like the following fable:

Sigfrid, a benevolent stranger well-known for his superhuman strength but with a ‘conditioned life’, comes to Gunther's court and makes friends with him. Desiring to marry Gunther's sister Kriemhild, he undertakes, in return for her hand, to help him win the beautiful but malevolent Brunhild, a distant queen endowed with superhuman strength which is conditional upon her remaining a virgin. The hero employs magic in order to win her for Gunther, both in the athletic contests which she stipulates and (probably) in the bedchamber, where she loses her virginity and her strength. Later Kriemhild insultingly reveals the trickery to Brunhild, who then incites her husband or one of his men to kill the hero. Kriemhild is tricked into revealing the secret of Sigfrid's conditioned life, and he is murdered. Brunhild lives on, triumphant, but reduced to the status of a mere human being.

This story is far removed from the mood of the heroic world, where men and women drew their strength from their own will. One may, if one wishes, call it ‘spielmännisch’, implying an affinity with such works as Salman und Morolf. Its author and his audience clearly delighted in astonishing feats of strength and had a taste for the burlesque (can the scene in the bed-chamber ever have been other than farcical?). The hero is portrayed as ‘der listige man’, acting on Gunther's behalf much as Morolf does on Salman's errands—though unlike Morolf he does not kill the queen, despite having Gunther's permission to do so (Nibelungenlied str. 655). Such a story can have posed little danger to the still heroic Fall of the Burgundians.

Nevertheless, the callous trickster has been transformed into a hero of sorts, whose death is regrettable and might justify his widow in seeking revenge. The ground has been laid for the re-heroicizing of the Brunhild-Sigfrid story, but now with Sigfrid as the tragic figure, since the object of his deceit has become a deserving victim. This was the task to which the Last Poet addressed himself. As far as he could, he played down the supernatural attributes of Sigfrid, transforming him into a courtly prince, an exemplary knight, a generous victor, a wise counsellor, a trusting friend, and a tender lover. Needless to say, this Sivrit (as we may now call him) does not eclipse the cunning helper or the dangerous outsider of previous stages; the stratification of the epic is nowhere more obvious than in the figure of Sivrit.

A similar up-grading of the Sigfrid figure (Sigurð) had taken place in the north, which had its own stock of fairy-tale motifs associated with the world of gods and demigods. Sigurð was endowed with superhuman strength and courage, but the trickery passed to the sorceress Grimhild, the mother of the Gjukungs. The philtre of oblivion brewed by her exculpates Sigurð from the deceit practised against Brynhild, and these two become a pair of doomed lovers, cheated of their happiness by fate and false friends. It may be that in both north and south a greater guilt was felt to lie with the king who betrayed his friend and helper than with the helper who acted, however deceitfully, out of friendship. The transformation of the helper into a tragic victim of treachery in both branches of the tradition should not deceive us into regarding the original Sigfrid as an unequivocally radiant hero. Remove the magic from both versions and he appears as K. C. King described him.

If Heusler was right in believing that the first version of the Sigfrid-Brunhild material was current long after it had been loosely linked with the Fall of the Burgundians, we may imagine that Sigfrid's death was viewed as the regrettable outcome of an unfortunate imbroglio, something that the Burgundians might take in their stride in the spirit of þaes oferēode, þisses swā maeg. It did not inevitably cast a shadow on the bravery with which they faced death later among the Huns, whether their adversary was a covetous brother-in-law or a vengeful sister. They rode to the Huns because to fail to do so would have been cowardly, believing themselves—and believed by the audience—to be in the right. After the Last Poet had made Sivrit into a true hero and his death into a monstrous act of disloyalty, there was a danger that the audience's sympathy might veer over to the side of his widow and that the Kings would be regarded merely as criminals overtaken by justice. It was here that the suone came to the poet's aid: by freely agreeing to make up her quarrel with Gunther, Kriemhilt forfeited her right to prosecute her vengeance against him. Even so, the heroism of the Burgundians in this last ‘Nibelunge Not’ was equivocal: the audience might admire their magnificent defiance and their steadfast loyalty to each other, but it could not fail to recall the reasons for their predicament. We might say—if we wanted to offer another interpretation of the work (one, incidentally, which would be close to Weber's)—that the poet was depicting a heroism emptied of all moral content but the martial virtues.

What we have said about the Nibelungenlied applies to version B. It is clear from the manuscript tradition, however, that many members of the public preferred version C, which goes a long way towards exculpating Kriemhilt and denigrating Hagen.²⁰ The differences between the two versions have often been discussed, and we will concentrate here on the one feature of the story, the suone, which posed the biggest obstacle to any redistribution of right and wrong. In version B we are not told whether Gunther shared Hagen's desire to get the Hoard to Burgundy and engineered the reconciliation to that end. When the narrator comments on the propriety of Gunther's seeking a reconciliation, he apparently refers only to past harm that had come to Kriemhilt von sînem râte (str. 1114). Version C refers to Gunther's ulterior motive (str. 1127 C)—

durch des hordes liebe                    was der rât getân:
dar umbe riet die suone                    der vil ungetriuwe man

—and while ‘der vil ungetriuwe man’ is probably Hagen, it could possibly be Gunther (depending on the sense of riet). In B we are told that no more tearful reconciliation was ever effected under vriunden (str. 1115); in C (str. 1128) this phrase is replaced by mit valsche. Kriemhilt's attitude too is different in the later version. In B (str. 1112) she rejects Gernot's request that she should receive Gunther, but to Giselher's pleading she at once responds with the words ‘Ich wil den künec grüezen’ (str. 1113). In C (str. 1124) she makes it clear that she enters into the suone under duress, and she reproaches her brothers for constraining her:

Sie sprach ‘ich muoz in grüezen:                    irn
welts mich niht erlân.
des habt ir grôze sünde.                    der künec
hât mir getân
sô vil der herzen swære                    gar âne
mîne scholt.
mîn munt im giht der suone,                    im wirt daz herze
nimmer holt.’

To which she adds, at the end of an additional strophe in which the brothers surmise that Gunther might still be able to win her over by some unspecified compensation: ‘seht, nû tuon ich swaz ir welt’ (1125 C). Kriemhilt appears to be keeping her options open, refusing to go back on her earlier declaration (1112 B; 1123 C) ‘holt wird ich in nimmer, die ez dâ hânt getân’. The suone has in C become a formality on both sides: for Gunther it is a device, for Kriemhilt a meaningless ritual. It is not surprising, therefore, that the redactor should have rewritten the first three lines of str. 1394 B (1421 C) and removed from it the suggestion that the devil counselled Kriemhilt to go back on her solemn reconciliation with one of her brothers (Giselher in MSS A, B and M, Gunther in D, I, d and h).

The changes we have just discussed have the effect of lightening, if not removing, the burden of guilt that Kriemhilt bears for her perfidy towards her brothers. They do not change the reader's assessment of the martial bravery which they and Hagen display in their last stand. His assessment of Hagen's motives, however, is affected by other changes in Aventiure 19. In B the only hint of his having private designs on the Hoard is contained in the words ‘er wânde er sold in niezen’ (1137), where niezen need not imply that Hagen expected to be its sole beneficiary. (No more need be implied than that he expected to administer it on behalf of his kings.) In C his selfish designs are clear: the phrase is modified to ‘er wânde in niezen eine’ (str. 1152), and this is repeated in an additional strophe, containing an imputation of untriuwe. It is indeed but a short step from a covetous Hagen to a disloyal Hagen, and this step is taken by the redactor. At the end of the work Hagen, ‘knowing’ that Kriemhilt will not spare him and fearing that after his death she will release Gunther, withholds the secret of the Hoard in order to make sure that Gunther dies with him. Thus the mutual loyalty of master and man, which alone of all loyalties remains intact in version B, is violated in C by the man. In Aventiure 36 his masters had been prepared to face death rather than surrender him to Kriemhilt, but he is ready to seal Gunther's fate by manipulating Kriemhilt for the last time. (It has been suggested that Hagen's silence in Aventiure 36, when he could have saved his Kings by giving himself up, is reprehensible.²¹ This is dubious: the heroic code required a man, when called upon, to fight to the death beside his lord, but it contained no clause enjoining self-surrender. If Hagen knew the text ‘Greater love hath no man …’ he had no reason to apply it to himself.)

The occurrence of the suone in both the German and the Scandinavian tradition suggests that it was an ancient feature dating from the epoch when the Sigfrid-Brunhild material was first grafted on to the older legend of the Fall of the Burgundians. As we have seen, its function in the north was to keep their sister loyal; in the south it made her perfidious. In both branches of the tradition it helped to preserve the heroic mood of the older legend, both in its original and in its revised form. However, the Last Poet's transformation of Sigfrid into a figure of full heroic stature posed a danger. By taking in hand the task of uniting (or, if there really was a Merovingian Kriemhildlied, of re-uniting) the two fables as equipollent parts of one epic, the poet incurred a literary challenge. How was he to describe the death of Sivrit at the hands of false friends and yet withhold enough sympathy from his widow to allow these friends to enjoy the audience's admiration when it was their turn to die? By skilful management of his material and reliance on the suone he was able to establish a fine balance between right and wrong, sympathy and revulsion. This was an artistic achievement; if we are inclined to read a moral message into it, this is our business, not the poet's. The redactor who made version C and whom Professor Hatto has aptly called ‘a rationalist, who, like many a person in the audience, required an explicit statement of motives and general clarity, whatever the cost,’²² did what the Last Poet had studiously avoided doing: he disturbed the balance, seeking to exculpate Kriemhilt and to denigrate her principal adversary Hagen. We must concede that he went about his task with some skill, a skill which is nowhere more evident than in Aventiure 19. Whether or not version C is the most ‘German’ version of the epic (as Salmon suggests),²³ it is in some ways a reassuring work, to be recommended to those who wish to be convinced that there is something like simple justice in the world. Version B, on the other hand, is a disturbing work, for, like the Hildebrandslied before it, it offers no such reassurance.

Notes

1. A notable exception is the work of D. G. Mowatt and Hugh Sacker, The Nibelungenlied. An Interpretative Commentary (Toronto, 1967), which provides a ‘running commentary’ on the text and, despite some idiosyncratic judgements, at least attempts to let it speak for itself.

2. F. Neumann, in his perceptive work Das Nibelungenlied in seiner Zeit (Göttingen, 1967), is prepared to acknowledge that the composer of the basic text was a great artist, but reluctant to use the term ‘Dichter’, lest this should confer upon the work ‘einen Charakter des Allzupersönlichen, betont Genialischen im Sinne des Einzelgängerischen’. He characterizes the poet's skill as ‘handwerklich’ (p. 165) and prefers to call him ‘der Nibelungenmeister’ (p. 139).

3. This judgment, so natural to the modern reader, has been most recently expressed by P. B. Salmon, ‘The German-ness of the Nibelungenlied’, New German Studies, 4 (1976), 3, where he asserts that ‘Gunther is on some occasions little more than a royal figurehead’. Later (p. 9) he writes: ‘In the Nibelungenlied only three of the principal characters are present throughout: Kriemhilt, Gunther and Hagen. Of these Gunther is relatively unimportant: he is directly responsible neither for the death of Sîvrit nor for the theft of the treasure …, much as he may have been involved in the conspiracy on both occasions …’ The key-phrases in these statements are ‘on some occasions’ and ‘directly’.

4. Ursula R. Mahlendorf and Frank J. Tobin, ‘Legality and Formality in the Nibelungenlied’, Monatshefte, 66 (1974), 225-37. This study attempts to provide the contemporary legal context for the epic, chiefly by invoking the Sachsenspiegel.

5. R. Wisniewski, ‘Das Versagen des Königs. Zur Interpretation des Nibelungenliedes’, Beitr. (Tübingen), 95 Sonderheft (1973), 170-86.

6. Mowatt and Sacker, op. cit., p. 100, aptly contrast Hagen's realism with Gunther's ‘fatuous faith in convention at all costs’. Gunther's fatuity consists in his assumption that Kriemhilt will be bound by an agreement that he himself has breached. Mahlendorf and Tobin (op. cit.) stress the Burgundians' reliance on formality, contrasting it with Sivrit's total disregard of form.

7. The fullest account is in Volsunga Saga 34 (paralleled in Gudrünar kviða II), adumbrated by Brynhild's words, ibid. 32, ‘sættask munu pit Guðrún brátt’ (paralleled in Sigurðar kviða in skamma 54, ‘Sátt munoð ip Guðrún, snemr, enn þú hyggir’. (Volsunga Saga is here quoted according to R. G. Finch's edition, the Eddic poems according to G. Neckel's.)

8. In the Volsunga Saga 38 Atli claims the Hoard as his wife's property and presents himself as Sigurð's avenger. In the prose section of the Edda headed Dráp Niflunga we read: Ófriðr var þá milli Giúcunga oc Atla. Kendi hann Giúcungom vold um andlát Brynhildar'.

9. In Volsunga Saga 32 Guðrun prophesies: ‘Nú munu þér riðdí her fyrst, ok er þér komid til bardaga, þá munu þér finna at Sigurðr er eigi á aðra hond yðr, ok munu þér þá sjá at Sigurðr var yður gæfa ok styrkr'.

10. A. Heusler, Nibelungensage und Nibelungenlied (2nd edition, Dortmund, 1922).

11. Brunhild und das Kriemhildlied', in K. Wais, Frühe Epik Westeuropas und die Vorgeschichte des Nibelungenliedes I (Tübingen, 1953), pp. 9-29.

12. ‘Die Werbung um Brünhild’, ZfdA, 88 (1957-58), 1-20.

13. Op. cit., p. 16.

14. ‘Das Weib muβ auch im sexuellen Kampf erliegen, durch den Erobrer seine Jungfräulichkeit verlieren … Auch da ist an Siegfried nichts zu tadeln.’ (From an early essay ‘Schichten der Ethik im Nibelungenliede’, reprinted in the work cited in note 2 above, p. 11.)

15. K. C. King (ed.), Das Lied vom hürnen Seyfrid, Manchester, 1958, p. 44.

16. Ibid., p. 45.

17. Ibid., p. 43.

18. F. Panzer, Das Nibelungenlied. Entste hung und Gestalt, Stuttgart, 1955, pp. 285 ff, reiterates this view, first advanced in 1912. He writes: ‘Wer der Erzählung des NL von Siegfried, seinem Tun und Leiden eine befriedigende sagen- und literargeschichtliche Deutung geben will, muβ sich zu der Einsicht durchringen, daβ wir es in Siegfried nicht mit einer historischen, sondern einer Märchenfigur zu tun haben’.

19. Op. cit., pp. 171 f.

20. The B and C texts are here quoted according to the edition of Karl Bartsch, Der Nibelunge Not. Mit den Abweichungen von der Nibelunge Liet (Leipzig, 1870).

21. In the ‘Introduction to a Second Reading’ which accompanies his English translation (The Nibelungenlied. A new translation by A. T. Hatto, Harmondsworth, revised ed., 1969) our gratuland writes (p. 319): ‘… the only thing that is needed to avoid the destruction of the house whose faithful guardian he claims to be is for him to walk out of the hall and die fighting.’ Salmon, op. cit., p. 10, cites F. Genzmer's judgment (from the introduction to a translation of the epic based on version C) that ‘Hagen gar nicht daran dachte, sich selbst zu opfern, um seine Könige und Freunde zu retten’.

22. Op. cit., p. 363.

23. Op. cit., pp. 20 f.