Heroic Legends of the North

An Introduction to the Nibelung and Dietrich Cycles

Edward R. Haymes, Susann T. Samples

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000762075
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Collezioni letterarie europee

Originally published in 1996, this book is a study of two of the central themes of medieval German mythology, the Dietrich and Nibelung legends. It traces its two legendary topics form their historical roots during the last centuries of the Roman Empire to the medieval texts that make them known to us. Many of the medieval texts have never been translated into English or even modern German. A synopsis of each work is therefore included so that the reader can form an idea of the content of the works in question. The book takes a text-oriented approach. The book includes a chronological chart which puts most of the texts and literary works discussed in a European and world context.

Part One:

BACKGROUND

CHAPTER 1

The Germanic Legends

The legend of Dietrich of Bern was medieval Germany’s closest parallel to the legends of King Arthur in Britain and Charlemagne in France. Dietrich became the central figure in a wide variety of stories, most of which have absolutely no connection to the historical figure on whom Dietrich is based, the Ostrogothic king Theoderic the Great (c.453—526)¹ The Dietrich of legend is associated with the Italian city Verona, the name of which appears in medieval texts as “Bern,” a name which has no connection to the present Swiss capital. The historical Theodoric made his capital in Ravenna, where his mausoleum can still be seen.

The story medieval audiences considered to be historical told of Dietrich’s exile from his rightful lands, his thirty years widi Attila the Hun, and his eventual return. Far more popular, however, were the fantastic adventures that featured Dietrich and his chief vassal, Hildebrand, in conflict with giants, dwarfs, and dragons.

The “Nibelung” legend actually combines several stories. The first of these involves the youth, marriage, and murder of Siegfried. There is no known historical source for Siegfried and his story, although there have been numerous attempts to associate him with various historical figures. The thirteenth-century poets and their audiences knew that Siegfried was raised in the wilds by a smith, that he killed a dragon and gained a great treasure, that he had some relationship to the supernatural princess Brunhild, diat he violated diat relationship and married the courdy princess Kriemhild, sister of Gunther, Gemot, and Giselher. As a condition for being allowed to marry Kriemhild, he helped Gunther win Brunhild. The tension between the two queens, Kriemhild and Brunhild, led to Siegfried’s murder.

The second story has to do with Kriemhild’s later marriage to Attila the Hun. Attila invited his brothers-in-law to a great feast and killed them along with all their entourage when they would not give up Siegfried’s treasure. There are two mutually exclusive versions of this story, but the result is the same. In the one version Kriemhild invited her brothers in order to gain vengeance for Siegfried. In the other she killed Attila and all of his men in order to avenge her brothers, whom Attila had invited out of avarice.

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1 In the following the name Dietrich will be used to refer to the legendary figure and Theoderic to refer to the historical king. All of the legendary figures referred to in this introduction are identified in the Glossary of Names at the end of this book.

These sketchy outlines are already problematic, since the different versions available in medieval texts vary so much. Many readers will have Wagner’s version of the stories in the back of their minds as well. Instead of trying to harmonize the versions into a single unified legend, we will present the medieval stories in all their diversity. Some of the differences result from the different historical situations out of which the versions come. A simple example involves the number of players in each version. The German Nibelungenlied was written around 1200 against die background of German imperial politics, and the final batde brings more than twenty thousand men to their death. In one of the Norse versions of the Attila story, the Atlamal, which may have been composed somewhat earlier on the lonely shores of Greenland, only two members of Kriemhild’s family come to Attila’s family to meet their death.

It is also difficult to say why these particular legends became the backbone of medieval Germanic traditional storytelling. We have evidence that the medieval storytellers knew other stories, but these are the ones that formed the nexus of legendary history. As the Middle Ages progressed, most legendary material was somehow integrated into the Nibelung and Dietrich framework. The story of Wieland the smith, for example, becomes a part of the Dietrich legend when Wieland’s son Witige becomes a member of Dietrich’s court. Finally the two legends are combined in the Nibelungenlied and the PiSrekssaga so that the Nibelung legend becomes a part of Dietrich’s career.

The one element most of the stories have in common is conflict within families. If it is not present in the sources, it is added within the poetic tradition. The oldest surviving legendary poem in any Germanic language (the Hildebrandslied) tells of a batde, presumably to the death, between father and son. Dietrich’s enemy is usually portrayed as his paternal uncle, although there is no historical basis for this idea. Siegfried is killed by his in-laws.

The literary presentations make it clear that there were two very strong bonds within Germanic society, those of blood relationship and those to the lord of the war-band. The most powerful tragic situation in the society must have been conflict between these two kinds of loyalty. We can imagine the tellers of these stories in oral tradition playing heavily on this kind of conflict in order to sharpen the effect of the stories, much as Shakespeare personalized the conflicts within the Wars of the Roses to make his history plays powerful on the human as well as on the historical level. The conflicts that drive the Nibelung and Dietrich legends are as universal as those that drive the Greek tragedies or modem soap operas. It is the individual poetic representation in the medieval works of literature that makes these legends special and it is those medieval works of literary art that will occupy much of our attention in what follows. At the same time we cannot lose track of die tradition and the way die various works relate to it.

The Medieval Literary Versions

The first connected written version of the Nibelung legend is the Nibe/ungenlied, composed in southern Germany around 1200, and the first connected written version of the story of Dietrich is the Pidrekssaga af Bern, compiled in Norway approximately a half-century later. Bodi assume something like the form of the legend presented below.

From thirteenth-century Iceland we have a collection of heroic poems about the Nibelung legends known as the Poetic Edda?² The story of Siegfried’s family is also told in a later (fourteenth-century) prose narrative, also from Iceland, called the Volsungasaga. There are written traces of Germanic heroic legend prior to these high medieval literary works, but they do not actually tell the stories, the sources merely refer to them. An example of this is the reference to the legend of Sigmund in die Old English epic Beowulf discussed below on p. 60. In the following chapters we shall look at the evidence pointing to earlier versions of the legends that emerges from historical documents from the fifth to the twelfth century.

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² The Poetic Edda also contains mythological poems about the Norse gods and their history. The section dealing with human events, however, is almost entirely devoted to stories of the Volsungs, the family of Siegfried/Sigurd.

When we speak of die Nibelung legend and particularly of the Dietrich legend we are actually describing a wide range of stories, most of which originally had nothing to do with each other. The Pidrekssaga in particular brings together many different stories, including the Nibelung legend itself, by relating them to the single figure of Dietrich of Bern. Hie ease with which poets could refer to these stories makes it clear that not only the singers of tales but also their audiences knew the outline of what we might call a “heroic history” of the Germanic past. We shall explore this heroic history as it presents itself to us in many very different written versions.

Perhaps it will make the task of sorting out the many different versions of our legends somewhat easier if we lay out in some detail the course of the legendary “history” that gives structure to the medieval literary versions. Each individual medieval poem or saga takes its place within this framework. Any medieval author attempting a Dietrich or Nibelung poem would know where the events of that poem would fit into die “liistory.” This outline resembles the Pidrekssaga because that is virtually die only attempt in medieval literature to cover the whole story from beginning to end. (The names follow the modem German forms.)

Dietrich of Bern rules over his kingdom in northern Italy. The young king’s fame spreads far and wide and he attracts die greatest heroes of his time to his court. He is eventually involved in a power struggle with his uncle Ermanrich, king of Rome. Ermanrich drives Dietrich and his men from his kingdom. Dietrich and most of his heroes find refuge at the court of die king of Hunland, Etzel (Attila). (Hunland is located variously in northern and eastern Europe.) After many years of exile Dietrich makes an attempt to retake his kingdom. He is victorious but the loss of Etzel’s young sons and his own brother in the batde so demoralizes him that he returns to Hunland in apparent defeat.

While Dietrich is establishing himself as the foremost king of his time, Young Siegfried is being raised by a smidi in the woods. He kills a dragon and wins a vast treasure. He then finds a warrior princess named Brunhild who predicts his future. The two heroic figures agree to marry.

Meanwhile the brothers Gunther, Giselher, and Gemot have established diemselves at Worms on the Rhine as kings of the Burgundians (also called Nibelungs). Young Siegfried arrives at their court and seeks the hand of their sister Kriemhild. Gunther agrees to the match if Siegfried will help him win the warrior maiden Brunhild. Siegfried does so, violating his earlier oadi to marry Brunhild. Brunhild eventually manages to incite some members of Gunther’s court to kill Siegfried. The brodiers plot against Siegfried and kill him by stabbing him in the back with a spear. The murder takes place by a spring in die forest (or in die hero’s bed). In some versions it is Hagen who kills Siegfried, in others it is Gemot (who is killed by the dying hero).

The widowed Kriemhild marries Etzel (Attila) and invites her brothers to a festival diat turns into a slaughter as Etzel seeks to find out where Siegfried’s treasure has been hidden. Dietrich and his men are eventually brought into the batde and diey take part on Etzel’s side. After all the Burgundian kings are killed, Kriemhild exacts vengeance on Etzel for killing her brothers. (In die Nibelungenlied she exacts vengeance on her brothers for the murder of her husband, and Etzel is virtually blameless in the matter.)

Several years after the slaughter of the Burgundians, Dietrich decides to return to his kingdom and retake it from Ermanrich. As the two armies face each other, Dietrich’s weapons-master Hildebrand encounters his son in single combat and is forced to kill him (or is reconciled with him). Dietrich recovers his kingdom and reigns for many years before being spirited off to Hell on the back of a magnificent black horse that appears next to the pool where Dietrich had been bathing. The age of heroes is at an end.

This is more or less the backbone of the story as it existed in oral tradition from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. We have ignored the stories that violate the basic structure here,³ but we will certainly discuss them as we move from a general consideration of the legendary world to a discussion of the individual works that transmit that world to us.

As we shall see below in our treatment of the Volsungasaga and the Poetic Edda_y there was a northern branch of this tradition, mainly in Iceland, that emphasized Siegfried’s family much more than the Burgundians and expanded a number of episodes far beyond what we see above. The summary of the Volsungasaga on pp. 114ff. shows the outlines of the Northern versions.

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³ There are, for example, many stories of Dietrich’s youth, such as the Hckenlied and the Virginal, that do not clearly fit into the generally accepted biography of Dietrich the king.

The Hero, Heroic Poetry, and the Heroic Age

Virtually all the poetry and prose discussed in this book belongs to the category generally called “heroic” poetry. The center of heroic poetry is the extraordinary individual, the hero, who stands above his contemporaries in physical and moral strength. There may be slight differences in the code of behavior expected of heroes in different cultures, but physical cou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Part One: Background
• Part Two: Literary Works
• Glossary of Names
• Index