The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Anonymous · a heroic epic in the Nibelungen strophe · about 2,380 strophes of four long lines in thirty-nine âventiuren, in two parts · the B version, the St. Gallen manuscript (Cod. Sang. 857) in the edition of Bartsch and de Boor, composed about 1200 · scored on the Middle High German, read from knowledge; no text in hand, Middle High German quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s own close English beneath and Hatto’s prose translation for sense
Mode
Heroic epic as tragedy of loyalty; the old heroic matter of the migration age made a courtly book epic that refuses the romance’s restoration
Mythos
The invulnerable hero with one mortal place, marked by his wife’s own hand; the hoard won from the underworld and sunk in the Rhine; the warrior queen of the north subdued by deceit; the river beyond which none return; the fall of a whole people in a foreign king’s hall
Phase
From the festivals at Worms, through the winning of Brünhild, the queens’ quarrel, the murder at the spring and the sinking of the hoard, to Kriemhild’s marriage to Etzel, the journey down the Danube and the destruction of the Burgundians at his court
Presentation
Middle High German verse in the Nibelungen strophe: four long lines split by a caesura, rhymed in couplets, three stresses to each half-line except the last, which carries four; about 2,380 strophes in thirty-nine âventiuren, in two near-equal parts; no poet named
Register
Formula and the narrator’s foreknowledge throughout; courtly description of clothing, gifts and festivals; scenes staged in speech and act, spare at the heights
Scale
The court of Worms, its kings and their vassal, a hero from outside, two queens; Etzel’s court of many peoples; the Rhine and the Danube; the fall of a people
Governing Proposition
Siegfried, who won the warrior queen Brünhild for King Gunther of Worms by deceit, is murdered by Gunther’s man Hagen after the two queens quarrel in public, and his widow Kriemhild, Gunther’s sister, married years later to Etzel, king of the Huns, draws her brothers and their men down the Danube and has them destroyed in his hall. The wager of the poem is that loyalty and honour, the virtues that bind a courtly order, are the very mechanism of its destruction; that the end can be told at the start and still be watched with dread; and that a world described with such love can be brought to total ruin with nothing restored.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The poem opens on a girl at Worms and on her end, in the same strophe. It introduces Kriemhild and closes on the warriors who will die for her: “dar umbe muosen degene vil verliesen den lîp”
“for her sake many warriors had to lose their lives”. A little later, still in the first âventiure, it states its law: “wie liebe mit leide ze jungest lônen kan”
“how love at last repays with sorrow”. Everything that follows, every festival and every wooing, is watched in that light, and the hearer knows from the first page what the last will hold.
The strophe carries this. It has four long lines, each split by a caesura and rhymed in couplets; each half-line has three stresses except the second half of the fourth line, which has four, so that every strophe closes on a heavier cadence. The form is very close to the strophe of Der von Kürenberg in early Minnesang, a lyric measure turned to narrative, and its heavy close is where the narrator again and again sets the doom ahead. The poem’s fatalism is in its metre before it is in any statement.
The unit is the B version, the version that ends on nôt, as the St. Gallen manuscript (Cod. Sang. 857) transmits it and as Bartsch and de Boor edit it: about 2,380 strophes, near 9,500 long lines, in thirty-nine âventiuren and two near-equal parts, the first running to the nineteenth âventiure. It was composed about 1200 in the Danube country between Passau and Vienna, and no poet is named. The C version, which softens Kriemhild, darkens Hagen and carries a famous opening strophe that B lacks, is context; so is the Klage, which follows the epic in most manuscripts and is a separate work.
Movement II
Siegfried comes to Worms from outside, and the old myth comes with him only in part. His dragon-slaying is told secondhand, by Hagen, in the third âventiure. The winning of Brünhild, the warrior queen of the far north, is a deception: Siegfried, in the cloak of invisibility, subdues her for another man. Her strength is gone after her wedding night. The ring and girdle are carried off from her chamber and given to Kriemhild, and the poem has laid the charge that will go off at Worms.
Between these joints lies the courtly world, and the poem describes it with love: the tailoring and robing for the Iceland voyage, told across two âventiuren, the festivals, the tournaments, the gifts. Much of it serves the surface more than the action, and perhaps a tenth of the poem could go without loss. But the strophe’s foreknowledge hangs over every feast, and the silk and the jewels are seen as what will be paid for.
The quarrel of the two queens at the cathedral door at Worms turns a private wrong into a public one. Its hinge is vassalage: the false claim that Siegfried is Gunther’s man. From that moment every bond in the poem, of lord and man, of kin, of queen and vassal, is drawn toward the murder. Each step is required by what follows; nothing on the spine can be taken away.
Movement III
Kriemhild, to protect her husband, marks his one mortal place with a cross on his garment, and so gives him to Hagen. The hunt goes into the forest; Siegfried lets a bear loose in the camp; at a spring among the flowers Hagen kills him. He does it out of loyalty to his queen and to his lord, and the poem’s disclosure is already whole: the virtue that binds the order is the instrument that breaks it.
Laid on his bier, Siegfried bleeds again when Hagen comes near. Then the hoard of the Nibelungs, won from the underworld, is taken from the widow and sunk in the Rhine, and the first part ends. The treasure, hidden, becomes the secret on which the last scene of the poem turns.
The second part begins with Kriemhild’s marriage to Etzel, king of the Huns, and her progress through Bavaria and Austria, with its welcomes at Passau and Pöchlarn. Rüdiger gives her his oath. In the Norse forms of the matter the widow avenges her brothers on Atli; here she avenges her husband on her brothers. Whether that change belongs to this poet or to earlier German tradition is contested. The halves now mirror each other: a wooing journey down the Rhine, a doomed journey down the Danube.
Movement IV
At the Danube the water-sprites prophesy that none of the Burgundians will return. Hagen tests it: he throws the chaplain overboard, and when the priest reaches the bank alive, Hagen knows the prophecy is true. He smashes the boat. From this crossing the poem rises again and again, and each rise is higher.
At Etzel’s court Hagen and Volker sit on the bench before Kriemhild and will not rise for her, Siegfried’s sword across Hagen’s knees. Volker keeps the night watch, fiddling the Burgundians to sleep. Then the feast breaks, the child Ortlieb is killed, and the hall burns; the thirsting men drink the blood of the dead at Hagen’s word. The murderer of the first part has become the greatest figure of the second, by the same loyalty, and the poem joins the two Hagens by its plot more than by a conception it owns.
Rüdiger has sworn to Kriemhild, and he has received the Burgundians as guests and kin; Giselher is betrothed to his daughter. Whichever bond he keeps, he must break the other, and the poem gives him no exit but his death. Before he fights he gives Hagen his own shield. The Christian frame stands beside him, in the question of his soul, but it is not made to judge the heroic ethic that kills him.
Movement V
At the end Kriemhild has Gunther’s head carried in to Hagen. He answers that now no one but God and he knows where the treasure lies, and calls her “vâlandinne”
“she-devil”. She strikes off his head with Siegfried’s sword, and Hildebrand cuts her down. The love of the first âventiure has been repaid in sorrow, and the version closes on its own name: “daz ist der Nibelunge nôt”
“that is the Nibelungs’ doom”.
The poem as it stands carries seams. On its own count Kriemhild is near fifty at the end; Siegfried has two youths that do not meet; the Nibelung kingdom shifts its nature; Brünhild drops out of the second part. They are probably the traces of older matter, and they are the work’s own, charged lightly because they rarely touch the spine. Its questions stay open: whether Kriemhild is avenger, she-devil or the one constant lover in the poem, whether Hagen is murderer or hero.
It was copied for three centuries, in more than thirty manuscripts and fragments, three of them complete and principal, A at Munich, B at St. Gallen and C at Karlsruhe. Then it went unread for about 240 years, until manuscript C was found at Hohenems in 1755. The nineteenth century made it the German national epic; Hebbel’s trilogy, Wagner’s Ring and Lang’s films drew on it, and it was used as a political myth of loyalty unto death. Today, outside the German school and the academy, its name is known far more widely than it is read.
Act III · The Twelve
Subtract a joint and ask what goes. Along the spine almost nothing can: Brünhild deceived by Siegfried in the cloak of invisibility, the ring and girdle carried off from her chamber and given to Kriemhild, the quarrel at the cathedral door, the murder at the spring, the theft of the hoard, Rüdiger’s oath to Kriemhild, the betrothal of Giselher to Rüdiger’s daughter, planted so that Rüdiger’s death can cost what it costs, and Hagen’s breaking of the boat. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the courtly surface laid over that spine: the long robing for the Iceland voyage, festivals and tournaments told at length, Kriemhild’s progress with its welcomes at Passau and Pöchlarn. Perhaps a tenth of the poem could go without loss.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: the virtues that bind a feudal and courtly order, loyalty (triuwe), honour (êre), the bond of kin and of lord and man, are the mechanism of its destruction, and once wrong has entered such an order no virtue can stop it. Hagen kills Siegfried out of loyalty to his queen and his lord, and the same loyalty makes him the greatest figure of the second part. Rüdiger, sworn to Kriemhild and host and kinsman to the Burgundians, must break one bond to keep the other, and has no exit but his death. A woman whose only power runs through men turns grief into the ruin of her house. Held off the top because the poem shows the mechanism more than it understands the persons inside it.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The second part rises again and again, and the rises grow. Hagen throws the chaplain overboard to test the water-sprites’ prophecy; when the priest reaches the bank alive he knows none of them will return, and smashes the boat. Hagen and Volker sit on the bench before Kriemhild and will not rise, Siegfried’s sword across Hagen’s knees. Volker keeps the night watch, fiddling the Burgundians to sleep. In the burning hall the thirsting men drink the blood of the dead at Hagen’s word. Rüdiger gives his shield to the man he must fight. The first part has the murder among the flowers and the bier that bleeds, and long stretches that do not rise: height near the summit, frequency held down by the first half.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The archetypal structure is built and bears the load. The invulnerable hero with one mortal place, betrayed through the wife who marks it with a cross on his garment to protect him; the hoard of the Nibelungs, won from the underworld, sunk in the Rhine, and at the end held only as a secret between a doomed man and God; the warrior queen of the far north subdued by deceit; the river crossing beyond which none return, sealed by a prophecy; the fall of a people in a foreign king’s hall, by fire and blade. These are the plot, not its ornament, and they stay particular, because Hagen, Kriemhild, Rüdiger and Volker are persons. Charged: the poem’s own demythologising, the dragon-slaying told secondhand and Brünhild’s strength gone after her wedding night.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Around 1200 the prestige forms of German narrative were the Arthurian romance and the courtly epic, from French models, signed by their poets, Hartmann and Wolfram, in rhymed couplets, and built so that crisis ends in the court restored. This poet took the old heroic matter of the migration age, sung in short lays, and made of it a book epic of the same scale and courtly dress, in a lyric strophe turned to narrative, with no name attached, and let the courtly world it describes so lovingly end in ruin with nothing restored. That refusal is the stake. What holds the axis down is inheritance: the plot existed before the poem, and whether its decisive change from the Norse pattern is this poet’s is contested.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The strophe is the instrument of the poem’s knowledge. Its fourth line, heavier by one stress, is again and again the place of the narrator’s foreknowledge: the strophe that opens this version introduces the girl and closes “dar umbe muosen degene vil verliesen den lîp”
“for her sake many warriors had to lose their lives”. The end is known from the start and every festival is watched in its light, so the fatalism is carried by the metre rather than stated. The two halves mirror each other: a wooing journey down the Rhine and a doomed journey down the Danube, a hall of feasting at Worms and a hall of burning at Etzel’s court. In the romance couplet or in prose the foreknowledge would go. Held below the top because the courtly description sits in the same form without being changed by it.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: copied for three centuries, then read without break since 1755 under some of the most sustained scholarship given any medieval text, and the questions have not closed. Is Kriemhild avenger, she-devil or the one constant lover in the poem? Is Hagen murderer or hero, and how can one figure be both? What are the B and C versions to each other, and which is the poem? How do oral formula and book composition meet in it, and what does the courtly surface do to the heroic core? What does it know of women’s power, of vassalage, of Christian and heathen? Each age has read it again. Held below the deepest epics because the return is narrower, mainly German and philological.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The field is German vernacular narrative about 1200, and the European heroic epic. The force is high: the first written German heroic epic of book scale, which made the heroic tradition a literary genre beside the romance. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in its own century it was answered at once by the Klage, and its strophe and manner were taken up by Kudrun and the later Dietrich epics; then came a break of two and a half centuries, and on its recovery the German national epic of the nineteenth century, Hebbel’s trilogy (1861), a frame for Wagner’s Ring, though Wagner drew mostly on the Norse sources, Lang’s two films (1924), and a political myth of loyalty unto death. The delayed reach is discounted, and much of it is use rather than literary redirection.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Survival over eight centuries, weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the poem survives complete in three principal manuscripts among more than thirty witnesses, and the existence of versions is a fact of its transmission, not a loss. Presence is the charge. It was copied and read from about 1200 into the early sixteenth century, then went unread for about 240 years until 1755; today, outside the German school and the academy, it is read far less than its name is known, and part of its modern presence was as political myth. The fabric is intact. The long neglect is the larger charge, and it places the poem in the band for a text long neglected, at the top of that band, since the form is whole.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The command is great at the scale of the scene and the strophe, and uneven below it. Scenes are staged with a dramatist’s precision: the bench, Rüdiger’s dilemma spoken in his own voice, Hagen at the river, the last exchange of the head and the hoard. The narrator’s management of foreknowledge holds across some nine and a half thousand long lines. Charged: a diction that leans on formula and filler, half-lines that assert truth or promise to tell, rhyme words that carry nothing; catalogues of clothing and gifts told by rote; and a time scheme that does not hold, so that on the poem’s own count Kriemhild is near fifty at the end. The sound of the verse is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the courtly maiden of the opening strophe, at a festival of silk and jewels at Worms, and the woman who has her brother beheaded and strikes off her enemy’s head after the hall has burned. One law joins them, the law stated in the first âventiure, that joy is repaid in sorrow, and with it the law of triuwe and êre, which governs festival and massacre alike. Charged: the poem’s sympathies move between the halves without the poem owning the move, so that Hagen the murderer and Hagen the loyal hero are joined by the plot more than by a conception; the supernatural is admitted and then disappears; and the Christian frame sits beside the heroic ethic without being made to judge it.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Many orders are held, and most are integrated. The state: kingship at Worms, vassalage, whose false claim that Siegfried is Gunther’s man is the hinge of the quarrel, war with the Saxons and Danes, embassy. The family: mother, brothers, sister, marriage, widowhood, and a child, Ortlieb, killed at the feast. History: the Huns, Etzel’s court of many peoples, Dietrich of Bern and his men, Christian and heathen side by side. The sacred: the cathedral door, the chaplain, the bishop of Passau, the question of Rüdiger’s soul. Nature and the other world: the two rivers, the hunt, the bear loosed in the camp, the dragon, the hoard, the sprites. Thin: consciousness, rendered almost wholly from outside, and labour and the common people.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Archetypal Deep at 9.0 and The Imperishable at 9.0, then The Unconcealment, The Sublime and The Bottomless Well at 8.8. A myth of the vulnerable hero, the hoard and the river crossing built into the plot itself; eight centuries of survival with the form whole, charged for long neglect; a disclosure that the virtues of a courtly order are the mechanism of its ruin; heights that grow from the Danube crossing to the last exchange of the head and the hoard; and questions that the long return since 1755 has not closed.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.0, lowest of the twelve, held by the courtly surface over a strict spine: the robing, the festivals and the progress that a tenth of the poem could go without. The Inner Law at 8.4, where the shift of sympathy between the halves is joined by plot rather than conception. The Made at 8.5, for formula, filler and a broken time scheme, and The Encompassed at 8.5, thin on consciousness. Among the gated axes, The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clear by a tenth.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.7, The Made at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 9.0, The Imperishable at 9.0, The Unconcealment at 8.8, The Swerve at 8.6 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, the last two by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.0, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.5. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, at 8.6.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the Nibelungenlied in the B version, the version that ends “daz ist der Nibelunge nôt”, as transmitted in the St. Gallen manuscript (Cod. Sang. 857) and read in the edition of Bartsch and de Boor: about 2,380 strophes of four long lines in thirty-nine âventiuren, composed about 1200 in the Danube country between Passau and Vienna, by a poet who is not named. The A version (Munich) and the C version (Karlsruhe, the version that ends on liet) are context, not the unit; the Klage, which follows the epic in most manuscripts, is a separate work and is not scored. No text was in hand, nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on the Middle High German. Middle High German is quoted only where its words are certain, briefly, with the desk’s own close English beneath; events are paraphrased, and citations are by âventiure. Translations · A. T. Hatto’s prose (Penguin, 1965), made from the Bartsch and de Boor text of B, for sense. It is not quoted, and no translation’s shortfall is charged to the poem. The sound of the verse is judged only as far as its metrical scheme and rhyme, and is otherwise neither credited nor charged. Matters that could not be verified are not given, among them the narrower span of the date, the patron proposed for the poem, the exact count of strophes in B and C, the proportion of the two parts, the last medieval copy, the dates of the first printings, an allusion to the poem in Wolfram, the dates of its political use and the manuscripts’ modern registration.