Where Kriemhild Gets Her Revenge

The Nibelungenlied by Unknown
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In part, I'm rating the translation and additional material, not just the original text. I didn't love the book itself--maybe 3 stars--but the appendices and other essays at the back are really good, and I thought the translation worked fine.

Curiosity drew me to the story and carried me through to the end more than the story. Some of the action and the overall plot is interesting enough on its own, but learning something about beliefs and norms and attitudes in Europe 700 or 1000 years ago is entertaining in a different way. Also, this story (or the Norse version) inspired the Ring Cycle of Wagner, and I always kinda wondered about the original. (It must be mentioned: Wagner was a racist dickhead and inspired a whole generation of racist nazi dickheads who looked to these stories as a source of ethnic and racial pride which they turned into war crimes, and they can all burn wherever dead racists burn--but I don't think we can blame the anonymous poet who wrote this 800 years ago for their antisemitism and bigotry.)

I wondered these things: what kind of story was it really? Was it mostly a kind of fantasy with River Maidens and magic weapons? Or was it mostly military, with lots of Arthurian jousts? Or was it romance? (The answer is yes to all of those, it seems to me.) Also, what were the characters like? What was the society like? What did they value?

Supposedly based on oral traditions going back to the 5th or 6th century, written about the 12th century, it does feel a lot like King Arthur stories. Knights have a strangely aggressive code where some killing, even murder, is just shrugged at, and other killing, when it seems very reasonable under the circumstances, is treated as heinous. It creates strange conflicts, like when Rudiger, a vassal of King Etzel, is sent to fight the Burgundians near the end of the book, and he can't figure out what to do. His daughter is pledged to marry one of the party he is sent to destroy, and he himself entertained them at his castle, so he can't honorably fight them. But he is pledged to his lord and can't honorably refuse. It's a strange scene when they're all crying about having to fight each other. In general, I found the points of honor confusing, since the knights were so dishonest and unscrupulous so much of the time that it was weird to think they still considered themselves honorable men.

I'd say the fighting dominates the story, but it started as a love story about two couples (Siegfried and Kriemhild, Gunther and Brunhild) each falling in love and getting married before they come into conflict. And there is a decent amount of fantasy stuff mixed in, including Brunhild's superhuman strength, though it's not treated as remarkable. As far as genre, it's an epic, but calling it a courtly romance (like the Arthurian stories) seems pretty apt, too.

Like in the Iliad, the named characters are all fantastic warriors who can kill dozens without getting a scratch. It's only when great knights face one other that someone has to die. The battles are very unrealistic as a result, and I find it super annoying that a hundred regular guys can die without upsetting anyone, but when one famous fighter dies, everyone cries. I guess that's the class system showing itself even in such old literature--only the noblemen matter. And the higher the rank, the more we're supposed to care about them.

There's a lot to notice here and a lot to take an interest in. I found this old work compelling enough that I want to find copies of the sagas related to it, and see if other cycles (like the story of Dietrich, also known as Theodoric) are available in English outside of crazy expensive textbooks. We'll see.

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