The Nibelungenlied: The Lay of the Nibelungs (Oxford World's Classics) Read Free Page B

later makes of his fiddle in battle against the Huns: ‘Do you hear the melodies, Hagen, which Volker is fiddling amongst the Huns over there, all those who go to the doors? It is red rosin he rubs on his fiddle’s bow!’ (strophe 2004).
    The
Nibelungenlied
owes its origins to oral poetry. For a long time, for some five centuries if not more, the ancient tales to which the poet refers in the first strophe had been circulating in oral form, and we cannot be certain when they first made their entry into writing. These origins colour not only the plot and ethos, but also the lay’s style. Albert Lord and Milman Parry’s studies, based on Homer and Balkan traditional poetry, read like a template for the performer of this poem, who must also, to an extent we cannot now determine, have been its shaper:
    The poetic grammar of oral epic is and must be based on the formula. It is a grammar of parataxis and of frequently used and useful phrases. Usefulness in composition carries no implication of opprobrium. Quite the contrary. Without this usefulness the style, and, more important, the whole practice would collapse or would never have been born. The singer’s mode of composition is dictated by the demands of performance at high speed, and he depends upon inculcated habit and association of sounds, words, phrases, and lines. He does not shrink from the habitual; nor does he either require the fixed for memorization or seek the unusual for its own sake. 8
    This style, so heavily dependent on parataxis and repetition, is far from alien to the Anglo-American oral tradition. It is preserved, for example, in the border ballads, and in much folk-song of Anglo-Irish origins which can still be heard today.
    None of the manuscripts of the
Nibelungenlied
preserves a melody, but this may be because very few melodies for German epics or lyrics are recorded before
c
.1300. (A notable exception is the
Carmina Burana
manuscript, dating from
c
.1230.) The melody of the fifteenth-century
Jüngeres Hildebrandslied
(
Later Hildebrandslied
) has been suggested as a possibility for the
Nibelungenlied
. 9 Eventoday, in the Balkans, war epics, orally composed, are performed with musical accompaniment on a single-stringed instrument, and it is tempting to suggest that the same held for the
Nibelungenlied
. The MHG poet’s performance is usually referred to as ‘singen unde sagen’ (‘singing and saying’), which certainly points to a musical recitation.
The Reception of the
Nibelungenlied
    The latest of the complete manuscripts of the
Nibelungenlied
(MS d) was written between 1504 and 1516 by Hans Ried, the meticulous scribe of the ‘Ambraser Heldenbuch’, a customs officer in the employ of Emperor Maximilian I. In the middle of the sixteenth century some strophes from the now lost MS c were published. In 1692 there is a reference to the
Nibelungenlied
in Hans Jacob von Wagenfels’
Ehren-Ruff Teütsch-Lands
, describing Seyuridt’s journey to Gunther’s land. 10 This apart, the lay disappeared from sight for some 200 years. The same fate befell the whole of medieval German literature.
    In 1755 the Swabian doctor, mystic, and private scholar Jacob Hermann Obereit (1725–98) found the thirteenth-century manuscript which was later to be designated C in the library of the Count of Hohenems. 11 The Swiss scholar and critic Johann Jakob Bodmer (1698–1783) played a key role in the restoration of the
Nibelungenlied
to public attention, publishing the final part of the lay in 1757. 12 It was Bodmer who first drew the comparison with Homer, likening the poem to the
Iliad
.
    The first complete edition was published by Bodmer’s pupil, Christoph Heinrich Müller (or Myller), in 1782. Goethe had seen Bodmer’s copy of the lay in Zurich in 1779, and had Müller’s edition sent to him, but it lay unread for over twenty years, until 1808/9, when he read extracts to the Weimar literary circle. Goethe’sbelated interest was inspired by the patriotic