The Nibelungenlied is singularly unique among all the great national epics of literature in that the figures it sets up to end as heroes by the end of the Part I wind up losing all the sympathy and admiration they have gained by the end of Part II to the point where if they are not actually villains, they are certainly less than heroes. If a national epic is designed to provide insight into the character of the culture it seeks to portray, then the great question raised at the end of the Nibelungenlied is what exactly are the Germanic peoples trying to tell the rest of the world about themselves?
Possible answers to that query could be that they share a strain of fundamental pessimism about the human condition that dooms everyone alike to a violent end. Or, possibly, that chivalry and honor are all well and good when applied to an imaginary utopian ideal, but in the real world the driving force is always revenge against wrongs. This may be the key to understanding the Nibelungenlied. By the time of the bloodbath which brings the proceedings to a close, one is the honor-bound codes of chivalry from the Frankish epics. Gone are the intrusions of gods into the petty lives of mortals found in the ancient Greek and Roman epics which lend those live a certain dignity in the face of the pettiness of the gods. And absolutely nowhere to be seen is the Round Table of equality and hope for a better future marking the Arthurian cycle. No other great piece of literature of any sort written or since tallies a higher body count than the epic battles featuring iconic figures like Siegfried and Brunhild and no less an invading foreigner than Attila the Hun (here called Etzel). By the end, the most loyal characters have become the most treacherous and the overriding emotional drive kicking the narrative into high gear is the most frigid cold slice of revenge ever served.
Ultimately, when all is said and done and the feudal courtliness and the operatic love triangle of Siegfried, Brunhild and Kriemhild has played out, what is left is the tragic deterioration of everything that first part has struggled to build up. Part II of the Nibelungenlied is essentially the portrait of a woman—Kriemhild—who has been invested with a truly epic sense of compassion and endowed with an easily understood motivation to enact vengeance against those who took everything from her. Part II proceeds from this zenith of courtly heroism down a path which inexorably strips away from Siegfried’s widow every last shred of empathy with her single-minded devotion to revenge. By the end, the two decades of mourning her dead husband—her first husband—has utterly transformed the model of courtliness into an avenging she-demon who actually manages to co-exist along Attila the Hun in a story in which he comes out looking like the voice the reason and moderation by comparison.
And that is perhaps the single most disturbing aspect of trying to answer the question of exactly what the Germanic peoples are trying to tell the rest of the world about themselves by adopting The Nibelungenlied as their national epic. When a character viewed as one of the greatest scourges of history by the rest of the world is presented as a model fairness and courtly generosity, it is hardly going beyond fairness to ask just what that presentation is intended to mean. The Nibelungenlied ends with the greatest bloodbath in epic poetry history, having transformed its most sympathetic character into its most fearsome villain, while leaving a character based on the very epitome of historical aggression behind to bring the warring factions together into the Germanic nation.
Just what is the message that Nibelungenlied has to tell those not part of that nation?
