A couple of years ago, I stumbled quite accidentally over what is a lost cinematic gem from 1924: Die Nibelungen. It’s a two-part silent movie directed by Fritz Lang and based on the medieval epic by the same name. Fans of J. R. R. Tolkien’s work will already know the basics of the story, as will those familiar with The Lay of Volsungs, but few have probably ever read it.
Fritz Lang’s silent picture, however, made me take up my Dent&Son Everyman edition and read it for the first time. I found myself compelled by Kriemhilde as much as for her plight as for her spooky similarity to Walt Disney’s Evil Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Unlike the Nazi propaganda during the Second World War that featured Sifrid as the main protagonist, the real protagonist in the piece is Kriemhilde.
Fritz Lang’s silent film version divides Kriemhilde into two different visuals. At the beginning, the first half of the film, she is clothed in white, her movements are shy, dignified, and her face is more open, more willing to break into happiness than to grief.
When the second half of the movie opens, she’s in all black. Her movements cloaked and her eyes fierce. The gentle maid is no more. We only see one more glimpse of the gentle maid and that is after she bears a son to Atilla. Then, she painfully creeps out of her bid, over to a small chest where she keeps a clot of earth from where Sifrid was murdered. She has remarried, even had a child, but her heart still lies with Sifrid.
For all this, Lang’s film actually downplays just how much Kriemhilde is wronged over the course of the story. The real text speaks to familial abuse after Sigrid’s death—where Hagen and Gunnar actively plot to steal from her, leaving her penniless and then insult her in her own home—after she has invited them to visit after she remarries. This is a women for whom we feel even greater sympathy than Clytemnestra.
So why don’t we discuss it more, or even include it in our popular remembrance of European-based mythology?
The simple answer is that German mythology and, consequently, its epic poetry, often get subsumed into Norse mythology and poetry. But that is too simple, in my personal point of view. The Nibelungenlied has more than enough to distinguish it from the Volsung saga and moreover, it’s a portrayal of a very different culture altogether.
So, if we treat the claim that it’s just like The Lay of the Volsungs as reductionist, then what that leaves us with is a deliberate side-lining. This happens often in literature for varying reasons, but I’ve identified at least two that should give us pause.
The first has to do with the tortured legacy of a united Germany in the first half of the 20th century. National epics afterwards took on sinister connotations—as a pathway to idolatrous nationalism at the expense of all other nationalities rather than as a means of creating interior unity. The second reason has to so with how our culture views angry women. That sounds itself like a reductionist claim, but I would submit that reductionist as it is, it nevertheless reflects a facet of the overall truth that we readily engage with when the subject is Romantasy, but not when the subject is a medieval epic.
An Overview of The Nibelungenlied
The allure of The Nibelungenlied over The Lay of the Volsungs is its obvious place in history. Unlike its Nordic cousins, The Nibelungenlied has ties to historical figures and a real time frame. We know that the events in the late “Aventiures” take place between 434 and 453 because Atilla the Hun (called Etzel in the poem) makes an appearance as a suitor (and second husband) to the widowed Kriemhilde. This puts the events in Burgundy in the lead-up to the “fall” of the Western Roman Empire in 476.
This detail alone should give us pause before we dismiss it as essentially the same as the Volsungs because this points to a conscientious effort to simultaneously identify a native culture with Rome while establishing it’s own identity. That impression is only strengthened when we examine the historical facts: Atlla the Hun’s last wife before his death actually was Germanic and her name, Ildico, is a derivative of the same root from which we get “Hilda” or “Hildé”—the last part of Kriemhilde’s name.
On top of that, the Huns actually did destroy Burgundy in 436-437, which doesn’t necessarily fit in with the poem’s timeline, but does provide an intriguing corollary between fact and fiction.
There is very little of German history not tied to Rome during this time period which begs the question of whether The Nibelungenlied has, like The Song of Roland or the Arthurian romances, a half-remembered historical event at it’s root or is simply an amalgamation of an actual historical event with a waning cultural memory.
The world of The Nibelungenlied, straddles two different spheres. On the one hand, there’s the ordered society of Burgundy which, as we’ve already established, would have actually been a Roman society. On the other, there’s the definitely non-Roman world of Atilla the Hun. So, there’s a juxtaposition of West and East, even if East here more West Asian and Eastern Europe. The next juxtaposition is between an “old” world where cultural norms like feuds, visions, battles are expected, accepted, and an inevitable part of life—not unlike Tacitus’ observations from centuries earlier—and a Christian world where daily mass is expected and almsgiving has been blended with the ancient rituals surrounding hospitality.
Yet, that is where the Christian world seems to end and the rest of the poem would be unrecognizable to a modern American Christian. We live in the aftermath of Victorian moralism mixed with modern Evangelicalism. The world which Sifrid is just blithely murdered because his brother-in-law is jealous isn’t he same world any Christian today would recognize as Christian, even with the constant church attendance and charitable giving.
But this is part of the point of the poem: this isn’t about good Christians being Christian. Most of the medieval tales that take place in an ostensibly Christian world aren’t about that at all—they are about Christians who are human beings living in a human world with all the usual human follies, only magnified to epic proportions.
This is, perhaps, part of the reason why medieval epics and romances are deliberately side-lined in most modern curriculum courses: the morality of today is far too pedestrian and inflexible to admit nuance.
The Blond Germanic “Beast”
My copy of The Nibelungenlied is D. G. Mowatt’s 1962 translation with his introduction and he actually goes into some of the reasons for the poem being basically side-lined. One of the main reasons, he claims, is that it’s dull, but his next claim is far more interesting in light of the cultural changes that came after 1962:
The blond Germanic beast marching bravely towards his fate is not to everyone’s taste. Nor, for that matter, is the hidebound medieval court obsessed with power and protocol. (Mowatt, iv)
Given this statement was made in 1962, we can reasonably infer that, at the time, the first part of that statement was more an observation about the general suspicion over anything German, especially when the Third Reich’s used Sifrid as something of a national mascot—the betrayed blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryan, struck down in the back.
But whether made in 1962 or in 2026, Mowatt is hilariously misguided. “The blond Germanic beast marching bravely towards his fate” is one of the key male fantasies that pervades literature even when he’s neither German nor blond. Greek epic heroes often fall into this category, Achilles being one of the most famous and while he very well may have been blonde, he certainly wasn’t Germanic.
Inevitability—the brave march towards fate—appeals to human beings because it gives them something to blame when there is nothing else. When your own endeavors are good, but they fail, you can just brush it of with “it’s not meant to be.” It’s like a perpetual pessimist who says that if you always expect the worst, you will never be disappointed.
So, what we’re left with is“Germanic” and the idea that a “hidebound medieval court obsessed with power and protocol” isn’t of interest.
The second can be more readily disposed of than the first with the fact that in 1962, the fantasy genre as we currently know it was still in its infancy and it was disregarded, if not outrightly disrespected.
J. R. R. Tolkien’s literary endeavors do not become a widespread serious area of study until the 2010s—even when I was in college in the late 00s “popular culture” conferences were for unserious academics, despite The Tolkien Society’s best efforts. Mowatt couldn’t have foreseen the slew of fantasy films that would grace movie screens in the late 70s and 80s, or the international event that was the premiere of The Return of the King.
The swing towards fantasy settings and fantasy movies naturally gave rise to more interest in medieval Europe thanks to Arthurian legend forming the basis of most fantasy up to Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn. With interest in the medieval aesthetic comes the interest in medieval politics.
So, we’re left with that word again: Germanic. Is the real reason why The Nibelungenlied ignored because it’s Germanic? I think we have to consider the possibility that it is. The Nazi party did appropriate the old medieval legend into a nationalist myth just as they appropriated Wagner’s operatic cycle based on the same.
Our current attitude towards anything that even has a whiff of scandal is to ostracize it. That goes doubly for whoever and whatever is labeled as the current bogeyman be that a shockingly rude President, a shockingly frail one, or whatever “ism” is currently fashionable to label as a precursor to Nazi Germany. Caution is prudent but in today’s world it’s often misplaced and overdone especially when as 12th century poem is punished for a 20th century regime appropriating it. It’s hardly fair that a nameless writer from the 1100s gets blamed for something in which he had no hand and couldn’t possibly have foreseen much less for not being up to a moral standard nearly a thousand years after his own time.
You will, of course, have idiots who will try to say and do differently—there are always those with more bravado than brains showing off their own ignorance—social media is filled with them. But I think it’s important for those of us who actually care about literature to do differently because any time we censor a work just because our 21st century opinions find it “problematic,” we’re really only revealing our own intolerance—not showcasing how advanced we are.
The Angry Woman
It’s easy to claim love for female rage, but it’s less easy to put that love into practice when the story is a tragedy and not a modern romance novel. Yet, that is what classical literature and the romantic tradition ask us to do.
The primary issue is that we associate tragedy with punishment, anti-heroes, and “morally gray” characters. This does a disservice when we come to look at some of the most famous angry women in literature like Medea and Clytemnestra. But the original Greek texts, like their medieval descendants offer no such black-and-white moral judgement. Those are interpretations we apply because we live in a world that is so obviously molded on a highly simplified Abrahamic morality.
Angry women in literature are not there as examples off women who are somehow inherently evil and therefore punishable. Their anger is justified and proportionate to the wrongs they suffered. What is questionable is how far their actions go.
Clytemnestra, for example, killed a king—if she was just a woman killing her husband, that would be one thing—but Agamemnon was a kind and king-killing was an invitation to chaos that could very well end in slavery should another king decide to try his hand at conquest. Killing him meant killing his authority and whatever protection his reputation lent the kingdom while he was away.
Kriemhilde also killed a king—she had her own brother Gunnar killed and then beheaded Hagen, his chief advisor herself. She is akin to Clytemnestra in that sense, only her wrongs are greater, her cause even more just, and unlike Clytemnestra, her beheading of Hagen Tronjë was more an execution.
Hagen Tronjë does all Gunnar’s dirty work in the poem and it’s something he almost take an inordinate amount of pride in—even going so far as to insult Kriemhilde when she hosts her brothers and their retainers at her home with Atilla. Insulting a lady of the court is one thing—but to insult the queen of a foreign nation? Kriemhilde’s demand for his head was justified by that alone.
Her elevated status compared to Hagen’s therefore makes his actions all the more heinous, especially in a culture that prized protocol and courtly manners. Hagen was unmannerly and unmannerly to one of his betters. Gunnar, who steadfastly defends Hagen against his own sister—even when Hagen is in the wrong—ends up as collateral damage.
Kriemjhilde doesn’t even undertake recent at first—she demands justice from her brothers. Gunnar had the power and ability to give his sister what she asked. The reasons he doesn’t are becuase Hagen acted on his ordered and because he was a man who reached for things beyond his capacity.
When, despite multiple appeals to her brothers, she is refused, Kriemhilde does the only thing left to her: she takes revenge. Sigrid’s death and the theft of the Nibelung horde could not go unpunished. Sifrid was a king in his own right and the deaths of kings in the ancient and medieval economy always required some kind of account.
Kriemhilde is almost forced to act as she does because no one else will.
She is not a woman to be judged, but a women for whom we should feel anger. This is what tragedy is supposed to do: present us with a set of circumstances that, to borrow a modern turn of phrase, suck all around and then give us an out. Usually, this means everyone dies, but imagine living with the knowledge that your brother ordered your husband’s murder and then protected his killer who then robbed you, insulted you in your own home, murders one of your children, and goes unchecked and unpunished for it all. Kriemhilde already had rebuilt once—do you really want her to rebuild again?
Her death at the end was a mercy: she too was destroyed from the inside out.
The Poem You Dare Not Forget
Nazi Germany may have latched on to Sifrid as their mascot, but they committed a fatal error in doing so because Sifrid isn’t the whole focus of the poem—Kriemhilde is. Sifrid is just the catalyst for her action in the poem.
We not not have to make their mistake. In fact, it would be the most glorious reversal of their appropriation if we make a point of remembering Kriemhilde.
But in the rush after World War II and the culture wars that ensued, very little has happened to dismantle the bias against The Nibelungenlied on a wider literary level. Yes, the world has moved on—UNESCO even recognizes early manuscripts of The Niebelungenlied as critically important to our common human heritage. Wagner’s operas can still be heard in opera houses the world over too. But the text ills hasn’t regained any of it’s pre-World War acclaim.
We still too readily lump it in with Norse mythology or because we are too reluctant to touch something used as nationalist idol and can’t tolerate sitting with the discomfort that brings.
The first is forgivable and understandable. The second is against any and all tenats of serious intellectual and literary pursuit. Frankly, we owe it to ourselves to sit with that discomfort and unpick the threads of nationalist idolatry to the real literary gold underneath. Kriemhilde is the wronged woman that we still see in the world today, her echo still sounding across a thousand-year history. Will you silence her too?
Works Cited
Mowatt, D. G. Introduction. The Nibelungenlied, Everyman’s Library, 1962, pp. i–x.
The Nibelungenlied. Translated with an introduction and notes by D. G. Mowatt, Everyman’s Library, 1962.
Watch the Original Movie
The link below will take you to YouTube and the first half of the Fritz Lang movie. It may show an error in the image below, but don’t worry, I’ve tested it my end and it worked for me !
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