the Middle Ages, with Kriemhilt and her maidens in various stages of undress, and engaging in lesbian activities. The film ends with Siegfried’s death being averted, which at least had the advantage of precluding a sequel.
The new millennium has seen the filming of the saga enter a new genre, with the fantasy film directed by Uli Edel (2004), like Reinl’s film an international co-production. Max von Sydow, who played the lead in the greatest film with a medieval subject, Ingmar Bergman’s
The Seventh Seal
(1957), plays Eyvind the smith, Siegfried’s foster-father—not a figure familiar from the saga. A sample of the dialogue will suffice to convey the film’s banality. Brunhilde has initiated Siegfried into love, and invites him to Iceland:
SIEGFRIED: How will I find you in Iceland? There must be lots of Brunhildes there.
BRUNHILDE: Yes, but only one who is Queen of Iceland.
Yet despite the vicissitudes of its reception, more people now read the
Nibelungenlied
than at any time in its history, and its place in world literature is secure.
NOTE ON THE TEXT AND TRANSLATION
T HIS translation is based on the edition by Karl Bartsch in the ‘Deutsche Classiker’ series, which first appeared in 1870; it was revised by Helmut de Boor in 1940, and after de Boor’s death in 1976 reprinted with a revised introduction and bibliography by Roswitha Wisniewski (1979, 1988). Bartsch based his text on manuscript B (St Gall, Stiftsbibliothek, cod. 857). Other editions and facsimiles have been adduced, and their variant readings very occasionally preferred, as indicated in the notes. On several occasions Bartsch’s readings have been preferred to those of de Boor.
The strophe numbers in the margin derive from the Bartsch/de Boor edition and are intended to aid the student who wishes to read the text in conjunction with the Middle High German. The same applies to the division into thirty-nine ‘Adventures’.
The style of the lay is uneven and was in some measure archaic, even at the time when it was written down. Transposing it into modern English prose inevitably means some loss of the timbre of the original. This translation tries to stay as close as possible to the MHG text. Heroic epic brings with it its own characteristic diction, and there are limits to the extent to which it is possible to bend the style in the direction of modern idiom, living as we do in what few people would venture to describe as a heroic age.
Some stylistic devices defy the translator altogether. That known by the Greek term
apo koinu
, the linking of two clauses by the same subject, is one such. For example, in strophe 2271 a literal rendering would be: ‘Then he wanted to leap at him, but Hildebrant, his uncle, would not permit him grasped him firmly to him.’ Hildebrant is the subject of both main clauses. Postposed epithets are less of a problem. In strophe 2325 Dietrich is described as
der helt guot
(literally: ‘the hero worthy’). This appellative introduces two further problems. The noun
helt
has been rendered as ‘hero’, even if on occasions this clashes with actions which are far from heroic. The lay has a large number of such designations at its disposal, of which the most frequently recurring, apart from
helt
, are
degen, ritter, recke
, and
wîgant
. The terms
degen
and
ritter
are generally rendered as ‘knight’, although that better befits
ritter
, the new rank of
miles
thatevolved in the twelfth century, 1 whereas
degen
is a more archaic word. The terms
recke
and
wîgant
are rendered as ‘warrior’ and ‘fighting man’; like
helt
, they had by 1200 an archaic ring to them. Modern English simply does not have sufficient synonyms in this field. The same problem applies, to a lesser extent, to laudatory epithets such as
guot, küene, snel, balt, gemeit, ûz erwelt:
‘worthy’, ‘bold’, ‘brave’, ‘courageous’, ‘valiant’, ‘gallant’, ‘excellent’. These are often qualified by the