If we accept as our definition of an Epic:—(a) A long poem, (b) of an interest not less than national[1], describing (c) in noble language (d) a series of naturally and organically connected actions (e) of heroic actors, we shall find that, while we must deny the name to some so-called epics[2], we have to thank the spirit, the imagination, the genius, of the Middle Ages for two great epics. If some critics are inclined to place these on a lower plane, for the alleged reason that the language is lacking in nobility, we may reply that it is a rash literary judgment which appraises the language and style of a far-off time by the standards either of a later civilization and culture, or by those of a quite different race, as of Greece. That is entitled to be called noble language which stirred with heroic impulses, and lifted above themselves, the hearers to whom it was addressed, and this great essential was, we know, amply fulfilled by the Chanson de Roland and the Nibelungenlied. These are both Primitive Epics, as distinguished from the epics of the study. They are National Epics, in the same sense in which the Iliad is, and in a sense in which the Aeneid is not one. By a strange coincidence, the great national epics of the world are unfathered. Of the authorship of the epics of the study, as of Virgil, Milton, Tasso, in which the imagination of a poet bodied forth the life of a long-past age, the scenes of a far-off world, there has never been the shadow of a doubt; but those which paint in everlasting colours the life, the stir of action, the thrill of passion, of an age in which the poet lived and moved and had his being, these songs which pulsate with the very life-blood of the past—when we ask, “Who was the singer?” there comes back only a muffled voice from behind a veil. In India, in France, in Germany, stand thrones waiting for ever empty of the kings of song, and in Greece upon the most imperial of all sits only a featureless shadow, to whose very name is denied by some the attribute of personality.
For this obscurity of authorship there is, in the case of the Nibelungenlied, more reason than with the other epics. What is conjectural with respect to the Iliad and the Chanson, is indubitable with respect to the Lied, viz. that both in its origin and in its construction it was composite, that the elements of which it is a union are in date, perhaps in place of origin, widely remote from each other. The Saga of the Niblungs, of which the Nibelungenlied is the finished poetical development, is a union of mythical and historical elements.
1. The Mythical Element, The groundwork of this is the Saga of Siegfried, or Sigurd, as he is named in the Northern versions of the myth. In the old heroic age of the Teuton tribes, perhaps during the period of the Migrations of the Peoples, in the 5th, 6th and 7th centuries, there took shape this legend of a demigod hero[3]. The supernatural pervades the whole atmosphere of this primitive form of the myth. The Gods still walk the earth, the hero is descended from a God, he woos a cloud-maiden, there is something more than earthly in his sword, in his horse, in the glance of his eyes. But as the Germanic tribes to whom this myth was a common inheritance broke up and wandered far apart, it came to pass that it was just with those who remained in the ancient home, the birth-land of the myth, that it became most modified, and that its supernatural elements were removed or toned down, as the result of admixture with more civilized peoples, and, still more, of the acceptance of Christianity by the Germans themselves. Christian teachers were too grimly in earnest to tolerate poems which assumed the existence of heathen deities, and glorified non-Christian virtues. Hence it came to pass that the tribes of Teutonic origin which longest preserved the original form of the myth were those which wandered farthest from the old home-land, and which were the last to abandon the old faith.
The Norse form of the legend, which is most fully preserved for us in the Eddas, or prose epics of Iceland, presents us with the original story, transfigured with all gleams of fancy and splendours of imagination which had gathered round it as it was handed down through generations of bards. There is no need here to tell the story of this Northern version of the Saga, since it has been told for all English lovers of noble poetry by William Morris in his Story of Sigurd, which has well been characterized as “the one great English epic of the nineteenth century,” and which is the most Homeric-spirited poem since Homer. It is an expanded verse-rendering of the Volsunga-saga of the prose Edda, a literal prose version of which is also accessible to all readers, executed by the same author[4].
We will confine ourselves to indicating the features which reappear, under some form or other, in the Nibelungenlied[5]. Sigurd, son of Sigmund, slays Fafnir, the man who had been transformed into a dragon, and takes the dragon-guarded treasure, three horse-loads of gold, with a magic ring, the begetter of gold. But to this Hoard cleaves the curse pronounced by the Dwarf Andvari, from whom it had been taken, that it should prove the destruction of every possessor. With this he rides away, and comes to a hill-top begirt with a wall of fire. He rides through the fire, and finds Brynhild, a Valkyr-maid, who had been cast into a trance-sleep by Odin for transgressing his behests. He awakens her; they love, and plight their troth. But Sigurd, to fulfil his destiny, has to ride on, and so comes to the realm of the Niblungs (people of Mistland), who dwell by the Rhine. Here Grimhild, mother of King Gunnar, gives him a drugged wine-cup which makes him forget Brynhild, and so he weds Gudrun, the sister of the King. He goes with Gunnar to help him to win Brynhild, who is again begirt with the wall of fire. Gunnar cannot ride through it; so Sigurd, transformed by a spell into Gunnar’s semblance, does so, and, still in his shape, lies three nights by Brynhild, but lays his sword between them. Gunnar is wedded to Brynhild, who sees at his palace Sigurd wedded to Gudrun, while Sigurd at the same time recovers memory of the past, and knows how he has been beguiled into proving false to his first love. The queens in their jealousy quarrel, and Gudrun tells Brynhild the truth about her wooing. The latter insists upon having vengeance in Sigurd’s death, and he is murdered in his sleep. Brynhild, after brief exultation in her revenge, slays herself to be united in her death to the only man she has ever loved: her body is burnt with his, and together they enter Valhalla. After this, the story, though with many differences of detail, follows substantially the same broad lines as the Nibelungenlied, in the second marriage of Gudrun, and the great vengeance wreaked in the hall of the Hun-king.
Now this older version was a tale of a dateless past, when men lived who were near in birth to Gods, and when Gods came down to earth as freely as they do in Homer. It is suffused with a glamour of the supernatural, with a weird magnificence, both of nature and of man. Its actors are led on, or thrust on, by inevitable doom, their fates are foretold to them, and they go clear-eyed to the consummation of all. There is no pettiness about any of them, they are all moulded on the heroic scale, and the light about them is not the light of common day. But the poet of the Nibelungenlied, as we have it (however it may have been with the lost original form of the lay), essayed a practically impossible task, namely, to bring the essential characters of the old Saga into the scenes and social atmosphere of the twelfth century, with the supernatural elements left out. Hence he makes a different story of the early life of Siegfried, which has the effect of making his parents’ fears for his safety, on his departure for Burgundy, unreasonable in the light of his past exploits. He makes a different tale of the slaying of the dragon, and of the winning of the Hoard, the amount of which he enormously exaggerates, while omitting all mention of the curse attached to it, though it does work in the poem. He has to construct a different Brynhild, and a different wooing, while he leaves unexplained Siegfried’s previous acquaintance with her, and her antipathy to him from the beginning. These flaws in construction are not all; the characters also suffer. Deeds of violence and wrong, which are accepted in the old Saga much as we accept the incidents of a fairy-tale, especially as the actors are not masters of their own fate, are now transferred to men and women who are made as amenable to our judgment as, say, our early Norman Kings, and who, moreover, live in a Christian land of minsters, monasteries and priests. Hence they cannot but lose in moral dignity; and it needs a mediaevally constituted mind to admire or respect a man simply on the score of his unflinching courage and fidelity to a cause which he has made a tainted cause. This weakness of treatment, which we may fairly say was inevitable for any poet, however great, who undertook to
