Gesamtkunstwerk.

Anonymous Das Nibelungenlied, translated by Burton Raffel. Yale University Press, 351 pages, $40

If you want to enjoy the Song of the Nibelungs, you must try to do one thing: forget Wagner. His music drama Der Ring der Nibelungen is such an overwhelming aesthetic experience--he was only slightly exaggerating when he claimed to have composed a Gesamtkunstwerk, a "total work of art'--that it has inevitably eclipsed the medieval saga on which it was based.

Yet Das Nibelungenlied is a remarkable work of art in its own right. Among medieval epics, it occupies the first rank, transcending even Beowulf and the Chanson de Roland in complexity and emotional intensity. Only Homer surpasses the lay of the Nibelungen in tragic grandeur. And its influence is ubiquitous--one need only mention the notable medievalist J. R. R. Tolkien, whose Lord of the Rings owes at least as much to the original poem as to Wagner's reworking.

What of the story itself?. It falls naturally into two halves, reflecting its origins in two distinct traditions. The first part tells the story of Sifried, King of the Netherlands, a mighty warrior and dragonslayer. Using magic, he impersonates the Burgundian Gunther, King of the Rhineland, to woo the Amazonian Brunhild, in return for Gunther's sister, Krimhild. Later, the two queens quarrel and Hagen, one of Gunther's retainers, plots to kill Sifried on a hunting expedition, deceiving Krimhild into revealing his weak spot. (Sifried's death is followed by a frightening scene at his funeral when the murderer's presence causes his wounds to bleed.) The widowed Krimhild remains in the Burgundian capital, Worms, and seems to be reconciled with Gunther, who covets the treasure of the Nibelungs, a dynasty of giants slain by Sifried. Their treasure, guarded by Alberich, is her dowry. For reasons which are not quite clear, halfway through the epic, the Burgundians, or "Rhinemen," take on the name "Nibelungs."

The second part of the epic, Krimhild's revenge, takes place many years later. Krimhild has remarried and is now Queen of the Huns. At her request, her husband King Etzel invites the Nibelungs to Hungary, where she plans to have Hagen killed. A fight breaks out between the Huns and Nibelungs, and at first the guests gain the upper hand. The Queen has their hall burnt down around them, but still they fight on. At last only Gunther and Hagen are left alive, but they are captured by Etzel's ally, the exiled King Dietrich of Verona. Krimhild decapitates both prisoners, whereupon she is herself hacked to death by Dietrich's vassal Hildebrand.

Like the Iliad and Odyssey, Das Nibelungenlied had a long and obscure prehistory, which is well summarized by Edward R. Haymes in his introduction to the present edition. It is based on historical events during the period of the Germanic migration that accompanied the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire: chiefly, the defeat of a Germanic tribe, the Burgundians, by a coalition of Huns and Romans around the year 436. Three kings were killed, two of whose names figure in the epic: Gunther and Giselher. These events were soon elaborated into a tale of Nibelung warriors betrayed by their Hunnish hosts at the behest of a vengeful queen.

Over the next two centuries, various other historical figures were woven into the story, including Attila the Hun (known in medieval German as Etzel), who died of a hemorrhage on his wedding night, and Ildico, his Teutonic bride. The legend soon grew that she had murdered Attila in revenge for her father, and she became Kriemhilde (or Krimhild), the central character in most versions of the epic, except Wagner's. Sifried and Brunhild (Wagner's Siegfried and Brunhilde) belong to a quite separate epic tradition, which merged with the lay of the Nibelungen only much later. According to the chronicler Gregory of Tours, the Frankish king Sigibert married Brunichildis, a Gothic princess. The rivalry between Brunichildis and her sister-in-law Fredegund led to a bloody feud, to which both Sigibert and his bride ultimately fell victim. By the time Brunichildis was killed in 613, history had already begun to evolve into legend, though the paucity of surviving German heroic verse until the Hildebrandslied in the eleventh century has obliged scholars to trace several lost stages of its emergence from Burgundian to Frankish, Bavarian, and Austrian versions.

A distant echo of the orally transmitted Germanic saga can be heard in the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, composed between the seventh and tenth centuries. There, we are told, King Hrothgar's minstrel compares the hero Beowulf's dragon-slaying exploits with those of Sigemund, "whose name was known everywhere." Sigemund figures in the Nibelungenlied as the father of the hero Sifried, but there is no comparison with his role in Wagner's Ring, where he and his son are sacrificed to appease the gods. The thirteenth-century Icelandic Edda saga, which preserves much of this Nibelung (or Nifelung in Old Norse) material in its archaic, pagan form, shows how refined the literary version known to us is by comparison.

Das Nibelungenlied had already survived in oral tradition for six or seven centuries before it was reworked into our Middle High German epic for performance at a south German or Austrian court around the year 1200. This period, the noontide of medieval German literature under the Hohenstaufen emperors, was as remote from the genesis of the epic as we are from the thirteenth century. We know nothing about the author, except that he probably lived in the region of Passau, on the Bavarian-Austrian marches, and is more likely to have been a clerical than a secular poet. He may have chosen anonymity because he was not creating but refashioning ancient lays according to contemporary courtly and Christian conventions. He probably also had a much more recent epic, Diu Not (composed around 1160 but now lost), to work from.

Just as Hollywood endlessly recycles stereotypical superheroes, so the Nibelungen poet incorporated popular heroes from other epics: Margrave Rudiger, Dietrich of Berne, and old Hildebrand. There is also Volker, the noble fiddler, who represents the rising status of the troubadours or Minnesinger. Above all, he turned the two villains of the piece, Hagen and Krimhild, into rounded, complex, and highly believable characters. By the time he had finished with it, the primitive saga of treachery and revenge had become a subtle psychological drama, in which the cultured, Apollonian world of courtly love is overwhelmed by the chthonic forces of tragic, Dionysian destiny.

The subsequent history of the Nibelungenlied's reception has likewise been no less rich and dramatic than Homer's, culminating in its rediscovery by the Romantics. Karl Simrock, the publisher and friend of the brothers Grimm, produced the best of several verse translations into modern German which popularized the work. The great classical philologist Karl Lachmann applied the new techniques of textual scholarship. I have his edition, the first reliable one, before me; it tries to distinguish between the "original" poem and later matter interpolated by the "editor" printed in italics. To the epic proper, Lachmann appended Die Klage ("The lament"), a much later and inferior work which is included in the surviving manuscripts. Modern editions omit Die Klage, but it is striking that the present translation is based on a nineteenth-century edition deriving from Lachmann.

No sooner had the Song of the Nibelungen become audible again than it was absorbed into the chorus of nationalists, including Wagner, who pressed it into the service of restoring the Reich. During the Weimar Republic, Fritz Lang sought to reach back beyond Wagner with his 1924 film version of Die Nibelungen. The screenplay by Thea von Harbou is much closer to the medieval text than to Wagner, whose mythological monopoly Lang hoped to challenge. But this monumental movie was criticized by Siegfried Kracauer, the great historian of German cinema, for prefiguring the propaganda of Goebbels with its leitmotif of ineluctable fate, and it is true that Lang saw himself as recreating a national myth.

The phrase Nibelungentreue had emerged in the early twentieth century to denote blind loyalty, still seen as a distinctive and positive Teutonic attribute--even though the poem is actually about disloyalty. But it was the Nazis who debased the heroic virtues celebrated in this pre-Christian saga, subsuming it into their own secularization of the Christian idea of sacrifice. They seized on the poem's glorification of death, which reinforced their own nihilism, while reading into it their very modern ideology of race. As Edward Haymes comments, the German defeat at Stalingrad was transfigured into a tragic scenario by the metaphorical use of the Nibelungen analogy. It is only recently that Germans have been able to detach the medieval epic from its echoes of the Third Reich, and in Wagner's case they have yet to do so.

There have been a number of English translations over the past century, but the only one that has been worth reading hitherto is the 1962 prose translation by A. T. Hatto. Written in the same plain style as E. V. Rieu's Homer (also published by Penguin Classics), Hatto provides excellent notes and makes the Nibelungenlied read like a thriller. But he cannot get around the fact that it is a poem, not a novel. A modern, reliable, and readable English verse translation of this landmark in European literature is long overdue. There can be few translators as well qualified for this daunting task--dismissed as impossible by Hatto--as Burton Raffel, who has already tackled Anglo-Saxon verse and prose as well as the narrative poems of Chretien de Troyes.

So what kind of poem is Das Nibelungenlied? It is divided into aventiure, or "adventures" which correspond to Homer's "books." These are composed throughout in quatrains, each line of which in turn is subdivided into two half-lines, the second of which are usually iambic tetrameters. In the original, the quatrains consist of pairs of strictly rhyming couplets. The poem as a whole has a noble simplicity of tone, lacking Homeric speeches and sparing with metaphor or adjective, but the action rattles along, its antagonists driven relentlessly to their final doom. We do not know whether it would have been sung, chanted, or recited, but the rhythm and strophic form suggests that it must have sounded less like the high-flown verse of a Milton, or even a Chaucer, than an old English nursery rhyme.

Raffel's translation of Das Nibelungenlied is fluent and accurate. He has tried to follow the original's form, rhyme, and meter as closely as is possible, given the linguistic gulf between modern English and Middle High German. As Raffel explains in his excellent and admirably lucid notes, the prosody of Middle High German depends for its effects on a wealth of case endings which had been all but lost in English already by Chaucer's time. The translator is therefore forced to vary the rhyming scheme, resorting to partial or assonantal rhymes, and "in desperation" he admits to having "simply ducked for cover and run?' Here is how Sifried dies:

   Then Krimhild's husband fell among the
      flowers.

This may seem a little prosaic, compared to the musicality of the original:

   Do viel in die bluomen der Kriemhilde man.

But the translation preserves the vivid imagery of the dying hero surrounded by beauty, and that is what matters. Again, the last line of the poem may sound flat:

   Here my story ends with the fate that fell
      on the Nibelungs.

The original, though, likewise opts for tragic simplicity:

   Hie hat daz maer ein ende ditze ist der
      nibelunge not.

Moreover, Raffel's "fate" is a more accurate rendering of "not" than Hatto's "last stand" which evokes the absurd Colonel Custer rather than Hagen of Troneg, who is a complex character, diabolical yet also noble, in the mold of Milton's Satan.

No translation can ever be definitive, for this is a work that encapsulates an eon of human experience like few others. Even so, Burton Raffel has unlocked the gateway to the era that will always be for us the Dark Ages, to reveal a world as authentic as any in European literature. There are more things in Das Nibelungenlied than were dreamt of in Wagner's philosophy.