‘But this is out of the question’ replied Dancwart. If you do this, I shall make you very rich and give you splendid clothes.Īnd then when they do go on expeditions, there’s always some noble margrave (a sort of count) who can take in a thousand men on no notice:

‘Now do exactly as I ask’, she said to the two messengers, ‘Tell them my message at home and you will earn a great reward. When Kriemhild bribes the messengers, for example, she offers them, of all things, splendid clothes: Clothing seems to be very important in this era. To be GQ ready, they enlist the women to manufacture gem and ruby studded clothing. When planning an expedition, their primary concern appears to be to arrive well-dressed. In addition to feasting, the men can often be found planning expeditions to neighbouring kingdoms. when dignitaries come into town) and do the things that men and women do. Men and women are also somewhat sequestered from one another, so they look forward to special occasions when they can intermingle (e.g. The women busy themselves in making fancy, gem studded clothing.

In the Nibelungenlied, castles resound with the thunderous and joyous sounds of clashing lances and shields. Excellent for Scrabble players out there everywhere! By the way, a fillet is a band worn by unmarried women around the head, a wimple is a cloth headdress worn by married women (still worn by nuns today), and a bohort is a jousting tournament with dulled lances. With words like ‘fillet’, ‘wimple’, and ‘bohort’, the Nibelungenlied is a vocabulary enhancing extravaganza.

The safest guess is, then, that the strange genius who wrote the Nibelungenlied was a semi-clerical poet by profession, technically of the order of vagi or wayfarers, though probably sedentary for most of his life. There is a short chapter “The Status of the Poet” which speculates on who this ‘Last Poet’ was. The ‘Last Poet’ (the one who put together the earlier lays into the current epic) is anonymous, so little to say here. Comparable in scope to the Iliad, this skilfully crafted work is one of the greatest of epic poems–the principal version of the heroic legends used by Richard Wagner in The Ring. But the two women quarrel, and Siegfried is ultimately destroyed by those he trusts most. Siegfried, a great prince of the Netherlands, wins the hand of the beautiful princess Kriemhild of Burgundy, by aiding her brother Gunther in his struggle to possess a powerful Icelandic Queen. Written by an unknown author in the twelfth century, this powerful story of murder and revenge reaches back to the earliest epochs of German antiquity, transforming centuries-old versions of the tale into a poetic masterpiece.

The Nibelungenlied by Unknown