The Epic in an Age of Romance: Genre and Discursive Context in the Nibelungenlied

Eine Dichtung entsteht und wirkt nicht isoliert, sondern in ihrer Wechselwirkung mit älterer und gleichzeitiger Literatur. Das drückt sich in direkter Bezugnahme, in Aufnahme von Stoffen, Themen und Gestaltungsweisen, in verwandelter Begrifflichkeit und Sprachstil oder auch in Distanz zu anderen Texten aus.

(Göhler 121)

The ways in which the various mythic and partly historic elements of the Nibelungenlied (NL) evolved into the creative ensemble we have before us now are uncertain – as is evident, for example, in the efforts of scholars of a former generation to identify discrete stages of evolution (Murdoch 120–38). Whatever its legendary antecedents may have been, however, in its written form the NL was not to appear until the decade that spawned the first wave of courtly/Arthurian romances on German soil, and the epic abounds in invocations of the life and (especially) material culture of twelfth and early thirteenth-century European courts. Despite its frequent references to outward markers of a fashionable lifestyle, on the other hand, most scholars would deny the Nibelungenlied the epithet "courtly" in the deeper, moral sense in which the term is customarily applied to Hartmann's Erec or Wolfram's Parzival, works whose ethical ambitions are encapsulated in the narrative structure of a binary sin-and-redemption pattern ("Doppelweg"). On the contrary, what Brian Murdoch has written of the Old High German Hildebrandslied might with equal validity be repeated of the Nibelungenlied: "the whole tone is fatalist, and God has no real role here" (126; also Buschinger 81–89).

The simultaneity of reception with products of the romance genre must have conferred on the epic a certain confrontational aspect within the discursive context of early thirteenth-century literary tradition. The chronological apposition has sometimes been interpreted as advancing a particularly provocative thrust, for example by Winder McConnell and Walter Haug:

It [the NL] may have been conceived of as an "answer" to the Arthurian romances of the day with their overt idealism and penchant for happy endings […]. The essence of the NL is the spirit it exudes, its pessimism in a literary world in which the prevailing spirit was decidedly optimistic and idealistic.

(McConnell, "The Passing of Old Heroes" 105)

Es [NL] bietet [...] in seiner Weise eine Antwort auf die Problematik der Zeit, eine Antwort, die wohl bewußt als Kontrast zur höfischen Epik gedacht war und aus diesem Kontrast verstanden sein wollte. Die Analogien und damit der kontrastierende Bezug zum Artusroman sind augenfällig.

(Haug 306; emphasis added)

These judgment s represent the impression left on a number of readers (for example Bekker; Haymes; Ihlenberg; and McConnell, A Companion to the Nibelungenlied) when coming from the romances to an epic that, despite its courtly externals, sustains a fatalistic, heroic ethos with what appears to suggest a determined skepticism towards the ethical aspirations of a Hartmann or Wolfram. Other scholars, on the other hand, have questioned whether such a formal opposition between courtly (romance) and heroic (epic) is actually implied in the text, for example Elisabeth Lienert:

[Das] NL thematisiert sein Verhältnis zum höfischen Roman nicht ausdrücklich [...]. Ein Gegensatz der Sphären des "Höfischen" und des "Heroischen" wird nicht konsequent aufgebaut, räumlich so wenig wie ideell.

(Lienert 98–99; see also Müller 449)

The following discussion reassesses the evidence for both these points of view. Given the many points of thematic overlap between important scenes in the NL and those romance coevals to which it supposedly supplies a rejoinder, an intertextual method will be employed to identify significant cross-textual ironies between the NL and the romances alluded to above. In this way the attempt will be made to reanalyse in concrete terms what some have intuitively suspected to be the poet's philosophical confrontation with the spirit of his age.

Thirteenth-century romance writers often strove to make their works cohere with the ideological structures of revered predecessors such as Hartmann or Wolfram, one example of such a tendency being Der Pleier in his efforts to submit Der Stricker's somewhat rough-hewn Daniel von dem Blühenden Tal...