Questions about Germanic heroic legend
Short answers, pulled from the story.
What is Germanic heroic legend and when did it originate?
Germanic heroic legend is the heroic literary tradition of the Germanic-speaking peoples, most of which originates in or is set during the Migration Period of the 4th to 6th centuries AD. The legends mythologize real historical events, transforming the causes of political catastrophes into personal human motivations such as greed, jealousy, and revenge, and portraying people from different centuries as contemporaries in a shared heroic age.
What are the most famous works of Germanic heroic legend?
The most famous works include Beowulf, the only surviving early medieval vernacular heroic epic in English; the Old High German Hildebrandslied (c. 800), probably the oldest surviving heroic poem; the Nibelungenlied (c. 1200), the most celebrated German heroic epic; and the Völsunga saga, a 13th-century Old Norse prose narrative. The Poetic Edda, compiled in Iceland around the mid-13th century from the Codex Regius (c. 1270), preserves 19 heroic poems alongside mythological material.
Who were the central figures of Germanic heroic legend?
The three most widely attested heroic legends concern Dietrich von Bern (based on the historical Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great), the hero Siegfried or Sigurd and his death, and the destruction of the Burgundian kingdom under king Gundahar by the Huns. These were described as "the backbone of Germanic storytelling." The Hunnic king Attila and the Gothic king Ermanaric were also central figures around whom legends accumulated.
How did Richard Wagner use Germanic heroic legend in Der Ring des Nibelungen?
Wagner's operatic cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen, first performed in 1876, drew on the Poetic Edda, the Völsunga saga, and the Nibelungenlied as mediated through the editions and translations of the brothers Grimm, Friedrich von der Hagen, Karl Simrock, and other Romantic scholars. Klaus Böldl writes that Wagner's work made the legends widely known while simultaneously suppressing awareness of the original medieval sources, so that outside Germany most subsequent reception of the Nibelungen material has passed through Wagner rather than the medieval texts.
How did Germanic heroic legend influence J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings?
Tolkien drew extensively on Germanic heroic legend throughout his work. The cursed golden ring Andvaranaut and the broken sword Gram from the Völsunga saga broadly correspond to the One Ring and the sword Narsil (reforged as Andúril). The shapeshifting bear-man Bǫðvarr Bjarki from Hrólfs saga kraka inspired the character Beorn in The Hobbit, and the Hervarar saga supplied sources for the Rohirrim and the forest Mirkwood. Tom Shippey calls Beowulf "the single work which influenced Tolkien most."
How was Germanic heroic legend used in Nazi propaganda?
The Nibelungenlied was used in anti-democratic propaganda in the interwar years to argue that the German people were better suited to a heroic, aristocratic order than to democracy, and Siegfried's murder was compared to the nationalist "stab in the back" myth. During the Second World War, Hermann Göring explicitly invoked the Nibelungenlied to celebrate the destruction of the German army at Stalingrad, comparing Soviet forces to Attila's Huns. After the Third Reich's fall, the Nibelungenlied was removed from German school curricula and became effectively taboo for a generation.