Germanic heroic legend

• 1. Introduction

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  Germanic heroic legend is a tradition born in catastrophe. Between the 4th and 6th centuries AD, the Migration Period tore apart the ancient world as Gothic kingdoms rose and fell, Hunnic armies swept across Europe, and the Burgundians lost their entire kingdom in a single devastating blow. Out of that wreckage came stories. They were passed by word of mouth across an entire continent, told in mead-halls and monasteries, carved onto runestones, and eventually written down in ink. They gave us Beowulf, the Nibelungenlied, and the Völsunga saga. They also gave Richard Wagner the material for his operatic Ring cycle, and they gave J.R.R. Tolkien the cursed golden ring and the broken sword reforged that became the beating heart of The Lord of the Rings. The same stories that celebrated the doomed last stand of Burgundian warriors would later be twisted into Nazi propaganda and used by Hermann Göring to celebrate the sacrifice of the German army at Stalingrad. How did tales of Migration Period kings become one of the most consequential storytelling traditions in Western history? That is the question at the center of this documentary.

• 2. The Heroes and Their Code

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  Edward Haymes and Susan Samples describe the Germanic hero as an "extraordinary individual who stands above his contemporaries in physical and moral strength." This was not simply a matter of fighting ability. The hero was always a warrior defined by his concern with reputation and fame, bound by political responsibilities, and belonging to an aristocratic class. The legends about these heroes gave their aristocratic audiences a mirror in which to examine their own behavior and values. What that mirror reflected was not always comfortable. Klaus von See rejected the idea that heroes were meant as role models, arguing instead that the hero is defined by egotism and excessive, often brutal behavior. Walter Haug pushed this further, suggesting that the brutality of the heroic ethos reflected the encounter with seemingly senseless violence in history itself. Peter Fisher drew a pointed distinction between the Germanic hero and the classic tragic hero of Greek drama. In classical tragedy, the hero's death restores order. In the Germanic tradition, the hero's death brings destruction. His goal is frequently revenge, which in classical tragedy would count as a flaw. Rolf Bremmer traces the origins of this heroic ethos to the Roman historian Tacitus, writing in the 1st century AD, whose descriptions of Germanic warrior culture planted the seed of scholarly interpretation that would grow for nearly two thousand years. The most celebrated heroes of the tradition were the Gothic king Ermanaric, the Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great (known in legend as Dietrich von Bern), the Hunnic king Attila, and the Burgundian king Gundahar. These figures from different centuries and different peoples were drawn together into a single shared heroic age, where they could meet, scheme, fight, and betray each other as though they had all lived at the same time.

• 3. Oral Roots, Written Branches

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  The Roman historian Tacitus, writing around 56 to 120 AD, noted that the Germanic peoples celebrated an earth-born god called Tuisto in what he described as traditional songs forming their only record of the past. He also recorded that the Cheruscian leader Arminius was celebrated in song after his death. These are the earliest hints of a poetic tradition that would survive, transform, and branch across nearly two millennia. The oldest surviving heroic poem is the Old High German Hildebrandslied, dating to around 800 AD, which tells of a battle between the hero Hildebrand and his own son Hadubrand. For most of the Early Middle Ages, almost nothing was written down. The Frankish Emperor Charlemagne, who lived from 748 to 814, may have collected heroic poetry; his biographer Einhard wrote that he "wrote out the barbarous and ancient songs, in which the acts of the kings and their wars were sung, and committed them to memory." None of that collection has survived, if it ever existed. The written tradition finally opened up in Anglo-Saxon England, which preserved the only surviving early medieval heroic epic in the vernacular: Beowulf. From the 13th century onward, Iceland and Norway produced the great Eddic poems and the legendary sagas, including the Völsunga saga. In Germany, the same century saw the appearance of the Nibelungenlied, composed around 1200, probably with the patronage of bishop Wolfger von Erla of Passau. A minority of scholars, led by Walter Goffart and Roberta Frank, have argued that there was never any genuine oral tradition and that learned clerics in the Carolingian period invented the legends wholesale by reading about Migration Period events in Latin chronicles. That position, however, is described as "contrary to almost all literary scholarship."

• 4. Stone, Bone, and Carved Wood

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  Long before ink and parchment, the legends were told in images. The Anglo-Saxon Franks Casket, made around 700 AD, depicts the legend of Wayland the smith: the crippled Wayland stands over the headless bodies of the children he killed in revenge, while the figure of a woman brings him a piece of jewelry to repair. An archer at the top of the casket is generally identified with Egil, Wayland's brother, whose story also appears in the Þiðrekssaga and the Völundarkviða. In Sweden, nine runic inscriptions and several picture stones from the Viking Age illustrate scenes from Germanic heroic legends. The picture stone known as Smiss I from Gotland, dated around 700, appears to show the legend of Hildr: a woman stands between two armed groups, one arriving by ship, apparently seeking to mediate between her father Hagene and the man who seized her for marriage. The Gotland image stone Ardre VIII, dated to the 8th century, shows two decapitated bodies, a smithy, and a winged creature interpreted as Wayland escaping his captivity by flying away. The Ramsund carving in Sweden tells the story of Sigurd killing the dragon Fafnir in a sequence of interlocking images. It was probably carved in memory of a man named Sigfried, which may explain why his legend was chosen. Parts of the Sigurd story also appear on several 10th-century stone crosses from the British Isles, including a number on the Isle of Man, and on Norwegian stave churches built around 1200, including the Hylestad and Vegusdal stave churches. The Kirk Andreas cross on the Isle of Man probably contains the only image of the hero Gunnarr found outside Scandinavia: he is shown dying in a snake pit while playing a harp.

• 5. The Machine of Transmission

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  By the late 9th century, a figure known in Old English as a scop and in Old High German as a skof was performing heroic poetry at the courts of lords. The scop also served as a keeper of past knowledge, functioning as a living archive of the tradition. A scop is depicted singing heroic material within Beowulf itself. The common poetic form binding these performers together was alliterative verse: lines of four stressed beats, divided by a caesura, with at least two beats alliterating across the dividing pause. This form is attested in very similar versions in Old Saxon, Old High German, and Old English. In Middle High German, this structure was eventually replaced by stanzas with end-rhyme, and the surviving melodies for several of these stanzas show that the poems were meant to be sung, not just recited. There is genuine scholarly disagreement about how heroic material was transmitted. Andreas Heusler's influential model, proposed in 1905, held that the poems circulated as short heroic lays with fixed wording, memorized and performed intact. Others have argued, following oral formulaic theory, that performances were improvised within a metrical framework, with inconsistencies across scenes serving as evidence of this improvisation. Eddic poems, however, show important differences from typical oral formulaic style, leading Edward Haymes to suggest they were memorized verbatim. He also proposed that the tradition of verbatim memorization required by Norse skaldic poetry may have driven heroic poetry out of the oral tradition in Iceland and Scandinavia altogether, eventually pushing it into prose sagas. In Germany, the tradition of heroic performance seems to have passed by the High Medieval period from noble courts to a class of minstrels who also performed Spruchdichtung, and the poet Der Marner records being constantly asked to sing songs on heroic subjects.

• 6. Nationalism, Wagner, and the Third Reich

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  Richard Wagner's operatic cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen was first performed in 1876, though an earlier version of his libretto had been published in 1853. The four operas mixed elements from the Poetic Edda, the Völsunga saga, and the Nibelungenlied, as filtered 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 a much broader circle of people aware of heroic legend and Norse mythology while simultaneously suppressing knowledge of the original medieval sources. Outside of Germany, most subsequent reception of the Nibelungen material has passed through Wagner rather than the medieval texts. Well before Wagner, in the period of the German Empire, the figure of Siegfried had become an emblem of German nationalism. During the First World War, the alliance between Germany and Austria-Hungary was described as embodying Nibelungentreue, or Nibelungen loyalty, referring to the loyalty unto death between Hagen and the Burgundians. After Germany's defeat, the Nibelungenlied was wielded in anti-democratic propaganda: the epic supposedly demonstrated that the German people were better suited to a heroic, aristocratic order than to democracy, and Siegfried's murder was explicitly compared to the "stab in the back" that nationalist mythology claimed the German army had received. During the Second World War, Hermann Göring drew on the Nibelungenlied to celebrate the destruction of the German army at Stalingrad, comparing the Soviet forces to the Asiatic Huns of Etzel. After the fall of the Third Reich, the Nibelungenlied was removed from German school curricula and became, for a time, something close to taboo. Harald Reinl's two-part film Die Nibelungen, released in 1966 and 1967, was among the first commercially successful postwar adaptations, and it deliberately drew on the Nordic versions to distance itself from the German nationalist tradition.

• 7. Tolkien and the Long Afterlife

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  J.R.R. Tolkien published The Lord of the Rings in three volumes between the 29th of July 1954 and the 20th of October 1955. In a 1941 letter to his son Michael, he had expressed his fury at what he called "that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler... Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light." Tom Shippey calls Beowulf "the single work which influenced Tolkien most," but the web of connections runs far wider. In the Völsunga saga, a magical but cursed golden ring and a broken sword reforged carry the names Andvaranaut and Gram; they correspond broadly to the One Ring and the sword Narsil, reforged as Andúril. In Hrólfs saga kraka, the hero Bǫðvarr Bjarki is a shapeshifting bear-man who provided the basis for the character Beorn in The Hobbit. The Hervarar saga supplied the horse-riding Goths who became a source for the Rohirrim, as well as the forest Mirkwood. The riddling contest in The Hobbit likely traces to the Hervarar saga and the character of Gestumblindi. William Morris, who Tolkien wished to imitate, had himself been deeply engaged with Icelandic literature between 1868 and 1876. In collaboration with the Icelander Eiríkur Magnússon (1833-1913), Morris translated and published Old Norse sagas and produced what Matthias Teichert calls the most important English-language work based on the Nibelungen legend: The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs. The trilogy Wodan's Children by Diana L. Paxson, published between 1993 and 1996, narrates the story of the Nibelungen from the perspectives of its female characters and stands as one of the rare English-language adaptations drawn directly from the medieval sources rather than from Wagner's Ring cycle.