The most striking kind of difficulty around heroes and villains is this relationship between Creamhild and Hagen who is her sort of turns out to be her arch enemy. In some ways in the first part of the text Creamhild seems to be our goody she's our beautiful princess you know married to the hero Hagen is the man who murders the hero but we've already seen that actually murdering the hero isn't an unproblematic act of evil. The only way that Siegfried can be dealt with is through an act of violence in the second half of the text their characters sort of get switched round in some ways Creamhild is reeking this terrible revenge and the narrator refers to
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss The Song of the Nibelungs, a twelfth century German epic, full of blood, violence, fantasy and bleakness. It is a foundational work of medieval literature, drawing on the myths of Scandinavia and central Europe. The poem tells of two couples, Siegfried and Kriemhild and Gunther and Brunhilda, whose lives are destroyed by lies and revenge. It was extremely popular in its time, sometimes rewritten with happier endings, and was rediscovered by German Romantics and has since been drawn from selectively by Wagner, Fritz Lang and, infamously, the Nazis looking to support ideas on German heritage.
The image above is of Siegfried seeing Kriemhild for the first time, a miniature from the Hundeshagenschen Code manuscript dating from 15th Century.
With
Sarah Bowden
Reader in German and Medieval Studies at King’s College London
Mark Chinca
Professor of Medieval German and Comparative Literature at the University of Cambridge
And
Bettina Bildhauer
Professor of Modern Languages at the University of St Andrews
Producer: Simon Tillotson