Brunhilde is shown to have an awareness of the sorts of agency that women can have. She exploits the fact that she's beautiful and that she can get married in order to marry a new powerful man who will help her wreak her revenge. Zephyr is a dragon slayer, he bays this in the dragon's blood to get impenetrable skin - also not clear why he gets that idea. Forts between his shoulder blades. That's the one vulnerable place and that's where Hagen gets him in there. Because that doesn't get swordproof. And Brunhilde, as Bettina was saying, realized this that something is art.
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