Epic Continent by Nicholas Jubber

Author:Nicholas Jubber [Jubber, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2019-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

18

The conflict could not reach a happy resolution,

And so out of this breach there flowed blood-drenched pollution.

Nibelungenlied, Thirty-Sixth Adventure

ALL ALONG THE road you find them, from Worms to Ezstergom: carved or painted, beaten out of bronze, twisted out of iron; protruding from church walls, inscribed on medieval houses, installed in the chambers of castles. They are knights from the Nibelungen tale, the occasional lady, the odd dragon, dwarf or river-maiden. Breastplates are buckled, helmets horned or winged, hair braided down the backs of pleated gowns. This is their territory, for this is the Nibelungenweg, the path followed by Kriemhild and later the ill-fated knights of Burgundy to the court of Attila the Hun.

I was running against the flow of the Rhine, catching trains south to Heidelberg and Bad Schönborn, then an afternoon’s hike in search of German literature’s most notorious murder site. Wasps danced over puddles of leaking blackberries and insects hummed in the linden trees, boasting of midsummer excess; oak leaves pulsated in tunnels of submarine light.

At the foot of a wooded mountain slope, I washed my feet (Damn! More blisters!) and unrolled my sleeping bag on the sapless grass. Dragonflies the size of toy helicopters were droning over the arrow-shaped channels of the stream. The spring poured itself under a small stone arch and an inscription recording Siegfried’s death, where ‘still the fountain flows’. The earliest known manuscript of the Nibelungenlied – the thirteenth-century copy found by Dr Obereit in the Austrian library – records Odenheim as the setting of the murder; although such is the prestige of the story, several other villages have launched their own bids, like nations competing to host the Olympics.

How do you mark a mythical murder site? Odenheim signposts the event with a bas-relief, carved in 1932 by a Jewish sculptor called Sigmund Odenheimer, which shows Hagen gripping his spear and pointing towards the cross on Siegfried’s cloak (sewn there by Kriemhild in the expectation that Hagen would protect him). The hero kneels over the spring, oblivious to the danger, quenching his thirst from a drinking horn. Frozen in the last moment before the mortal wound is inflicted. ‘Then,’ the poet narrates, ‘as Siegfried bent over the brook and drank, Hagen hurled the spear at the cross, so that the hero’s heart’s blood leapt from the wound and splashed against Hagen’s clothes. No warrior will ever do a darker deed.’

This is the iconic moment of the epic – so iconic that Sigmund Freud used it to explain his analytical method. Asking patients to repeat their dreams, he would look for the ‘weak spot’ in their account: ‘they serve me as the embroidered mark on Siegfried’s cloak served Hagen’. But so malleable is the death of Siegfried, it has been used in other, more political ways.

‘Just as Siegfried fell to the treacherous spear of the terrible Hagen,’ declared General Paul von Hindenburg in 1919, ‘so did our exhausted front line collapse.’ Here was the Dolchstosslegende or ‘back-stabbing legend’, cited by the two most senior

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