ON THE NIBELUNGEN LIED
BY
THOMAS CARLYLE[1]
In the year 1757, the Swiss Professor Bodmer printed an ancient poetical manuscript, under the title of “Chriemhilden Rache und die Klage” (Chriemhilde’s Revenge, and the Lament); which may be considered as the first of a series, or stream of publications and speculations still rolling on, with increased current, to the present day. Not, indeed, that all these had their source or determining cause in so insignificant a circumstance; their source, or rather thousand sources, lay far elsewhere. As has often been remarked, a certain antiquarian tendency in literature, a fonder, more earnest looking back into the Past, began about that time to manifest itself in all nations (witness our own “Percy’s Reliques”): this was among the first distinct symptoms of it in Germany; where, as with ourselves, its manifold effects are still visible enough.
Some fifteen years after Bodmer’s publication, which, for the rest, is not celebrated as an editorial feat, one C. H. Müller undertook a “Collection of German Poems from the Twelfth, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth Centuries;” wherein, among other articles, he reprinted Bodmer’s “Chriemhilde” and “Klage,” with a highly remarkable addition prefixed to the former, essential indeéd to the right understanding of it; and the whole now stood before the world as one Poem, under the name of the “Nibelungen Lied,” or Lay of the Nibelungen. It has since
- ↑ [Originally published in the “Westminster Review,” No. 29 (1831), as a review of Karl Simrock’s modern German translation of the poem.—Ed.]
