Nibelungen

The Song of the Nibelungs, in German Nibelungenlied, is part of Germanic mythology, and passed through oral tradition across the whole of Germanic speaking Europe. It is a central German epic and has been called the German Iliad. It is made up of some 2400 stanzas in 39 'adventures'.

The first written copy dates from the middle ages, around the year 1200. Like the story of the Holy Grail, it has had multiple variants as a result of re-discoveries over the centuries.

These sagas describe the setting of the fourth Atlantean epoch and the rise of the new fifth epoch out of the previous. At the same time this is the story of the development of the human intellect or self-consciousness that did not exist among the Atlanteans, who lived in a different clairvoyant condition of consciousness.

Aspects

• versions and key people
  • the poem was 'lost' for centuries, and manuscripts from as early as the 13th century were re-discovered during the 18th century. Currently there are 37 known versions (in different languages and with variants, eg Nordic others German), of which 11 are complete and 24 in various fragmented states. There are three main versions which serve as the foundation for what is considered and studied as the basic original version of the Nibelungenlied. These three main manuscripts of the Nibelungenlied are in UNESCO's 'Memory of the World Register' since 2009
  • Christopher Heinrich Müller (1740-1807), after several centuries, drew attention again to the greatness and importance of the work (1915-03-28-GA161)
  • Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen (1780-1856) issued four editions of the Nibelungenlied between 1810 and 1842
  • the version by Wilhelm Jordan (1819-1904) of 1869 is discussed in depth in 1915-03-28-GA161
  • Richard Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen, whereby he based himself more on the Norse version
• correspondence with other myths and legends
  • Prometheus
    • Prometheus means ‘thinking in advance’ (manas thinking), he is the representative of the fifth epoch, the man of forethought. His brother is Epimetheus, means ‘thinking afterwards' (kama-manas thinking), the man of reflection .. "the man who allows the things of this world to work upon him, and then thinks; such thought is the Kama-Manas thinking. Today the Man of the fifth epoch still thinks predominantly like this." The two streams run in parallel in the fifth epoch, and the manas thinking will gradually become more widespread. Thus the Manas of the fifth root-race is chained to the mineral forces, as the Atlantean race was bound up with the life forces. All Promethean force is chained to the rock, to the earth.
  • Gudrunlied (also known as Kudrun or Gudrun) is a heroic epic from the middle ages (approx around 1250), second in stature only to the Nibelungenlied (to which in alludes in numerous ways)
• similarities and parallels with Nordic sagas: Poetic Edda and Völsunga saga
• storyline shorthand (from wikipedia)
  • The poem is split into two parts. In the first part, Siegfried comes to Worms to acquire the hand of the Burgundian princess Kriemhild from her brother King Gunther. Gunther agrees to let Siegfried marry Kriemhild if Siegfried helps Gunther acquire the warrior-queen Brünhild as his wife. Siegfried does this and marries Kriemhild; however Brünhild and Kriemhild become rivals, leading eventually to Siegfried's murder by the Burgundian vassal Hagen with Gunther's involvement.
  • In the second part, the widow Kriemhild is married to Etzel, king of the Huns. She later invites her brother and his court to visit Etzel's kingdom intending to kill Hagen. Her revenge results in the death of all the Burgundians who came to Etzel's court as well as the destruction of Etzel's kingdom and the death of Kriemhild herself.
• key symbolic personalities in the storyline (see ao 1915-03-28-GA161, also the lectures commenting on Richard Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen)
  • Siegfried
  • Brunhilde - warrior queen
  • Kriemhilde or Kriemhild
  • Gunther - King and brother of Kriemhilde
  • Etzel - king of the Huns
  • Hagen
• symbols
  • gold

Inspirational quotes

1917-10-22-GA292

People at present, if they do not only want to have superficial feelings but have a heart for the monstrous events taking place in our time, cannot today think of the Nibelungen legend without seeing prophetic depths within it. Whoever understands the Nibelungen legend in its depths, feel prepared for all the terrible events which flash through the present. By thinking in the same way in which thoughts are shaped in the Nibelungenlied, one thinks in a prophetic manner because then thoughts are formed through the mystery of gold.

Lecture coverage and references

Richard Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen

.. is a cycle of four German-language epic music dramas (developed by Richard Wagner in the period 1848-1874) based on the Germanic and Norse sagas of the Nibelungen:

• Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold)
• Die Walküre (The Valkyrie)
• Siegfried
• Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods) - see also Ragnarok

To see what it is all about, see: Current Postatlantean epoch#Note 4 - About 'the great goodbye'

1905-03-28-GA092

lecture 1 of 3, introduces the Ring and the Siegfried legend

1905-05-05-GA092

lecture 2 of 3, continues on the Ring

1905-05-12-GA092

lecture 3 of 3, covers Valkyrie, Siegfriend, and Twilight of the Gods

Note the fourth lecture 1905-05-19-GA092 in this cycle is on Parsifal

1906-03-22-GA054

It came as something of a surprise when, in the 18th century, educated Germans discovered the ancient legend of the Nibelungs. In fact, this legend, to which we owe the European peoples' ideas about their origins, had been forgotten for centuries.

Little was known about what the Germans in ancient times told each other about the dawn of their existence, little was known about it from the 12th to the 18th century, and minds capable of recognizing the full significance of such a discovery for the spiritual life of the German people, such as Goethe, attributed particular importance to the Nibelungenlied.

Then it became known that what had been extracted from manuscripts of the 12th and 13th centuries were only later creations of an even older folk poetry.

In the Edda poems, these older figures of German legend from prehistoric times were found, who had fled northward, so to speak, but then made their way back—initially through scholarship—and now, in the second half of the 19th century, provided the basis for the truly great renewal of art by the poet-musician Richard Wagner.

Richard Wagner sought to bring about the renewal of art by taking figures who expressed the deepest foundations of human destiny, or who could gain our interest through a special destiny that transcended the everyday, not from everyday life, but from the superhuman, idealized figures of ancient times. He knew well that the secrets hidden in the human heart and soul cannot be expressed through everyday characters or events; he knew that myths and legends in particular can reflect what goes on inside the human soul. Everyday life already shows us how every human being is actually a mystery and harbors infinitely more than we can perceive with our ordinary senses and intellect. We know that we have an obligation—if we recognize such an ideal obligation—to regard human beings as such a mystery, never to conclude our judgment of them. If we allow what a person has inspired in us to continue to have an effect on us, then their image will indeed grow into something superhuman. We can only portray this by enlarging their features, and enlarging them in the right way, by emphasizing their characteristic traits without distorting them into caricatures. This is the true art of inner human characterization.

...

It is no coincidence, but rather a result of profound wisdom, that the new Christianity also appears in the German version of the Nibelungenlied, where the people descend to the court of King Etzel to meet their doom. Christianity seems to have entered the old world, which had been founded on love. People symbolically remembered an old love that had been replaced by statutes based on gold. The age of gold had led to Brünhilde's higher consciousness having a destructive effect. And the moment when the old gods sank down is cosmically represented by the time when astral vision gave way to physical vision, which thereby became a reflection of the cosmic process.

Love instead of statutes is to rise again as a new element. Even this is symbolically hinted at in the myth, and it emerges even more intimately in this fact: when Siegfried was to be betrayed, his wife marked the spot where he could be wounded with a cross. Every initiate is spiritually invulnerable to earthly sensuality, even if his body is torn to pieces. The soul has grown into the higher life. But there is one thing the initiate has not yet been able to achieve. Siegfried has remained vulnerable in the place where moral law, purified into the divine, should flare up in love. This flaring up of deifying morality in love is the essence of Christianity. That was not yet part of Siegfried's initiation. After the twilight of the gods is over, another hero enters among the old combatants, one who stands higher than Siegfried, who is invulnerable in the place where Siegfried was still vulnerable. The cross that Kriemhilde can only sketch has been carried on the back of the Great One. — You see what a deep foundation, what a spiritual picture of life is present in this saga of ancient times. The mystery of humanity resounds everywhere in it.

You all know that Richard Wagner was not satisfied with the figure of Siegfried in the Nibelungenlied, but that he drew on Norse mythology, even if he changed some of the individual motifs and personalities. He depicts Siegfried as the soul that has passed through initiation by slaying the Lindworm, as a being who understands the language of birds, who therefore sees and hears not only through the gates of the sensory world. And in Götterdämmerung, he allows us to see the connection symbolized in Brünhilde as the old world of the gods, which descends into the depths, from which Christian love then rises, replacing the old world of the gods.

1908-04-13-GA102

Anyone in the slightest degree capable of interpreting the signs of the times will perceive in the art of Richard Wagner the first rays of Christianity emerging from the narrow framework of the religious life into the wider horizons of modern spiritual culture.

One can discern quite unmistakably how in the soul of Richard Wagner himself the central idea of Christianity comes to birth, how it bursts the bonds of religion and becomes universal. When on Good Friday, in the year 1857, he looks out of the Villa Wesendonck by the Lake of Zürich at the budding flowers of early spring, and the first seed of “Parsifal” quickens to life within him, this is a transformation, on a wider scale, of what already lives in Christianity, as a religious idea.

And after he had reached the heights of that prophetic foreshadowing of Christianity to which he gave such magnificent expression in the “Ring of the Nibelungs,” this central Idea of Christianity found still wider horizons in “Parsifal,” becoming the seed of that future time when Christianity will embrace, not only the religious life, but the life of knowledge, of art, of beauty, in the widest sense of the words.

1912-04-09-GA136

[Hermann Grimm on the Iliad before this section]

What does Hermann Grimm arrive at with regard to the Iliad and the Nibelungen saga?

He ends by assuming that the historical dynasties, the races of rulers were preceded by other such races; this is literally what he thinks. Thus he considers that probably Zeus and his whole circle represent a sort of race of rulers which had preceded the race of rulers to which Agamemnon belonged. Thus he considers that there is a certain uniformity in the history of humanity, so to speak; he considers that in the Iliad or Nibelungen saga are represented Gods or Heroes of primeval humanity whom later humanity only attempted to represent by clothing their deeds, their characters, in the dress of superhuman myths.

There is much that one cannot reconcile if one takes as a basis such an hypothesis, above all the special form of the intervention of the Gods in Homer. Let us take one case.

How do Thetis the mother of Achilles, Athene, and other figures of the Gods intervene in the events in Troy?

They so intervene by taking the forms of mortal men, inspiring them as it were, leading them on to their deeds. Thus they do not appear themselves, but permeate living men. Living men were not only their representatives but sheaths permeated by invisible powers which could not appear in their own form, in their own being on the field of battle. Yet it would be strange to admit that primeval men of the ordinary kind should be so represented that they had to take representative men of the race of mortals as a sheath. This is only an intimation which can prove to us all that in this way we shall not arrive at a true understanding of the ancient national epics.

Just as little shall we succeed if we take the figures in the Nibelungen saga

• Siegfried of Xanten on the lower Rhine who was removed to the Burgundian court at Worms, who then wooed Kriemhilde the sister of Gunther, but who by virtue of his special qualities can alone woo Brunnhilde.

And in what a remarkable way are described such figures as Brunnhilde of Iceland, and Siegfried:

• Siegfried is described as having conquered the so-called family of the Nibelungen, as having acquired, won, the treasure of the Nibelungen.
• By means of what he has acquired through his victory over the Nibelungen, he gains special qualities which are expressed in the epic when it is said that he can make himself invisible, that he is invulnerable in a certain respect, that he has, moreover, forces which the ordinary Gunther has not!
• For the latter cannot win Brunnhilde who is not to be conquered by an ordinary mortal.
• By means of his special powers which he has as the possessor of the treasure of the Nibelungen Siegfried conquers Brunnhilde,
• and on the other hand, because he can conceal the powers which he has developed, he is in a position to lead Brunnhilde to Gunther his brother-in-law.
• And then we find how Kriemhilde and Brunnhilde (whom we meet at the same time at the Burgundian court) are two very different characters in whom obviously forces are at work which are not to be explained by the ordinary soul forces. Therefore they quarrelled, and therefore also it came about that Brunnhilde was able to seduce the faithful servant Hagen to kill Siegfried.

That again shows us a feature which appears so remarkably in the Sagas of Central Europe. Siegfried has higher superhuman forces; these superhuman forces he has through the possession of the treasures of the Niebelungen. Finally they make of him not an absolutely victorious figure, but a figure which stands before us as a tragedy. The powers which Siegfried possesses through the treasures of the Niebelungen are at the same time a fatality.

Still more remarkable do things become if we take in addition the Northern Saga of Sigurd, the slayer of the dragon, but this is enlightening. In this, Sigurd, who is none other than Siegfried, appears as the conqueror of the dragon; as he who thereby wins from an ancient race of dwarfs the treasures of the Nibelungen. And Brunnhilde meets us as a figure of a superhuman nature, as a Valkyrie figure.

1915-03-28-GA161

is a lecture dedicated to the Nibelungenlied and an explanation of the deeper meaning of characters and storyline

• discussing Christopher Heinrich Müller (1740-1807) who drew attention to the greatness and importance of the work
• with focus on the version by Wilhelm Jordan (1819-1904) of 1869.

1917-10-22-GA292

short extract, translated from the DE version

Linked to the gold mystery is the figure of Siegfried, who has captured the gold but perishes because of the tragedy of gold.

For it runs like a red thread through the meaning of the Song of the Nibelungs that gold, with its magic, belongs to the supernatural world alone and must not be dedicated to the sensual.

Sacrifice the gold to the dead! Leave it in the supersensible realm, for in the sensual realm it causes mischief.

longer extract

Now consider the following. I had said that in the 9th Century when the church of Rome and the papacy had a different understanding than later, of what actually had to happen in the western world, from a certain viewpoint I represented this, how from the 9th Century onward forces in Rome, which one could say rose from below and became valid, how these laws from Rome became systemized just like laws originating from the spiritual world should have been included.

On the one side Rome can seem thus:

• from the South rose the magic and sign world which came from above
• but with a focus towards the North where liberated town culture was being developed, focusing towards the North where joy grew in the secret of gold, in the secret of gemstones. However, this northern influence had already produced something out of its old mysteries, which necessarily had connections through the mysteries to, on the one side, the mystery of gemstones—this we can leave out of the game today—and on the other side, connections to the mystery of gold.

Christianity didn't simply develop out of a single impulse and impulses also worked against Christianity.

• Just as it was opposed in the South by the magic of signs,
• so in the North it was opposed by the world of Central European legends and out of the North incorporated by the great gold mystery, as illustrated.

[see also Two streams of development]

With the gold mystery the figure of Siegfried is connected, who looted gold and perished through the tragedy of gold. Everything which is connected to the Siegfried figure is related to the mystery of gold. The theme that gold and its magic only belong to the supersensible world is like a red thread throughout the Nibelungenlied, gold is not to be dedicated to the sense world.

If one considers it in this way, then your mind understands the deepest mystery of gold.

What did Siegfried's friend tell him? What does the Nibelungenlied say? What is its great teaching?

Offer the gold to the dead! Leave it to the supersensible realm; in the sensible world it makes mischief.

That was the teaching which propagated through Christianity in the northern countries.

This is what was understood in Rome during the great synthesis taking place between Roman elements of the 9th Century in the northern European areas when within art it united with what rose from the one side out of signs and on the other side from symbols added into the gold and gemstone work.

[see a.o. Central European cultural basin and Schema FMC00.501 for this merger in the 9th century]

How beautiful this confluence of symbol-rich art and gold-gemstone art is during the 8, 9, 10, 11, 12th centuries. Everywhere we see this ancient Christian art of symbols. By connecting other impulses, we see the incorporation of the symbols into the working of the gold and gems.

...

This was known particularly in the 9, 10, 11, 12, 13th centuries. It was then known that the ancient heathen elements had become obsolete, but lots remained behind—yet these elements had become old—and that the young Christianity of that time had to work into this, was known. This we meet in literature, in art, in the creation of legends, everywhere.

I have already often pointed this out, how present time humanity has become completely lost to the idea of spirituality working in outer reality. In the 5th post-Atlantean age when materialism is written on people's banners, this idea has nearly become lost completely. People are unable to imagine the streaming in of the spiritual, of the meaningful elements in pure naturalism, in pure matter. As a result, the gradual dying of the heathen and the gradual becoming of the Christ impulse in European culture is considered, at best, in abstract terms.

In the 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13th centuries this was not the case. Then one presented it, if a representation was wanted at all, in such a way that the soul and outer corporeality were considered simultaneously as outside of the human being in history and in natural events. Everywhere one looks at the physical geographical surroundings something spiritual is simultaneously expressed. Hence much in the prophetic line came to be seen in these ideas.

People at present, if they do not only want to have superficial feelings but have a heart for the monstrous events taking place in our time, cannot today think of the Nibelungen legend without seeing prophetic depths within it.

Whoever understands the Nibelungen legend in its depths, feel prepared for all the terrible events which flash through the present. By thinking in the same way in which thoughts are shaped in the Nibelungenlied, one thinks in a prophetic manner because then thoughts are formed through the mystery of gold.

Hagan allowing the Nibelungen treasure, the gold treasure, to sink into the Rhine, was a prophetic idea at the time the Nibelungen saga was created and is experienced as deeply tragic in view of the future, on all that the Rhine will become as a cause for antagonistic impulses against the future.

At that time the outer geographic natural world was not regarded as soulless, but was seen in connection with the soul, in every breath of wind was a soul quality, in every flowing stream something of a soul.

At that time, it was also really known in what sense the purely materialistic reference meant regarding “the old Rhine River”.

What is the Rhine actually in a materialistic sense?

It is the water of the Rhine. What flows in it these days will in future be somewhere else. The water of the Rhine is actually not really something one can call the old Rhine, and one does not usually think of the mere coincidence of the earth. All that is matter flows on, it doesn't remain. In olden times external matter was given no thought, other than everything being an illusion; it was not believed that external events were merely embedded in the flow of what was described as naturalistic. Whatever was external was simultaneously a soul expression permeating physical existence. For this reason and particularly during this time it was a necessity to allow the old heathendom to dissolve and allow the new introduction of the Christian impulse—that was necessary in Europe in the later centuries—there people tried to think soulfully about geography, making geography plausible to the soul, the heart, to the mind.

Related pages

• Ancient history of myths and legends
• Germanic mythology
• Ragnarok
• Richard Wagner

References and further reading

• Karl Lachmann: 'Der Nibelunge Noth und die Klage nach der ältesten Überlieferung mit Bezeichnung des Unechten und mit den Abweichungen der gemeinen Lesart' (1826)
• Karl Knortz: 'Das Nibelungenlied und Wilhelm Jordan' (1895)
• Otfrid Ehrismann: 'Nibelungenlied. Epoche, Werk, Wirkung. (1987, 2002)
• Michael Köhlmeier: 'Die Nibelungen: neu erzählt - Das Sagen-Epos in moderner Sprache' (1999)

Other

• On Christopher Heinrich Müller: artigos.wiki page (use google translate)

Muller's most important publication is the collection of German poems from XII., XIII. and fourteenth century. It was published in three volumes in Berlin between 1784 and 1787. In this edition, many important epic and lyrical texts from German-language literature of the Middle Ages were edited for the first time and thus released to modern audiences.

The rich collection of texts offers the Nibelungenlied, Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach, Iwein, Gregorius and Armen Heinrich by Hartmann von Aue, Tristan by Gottfried von Straßburg, Eneasroman by Heinrich von Veldeke, as well as Flore and Blanscheflur and other more or less complete texts. , including some collections of sung verses, love songs, animal bispiln and some maeren.

He always placed his edits alongside copies of Middle High German texts, as it was his real concern to bring them closer to the public.