Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 69, No. 423, January 1851

If there is any blemish in the very interesting volume, of which our limits will only permit a more cursory notice than its high merits deserve, it is to be found in the too frequent use of quotations from old authorities or original letters in the text, and the mosaic-like appearance which is often given to her pages, by the introduction of quaint and antiquated expressions drawn from contemporary writers in the body of the narrative. We are well aware of the motive which has led to this, and we respect it as it deserves: it arises from the wish to be accurate and trustworthy, the anxious desire to make her Lives a faithful transcript of the times – to exhibit their very "form and pressure." The object was good, the desire was laudable; but it is quite possible to be carried too far, even in working out the most praiseworthy principle. Long accounts of dresses, decorations, and processions; entries of expenses in Treasurers' accounts; even original letters, unless on very particular occasions, are the materials of biography, but they are not biography itself. It is living character, not still life, which we desire to see delineated: the latter is the frame of the picture, but it is not the picture itself. Such curious details are characteristic, generally amusing, often interesting; but they, in general, do better in foot-notes than in the body of the narrative. We must admit, however, that Miss Strickland has exhibited equal judgment and skill in the manner in which she has fitted in those contemporary extracts into the body of the narrative, and the selection she has made of such as are most curious and characteristic of the times. By many, we are well aware, they will be considered as not the least interesting part of her very interesting volumes. It is the principle of introducing them in the text that we wish her to reconsider. Unity of composition is not less essential to the higher productions of art, in history or biography, than in painting or the drama; and Miss Strickland writes so powerfully, and paints so beautifully, that we cannot but often regret when we lose the thread of her flowing narrative, to make way for extracts from a quaint annalist, or entries from the accounts of a long-forgotten exchequer.

THE LAY OF THE NIEBELUNGEN.[14 - The Fall of the Niebelungers; otherwise the Book of Kriemhild: a translation of the Niebelunge Nôt, or Niebelungen Lied. By William Nanson Lettsom. London: Williams and Norgate, 1850.Ueber die Iliade und das Niebelungen Lied. Von Karl Zell. Karlsruhe: 1843.]

Wolf, the learned German, was certainly very far wrong – as Germans in their endless speculations are apt to be – when he set himself to explain the Iliad without Homer; an attempt which, to our British ears, generally sounded pretty much as profane as to explain the world without God, or, according to Cicero's simile against the Epicureans, to explain the existence of a book by the mere accidental out-tumbling of alphabetic counters on the ground. The Iliad could not have existed without Homer – so the rude instinct of the most unlearned and most unmetaphysical English Bull declared against the cloud-woven theories and the deep-sunk lexicographical excavations of the famous Berlin professor; and the rude instinct, after much philological sapping and mining, stands ground. But Wolf did not labour in vain. Though he did not take the citadel, he made breaches into many parts of our classical circumvallation, formerly deemed most strong, and made us change, in great measure, the fashion of our fortifications. In the same manner Niebuhr, with his knotty club, made sad havoc among the waxen images of the old Romans, which the piety of Livy – taking them for genuine granite statues – had set forth with such a wealth of fine patriotic elocution; but after all this work of destruction, Rome still remains with its Tiber, and, in the minds of most sane persons, Romulus also, we imagine; while the great Julius shines a kingly star every inch, as much after Niebuhr's strong brush as before. What, then, was the great truth by virtue of which – as stupid sermons are redeemed by a good text – Wolf, with his startling anti-Homeric gospel, made so many proselytes, and such fervid apostles, among the learned and the poetic of his countrymen? Plainly this, that he seized with a keen glance, and a grand comprehensiveness, the minstrel character of the Popular Epos of early ages, as distinguished from the more artificial and curiously-piled compositions of more polished times, bearing the same name. Wolf was wrong – say mad, if you please – in asserting that Pisistratus, with a whole army of such refurbishers of old wares as Onomacritus, could have put together such a glowing vital whole as the Iliad; but he was right, and altogether sound, when he looked upon the great Epic song of the wrath of Achilles as a thing essentially different, not only in degree, but in kind, from the Æneid of Virgil, or the Paradise Lost of our Milton. Many men of learning and taste, from Scaliger downwards, have instituted large and curious comparisons between the great national Epos of the Greeks, and that of the Romans; but the comparison of things that have a radically different character can seldom produce any result beyond the mere expression of liking and disliking; as if, among critics of trees, one should say, I prefer a bristling pine, while another says, Give me the smooth beech. Or, a result even more unsatisfactory might be produced. Starting from the beech as a sort of model tree, a forest critic, predetermined to admire the pine also, might spin out of his brain a number of subtle analogies to prove that a pine, though bearing a different name, is, in fact, the same tree as a beech, and possesses, when more philosophically considered, all the essential characteristics of this tree. You laugh? – but so, and not otherwise, did it fare with old Homer, at the hands of many professional philologists and literary dilettantes, who, with a perfect appreciation of such works of polished skill as the Æneid and the Jerusalem Delivered– as being akin to their own modern taste – must needs apply the same test to take cognisance of such strange and far-removed objects as the Iliad and Odyssey. Such transference of the mould that measures one thing to another, and an altogether different thing, is indeed a common enough trick of our every-day judgments; but it is, nevertheless, a sort of criticism altogether barren of any positive results, and which ends where it begins – in talk. To the character and certainty of a science, it can assuredly have no claim. If you wish to descant with any beneficial result upon roses, pray compare one English rose with another, and not with a Scotch thistle. Bring not the fine city dame into contact with the brown country girl; but let Lady B's complexion be more delicate than Lady C's, and the brown of Bessie be more healthy than that of Jessie. Jessie, if you will consider the matter, has nothing in common with Lady B, except this, that she is a woman. As little has Homer in common with Virgil, or Tasso, or Milton. With whom, then, is Homer to be compared? A hundred years ago, Voltaire, with all his wit, could not have answered that question – the whole age of European criticism of which Voltaire was the oracle and the god could not have answered it; but thanks – after the Percy Ballads, and Cowper, and Wordsworth, and Southey, and Burns – to Frederick Augustus Wolf, that question we can answer now in the simplest and most certain way in the world, by pointing to the famous Spanish Cid, and the old Teutonic Lay of the Niebelungen.

To the Cid, we may presume that those of our readers who love popular poetry, and are not happy enough to know the sonorous old Castilian, have been happily introduced by the great work of Southey. But, with respect to the other great popular Epos of Western Europe, we suspect Mr Lettsom is only too much in the right when he says, that this venerable monument of the old German genius is "so little known amongst us, that most ordinary readers have not so much as heard of it. Even amongst the numerous and increasing class of those who are acquainted with German, few pay attention to the ancient literature of Germany: they are generally conversant only with the productions of the day, or, at farthest, with those of the most celebrated authors." So, indeed, it must be; the necessary business and amusements of life leave but few of us at liberty to follow the example of the learned Germans, and refuse to look at Helen before we have critically investigated the history of Jove's amours, and of Leda's egg. So much the more are we beholden to gentlemen like the present translator, who, by the patient exercise of those pious pains which are the pleasure of poets, put us into the condition of being able to hear the notes of that strange old Teutonic lyre prolonged through the aisles of an English echo-chamber. Mr Lettsom has done a work, much wanted for the English lover of poetry, honestly and well: this we can say from having compared it in various places with a prose translation of the old German poem, published at Berlin in 1814;[15 - Das Niebelungen Lied; in's hoch Deutsche übertragen. Von August Zeune. Berlin: 1814.] also from the distinct recollection which we have of the character and tone of the modern German version of Marbach, which we read for the first time several years ago. But Mr Lettsom's translation bears also internal evidence of its excellence: there is a quiet simplicity and easy talkative breadth about it, characteristic no less of the general genius of the Germans than of the particular mediæval epoch to which it belongs. With a perfect confidence, therefore, in the trustworthiness of the present English version, we proceed to lay before our readers a rapid sketch of the Epic story of the Niebelungen, accompanied with such extracts as may serve to convey an idea of the general tone and character of the composition.

At Worms, upon the Rhine, (so the poem opens,) there dwelt three puissant kings – Gunther and Gernot and Gieselher – three brothers, of whom Gunther was the eldest, and, in right of primogeniture, swayed the sceptre of Burgundy.[16 - These Burgundians are, in the second part of the poem, also called the Niebelungen, which epithet, however, in the first part, is applied to certain distant Scandinavian vassals of Siegfried. The origin of this name has caused much dispute amongst the learned.] These kings had a sister named Kriemhild, the real heroine and fell female Achilles of the Epos; for though she is as gentle and mild as a Madonna till her love is wounded, after that she nourishes a desire of vengeance on the murderers of her husband, as insatiate and inexorable as that which the son of Peleus, in the Iliad, nurses against the son of Atreus for the rape of the lovely Briseis. In fact, as the great work of Homer might be more fully designated the wrath of Achilles, so the most significant designation for this mediæval Iliad of the Germans would be the revenge of Kriemhild. After naming these, and other notable personages of the Burgundian court at Worms, the poet makes use of a dream, as Æschylus in the Agamemnon uses an omen, to open up, in a fitful glimpse of prophecy, the general burden and fateful issue of his tale.

"A dream was dreamed by Kriemhild, the virtuous and the gay,
How a wild young falcon she trained for many a day,
Till two fierce eagles tore it; to her there could not be
In all the world such sorrow as this perforce to see.

To her mother Uta at once the dream she told;
But she the threatening future could only thus unfold —
'The falcon that thou trainedst is sure a noble mate;
God shield him in his mercy, or thou must lose him straight.'

'A mate for me! What say'st thou, dearest mother mine?
Ne'er to love, assure thee, my heart will I resign.
I'll live and die a maiden, and end as I began,
Nor (let what else befall me) will suffer woe for man.'

'Nay!' said the anxious mother, 'renounce not marriage so;
Wouldst thou true heartfelt pleasure taste ever here below,
Man's love alone can give it. Thou'rt fair as eye can see:
A fitting mate God send thee, and naught will wanting be.'

'No more,' the maiden answered, 'no more, dear mother, say;
From many a woman's fortune, this truth is clear as day,
That falsely smiling pleasure with pain requites us ever.
I from both will keep me, and thus will sorrow never.'

So in her lofty virtue, fancy-free and gay,
Lived the noble maiden many a happy day;
Nor one more than another found favour in her sight;
Still, at the last, she wedded a far-renowned knight.

He was the self-same falcon she in her dream had seen,
Foretold by her wise mother. What vengeance took the queen
On her nearest kinsmen, who him to death had done!
That single death atoning died many a mother's son."

With these words ends the very short first canto, or, in the phraseology of the bard, "adventure" of the poem. The second introduces us to the most prominent male character in the first part of the poem – for it is divided into two distinct parts or acts – the famous Siegfried, "with the horny hide," as the old German chap-book has it, which any of our readers may have for a groschen or two in Leipzig, and not more, we suppose, than a sixpence here.

"In Netherland there flourished a prince of lofty kind,
(Whose father hight Siegmund, his mother Siegelind)
In a sumptuous castle, down by the Rhine's fair side;
Men did call it Xanten; 'twas famous far and wide."

This princely youth, who, like the Spanish Cid, is perfect even to the smallest hair on his beard, after having employed his early days, like ancient Hercules and Theseus, in attacking and overcoming every sort of terrible monster, in bestial or human guise, that came in his way, is dubbed knight with the stroke of the chivalrous sword, in due form, and a festival is held in honour of the event, the description of which occupies the "second adventure." Like a dutiful son, as well as a fearless knight, he will accept no royal honours, or share in the official dignities of government, so as long as his father and mother live.

"While Siegelind and Siegmund yet lived and flourished there,
Full little recked their offspring the royal crown to wear.
He only would be master, and exercise command,
'Gainst those whose pride o'erweening disturbed the peaceful land.

None ventur'd to defy him; since weapons first he took,
The bed of sloth but seldom the noble knight could brook!
He only sought for battles: his prowess-gifted hand
Won him renown eternal in every foreign strand."

But even the sturdy mail-clad heroes of mediæval knighthood sometimes tired of "battles;" and when they were thus aweary, they had one other serious occupation, and that, of course, was love. With the entrance on this new career, the third adventure is occupied.

"'Twas seldom tear or sorrow the warrior's breast assayed;
At length he heard a rumour how a lovely maid
In Burgundy was dwelling, the fairest of the fair;
For her he won much pleasure, but dash'd with toil and care."

Siegfried opens his determination to his parents to follow the fortune of this rumour, and take to wife none other than —

"The bright Burgundian maiden, best gem of Gunther's throne,
Whose far-renowned beauty stands unapproached alone."

This resolution, of course, as is the fortune of true love, meets with opposition, at first, from the parents of the youth; but with a calm and decided answer, such as true love knows how to give, the difficulty is overcome.

"Dearest father mine,
The love of high-born women for ever I'll resign
Rather than play the wooer but where my heart is set."

Forthwith, therefore, he sets out on an expedition to Worms, predetermined, after the common fashion of mediæval love-romances, to marry the woman whom he had never seen; for in these matters, rumour, it was thought – that plays so falsely elsewhere – could not err. To make the necessary impression on so mighty a king as Gunther, the Prince of the Netherland is pranked out most gorgeously with all that woman's needle can produce of chivalrous embroidery; and, thus accoutred, —

"On the seventh fair morning, by Worms along the strand,
In knightly guise were pricking the death-defying band;
The ruddy gold fair glittered on every riding vest;
Their steeds they meetly governed, all pacing soft abreast.

Their shields were new and massy, and like flame they glowed;
As bright, too, shone their helmets; while bold Siegfried rode
Straight to the court of Gunther to woo the stately maid.
Eye never looked on champions so gorgeously arrayed.

Down to their spurs, loud clanging, reached the swords they wore;
Sharp and well-tempered lances the chosen champions bore;
One, two spans broad or better, did Siegfried sternly shake,
With keen and cutting edges grim and ghastly wounds to make.

Their golden-coloured bridles firm they held in hand: