The Nibelungenlied

The Nibelungenlied, as the great national epic of Germany, is notonly one of the most important literary monuments that the Germanmind has produced in all periods of its history, but, in reality beyondthis, it is also in its matter and its manner one of the world's greatclassics. It is this inherently because of the universal intelligibility of itsstory, for the broad human sympathy which must be felt with its charactersand their motives of action, and for the sustained poetic treatmentof the whole in the long poem. In all these respects theNibelungenlied, although German in its spirit and its environment,rises inevitably above the confines of nationality, and becomes, likeother works that are in a true sense great, by virtue of its universalityan integral part of that cosmopolitan body that we call the literature ofthe world.Like the Iliad, or any other popular epic whatever, the Nibelungenliedis, however, first and foremost a picture of the national life andthe national soul. Its characters in this way are, consequently, bothfundamentally and of necessity a part of their own special environmentinto which each, according to his individuality, fits; and themanners and customs, the religion and ethics, are first of all essentiallyGerman in order to embody them and to motive their actions to thepublic for which the poem was originally intended. What we are givenin the Nibelungenlied is primarily then, at least in its exterior, apicture of German life in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Thecustoms are those of the courts and castles of the place and time, themen and women are the knights and ladies who inhabit them; and ifthe real mainsprings of motive and action sometimes go back beyondtheiv poet's own day and generation for reasons that shall presently betold, the thoughts and feelings of the characters under his hand betrayon the surface no trace of it.