The Nibelungenlied

Summary

The Nibelungenlied is a medieval German epic of courtship, deception, insult and catastrophic revenge. Its first half centers on Siegfried, prince of Xanten, who comes to Worms hoping to win Kriemhild, sister of the Burgundian kings Gunther, Gernot and Giselher. Siegfried has already won the Nibelung treasure, a magic cloak of invisibility and near invulnerability after bathing in dragon's blood, though a leaf left one spot between his shoulders exposed. Gunther wants to marry Brunhild, formidable queen of Iceland, who will accept only a man who can defeat her in athletic trials. Siegfried secretly uses the cloak to help Gunther win, then again helps subdue Brunhild after the wedding. Years later the deception surfaces through a quarrel between Brunhild and Kriemhild over precedence. Kriemhild displays Brunhild's ring and girdle, exposing the fraud and humiliating the queen. Hagen, Gunther's vassal, persuades the Burgundians that Siegfried must die. He tricks Kriemhild into marking Siegfried's vulnerable spot, murders him during a hunt, and sinks the Nibelung treasure in the Rhine when Kriemhild seeks to use it for power. The second half follows Kriemhild's long revenge. She marries Etzel, king of the Huns, and invites her Burgundian kin to his court. Warnings multiply, but honor and fatalism drive the Burgundians onward. At Etzel's hall, suspicion erupts into slaughter. Kriemhild demands Hagen; Hagen kills her son by Etzel; fighting spreads until nearly all Burgundians and Huns are dead. Dietrich of Bern finally captures Gunther and Hagen. Kriemhild has Gunther killed, then kills Hagen herself with Siegfried's sword after he refuses to reveal the treasure's location. Hildebrand kills Kriemhild, and the poem closes in grief. The epic is not a simple celebration of heroism: it shows honor culture as a system that makes public shame, oath-bound loyalty and revenge more powerful than mercy. Its medical interest lies in wounds, vulnerability, grief, traumatic vengeance and the poem's grim attention to bodies destroyed by feuding politics.

Plot or Argument

• Kriemhild's dream and Siegfried's arrival

  Kriemhild dreams of a falcon killed by eagles, foreshadowing love and loss. Siegfried comes to Worms, displays heroic prowess and seeks her hand.

• Brunhild's wooing

  Gunther seeks Brunhild, whose tests of strength he can pass only through Siegfried's invisible assistance. The fraud establishes the secret that later destroys the court.

• Marriage quarrel

  Kriemhild and Brunhild argue over rank and sexual honor. Kriemhild's public revelation of Brunhild's humiliation demands retaliation within the poem's honor code.

• Siegfried's murder

  Hagen learns the one vulnerable place on Siegfried's body and kills him during a hunt. The body is returned to Kriemhild, and vengeance begins as grief hardens.

• The treasure and Etzel's marriage

  Hagen hides the Nibelung hoard in the Rhine to limit Kriemhild's power. Kriemhild marries Etzel and gains the political setting for revenge.

• The Burgundians ride east

  Despite omens and warnings, Gunther, Hagen and their companions travel to Etzel's court. Hospitality is poisoned by mutual suspicion.

• Slaughter in Etzel's hall

  Violence erupts into total war inside the hall. Kriemhild, Hagen, Gunther, Dietrich, Rudiger and Hildebrand are drawn into a chain of deaths that leaves almost no one untouched.

Characters

• Kriemhild, Burgundian princess and avenger

  Siegfried's wife, whose grief over his murder becomes a long, politically orchestrated revenge.

• Siegfried, hero of Xanten

  Dragon-slayer, owner of the Nibelung treasure and cloak of invisibility, nearly invulnerable except for one hidden place.

• Hagen, Burgundian vassal

  Hard, loyal and ruthless counselor who murders Siegfried and becomes Kriemhild's chief target.

• Gunther, Burgundian king

  Kriemhild's brother, whose desire for Brunhild and dependence on Siegfried's deception initiate the fatal chain.

• Brunhild, queen of Iceland

  A powerful woman humiliated by deception and public disclosure, prompting Hagen's revenge on Siegfried.

• Etzel, king of the Huns

  Kriemhild's second husband, whose court becomes the site of the Burgundians' destruction.

• Dietrich of Bern, exiled hero

  A powerful but restrained warrior who eventually captures Gunther and Hagen.

• Hildebrand, Dietrich's old retainer

  The warrior who kills Kriemhild after she executes Hagen.

Lessons

• Honor can make truth lethal

  The scandal of Brunhild's deception matters because courtly rank and sexual reputation are public structures. The poem teaches that truth spoken inside an honor culture may not liberate anyone; it may demand blood.

  • Is Kriemhild wrong to reveal what happened to Brunhild?
  • Who benefits from maintaining the lie?
  • How does public shame differ from private injury in the poem?

• Loyalty without conscience becomes atrocity

  Hagen's loyalty to Burgundy is real, but it licenses murder, theft and mass death. The epic presses readers to ask when fidelity to lord or kin becomes a refusal of moral judgment.

  • Is Hagen admirable, monstrous or both?
  • Does Gunther command events or surrender responsibility to Hagen?

• Grief can become a political force

  Kriemhild's mourning is not passive. It becomes strategy, alliance and revenge, showing how private bereavement can reorder kingdoms when law offers no satisfaction.

  • When does Kriemhild's grief become morally corrupt?
  • Does the poem sympathize with her revenge?
  • What alternatives are available to her?

• Heroic culture is a machine for extinction

  The poem admires courage while showing that heroic consistency leaves almost everyone dead. Its grandeur depends on the terrible cost of men and women refusing humiliation, compromise or retreat.

  • Why do warnings fail to stop the Burgundians' journey?
  • Is fatalism an excuse or an accurate description of the culture?

Context

The Nibelungenlied preserves ancient Germanic heroic material in a High Medieval courtly form. Figures associated with the Burgundians, Huns and Ostrogothic legend are filtered through Christianized aristocratic manners, feudal loyalty, courtly love and manuscript culture around 1200.

Composition

The poem was likely composed in Middle High German in the Danube region, perhaps near Passau, drawing on oral heroic legends about Siegfried, the Burgundians and Attila. It survives in several medieval manuscripts with variant endings and emphases.

Reception

Rediscovered for modern readers in the eighteenth century, the epic became central to German national literary culture and later to Wagnerian mythmaking, though Wagner's Ring uses related traditions rather than simply adapting this poem. Modern criticism often stresses the work's bleakness and its critique of heroic honor.

Comparisons

• the-iliad

  Both epics build tragedy from honor, wrath and heroic reputation, but Homer lingers on battlefield pity while The Nibelungenlied drives toward social annihilation.

• the-odyssey

  Odysseus survives through cunning and return, whereas Siegfried's heroic transparency and Kriemhild's public grief lead away from homecoming into revenge.

• wuthering-heights

  Both works show love transformed into multi-generational revenge, with houses and kinship networks becoming instruments of punishment.

• macbeth

  Macbeth and Hagen both inhabit worlds where violence done for power or loyalty triggers escalating bloodshed that no later courage can redeem.

• troilus-and-criseyde

  Chaucer's poem also filters older heroic material through medieval courtliness, but it replaces mass revenge with psychological irony and erotic disappointment.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• Kriemhild's dream in the First Adventure of a falcon she has raised that is torn apart by two eagles, and her mother Uta's reading of it. The poet tells you the ending at the beginning; watch how often he does it again.
• The quarrel of the queens at the cathedral door in Worms (Fourteenth Adventure). An argument over whose husband ranks higher ends with Kriemhild showing the ring and girdle Siegfried took from Brunhild, in public, on the way into Mass.
• The cross Kriemhild sews on Siegfried's garment so that Hagen can protect the one vulnerable spot between his shoulders, and the spring in the forest where Hagen uses it to kill him (Fifteenth and Sixteenth Adventures).
• The crossing of the Danube on the way to Etzel's land, when water-sprites tell Hagen that only the chaplain will return. Hagen throws the chaplain overboard to prove the prophecy false, the priest reaches the shore alive, and Hagen breaks up the boat.
• Margrave Rüdiger's agony in the Thirty-seventh Adventure, bound by his oath to Kriemhild to fight the Burgundians whom he has welcomed as guests and to whom he has betrothed his daughter. Before the fight he gives Hagen his own shield.

Key terms and names

Adventure (aventiure)

The name for each of the poem's thirty-nine sections. Many open with a summary of what is about to happen, so the poem is less about suspense than about watching fate unfold.

Worms

The Burgundian royal seat on the Rhine, ruled by Gunther with his brothers Gernot and Giselher. It is the setting of the first half and the court that all the later violence traces back to.

The Nibelung hoard

The treasure Siegfried won before the poem begins. After his death it gives Kriemhild the means to win followers, so Hagen sinks it in the Rhine, and its hiding place becomes the secret Hagen dies refusing to reveal.

The cloak of invisibility (Tarnkappe)

The magic cloak Siegfried took from the dwarf Alberich, which makes him invisible and gives him the strength of twelve men. He uses it to win Brunhild for Gunther in her athletic contests and again in Gunther's bedchamber.

Hagen of Troneck

Gunther's chief vassal, who kills Siegfried to avenge his queen's shame and to protect his lord's honor. He is ruthless and fiercely loyal, and in the second half he faces death with open eyes.

Etzel

King of the Huns, the poem's version of the historical Attila, presented as a generous and peaceable heathen king at whose court Christians and pagans both serve. Kriemhild marries him chiefly to gain the power to avenge Siegfried.

Rüdiger of Bechelaren

The margrave who woos Kriemhild on Etzel's behalf and swears to her that he will avenge any wrong done to her. His oath later forces him to fight his friends, and he and Gernot kill each other.

Balmung

Siegfried's sword, which Hagen takes after the murder and later lays across his knees as Kriemhild approaches. Kriemhild finally kills Hagen with it.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension How does Gunther win Brunhild in Iceland, and what part does Siegfried secretly play?
2. Comprehension How does Hagen learn where Siegfried can be wounded, and how does he arrange the murder during the hunt?
3. Comprehension What warnings do the Burgundians receive on their journey to Etzel's court, and why do they keep going?
4. Interpretation The whole catastrophe begins with a deception Siegfried performs out of friendship for Gunther. Who bears the greatest responsibility for what follows: Siegfried, Gunther, Kriemhild, Brunhild or Hagen?
5. Interpretation Kriemhild begins the poem as a modest, courteous princess and ends it ordering her captive brother's death and striking off Hagen's head with her own hand. Does the poet present her as a loving widow driven to the limit, or as a woman destroyed by vengeance?
6. Interpretation Hagen is a murderer, yet in the second half the poet gives him courage, foresight and a kind of grandeur. Why might the poet make the killer of Siegfried the most impressive figure among the doomed Burgundians?
7. Interpretation The characters attend Mass, are baptized and keep a chaplain, yet they live by a code of honor and revenge. Where in the poem do Christian practice and the heroic code meet, and which one governs the characters when they are tested?
8. Big Question Rüdiger must choose between an oath to his lady and his bond with his friends and guests, and either choice brings dishonor. When two sacred obligations conflict, what should a person do, and is it ever right to keep a promise that requires doing wrong?

Faith Connections

• Romans 12:17-21 (Scripture)

  Paul tells Christians never to avenge themselves but to leave room for God's wrath, and to overcome evil with good. Kriemhild, who goes to church throughout the poem, spends years of widowhood and a second marriage preparing exactly the private vengeance Paul forbids, and the poem's ending shows its cost.

• Judges 11:29-40 (Scripture)

  Jephthah vows to sacrifice whatever first comes out of his house to meet him and then must face his daughter. Rüdiger's oath to Kriemhild, sworn before he knew whom it would bind him to fight, raises the same question of whether a rash vow must be kept.

• Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 108 (Church Fathers)

  Aquinas holds that punishing wrongdoing can be lawful when it aims at justice, the correction of the wrongdoer and the protection of others, but sinful when it aims at the harm of the person for its own sake. His distinction helps students weigh whether Kriemhild's revenge, or Hagen's for Brunhild, ever had a just aim.

• Augustine, City of God XIX.7 (Great Conversation)

  Augustine laments that even just wars bring the wise man grief, and that the miseries of human societies multiply through conflict. The Nibelungenlied's closing scene of lamentation in Etzel's hall shows what the honor code produces on a scale that bears out Augustine's sorrow.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: In a world where honor is public and shame must be answered, a single deception, Siegfried's help in winning Brunhild, creates a hidden injury; when the injury is exposed it demands vengeance, and each act of vengeance creates a new obligation to avenge; because loyalty, oaths and kinship bind every character to someone on the other side, the chain cannot stop until nearly everyone is dead; the poem therefore shows heroic honor, for all its splendor, carrying within it the power to destroy the very community it was meant to uphold.

Rhetorical device: prolepsis (foreshadowing by announcement). From Kriemhild's dream of the falcon in the First Adventure onward, the poet repeatedly tells the audience that a joy will end in sorrow or that a hero will soon lie dead, often at the close of a stanza. The device turns the story from a question of what will happen into a question of how and why.

Debate: Resolved: Hagen, more than Kriemhild, is responsible for the destruction of the Burgundians.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Kriemhild and Hagen are each loyal to someone, Kriemhild to her murdered husband and Hagen to his lord and queen, and each loyalty ends in slaughter. Argue whether the Nibelungenlied presents loyalty itself as a virtue that has been misdirected or as the force that makes the catastrophe inevitable.

Comparison with Beowulf: Both Beowulf and the Nibelungenlied are Christian-era poems that tell old Germanic stories of treasure, feud and heroic death. Compare how the Beowulf poet and the Nibelungenlied poet judge the pagan or heroic code their characters live by, and argue which poem places that code more clearly under Christian judgment.

Medical Lens

The poem is not medical, but its plot turns on bodily vulnerability, visible wounds and grief's conversion into revenge. Siegfried's protected body with one exposed spot is a mythic anatomy of susceptibility; the second half offers an almost clinical inventory of mass violence, exhaustion, thirst, burning halls and mutilating combat. For a history-of-medicine reader, the value lies in medieval heroic attitudes toward wounds, blood, endurance and death rather than in physicians or treatment.

• Aventiure 3

  Siegfried's dragon-blood invulnerability leaves one concealed vulnerable spot, making the hero's body both magical and anatomically fragile.

  Disability DeformityPain
• Aventiure 16

  Hagen kills Siegfried by striking the hidden vulnerable place while the hero drinks at a spring.

  WAR WoundsDeath Dying
• Aventiure 17-19

  Kriemhild's mourning over Siegfried's body becomes the emotional and political source of the revenge plot.

  GriefTrauma Shell Shock
• Aventiure 33-39

  The fighting in Etzel's hall emphasizes wounds, exhaustion, burning, thirst and the mass death of warriors trapped by honor.

  WAR WoundsPainDeath Dying

Creative Prompts

• Fiction

  Rewrite Siegfried's murder from the point of view of the person who marked his vulnerable spot on his clothing.

• Essay

  Analyze Kriemhild's grief as a political force rather than a private emotion.

• Dialogue

  Stage a debate between Achilles and Hagen about whether honor excuses cruelty.

Further Reading

• The Nibelungenlied, Anonymous

• The Poetic Edda, Anonymous

  Preserves related northern traditions about Sigurd and the Volsungs.

• The Saga of the Volsungs, Anonymous

• The Nibelungen Tradition, Winder McConnell