[9] For a complete list of these, also of magazine articles, etc.,
relating to the Nibelungenlied, see F. E. Sandbach, The
_Nibelungenlied and Gudrun in England and America_, London,
1903.
Early in last century interest in the Nibelungenlied began to manifest
itself in England. A synopsis of it, with metrical translation of several
strophes, appeared in the year 1814 in Weber, Jamieson and Scott's
"Illustrations of Northern Antiquities" (London and Edinburgh), in which,
according to Lockhart, Sir Walter Scott's hand may perhaps be seen.
Carlyle, laboring as a pioneer to spread a knowledge of German literature
in England, contributed to the Westminster Review in 1831 his well-known
essay on the Nibelungenlied which, though containing an additional mass
of rather ill-arranged matter and now antiquated in many particulars, is
still well worth reading for its enthusiastic account of the epic itself
in the genuine style of the author. Carlyle here reproduces in metrical
form a few strophes. He has said elsewhere that one of his ambitions was
to make a complete English version of the poem. Since then an endless
number of accounts of it, chiefly worthless, has appeared in magazines
and elsewhere. The first attempt at a complete metrical translation was
made in 1848 by Jonathan Birch, who however only reproduces Lachmann's
twenty _lieder_, with some fifty-one strophes added on his own account.
His version of the first strophe runs thus:
Legends of by-gone times reveal wonders and prodigies,
Of heroes worthy endless fame,--of matchless braveries,--
Of jubilees and festal sports,--of tears and sorrows great,--
And knights who daring combats fought:--the like I now relate.
In 1850 appeared William Nansom Lettsom's translation of the whole poem
according to Braunfels' edition, with the opening strophe turned as
follows:
In stories of our fathers high marvels we are told
Of champions well approved in perils manifold.
Of feasts and merry meetings, of weeping and of wail,
And deeds of gallant daring I'll tell you in my tale.
The next metrical rendering is that by A. G. Foster-Barham in the year
1887. His first strophe reads:
Many a wondrous story have the tales of old,
Of feats of knightly glory, and of the Heroes bold,
Of the delights of feasting, of weeping and of wail,
Of noble deeds of daring; you may list strange things in my tale.
In the year 1898 follows still another, by Alice Horton (edited by E.
Bell). This latest translation is based on Bartsch's text of MS. B, and
is prefaced by Carlyle's essay. First strophe:
To us, in olden legends, / is many a marvel told
Of praise-deserving heroes, / of labours manifold,
Of weeping and of wailing, / of joy and festival;
Of bold knights' battling shall you / now hear a wondrous tale.
Apart from the many faults of interpretation all of the metrical
translations of the Nibelungenlied here enumerated are defective in one
all-important respect: they do not reproduce the poem in its _metrical
form_. Carlyle and other pioneers we may perhaps acquit of any intention
of following the original closely in this regard. None of the translators
of the complete poem, however, has retained in the English rendering what
is after all the very essence of a poem,--its exact metrical quality.
Birch has created an entirely different form of strophe in which all four
lines are alike, each containing seven principal accents, with the
caesura, following the fourth foot. Lettsom makes the first serious
attempt to reproduce the original strophe. It is evident from the
introduction to his translation (see p. xxvi) that he had made a careful
study of its form, and he does in fact reproduce the first three lines
exactly. Of the fourth line he says: "I have not thought it expedient to
make a rule of thus lengthening the fourth lines of the stanzas, though I
have lengthened them occasionally"(!). What moved him thus to deprive
the stanza of its most striking feature--and one, moreover, that is
easily preserved in English--he does not make clear. The versions of
Foster-Barham and of Horton and Bell show the same disfigurement, the
latter omitting the extra accent of the fourth line, as they say, "for
the sake of euphony"(!). It is just this lengthened close of each strophe
that gives the Nibelungenlied its peculiar metrical character and
contributes not a little to the avoidance of monotony in a poem of over
two thousand strophes. In theory the form of the fourth line as it stands
in the original is no more foreign to the genius of the English language
than to that of modern German, and few of the many Germans giving a
modernized version of the epic have been bold enough to lay sacrilegious
hands upon it to shorten it.
A brief account of the Nibelungen strophe may not be out of place here,
owing to the fact that its character has generally been misunderstood.
The origin and evolution of the strophe have been the subject of much
discussion, the results of which we need not pause to formulate here. As
it appears in actual practice in our poem of about the year 1200, it was
as follows: Each strophe consists of four long lines, the first line
rhyming with the second, and the third with the fourth. The rhymes are
masculine, that is, rhymes on the end syllable. Each line is divided by a
clearly marked caesura into two halves; each half of the first three
lines and the first half of the fourth line has three accented syllables,
the second half of the fourth line has four accented syllables. The first
half of each line ends in an unaccented syllabic--or, strictly speaking,
in a syllable bearing a secondary accent; that is, each line has what is
called a "ringing" caesura. The metrical character of the Nibelungen
strophe is thus due to its fixed number of accented syllables. Of
unaccented syllables the number may vary within certain limits.
Ordinarily each accented syllable is preceded by an unaccented one; that
is, the majority of feet are iambic. The unaccented syllable may,
however, at times be wanting, or there may, on the other hand, be two or
even three of them together. A characteristic of the second half of the
last line is that there is very frequently no unaccented syllable between
the second and the third accented ones. Among occasional variations of
the normal strophe as here described may be mentioned the following: The
end-rhyme is in a few instances feminine instead of masculine; while on
the other hand the ending of the first half-lines is occasionally
masculine instead of feminine, that is, the caesura is not "ringing." In
a few scattered instances we find strophes that rhyme throughout in the
caesura as well as at the end of lines;[10] occasionally the first and
second lines, or still less frequently the third and fourth, alone have
caesural rhyme.[11] Rhyming of the caesura may be regarded as accidental
in most cases, but it is reproduced as exactly as possible in this
translation.
[10] Strophes 1, 17, 102, and possibly 841.
[11] Strophes 18, 69, 103, 115, 129, 148, 177, 190, 198, 222, 231,
239, 293, 325, 345, 363, 485, 584, 703, 712, 859, 864, 894, 937,
1022, 1032, 1114, 1225, 1432, 1436, 1460, 1530, 1555, 1597, 1855,
1909, 1944, 1956, 2133, 2200, 2206, 2338.
In the original the opening strophe, which is altogether more regular
than the average and is, moreover, one of the few that have also complete
caesural rhyme, is as follows:
Uns ist in alten maeren / wunders vil geseit
von heleden lobebaeren, / von grozer arebeit,
von frouden, hochgeziten, / von weinen und von klagen,
von kuener recken striten / muget ir nu wunder hoeren sagen.
Here the only place where the unaccented syllable is lacking before the
accented is before _wunders_ at the beginning of the second half of the
first line. A strophe showing more typical irregularities is, for
instance, the twenty-second:
In sinen besten ziten, / bi sinen jungen tagen,
man mohte michel wunder / von Sivride sagen,
waz eren an im wuchse / und wie scoene was sin lip.
sit heten in ze minne / diu vil waetlichen wip.
Here the rhyme of the first and second lines is still masculine, _tagen_
and _sagen_ being pronounced _tagn_ and _sagn_. The unaccented syllable
is lacking, e.g., before the second accent of the second half of line
two, also before the first and the third accent of the second half of
line four. There are two unaccented syllables at the beginning
(_Auftakt_) of the second half of line three. The absence of the
unaccented syllable between the second and the third accent of the last
half of the fourth line of a strophe, as here, is so frequent in the poem
as to amount almost to a rule; it shows an utter misconception, or
disregard, of its true character, nevertheless, to treat this last
half-line as having only three accented syllables, as all translators
hitherto have done.