THE GERMAN HERO-LEGENDS. Ludwig Uhland has rightly divided all the various characters in the heroic legends into two groups: the loyal and the disloyal. The duty of liberality is connected with loyalty, and avarice is a sign of disloyalty. Self-sacrifice, the root of all virtues, first appears within the family circle, then in the society at court, and in companionship in arms. As the lord and his vassals are bound together by a general bond, so the vassals are often connected with each other by some peculiar tie, and afford beautiful examples of heroic friendship. Over and above the duties imposed by natural ties, or by alliances expressly agreed upon, it is esteemed honorable and glorious for a warrior to relieve distress in strangers and to aid the oppressed. Action is free, so far as it does not conflict with a warrior's code of honor. Violated faith among relations is the chief cause of all the complications of the heroic legends. When two parties are once on a footing of enmity their friends often find themselves in a dilemma. Loyalty to a friend entails determined treachery to an enemy; loyalty to one who has been basely murdered leads to treacherous revenge on all his living enemies; the duties of a vassal come into conflict with family duties, and a marriage often becomes the source of a feud. The woman who was to form a connecting link between two houses suffers by her twofold position, and, whilst trying to fulfil her conflicting duties, the flame of her short-sighted passion may become a firebrand destroying both houses. The spirit of chivalrous self-sacrifice, which instead of deriving a brutal pleasure from warfare, regarded it as a high and honorable calling, breathed a new life into the old heroes. They were typical examples of a noble secular life, a life of fighting and of many duties. A fervent enthusiasm for the profession of arms inspires every line of the Middle High-German heroic poems. The men are always described with solemn emphasis as heroes, warriors, swordsmen, and knights. Though the heroic poetry remained, the whole, true to its origin, still it underwent some modification in the course of centuries. New characters were admitted who bear witness to this influence of the times. Side by side with the dignity and nobility of the chief characters, we perceive in some of the sub ordinate ones the coarse minstrel humor of the tenth century, which loudly applauded a Kuno Kurzibold. . . . The heroic poems of the middle High-German epoch, like the popular epics of Merovingian times, are full of conventional phrases and ideas, out of respect to which the poet is content to forego all personal originality. We do not find in these poems the grandeur and pictorial breadth of Homeric description; on the contrary, the style is throughout perfectly simple. The heroes and heroines are characterized by such epithets as brave, bold, beautiful; sometimes these are emphasized into very brave, bold as the storm, wonderfully beautiful; sometimes they denote the leading characteristic of the person to whom they are applied, as when Rüdiger is called the generous, Eckhart the faithful, Hagen the cruel. The descriptive element is confined to the most ordinary epithets; such expressions as a white hand, a red mouth, bright eyes, yellow hair, are perpetually recurring. There are no detailed poetical similes, and the poet's imagination never goes beyond the very simplest comparisons, as, for instance, of the color of young cheeks to the roses, of the rude love of fighting to the wild boar, of a malicious disposition to a wolf. Every mood has its conventional outward demeanor: the afflicted man sits silently upon a stone, and the man who has formed a resolution speaks not a word until he has carried it out. A downcast eye betokens dejection, an upward glance joy, silent contemplation inquiry, while turning pale and then red denotes a rapid change of mood. In the same manner remarks about stature, garments, and weapons are only made from a few fixed points of view. All the occupations of hero-life are reduced to conventional formulas. From the earliest times the Germans used the falcon in hunting, and in their poetry the fighting, hunting falcon served as the emblem of a youthful hero. Flashing eyes reminded the mediæval poet of falcon's eyes, and a noble lady of the twelfth century who has won the love of a man expresses this in poetry by saying that she has tamed a falcon. So, too, in the opening of the Nibelungenlied, we read how Kriemhild dreamt in girlhood of a falcon which she spent many a day in taming, but to her lasting sorrow two eagles tore it to pieces before her eyes. This dream of gloomy foreboding foreshadows the events related in the first half of the poem. Siegfried is the falcon, his brother-inlaw Gunther and Gunther's vassal, Hagen, are the eagles who tear him to pieces, and Kriemhild weeps for him and will not be comforted. The carrying out of her horrible revenge forms the subject of the second part. She gives her hand in marriage to the King of the Huns, and invites the murderers to a feast, which she turns into a massacre. With wooing and betrothal the tale opens, with murder and fire it closes, very like in this to the legend of the siege of Troy. But the Nibelungenlied does not merely consist of certain episodes selected from the legend, but exhausts the whole of the legendary material, thereby attaining a higher degree of unity than the Iliad.-History of German Lit erature. |