Siegfried the Dragon-Slayer

 The story of Siegfried the Dragon-Slayer is a very old Germanic story that, in the Middle Ages, got attached to several other old stories, and in the nineteenth century was picked up by Richard Wagner for his massive "Ring" opera cycle (that's Wagner down below, click here for more on nineteenth-century efforts to reimagine medieval culture).  Literary scholars have a field day figuring out how all the parts of the Siegfried story might fit together.

 

The core of the story is that the hero Siegfried killed a dragon (also called a worm or a serpent), tasted the dragon's blood, and now was able to understand the language of birds.  A bird warned him that the dragon's friends and/or relatives were seeking revenge.  The dragon's horde of gold entered into it too.  There are many medieval images of someone with a sword in one hand licking the fingers of the other hand, with a bird perched in the tree above him.  These are Siegfried images.

But what happened to the story then?  One has to do some sort of mental archaeology to follow all its twists and turns.   The fullest medieval account is in the thirteenth-century Icelandic "Saga of the Volsungs."  Here Siegfried (Sigurd in Norse) enters the story well along, as a descendant of the (pagan) Norse god Odin.  It turns out that the dragon is the brother of Siegfried's foster father, who first encourages Siegfried to kill his brother, then wants to kill Siegfried to get revenge for the brother he himself wanted dead, but Siegfried kills him first.  Nice family interaction.  You will note that this saga was written long after Iceland had become Christian, and a constant theme is the horror of family feuds (conveniently set in long-ago pagan times).

Then we have historical events getting drawn into the Siegfried story, including Attila the Hun, the Merovingian-era kings of Burgundy, the Merovingian queen Brunhild (originally from Visigothic Spain), and the Carolingian-era Burgundian lords named Nibelung (Volsung in Icelandic).  There were also some ninth- and tenth-century epic tales that survive now only in fragments, whose heroes got attached to the Siegfried story,  These varied historical and fictional accounts seem to have circulated all during the early Middle Ages, different authors playing mix-and-match with pieces of them, until they emerged in the two great thirteenth-century epic tales, the "Saga of the Volsungs" in Norse and the "Nibelungenlied" in German.  Although Wagner tried to combine them (working in some material from the Norse Eddas while he was at it), the two versions were very deliberately written to reject parts of the story found in the other.

In the "Saga," as already noted, Siegfried enters the story rather late.  He kills the dragon and has a hot affair with Odin's daughter Brunhilda (who is actually his aunt, but we won't go into that), well before he marries.  In the "Nibelungenlied," however, the story starts with Siegfried, a rather reckless but Christian prince, who had killed a dragon and gotten its gold sometime in the past and had never met Brunhilda in his life.  In this version everyone is wealthy, courteous, and courtly--though soon it will all change.

Both versions have Siegfried marry a princess, then be killed by his brothers-in-law, because they have been stirred up against him by his oldest brother-in-law's wife, Brunhilda.  Having left the story, he plays no further role except as a reason for long-term revenge plots, which lead to just about everyone being dead.  Both the Norse and the German versions have this central plot, but it's handled very differently.

In the Norse version, Brunhilda wanted Siegfried dead because he had forgotten her, and she was wildly jealous.  She laughs to learn he's dead, but then commits suicide.  In the German version, she's very irritated with Siegfried's princess, who mocks Brunhilda by saying she (Brundhilda) had had sex with Siegfried thinking he was her own husband (she hadn't), and Brunhilda decides to get revenge by having Siegfried killed.  (She herself stays alive.)

In both versions, Siegfried's widow (Gudrun in the Norse version, Kriemhild in the German) is married off to Attila the Hun to get her out of the way.  When her brothers come to visit, there is a great battle with great slaughter, and Gudrun sides with her brothers in the Norse version.  In the German version, Kriemhild instead helps kill them.  The courtliness of the early parts of this story is long gone.

The brave young warrior who kills a dragon and gets the gold has shown up in various stories for 1500 years, and he seems to have started with Siegfried.  In the hands of two great thirteenth-century poets, he became the starting point about the horrors of betrayal and revenge.

There are various translations of both versions.  I like Jesse L. Byock's translation of the "Saga" and A. T. Hatto's translation of the "Nibelungenlied," both available from Penguin Books.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For more on medieval epics, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Whose Middle Ages?

 Memory studies teach us that those who control the past control the present (and future).  That is, if one can create a particular version of history, and have it accepted, one can seek to have the present (and future) shaped to be more like the Good Old Days.

Historians are always acutely aware of this.  We try to present a history that matches the records and do our best not to portray a past that was like what we would have preferred it to be like.  (This can of course work both ways:  the past could be a Golden Age to which we need to return, or the past can be a horrible, savage time, and we need to do the exact opposite of everything they used to do.)

Every generation thinks it's finally gotten it right, only to have the next generation raise their eyebrows at such evident bias.  But I do think that, over the two-plus generations that I've been a medievalist, we may be getting closer.  At least historians tend to focus on medieval records rather than some romantic vision.

Though here one has to be aware that "the records," things written down in the Middle Ages, supplemented with archaeology, do not give a unitary result.  When you have millions of people doing various things, it's always possible to find someone in the past who said something about their period that matches what you wanted them to say.  One of the great challenges for any historian is approaching the archives with an open mind, not going in determined to find only certain things, because if you do, that's all you'll find.

There's been a recent surge of interest in the general population in the Middle Ages, due in part to the fantasy versions found in the wildly popular Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones.  Although medievalists are delighted to have people interested in our period, it does give us pause when people create their own version of the Middle Ages, trying to shape the medieval past to match what they'd like to be the situation now.

Specifically, there has been a strong effort to portray medieval Europe as completely white and completely Christian, where lower-class people "knew their place," so that the wealthy could dominate them, and where women were "properly" subservient to men.  The Crusades are sometimes portrayed as a wonderful time when Christians beat the heck out of Muslims (leaving out the tidbit that all Crusades after the first were disastrous for the West).  Now historians know that none of this is true.  As I have discussed before, there were certainly people of color in medieval Europe, there were significant minority populations of Jews and Muslims, and both women and peasants were entirely capable of resisting any effort by powerful men to dominate them.

And yet the Middle Ages have such a hold on the population that it is often invoked as informing the present.  A great many white, male organizations call their members "knights."  This needn't mean they are white supremacists, but it does indicate an effort to invoke a period believed to be one of honor, strength, and willingness to sacrifice for a higher goal.  (In a period today where such things seem to be in short supply, one can appreciate their approach, though I continue to find men in nice suits, glasses, and a comb-over calling themselves knights somewhat, shall I say, droll.)

Now, as in LotR and GoT, one can create fantasy imbued with at least some medieval aspects.  Part of fantasy's appeal is that honor and glory can find a home.  Just make it clear this is not historical fiction.  After all, medieval people wrote such fantasy themselves, creating larger-than-life versions of their own world for their heroes and heroines to run around in.  But it seems mean-spirited at best (not to say a-historical) to make up a fantasy Middle Ages in which everyone is white and Christian, except for the bad guys, and where women and lower-status people can safely be ignored.

(Interestingly, the "Indiana Jones" movies, deliberately using the language of Crusade as the heroes rampage around the Middle East, did not have Muslims as bad guys.  Rather, the bad guys were Nazis.  Nazis make a convenient all-purpose villainous enemy, though it's disturbing to see Nazi flags show up at some rallies.  Guys, we beat them.  They were not only evil, they were losers.)

There is a new book out, called Whose Middle Ages?, by Andrew Albin et al. (Fordham University Press, 2019), full of ideas for those teaching the Middle Ages, to avoid modern prejudices and stereotypes.

 © C. Dale Brittain 2022

For more on medieval society and religion, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Lost medieval manuscripts

 Most of the Middle Ages was pre-printing press.  Until the second half of the fifteenth century, everything had to be written by hand.  No printing, not even laser jets, no copy machines, only people writing or copying onto parchment or (by the fourteenth century) paper.  Understandably, there were far fewer books and documents than we have now.  This makes the loss over the centuries very noticeable.

Some medieval records we know only because the author's original manuscript (improbably) survives.  Others we know because the work was copied many times, such as the Arthurian stories I've previously discussed.  Property transactions at monasteries are known primarily if the records of these transactions were copied into cartularies.

It was not only the passage of time, with inevitable decay and fading, that did in medieval manuscripts.  Fire or flood will destroy parchment.  So will rats, who find parchment tasty good.  But the biggest losses were caused by humans.  Medieval bookbinders used old manuscripts in their bindings, a handy (free!) source of parchment.  The Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century destroyed many medieval records.  In France, the French Revolution of the eighteenth century destroyed many more, as these records were seen as oppressive tools of the ancien régime that was being overthrown.  Documents that survived into the twentieth century were sometimes destroyed during the two world wars.

And then a number of people set out deliberately to destroy medieval manuscripts.  They didn't do so with destruction per se on their minds, but due to seeing these manuscripts as sort of random pieces of interesting material, to be used or sold or recombined in ways to please the owners.  For example, there was a fad in the nineteenth century of carefully cutting out decorated initials from medieval manuscripts and gluing them to white paper, then framing them as attractive decorations.

Liturgical manuscripts especially, those which had been done with great care and artistry, were especially prone to such mutilation.  Even if the initials were not actually cut out, individual leaves might be separated from the rest of the book and sold individually.  Rare book dealers realized that they could make far more money selling individual leaves of medieval manuscripts than selling the entire book to one person.

A recent interesting example is the Beauvais missal.  It is a liturgical manuscript, highly decorated, which exists as a partial volume.  Recently a number of individual leaves, separated in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, have come to light, most in individual hands.  Some were picked up at an estate sale, where the deceased's heirs thought an attractive late medieval sheet of parchment ought to be worth something.  Lisa Fagin Davis, director of the Medieval Academy of America, has been on a mission to identify as many of these missing leaves as possible. This is what one of the missing leaves looked like.

 

I've had folks selling individual medieval manuscript leaves tell me, "Well, the leaves were already separated from the book when I got them."  I consider this similar to, "Well, the leopard was already dead when I made its fur into a coat."

It's disconcerting how limited our collection of medieval manuscripts must be compared to those that existed 500 years ago.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For more on manuscripts, writing, and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available as a paperback.