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Das Nibelungenlied: Song of the Nibelungs (review)

Nobody should blame any author or translator for the sins of the copy-writers who supply the blurbs for books, but the declaration on the cover of this new verse translation of the Nibelungenlied invites comment, since the interested but casual reader might well be influenced by it. The translator, we are told, ‘brings to life in English for the first time the great German epic poem that inspired Richard Wagner’s opera tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. His verse translation underscores the allimportant formal aspects of the poem and preserves its haunting beauty.’ The factual errors can be dismissed: Wagner’s operas used in their final form the rather different Norse legends, and Tolkien famously denied any such influence (indeed, it is difficult to see one, especially given the absence of any special rings in the Nibelungenlied). Beyond that, however, the poem has been brought to life perfectly well by the excellent prose translations of D. G. Mowatt for Everyman’s Library (1962) and A. T. Hatto for Penguin (1965), and this in turn raises the questions first of whether a verse translation is an acceptable idea, and second, of whether this one really does preserve the formal aspects. Beowulf, of course, has appeared in at least three major poetic translations (by Michael Alexander, Seamus Heaney, and Edwin Morgan), but the form of Beowulf is more acceptable to a modern English eye and ear. The problems with the form of the Nibelungenlied are far greater, and verse translations have been rare since the nineteenth century. The book contains a brief foreword by Michael Dirda. He claims that the translation closely emulates the original’s structure and language; and he modifies slightly the references to Wagner and to The Lord of the Rings, indicating only that this is the kind of work which influenced Tolkien. However, he also makes the extraordinary remark that medieval epics might have provoked their audience to think that this is as good as Tolkien, had they ever heard of Tolkien. This foreword is followed by a concise and accurate introduction to the Nibelungenlied and its reception by a specialist, Edward R. Haymes, who clarifies the matter of Wagner’s sources, and points out equally clearly that Tolkien did not use the work, thus ending Tolkien’s rather misleading guest appearance as a marketing device. To Haymes’ valuable (mostly American) bibliography one might usefully add Francis E. Sandbach,