Bold Knights and Lovely Ladies: Edward Haymes assesses a new prose translation of the ‘Nibelungenlied’

Wagnerians will be interested in a translation of one of the main sources for Der Ring des Nibelungen, although Wagner himself did not like the poem and drew much of his material from other sources. He did adapt portions of the Middle High German epic for his drama, mainly in Götterdämmerung, but his chief interest was in the Siegfried figure developed in Iceland and Norway (as Sigurd) and in the Germanic pantheon he saw in Wotan and the other gods, something that is totally missing in the Nibelungenlied, which takes place in a very Catholic Europe of the High Middle Ages. Still, it is important for the serious student of Wagner’s Ring to know the epic that attracted much scholarly and lay opinion in the first half of the 19th century.