Reading, interpretation, and tragic rewriting of the Nibelungenlied: Friedrich Hebbel’s Die Nibelungen

Abstract

The Nibelungenlied (ca. 1200) has been one of the most commented-on and brought back medieval texts during the 19th century, within the framework of shaping a ‘national identity’. The case of Hebbel’s Die Nibelungen (1861) is a direct rewriting and also contains recognisable elements from the Nordic Nibelung tradition, such as Völsunga Saga and the poetic Edda. Beyond these issues that clearly influence the peculiar composition of this text, this paper examines Hebbel’s rewriting as a personal reading of the Nibelungenlied from a tragic perspective. Thus, I mainly focus on the most important episodes, on the ellipses and how these are executed, and, due to its theatrical nature, on the dialogues, since these allow us to go deeper into the characters’ creation and their (bigger or lesser) sliding in terms of their motivations, relevance, and characterisation. Through this methodology, this paper aims to delineate the interpretative reading of the Nibelungelied by Hebbel, captured by the poetic composition itself.

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