Sacred Texts: Legends and Sagas

Teutonic Myth and Legend: Chapter XXXVI. The Nibelungen T...

Summary only - full text stays on its own separately-gated source. Read the full text at the source »

This is a chapter from Donald A. Mackenzie's 1912 prose retelling of Germanic heroic legend, specifically covering the climactic vengeance sequence of the *Nibelungenlied* — the medieval German epic that forms the core of the Teutonic mythological tradition. The chapter follows Kriemhild, now queen of the Huns after marrying King Etzel, as she engineers the destruction of the Burgundian court at Worms by luring her brother Gunther and his knights — especially Hagen, who killed her first husband Siegfried — to a doomed feast under the pretense of a royal festival. Mackenzie narrates the escalating catastrophe: Hagen's grim foreknowledge of doom, the water-fairies' prophecy, the nighttime vigil of Hagen and the minstrel Volker, the ambush of the Burgundian retainers, and the eruption of slaughter in Etzel's feasting hall, including Hagen's killing of the infant prince Ortlieb before his father's eyes. Dietrich of Bern, the honorable exile-king, is presented as a morally distinct figure who refuses Kriemhild's entreaties to avenge Siegfried and ultimately tries to preserve order. The text reads as a narrative summary rather than a scholarly analysis, aimed at popularizing these legends for a general Edwardian audience, and its distinctive quality is the way it frames Kriemhild's long, cold patience as the engine of tragedy — her grief transmuted over thirteen years into methodical, implacable revenge.

Teutonic Myth and Legend: Chapter XXXVI. The Nibelungen T...

Related pages View as graph →