Die Nibelungen zogen nach Dänemark: Eine Neuinterpretation der Erzählung 'Von Hven zwischen Seeland und Schonen' by Peter Hvilshøj Andersen

Abstract

914 Reviews I7. Jahrhundert' by Lieven Rens, published inTheatrumEuropaeum (Munich: Fink, I982), which may have been consulted by one or other of theauthors of thiswelcome new volume spanning a cultural period extending from I400 to I625. Surprisingly, however, it lacks the comprehensive bibliography one expects in awide-ranging work of thiskind. All thirteencontributors have interestingpoints to make, but thearea inwhich they areworking is a specialized one which isunlikely tohave much immediate appeal out side Dutch Studies. However, at the centre of the collection, Peter Happe, a British Ben Jonson specialist, opens up awider view in 'Pyramus and Thisbe: Rhetoricians and Shakespeare', a contribution which deserves the attention of a broader reader ship.Oddly enough, only tenof his fellow contributors arementioned in thebrief but interesting 'Notes on Contributors'. Carla Dauven-Van Knippenberg, theauthor of a particularly focused examination of 'borderline texts', i.e. texts written on the linguis ticborder between theCologne/Lower Rhine area,Maastricht, and theNetherlands, is leftout and so, too, isFemke Kramer, whose contribution, 'Producing Late Medi eval Dutch Plays Today', is an engagingly illustrated account of the efforts made by students and teachers ofDutch literature tobring a selection of such plays to lifeby 'recontextualizing' them and performing them at drama festivals sometimes farbe yond theirareas of origin. The omission of information about these authors reinforces the impression that this potentially valuable book could have done with some close final copy-editing; signs of haste are also evident in the informative introduction by Elsa Strietman and Peter Happ6, which includes a 'timeline' or chronology starting in 1270 and ending appropriately with thePeace ofMiinster in I648. As Gary K. Waite shows in his thoughtful contribution entitled 'Rhetoricians and Religious Compro mise during the Early Reformation', the rederijkers' rough-hewn plays contributed significantly to the sixteenth-century cultural and social evolution of theNetherlands, but by the I630s theywere already being replaced by the loftierrhetoric ofHolland's 'golden age'. UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL PETER SKRINE Die Nibelungen zogen nach Ddnemark: Eine Neuinterpretation der Erzahlung 'Von Hven zwischen Seeland und Schonen'. By PETER HvILSH0J ANDERSEN. (Bre mer Beitriige zur Literatur- und Ideengeschichte, 48) Bern: Peter Lang. 2007. 443 pp. E68.50. ISBN 978-3-631-56II8-8. Unravelling the tangled narrative strands of theNibelungen tradition has long been a favourite sport of scholars. This is a remarkable book, a brave and enthusiastic attempt to rekindle interest in and rehabilitate the so-called Hven Chronicle, a short Danish prose narrative dating from I603, which as long ago as I889Wolfgang Golther dismissed as 'eindanisches gelehrtesMachwerk'. This remarkhas coloured reception of it ever since-in so far as ithas received any scholarly attention at all (Andersen gives a fullaccount of previous research inChapter 3). In sharp contrast toGolther's opinion stands Andersen's assessment of itas an 'auBerst kunstvolle Erzihlung' and a 'hervorragende literarische Leistung' (p. 22). In i892 Otto Jiriczek published a diplomatic edition of it from the better of the twomanuscripts, MS K 23 40 in the Royal Library at Stockholm, but his introduction, focusing exclusively on palaeo graphical and linguistic features,was so utterly uninformative thatnot a single word was devoted to the content of the text.The text,headed 'On Hven between Seeland and Schonen' in theStockholm manuscript, is, in fact,not a chronicle at all but part of the richGerman-Scandinavian legacy ofNibelungen material. It sets the familiar story of Siegfried, Hagen, and Kriemhild on the once Danish, now Swedish islet of MLR, I03.3, 2oo8 9I5 Ven (formerlyHven) in theBaltic. The author was theCopenhagen pastor, professor, and (from i602) royal historiographer Jon Jakobsen (before I559-I 6o8), who called himself Venusin(us) afterhis birthplace, Ven itself,and inplayfully learned allusion to theRoman poet Horace, who was born atVenusia (now Venosa) inApulia. In a wide-ranging discussion that comprehensively analyses theHven Chronicle's place in the broader Nibelungen tradition,Andersen shows thatVenusin, who studied at Rostock and tookhisMA at Wittenberg in I58o, adapted theNibelungen storyusing material from theDanish Hundredvisebogen, compiled by Anders Sorensen Vedel (I542-I6I6), the Swedish Didrikskrdnikan, German Nibelungen poems such as the Rosengarten zu Worms and theLied vonHurnen Seyfrid, and various lesser sources such as the story ofMelusina in Sigmund Feyerabend's Buch der Liebe (I587). He moulded it...