Rules for the Endgame: The Epic World of the 'Nibelungenlied'. (Parallax: Re-Visions of Culture and Society) by Jan-Dirk Müller, William T. Whobrey

Abstract

MLR, 104.3, 2009 893 Itwould be invidious to single out for special praise any of the ensuing essays in a collection thatmaintains to the end a uniformly high standard. The major preoccupations of students of the comedia are all expertly and intelligently dealt with: honour, kingship, class conflict, race, the gender question (that is to say, women in the comedia aswell as comedias written bywomen), the comedia and film, the comedia and other seventeenth-century European dramatic traditions, and, of course, the nuts and bolts of theatrical performance. There are also refreshing and unexpected takes on Golden Age drama: the comedia and the emblem; polimetrta (possibly the most individual and characteristic formal feature of the comedia); the comedia and the imperial enterprise; and the comedia viewed alongside what Vincent Martin terms 'non-comedia festivedrama (p. 115). There are,moreover, plenty of surprises. Enrique Garcia Santo-Tom?s makes a good case forviewing Tirso as a characteristically urban playwright. He also helps to confirm this reviewer's growing sense overmany years that the handling of space inTirso is peculiarly intense. A. Robert Lauer's manipulations of the desenlace of La vida es sueno as trial is as entertaining as it is instructive. Dale J.Pratt and Valerie Hagstrom challenge us with their essay on teaching bymeans of production and performance. One emerges from reading their contribution inspired as well as positively exhausted. Finally,we must record one piece of deafening silence. Those prospective readers who have no faith in secular religions will be delighted to learn that the names of Otto Rank and Sigmund Freud appear on only two or three pages, while those of Jungand Lacan are entirely absent. University of Birmingham R. J. Oakley Rules for theEndgame: The Epic World of the 'Nibelungenlied'. By Jan-Dirk M?ller. Trans, byWilliam T.Whobrey. (Parallax: Re-Visions of Culture and Soci ety) Baltimore: JohnsHopkins University Press. 2007. xv+562 pp. ?46.50. ISBN 978-0-8018-8702-4. Jan-DirkM?llers ground-breaking and controversial study of theNibelungenlied, originally published inGerman in 1998, is an important book formedieval studies, and it is greatly to be welcomed that it isnow available in an American translation and thus accessible to a larger audience. Itnot only offersa comprehensive interpre tation of one of the classic' texts ofmedieval German literature as epic narrative, but also assesses paradigmatically the role of vernacular literaturewithin medieval culture around 1200, and, on ameta-level, reflectson the limits and boundaries of historical interpretation. As the preface states,M?llers engagement with theNibelungenlied goes back to a grammar-school essay exploring thequestion 'How did Kriemhilt become a villain?'. The whole of the book can be read as an engagement with this question, outlining why itmay be impossible to answer, what it reveals about modern conceptions of narrative, and?bringing both strands together?in what way medieval narrative may be distinctly different frommodern expectations. 894 Reviews The Nibelungenlied is a particular puzzle for modern readers, because itdefies ex pectations of narrative coherence, presenting the audience with a female protagonist who is the beautiful princess at one moment and amurderous she-devil at the next, without any obvious moments of transition from one to the other. Some critics have pointed to the literaryorigins of thework, a conflation of earlier and independent oral stories, and insisted that this internal incoherence made ituninterpretable as a poetic whole. Others have sought refuge in psychological explanations. M?ller reveals both of these approaches as anachronistic. He highlights theway inwhich this storydefiesmodern notions of narratives plotting gradual developments moti vated by psychological states, and instead presents us with a text inwhich narrative itself is used to create meaning. What his interpretation offers therefore is a view of theNibelungenlied as coherent, but coherent inways that defy causality and psychological realism. In a series ofwell-defined steps,M?ller assesses the text in all its layers, starting with the textual and philological problems itposes: its transmission in three early manuscripts which differ so significantly that they appear to represent individual versions; its conflation of originally disparate elements of historical narrative; its uneasy fusion of oral elements with an inherently literate courtly culture which is evident in the variant openings...