The Influence of the Trojan War Story on the Nibelungenlied: Motifs, Characters, Situations

Abstract

Herbort von Fritzlar’s Liet von Troye was composed shortly after 1190, commissioned by Landgrave Hermann von Thüringen (1190 – 1217). It is presumed that this new German Trojan War story, based on the French Roman de Troie by Benoît de Sainte-Maure, was supposed to add the events preceding Heinrich von Veldeke’s Eneit. Veldeke was mentioned by Herbort. Since the Liet von Troye was the first German rendition of the Trojan Wars (although Konrad von Würzburg’s Trojanerkrieg became more famous in 1287), I believe that it could well have influenced the Nibelungenlied of 1200/1205. It seems to me that the idea for the final version of the Nibelungenlied by the anonymous Austrian poet, based on old Germanic sources, could have been to write an epic that was native to Germany, but which would have the epic dimensions and the model of the classic Trojan War story, the Iliad. There are no epics other than the Nibelungenlied and the Iliad which end in destruction like this. In the Iliad, the Greeks destroy Troy; in the Nibelungenlied, the Burgundians destroy Attila’s fortress. In both epics, hardly anybody of the royal dynasties and their friends stays alive, excepting Eneas in the Iliad and Dietrich von Bern in the Nibelungenlied. Although the two epics are not identical in their plots, enough similarities could be enumerated to show an influence of the Trojan Wars on the Nibelungenlied.