Reviewed by: The Return of King Arthur and the Nibelungen: National Myth in Nineteenth-Century English and German Literature William R. McKelvy (bio) The Return of King Arthur and the Nibelungen: National Myth in Nineteenth-Century English and German Literature, by Maike Oergel; pp. viii + 325. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1998, DM178.00, $106.00. From 1714 to 1917, British subjects were ruled by two Germanic dynasties, the houses of Hanover and Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. George V ended this nominal Teutonic reign when he exchanged Saxe-Coburg-Gotha for Windsor in 1917. Victoria’s grandson did this because his subjects were deep in a bloody, muddy war against a Germanic alliance led by his first cousin (and another grandchild of Victoria), Wilhelm II. The commander of British forces, Douglas Haig, had a new war strategy (“kill more Germans,” as he put it) which was not chiming well with a king whose name (George Frederick Ernest Albert Saxe-Coburg-Gotha) sounded like roll call on the wrong side of the front. This is a dynastic way to illustrate the broad cultural arc inspiring this book. “Around the middle of the nineteenth century the English were quite convinced that they were just as Teutonic as their continental neighbors” (3), but (largely) because of World War I, this thriving Victorian Teutonism expired and then was retroactively repressed. The birth of the Windsors in 1917 is the most dramatic marker of this significant cultural pivot. This book in turn supplements a series of studies which have retraced Germanic aspects of British (and, in particular, English) intellectual life from about 1750 to 1918. Some of these earlier works have documented the invention of Germanic cultural and racial genealogies. Others have focused on reactions to innovative German developments in hermeneutics and, more generally, the rise of historicism. Oergel’s book covers both the ethnological and the philosophical fields staked out in these earlier studies. The best material is delivered up front in the two opening chapters, where Oergel summarizes a post-Enlightenment process in which “the status of both literature and history was elevated to a quasi-religious level” (11). In this part of the study, Oergel joins an increasing number of critics who are revising the standard secularization thesis. It has been a commonplace for some time now that the birth of the modern in the West had something to do with the death of God. But literary scholars interested in the formation and institutionalization of their own profession are discovering a more complex, metaphysically ambiguous process. As Oergel puts it, “the secularisation of the sacred texts,” a process normally described as the rise of modern historical criticism, “in turn generated the sanctification of secular literature” (11). The same critical tendencies which [End Page 525] undermined the historical accuracy of Scripture led to the sanctification of national literary and mythic traditions. As Christian scripture became mythic, national literary canons were sacralized, and history, as God’s new master narrative, became the living, universal gospel. These are important and persuasive generalizations, but Oergel, after setting the stage so well, rarely applies them in stimulating ways. The major innovations proposed in this study are an incorporation of Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859–91) into the cultural history of Teutonism and, more specifically, an insistence that Tennyson’s text took shape in response to the same cultural forces that produced Richard Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen (1869–76). This second point is too general to bear fruit from its proof, and one blushes for the author as this most tedious part of the argument commences with an earnest appeal to lifespans: “Initially there are some basic facts: Wagner (1813–1883) and Tennyson (1809–1892) were near contemporaries” (215). The first point about the ethnological significance of the Idylls is troubled by a complexity that Oergel does not handle well. Tennyson’s epic is about an explicitly non-Germanic hero whose primary business, after being cuckolded, is to kill more Germans (to borrow Commander Haig’s phrase). At times, Oergel addresses this difference, but almost as often, the author seems to be working hard to forget it. Despite the titular Arthur’s Saxon...