Robert Bartlett: The Making of Europe

Introduction

Europe is both a region and an idea. The societies and cultures that have existed in this western
extremity of the Eurasian land-mass have always been highly diverse, and the case for grouping
them together as 'European' has varied from period to period. Since the later Middle Ages, however,
there has been enough common ground among the different parts of western and Central Europe to
make it reasonable to see this region of the world as a whole. When compared with other culture
areas of the globe, such as the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent or China, western and Central
Europe exhibited (and exhibits) distinctive characteristics. In particular, Latin Europe (that is, the
part of Europe that was originally Roman Catholic rather than Greek Orthodox or non-Christian)
formed a zone where strong shared features were as important as geographical or cultural contrasts.

Some features were basic throughout the Middle Ages: Europe was a world of peasant
communities, making a living from pastoral and arable agriculture supplemented by hunting and
gathering, with technological and production levels far below those of the present day. Everywhere
a small elite of aristocrats dominated and fed itself from the labours of the peasantry. Some were
laymen, trained in warfare, proud of family, committed to the continuation of their line; others were
clerics or monks, set apart for the Church, avowedly literate and celibate. Lay lords maintained a
network of loyalties, alliances and patterns of subordination and domination that made up the
political world; clerics and monks were located in a web of institutions and hierarchies with a loose
centre in the papal see at Rome. The cultural inheritance of this society was a mixture of Roman,
with Latin as its learned language and a partly surviving physical skeleton of roads and cities,
Christian, with the pervasive presence of a scriptural, sacramental religion, and Germanic, as
witnessed in the names, rites and ethos of the military aristocrats.

The Latin Europe of the early Middle Ages was marked by much greater internal differentiation and
by a smaller territorial extent than the Latin Europe of the later Middle Ages. No period of history
anywhere can truly be called static or stagnant, but the amount of mobility and cross-regional
contact in early medieval Europe was undoubtedly less than that found in the years after 1000 AD.
The new millennium did not mark a sudden or radical redrawing of the outlines of this society, but
from the eleventh century a period of exceptionally intense creative activity began within western
Europe. The invasions that had marked the earlier period (Viking, Magyar and Saracen) ceased; and
from the eleventh century until the slump and crisis of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries stretch
the High Middle Ages, an epoch of economic growth, territorial expansion and dynamic cultural
and Social change.

The vitality of European society between the late tenth and early fourteenth centuries can be seen in
many spheres of life. The scale and speed of production and distribution were transformed: the
population grew, the cultivated area expanded, urbanization and commercialization restructured
economic and social life. Alongside the spread of money, and of banking and business devices,
there developed in some areas a level of manufacturing activity that had never previously been
attained. The same creativity is found in social organization. In many areas of life fundamental
institutions and structures were given their decisive shape in these centuries: the incorporated town,
the university, central representative bodies, the international orders of the Roman Catholic Church
- all date from this epoch.

By the year 1300 the European. world was relatively densely settled, productive and culturally
innovative. In Flanders tens of thousands of looms were producing textiles for export; in northern
Italy sophisticated international banking empires were elaborating credit, insurance and investment;
in northern France intellectual life of the highest sophistication and political power of exceptional
effectiveness had developed side by side. Just as this dynamic society had centres, so it had edges,
and its internal dynamism was matched by external or territorial expansionism. In some senses this
phenomenon is obvious and unproblematic. Everywhere in Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries trees were being felled, roots laboriously grubbed out, ditches delved to drain waterlogged
land. Recruiting agents travelled in the overpopulated parts of Europe collecting emigrants; wagons
full of anxious new settlers creaked their way across the continent; busy ports sent off ships full of
colonists to alien and distant destinations; bands of knights hacked out new lordships. Yet in this
world of bloody frontiers, raw new towns and pioneer farms, it is not always easy to delineate the
boundaries of expansion. This is partly because `internal expansion' - the intensification of
settlement and reorganization of society within western and central Europe - was as important as
external expansion; and hence the problem of describing and explaining these expansionary
movements is not distinct from the problem of describing and explaining the nature of European
society itself.

This book approaches the history of Europe in the High Middle Ages from one particular
perspective, by concentrating on conquest, colonization and associated cultural change in Europe
and the Mediterranean in the period 950-1350. It analyses the establishment of states by conquest
and the peopling of distant countries by immigrants along the peripheries of the continent: English
colonialism in the Celtic world, the movement of Germans into eastern Europe, the Spanish
Reconquest and the activities of crusaders and colonists in the eastern Mediterranean. It asks what
developments in language, law, belief and habit accompanied warfare and settlement. In doing so it
continually alternates its focus between phenomena that are truly 'frontier', born of the needs of new
settlement or military confrontation, and forces and developments that are to be found within the
heartlands of the culture, for the expansionary power of this civilization sprang from its centres,
even if it may be seen most starkly at its edges. Hence the theme is not only colonial conquest and
immigration, the moving edge, but also the foundation of an expansive and increasingly
homogeneous society - `the Making of Europe'.
THE NIBELUNGENLIED

The Nibelungenlied was written in about A.D. 1200 by an anonymous poet,

probably a professional entertainer, for performance at court in Austria
somewhere between Vienna and Passau.
ARTHUR THOMAS HATTO (b. 1910) was Head of the Department of German,
Queen Mary College, University of London, from 1938 until his retirement in
1977, and was Professor of German Language and Literature at the same
university from 1953 to 1977. He is now Professor Emeritus in German in the
University of London. He was assistant for English at the University of Berne
(1932–4), and during the Second World War worked in the Foreign Office
(1939–45). From 1960 to 1977 he was a Governor of the School of Oriental
and African Studies, University of London, where in 1970 he gave the
Foundation Lecture, with the tide ‘Shamanism and Epic Poetry in Northern
Asia’, and was elected an Honorary Fellow. In 1984 he was elected an
External Member of Professor Walther Heissig’s Central Asia Seminar at the
University of Bonn. His other publications include The Memorial Feast for
Kökötöy – khan – a Kirghiz epic, edited, translated and with a commentary;
The Manas of W. Radhff, a new edition, with new translation and commentary
of Kirghiz epics; and Towards an Anatomy of Heroic/Epic Poetry (1989). In
1999 he published The Mohave Heroic Epic of Inyo – kutavêre in which A. L.
Kroeber’s text is re-appraised. He was elected a Senior Fellow of the British
Academy in 1991. His translations for the Penguin Classics are Gottfried’s
Tristan and the fragments of Thomas’s Tristran (together in one volume) and
the Nibelungenlied, and with Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, his third
volume for the series, he has made available to the English – reading public a
substantial portion of the finest narrative poetry of the medieval German
Golden Age. Professor Hatto is married and has one daughter.

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THE NIBELUNGENLIED
TRANSLATED BY
A. T. HATTO

PENGUIN BOOKS

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PENGUIN BOOKS
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This translation first published 1965

Reprinted with trevisions 1969
28

Copyright © A. T. Hatto, 1965, 1969

All rights reserved

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by
way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a
similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

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CONTENTS

FOREWORD

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

THE NIBELUNGENLIED

AN INTRODUCTION TO A SECOND READING

A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION

APPENDICES

1. The Status of the Poet

2. The Manuscript Tradition, Bishop Wolfger of Passau, and the Homeland of the Last Poet

3. The Date of the Poem

4. The Genesis of the Poem

5. The Geography of the Poem

6. A Glossary of the Characters’ Names

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FOREWORD

THE Nibelungenlied is a heroic epic surpassed only by the Iliad of Homer. It

was written at about A.D. 1200 by an unnamed poet, for performance at court
in Austria somewhere between Vienna and Passau. In it there culminated a
tradition of heroic poetry reaching back to the sixth or fifth century A.D. in
the lands of the Germanic peoples, and so well did it succeed in its own age
that, for want of copying, all earlier poems on the theme in German were lost
for ever. Modern poets and poetasters have often returned to its subject,
prominent among them Richard Wagner with his gigantic music drama Der
Ring des Nibelungen with which (as with his Parsifal and his Tristan–whatever
their merits as modern works of art) he has unfortunately harmed the cause of
medieval German poetry by intruding reckless distortions between us and an
ancient masterpiece. Thus those who come to the Nibelungenlied from Wagner
will be much surprised by what they read in it.
The story which our poem tells is one of murder and of revenge long –
nourished, and it ends in the destruction of two armies. The avenger is a
woman; the avenged her beloved husband; her victims are her brothers and
kinsmen. This, in its crudest terms, is the plot: having won the amazonian
Queen Brunhild for King Gunther in exchange for Gunther’s sister Kriemhild,
the mighty King Siegfried is murdered by Gunther’s vassal Hagen after a
quarrel between the Queens; for which Kriemhild, at long last, avenges him.
The action thus has two crises, of which the first is subordinated to the
second, but less emphatically than one would expect in a story of revenge. (In
the Japanese Tale of the Forty – Seven Baron, for example, the Provocation is
dealt with briefly, though firmly.)

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 Yet despite its two crises,1 the plot of our poem is single – stranded to a
remarkable degree. Apart from incidental tournaments it knows no women or
greybeards on the city – walls as onlookers, nor is there an upper storey from
which Heaven may watch and intervene. (The miraculous escape of the
chaplain in Chapter 25 is an isolated incident) Its actors of the moment are
held in the limelight and left godforsaken and alone to work out their own
destinies, while all others, even those who were talking and doing but a
moment before, are blacked out till required again. But on the margins of
light and darkness there is, either present or evoked from the future, a chorus
of widows and young women whose inarticulate weeping points to woe, or
woe to come. Comparison with the Iliad confirms the markedly linear nature
of the plot. For whereas Homer selects but a few days from the whole action
of the Rape of Helen and the Siege and Sack of Troy, thereby anticipating the
three unities of Greek drama, our poet narrates all significant events from
Kriemhild’s girlhood till her death as a woman of advanced years. In order to
do this, the poet passes over vast lapses of time during which nothing happens
and concentrates on brief periods full of incident with peaks of tense dialogue,
which in their turn foreshadow modern drama. The poet is able to do this
thanks to the strength and directness of his plot, as, step by step, he confronts
the implacable wills of his great protagonists, Kriemhild and Hagen. He thus
achieves a work the finest moments of which would come through even in
pidgin – English and positively thrive on the prose of Damon Runyon. Indeed,
I once read a gripping essay on the plot of the Nibelungenlied by an
undergraduate who knew (or pretended to know) no better than to treat it as
a thriller.
The Nibelungenlied, then, should appeal on the one hand to those who have
read the Iliad and the Song of Roland with pleasure, and on the other to
readers (though scarcely to addicts) of the tougher novels of our day, but also
to many in between; and they could enjoy it in English better or worse than
mine. Yet a word of warning is due to them. Owing to the weight which the
poet gives to the events that lead up to the quarrel of the Queens and the
death of Siegfried, the story unfolds slowly at first. Indeed, it begins almost

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like a fairy – tale, with a Princess averse to love and a Prince Charming
destined to win her. But at length this crystal casement is shattered, to reveal
a stage on which imperious wills, guile, treachery, loyalty of many hues, some
chivalry, sublime, tact, and desperate courage, all play their fateful parts.1
Queen Mary College, London. July 1962

A.T.H.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To acknowledge my debt in full for all the help that I have received whilst
preparing this book would involve the compilation of a bibliography of the
subject; for so vast is the literature on the Nibelungenlied, the epic poem of one
of the more learned tongues of the world, that I have inevitably profited from
works I shall never read, by authors whose names I have never seen. I am
therefore all the more happy to confine my acknowledgements to recent and
living authors.
I wish to thank the following for the gift of offprints of their illuminating
articles: Professor Werner Betz, Professor Jean Fourquet, Professor Hugo
Kuhn, Dr Emil Ploss, Professor Fried – rich Neumann (whom I have quoted as
near as English would let me), and Professor Peter Wapnewski. I was grateful
to receive an offprint from the late Dr J. Knight Bostock, whom on one
occasion I quote verbatim. If through inadvertence I have failed to
acknowledge any debt under this head, I am truly sorry.
To name only some of those whose writings have been an especial
stimulus to me, I have further profited from books or articles by Professor
Joachim Bumke, Professor G. Femvick Jones, Professor Dietrich Kralik,
Professor Wolfgang Mohr, Dr Bert Nagel, Professor Hans Naumann, Professor
Otto Höfler, Professor Hermann Schneider, Professor Julius Schwietering,
Professor K. F. Stroheker, Professor E. Tonnelat, Professor K. Weller, Dr R.
Wisniewski, and Professor O. Zallinger.
I am greatly indebted to an article by Professor Heinrich Hempel, whose
argument that the strophes which concern Passau must be interpolations, I
have adopted and, I hope, reinforced.

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 I am particularly grateful to Dr Helmut Brackert, who placed a summary of
his challenging book on the manuscript relations of the Nibelungenlied at my
disposal in advance of publication, and for answering some stiff questions
arising therefrom; to Dr Emil Ploss for very generously allowing me to read in
typescript a chapter of a treatise he was preparing; and to my colleague Dr
Paul Salmon for showing me an article which he had hastened to put on to
paper so that I might read it before going to press.
Following up Professor Hempel’s ideas already referred to, I got out of my
depth in the Danube somewhere between the River Enns and the River Inn,
and was promptly hauled out, on receipt of my S.O.S., by Professor Erich
Zöllner of the Institut für österreichische Geschichteforschung of Vienna, far
downstream, and given the full benefit of his deep learning in medieval
Austrian history. It is thanks to him, and to the staff of the Oberöster –
reichisches Landesarchiv in Linz, that I have been able to set forth certain
facts of local Austrian history c.1200 with confidence, despite their
problematic background, in my Appendix 2. But it goes without saying that I
must take the entire responsibility for the literary use to which I have put this
information. Here I must warmly thank the Director, Secretary, and Librarian
of the Austrian Cultural Institute of London for their kind mediation and
generous loan of books procured from Vienna and Linz.
My debt to Professor Helmut de Boor, editor, commentator, and verse –
translator of the Nibelungenlied, and to Professor Maurice Colleville and the
late Professor Ernest Tonnelat, joint translators of the epic into French, is
recorded at a more appropriate place below.
No writer on any major aspect of the Nibelungenlied can pass by the name
of Andreas Heusler, the great Swiss scholar of Basle, to whose monumental
work reference is also made below.
I wish to record my gratitude to my tutor, Professor Frederick Norman,
O.B.E. , and our colleague Dr Herbert Thoma for their having answered,
independently, four pages of searching questions on points for which I needed
other opinions; and I must thank the former, the leading authority in this

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