Nibelungenlied: introduction Kriemhild

I’m re-reading the Nibelungenlied! Again! It’s not as if I’d know large parts of it by heart by now, noooooo…. :D I decided to post this because I can’t help it, I always laugh out loud at Kriemhild’s character introduction. (Very free translation by me – the grammar with its passive structures doesn’t have a direct equivalent in English that doesn't sound horribly clunky, so please don’t take this as a lecture in Middle High German! I'm trying for "makes sense" rather than "correct".)

Ez wuohs in Burgonden ein vil edel magedîn - There grew up, in Burgundy, a very noble maid
daz in allen landen niht schoeners mohte sîn, - so there could have been none more beautiful anywhere*,  
Kriemhild geheizen, si wart ein schoene wîp, - called Kriemhild, she became a beautiful woman
darumbe mousen degene vil verliesen den lîp. - because of whom many heroes** had to lose their life***.   

*in all countries|places - basically, she's the world's most beautiful woman.
**degen: boy, man, fighter, warrior, hero. In the Nibelungenlied, it's typically used to refer to the male heroic characters, so I chose to translate it as "hero" rather than just "man" although both would be technically correct. It's the context.
***or: lose the body; lîp can refer to both. I chose the one that makes more sense in English. Either way: they die.

LOLOLOL

This is, of course, heavy sarcasm - and an intentional play with genre tropes. (Throughout the whole text, Unknown Author shows a deep knowledge of what the audience is expecting… While subverting it in creative ways. It’s one of the things that make the poem so much fun!)

Here, the audience expects the introduction of the main female character of a classic adventure story of the time. Unknown Author clearly was having some fun with introducing our (anti-)heroine Kriemhild! She’s beautiful beyond compare (Of course! Somehow, ladies in epic poetry always are!) and, by emphasizing that, the author intentionally sets her up as a conventional medieval heroine while nevertheless foreshadowing the bloody events to follow. Basically, the medieval audience is led to believe that the knights will have to go on some kind of lethally dangerous quest for her sake, to save her or to win her love or whatever. Maybe fight each other over her, too. That’s what usually happens in these stories when a legendarily beautiful woman is mentioned! So, the listeners won’t expect that beautiful young noblewoman herself going on a murder spree (and, indeed, cause the death of many heroes that way)… Ah, I love it when poets possess a healthy sense of humor.

[Also, I strongly suspect the extreme (and, unfortunately, hard-to-translate) use of passive voice in this stanza is chosen intentionally for the same reason: to obfuscate the fact Kriemhild is extremely active when it comes to murder driving the plot. Maximal contrast! Is snarky grammar a thing? Because these are some of the most ironic verb forms I've ever seen, and I don't think they're a lucky accident.]

It’s notable that female characters rarely had their own agenda in fiction of that time, so having a female lead character – who does her own killing, too – is highly unusual. Ladies usually appear as the one to be saved, the one to be married, the one sending the hero off to have the actual adventure… You know it. And yet, Kriemhild is an independent character with not only opinions on what the male characters are doing, but with her own plotline. (Oh, and she's the first of the main cast to be introduced, too! By medieval epic poetry conventions, that makes her the main main character, the one who the whole poem is about.)

And she’s a worthy opponent for Hagen, who is seriously badass himself. (By the way, having a deadly conflict between a female and a male character who are equally matched and also equally amoral, and not judged by different standards for that is another genre transgression. Unknown Author is good at those.) While I don’t actually like Kriemhild as a person, I… appreciate her existence in medieval literature.

I maintain this is the coolest character intro, ever.