SOURCE: “Hagen and the Problem of Individuality in the Nibelungenlied,” Monatshefte, Vol. 68, No. 1, 1976, pp. 5-12.

In the following essay, Gentry maintains that the Nibelungenlied explores the issue of feudal bonds while it instructs its audience that an individual moral decision can override law and custom.

I

The history of Nibelungenlied* scholarship is a fascinating chapter within the larger scope of Germanic philology.¹ More than any other work of the Blütezeit the Nibelungenlied has attracted researchers for reasons other than purely aesthetic. Only in the last thirty years has the emphasis of research been shifted to an evaluation of the epic as a literary work.² One of the main problems of this modern criticism has been to disentangle the Nibelungenlied from its contemporary epic companions, the Arthurian romances, most notably those of Hartmann and Wolfram. As a result the Nibelungenlied is compared either expressly or tacitly with the...