Thirsty?

We left off with the Burgundians/Nibelungs drinking (and enjoying) the blood of their enemies while Etzel's hall burns down around them. I'm not sure if any of us want or need to spend much more time with this, but there is one more analogue from earlier in the poem which might shed some light on this enigmatic and gruesome episode.

The burning of the hall and the drinking of blood marks the transition to the sustained dramatic height of the poem's second half: the disastrous and emotionally fraught encounters with Rudiger and his vassals, Dietrich's vassals, and Dietrich, and the final face-to-face of Hagen and Kriemhild. In the first half of the poem, the hunting trip with Siegfried occupies a structurally equivalent position: after the inciting incident (quarrel of the queens - slaughter of squires/killing of Ortlieb), past the point of no return (decision to murder Siegfried - refusal to surrender Hagen and accept a truce), but before the final crescendo of connected catastrophes (in the first half of the poem, the murder, alienation of Kriemhild, and theft of the treasure, ending with the conspicuous lack of a direct encounter between Hagen and Kriemhild - "Hagen dared not enter her presence" [146]).

At the end of his hard day's hunting, "Siegfried was tormented by thirst" (129), there being no wine to be had in the camp. Actually, this is because Hagen has deliberately sent the wine elsewhere in order to inveigle Siegfried into a vulnerable position, occasioning "perfidious" Gunther's remark: "This is Hagen's fault - he wants us to die of thirst" (129). Siegfried's thirst might also remind us of the ritual performed to integrate Siegfried into the Burgundian court after his first truculent arrival: "Word was given to pour out Gunther's wine in greeting" (31). Now, as part of the severance of these ties of service and alliance, Hagen directs Siegfried not to the missing wine that would convey and symbolize it, but to "a cool spring nearby" (129), which becomes a stream on the next page, "cool, sweet, and clear" (130). In other words, Hagen has maneuvered Siegfried out of the Burgundian sociopolitical orbit and back into the natural world from which he emerged, his own world - except without its mythic, magic, monstrous element. Instead of dragon's blood in which to bathe and become invulnerable, Siegfried only has streamwater to drink to quench his very human thirst. (Is it too much of a stretch to quote the Bible at this juncture: "After this, Jesus...saith, 'I thirst'" [John 19:28]?) Deprived of his shield and weapons by another trick, Siegfried bends to drink and is speared in the back.

This scene very elegantly accomplishes Siegfried's transition from monster/hero/other to man - his humanization, which is as much as to say, his death. In Northrop Frye's terms, we move from a romance to a high mimetic register. Before killing him, Hagen reads and (re)interprets Siegfried, identifying his human points. (Siegfried has been depicted in explicitly textual terms, as a book to be read, at a previous vulnerable moment, his introduction to Kriemhild: "Siegfried son of Siegmund stood there handsome as though limned on parchment with all a master's skill" [48].) Hagen steers thirsty Siegfried to the brook and then "searched for the sign on the brave man's tunic" and "hurled the spear at the cross" (130). (Hatto is convinced that the use of "cross" here is a slip-up, and he may be right, but it would not be the first time in literature that a spear is driven into a cross to enormous emotional and thematic effect.) The stabbing fixes Siegfried, pinned like a butterfly in a display case, to his human identity. It also lines Siegfried up with Brunhild; just as the loss of Brunhild's virginity diminished her monstrous otherness and deprived her of her power, so Siegfried, when penetrated, lapses into humanity and loses his superhuman power: "The hero's face had lost its colour and he was no longer able to stand. His strength had ebbed away" (131). Symbolically deflowered, he falls "among the flowers" (131), which become "drenched with blood" as he breathes his last (132). Siegfried's superhumanity bleeds out into the fragility of the natural world. Nor, to conclude the discussion of this scene, are these flowers the only things stained by Siegfried's blood: "the hero's heart's blood leapt from the wound and splashed against Hagen's clothes" (130). As Siegfried, humanized, dies, the otherness or monstrosity into which he was baptized by the dragon's blood passes to Hagen as he in turn is bathed by the blood of an Other.

At the equivalent structural point of the poem's second half, the blood-drinking episode recycles many elements and motifs from Siegfried's death by the stream: thirst, wine/water/blood, the gain or loss of strength, human/natural spheres, Christian associations, and the movement between humanity and monstrous otherness carried by the flow of blood. This time, instead of in the natural world of forest and stream, the action takes place at the heart of the human sociopolitical sphere, Etzel's hall. The hall, however, is burning down, and indeed these sections of the poem show us a social order in total collapse: sovereigns beg their vassals to fight for them, warriors bound by friendship and marriage kill each other nevertheless, and entire feudal and kinship societies meet their annihilation. Amid this universal collapse of the human and social, a Burgundian knight complains, "This fierce heat has given me such a terrible thirst that I fear I shall soon expire amid all these perils," to which Hagen responds, "if any of you are plagued with thirst let them drink the blood here - in such heat it will be better than wine!" (261)

As it did upon Siegfried's arrival at Worms, sharing wine in this case would have symbolized and enacted the strengthening of the human social order, retying the feudal/kinship bonds among the Burgundians. However, this very humane order is being visibly destroyed, and in Hagen's eyes, at least, it is too late to save it. By consuming, instead, the blood of their enemies, the othered Huns, the Burgundians/Nibelungs move to a superhuman (inhuman?), monstrous level themselves - joining Hagen in the otherness he acquired through his baptism in Siegfried's blood. Ingesting this blood also gives them the exceptional strength lost by Siegfried when his blood was spilled: "their bodies were greatly strengthened by it" (262). The Burgundians began their day of slaughter by receiving a traditional Christian mass; during the night after it, they now observe a sinister heroic mass, celebrating not Christ's humanity but their collective inhumanity.

This barbarous scene ends with a poignant detail, though: Giselher's remark that "it will soon be dawning, for a cool breeze has sprung up" (262). Such breezes, clean and refreshing, waft intermittently through this part of the poem, usually seeming to blow just over the heads or in front of the faces of the characters describing them. They carry over the associations of the stream in the first half, "cool, sweet, and clear," translating these characteristics from water to air. The stream from which Siegfried quenched his thirst before his death now flows outside the ruined hall in which the Burgundians have been trapped, or have trapped themselves. It subtly comes to represent an unobtainable relief, sought by whatever remains human among the Burgundians even after their monstrous ritual (usually voiced, as above, by Giselher, one of the least othered among them): "'Death has robbed us mightily,' said Young Giselher. 'Now leave your weeping and let us go out into the air so that, battle-weary men, we may cool our armour. I fear God will not grant us longer life here'" (274). Siegfried's humane death by the stream among the flowers, however mutable and fragile its associations, seems to be a death that Gunther (beheaded in captivity by his sister's orders), Hagen (cut down, "powerless" [290], by a woman), or any of the hordes killed in the claustrophobic slaughter in the hall, might otherwise have envied. But Hagen, who offered water for Siegfried's thirst, humanizing him in order to kill him and shore up the social order, has now given his thirsty companions blood, turning away from the collapsing social order to choose monstrous otherness and deaths to match.

Anyway, so much for the Nibelungenlied and its beverages. In the future, when I want to imagine blood-wine I'll just watch Star Trek.