The Return of King Arthur and the Nibelungen : National Myth in Nineteenth-Century English and German Literature

336 Pages·2010·98.783 MB·English

by  Oergel, Maike

Maike Oergel
The Return of King Arthur and the Nibelungen
W
DE
G
European Cultures
Studies in Literature and the Arts
Edited by
Walter Pape
Köln
Editorial Board:
Philip Brady f, London · Keith Bullivant, Gainesville
Frederick Burwick, Los Angeles · Peter de Bolla, Cambridge
Mark Galliker, Heidelberg · Joachim Gessinger, Potsdam
Marian Hobson, London · Günter Jerouschek, Halle
Fran$ois Lecercle, Lyon · Carlo Ossola, Torino
Terence James Reed, Oxford · Elinor S. Shaffer, Norwich
Barbara Stafford, Chicago
Volume 10
Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York
1998
Maike Oergel
The Return of King Arthur
and the Nibelungen
National Myth in Nineteenth-Century
English and German Literature
Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York
1998
® Printed on acid-free paper
which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI to ensure
permanence and durability.
Die Deutsche Bibliothek — Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Oergel, Maike:
The return of King Arthur and the Nibelungen : national myth in
nineteenth-century English and German literature / Maike Oergel.
Berlin ; New York : de Gruyter, 1998
(European cultures ; Vol. 10)
ISBN 3-11-015084-0
© Copyright 1997 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., D-10785 Berlin.
All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book
may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher.
Printed in Germany
Printing: Werner Hildebrand, Berlin
Binding: Lüderitz & Bauer GmbH, Berlin
Cover design: Rudolf Hübler, Berlin
Cover illustration: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, König Arthurs Grab
(Christie's London)
Photo: Artothek
To my Teachers
Elinor Shaffer and Gary Frank

CONTENTS
Introduction: National Myth - Mythic or National 1
CHAPTER!
The Investment of Literature with Mythic Significance 11
The Modern Interpretation of Myth, the Bible and the Idea
of Original Literature: Heyne, Eichhorn, Herder, Lowth 13
Ancient Popular Poetry -
The Secular Source of Original Literature: Percy, Herder, Scott 33
The Mythopoeic Concept of Literature -
Poetry as the Modern Sacred Text: Friedrich Schlegel and Wordsworth ... 42
CHAPTER 2
The Investment of History with Mythic Significance 52
The Discovery of the Human Telos through Historical Study:
Herder's Ideen 53
History as Secular Revelation in German Idealist Thinking:
Schelling, Fichte, Hegel 58
The Poetic Approach to History in Britain: Carlyle and Macaulay 79
CHAPTER 3
The Search for the Legitimising Mythic Matter of the Moderns:
From Homer's Heroes to Gothic Knights and Back 97
The Path towards Equality between the Ancient and the Modern Cultural
Achievement: Blackwell, Bodmer, Hurd, August Wilhelm Schlegel 97
The Identification of the New Mythic Matter - "Rittermythologie":
The Schlegels and Kenelm Digby 107
Finding a Suitable Form for the Mythic Matters - Clues from Ancient
and Modern "Original Literature": Wolf, Niebuhr, Macaulay 114
CHAPTER 4
The National Dimension of the New Mythic Materials: "Volkspoesie",
Ballad Revival and the Germanic Nations' Mission in History 122
"Volkspoesie" and the Nibelungen: Görres, Wilhelm Grimm, Uhland ... 123
The Revival of the Ballad and the Return of the Arthur-Matter:
Scott, Wordsworth, Kingsley 136
Vlll Contents
The Role of the "Volksgeist" and the Definition of the Germanic Spirit:
Fichte, Hegel, Arndt 146
The Teutonic Spirit of the English and the Anglo-Saxon Success:
Kemble, Freeman, Kingsley, Macaulay 158
CHAPTER 5
The Representative National Individual:
The Emergence of Siegfried and King Arthur 172
The Germanic and the Medieval in the Nibelungen-Material and the
Arthur-Matter: Some Cultural and Racial Assimilations and Oppositions 172
The Function of the Great Human Being in History:
Hero-Worship by Fichte, Hegel, Carlyle and Kingsley 184
The Representative Suitability of the Figures of Siegfried
and Arthur as National Heroes 192
CHAPTER 6
The Results: Richard Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen and
Alfred Tennyson's Idylls of the King as Modern National Myths 208
Wagner and Tennyson:
The Conditions of a "Remarkable Case of Cultural Convergence" 208
The Hero of the Ring:
Does Wotan overthrow the German(ic) Siegfried? 240
The Arthur of the Idylls:
An English Version of the Duality of the Ideal and the Real? 264
CONCLUSION
Arthur, Siegfried and the Germanic - A Qualification
of the Difference between the German and the Western Tradition 294
Bibliography 300
A. Primary Sources 300
B. Secondary Sources 306
Index 318
Introduction: National Myth - Mythic or National?
This study proposes to investigate the significance, that is the meaning and pur-
pose, of national myth in nineteenth-century English and German literature. The
investigation approaches its subject from a doubly dual perspective: on the one
hand it is comparative, considering two national contexts, and on the other is
based on the premise that "national myth" consists of two constitutive elements,
the mythic and the national, both of which need to be understood not only sepa-
rately in their nineteenth-century contexts, but also in their relation to one an-
other. Why should such a complex approach be called for?
In Germany the recent debate about the meaning of myth in general has been
conducted with great vigour and erudition. The works of Hans Blumenberg1 and
Kurt Hübner2 have established myth as a form of conceptualising that is different
yet equal to its scientifically analytic counterpart. It is the cognitive form that
combines the particular and the general not as reference of one to the other but as
identity of one with the other. As such it provides the possibility of leaving
"nothing unsaid"3, and achieves a totality that makes it regulative as well as de-
regulative. Hübner speaks of the simultaneous "Verbindlichkeit" and "Unverbind-
lichkeit" of myth4, its equally binding and non-binding nature, and Manfred
Frank has pointed out that, as a symbolic expression, myth remains "non-naming"
("nicht bezeichnend") and non-coded, without a firm frame of reference.5 Frank
has further maintained that in the oppositional universe of "Mythos" and "Logos"
the later "Logos" ultimately depends on the preceding, original "Mythos" for its
own justification, because it cannot explain its own existence in any other way
than through the "Mythos", but, without it, is well capable of dissecting itself out
of existence.6 In the English-speaking world, myth in its function as a valid form
of conceptualising in a world that has been dominated by the one-sided absolutism
of reason has been discussed by Colin Falck in his book Myth, Truth and
1 Blumenberg: Arbeit am Mythos (1979).
2 Hübner: Die Wahrheit des Mythos (1985).
3 Blumenberg: Arbeit am Mythos, pp. 194-195.
4 Hübner: Die Wahrheit des Mythos, p. 405.
5 Frank: "Die Dichtung als Neue Mythologie." Bohrer, ed., Mythos und Moderne, pp. 15-40, here
pp. 17-18.
6 Ibid., pp. 17ff. and Frank: Der kommende Gott, pp. 107-122.
2 Introduction: National Myth - Mythic or National?
Literatur·/, which covers a ground similar to Frank's Der kommende Gott and
shares key-ideas with Hübner and Blumenberg. Hübner, for example, referred to
the identity of the universal and the particular as the "tautegorical" aspect of the
poetic-mythic utterance8; Falck pointed out the non-allegorical, symbolic nature
of Romantic poetry9 which he considers to be mythic10. Thus myth is being
discussed on a universal level of meaning, a discussion which often omits, when it
looks at the nineteenth-century use of "myth", the national dimension of this
nineteenth-century use. In a separate debate, on the other hand, nineteenth-cen-
tury literature has been subjected to a thorough search for national, nationalist,
and ideological elements from the perspective of ideological criticism. In Ger-
many the wealth of treatments of Nibelungen-literature as an emanation of, a
sometimes rabid, German nationalism is evidence of this as much as Stephen
Knight's study of the use of the Arthur-matter as a tool of a class-conscious British
ideology.11 Wolfgang Frühwald pointed out the "two traditional lines of recep-
tion" of the Nibelungen-material, one aesthetically-mythic and the other political-
ideological, which would need to be combined in order to fully assess its signifi-
cance.12 This study seeks to fill this (still existing) gap by relating the two areas of
debate, that on the universally mythic element in nineteenth-century literature
and that on the ideological uses of this element, by showing that in the nineteenth
century the "national" had a constructive historical function intricately connected
with the universal considerations that conditioned the re-acknowledgement of
myth as a cognitive form and made it worthy of philosophical consideration. In
1983 Karl Heinz Bohrer was still hesitant to bring the two together in a discussion
of nineteenth-century myth, fearing precisely a contamination of the aesthetic-
philosophical phenomenon from the political-ideological side.
Against the texts of such a 'new mythology' between "Frühromantik" (early German
Romanticism) and Surrealism [...] evidence of a specifically Germanic myth had to take
a backseat in the context of Romantic philology. These [latter] topics [...] even obstruct
the conscious approach to the problem of the 'new mythology', as they divert attention
to the ideologically critical reaction and only confirm the exhaustingly proved thesis of
the irrational traditions that were created by the late-Romantic myth.13
7 The first edition appeared in 1989, the second in 1994.
8 Hübner: Die Wahrheit des Mythos, p. 21.
9 Falck: Myth, Truth and Literature, p. 182.
10 Ibid., p. 149.
11 Knight: Arthurian Literature in Society.
12 Frühwald: "Wandlungen eines Nationalmythos." Borchmeyer, ed., Wege des Mythos in der
Moderne, pp. 17-40, here p. 18.
13 Bohrer: "Vorwort." Bohrer, ed., Mythos und Moderne, pp. 7-11, here p. 9.