What is Stephen Harper Reading?

ANSWER RECEIVED FOR BOOK NUMBER 85. SEE “REPLIES RECEIVED”.

Inscription:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

I was in Germany last week to promote my latest novel and I thought that while there I’d find something German for you. My first thought was Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, a virtuoso piece of short fiction. But as I was browsing through the foreign-language section of a bookstore in Frankfurt, my eyes fell upon the book I’m sending you this week, The Nibelungenlied. It’s the medieval illustration on the cover that drew my attention, and then I was further drawn by the imprimatur just below the title: Oxford World’s Classics. This was a classic I’d never heard of—what better reason to read it? The title is somewhat unattractive, but I assure you: this is a great book.

The Nibelungenlied arose from the oral tradition and was finally written down—whether with accuracy or great liberties is not known—by an anonymous poet roughly in the year 1200, and it is, in the words of the introduction by the translator Cyril Edwards, “the greatest medieval German heroic poem or lay, a revenge saga on an epic scale, which has justly been compared with Homer…” The introduction, by the way, is useful but not essential. You can plunge directly into the epic. Despite the chasm of time between then and now, and the ensuing profound changes in thinking and mores, there is an emotional appeal to the work that makes it intemporal. Our world isn’t inhabited by knights and damsels any longer, but love, devotion, heroism, envy, treachery, lust for revenge—these are emotions we still feel today, and they continue to feature in novels and movies of all genres, from literary ones to romances and thrillers.

The language of the work, both of the minstrel narrator and of the various characters, is gracious and courtly, full of ornate flattery. Every knight is a hero of blinding good looks, dressed in the finest garments the world has ever seen, mightier than Samson or Arnold Schwarzenegger, and richer than Croesus or Bill Gates. And in a like way with the ladies. But the action betrays the words. Treachery is done after the nicest exchanges. Queens follow up social niceties by calling each other wenches and whores, and a knight who has sworn eternal loyalty to another then proceeds to stab him in the back. It makes for glorious reading.

I doubt The Nibelungenlied describes with anthropological accuracy the actual ways of central Europe’s nobility a thousand years ago. It is a work of literature, not of history. But there’s something to be gained thereby for the modern reader. If true ways are not described, ideal ways certainly are. The treachery of Prunhilt, of Gunther and, especially, of Hagen—you will see how profoundly perfidious they are—stands in strong contrast to the good and honourable behaviour of those they betray, Sivrit and Kriemhilt. The characteristics of this good and honourable behaviour offer a fascinating look at the mindset of the time.

For example, you might notice the surprising cosmopolitanism. The characters in The Nibelungenlied come from a variety of places: Burgundy, Netherlands, Iceland, Hungary, Austria, Denmark. (One name place never mentioned is Germany, which didn’t exist yet as a nation; Bavaria comes up in passing, but only as a dangerous nest of brigands.) Yet all these characters mix and match without any linguistic or cultural friction. And the good relations go beyond language. The Hungarian characters, with King Etzel at their head, are Huns, and therefore pagans. Nonetheless, they get along very well with the Christian characters. Better than that: Etzel, King of the Huns (historically, Attila the Hun) marries Kriemhilt, devout Christian lady and widow of slain Sivrit.

What struck me even more in the relations between the various nobles is the material generosity of their exchanges. I had in mind that these kings and queens, these lords and ladies would keep tight control of their goods and chattels. Being at the top of the feudal pyramid, they would be the recipients of much of the commodities produced by their vassals. And don’t wealthy people tend to cling to their wealth? Don’t the rich hoard, giving to charity only as much as will not diminish their abundance, as in the parable of the poor widow in the Bible? Well, not in The Nibelungenlied. Take this line, describing what Kriemhilt does when she arrives at the court of her new husband, King Etzel:

The queen then distributed gold and garments, silver and precious stones. All that she had brought across the Rhine with her to the Huns had to be given away in its entirety.

In its entirety? And this is just one instance of giving. Such abundant giving happens again and again in The Nibelungenlied. People are constantly giving, giving, giving, and not just to allies, which might have an element of self-interest. No, the giving also goes to guests who are strangers. This constant gifting reminds me of a book I sent you earlier. Do you remember The Gift, by Lewis Hyde. It too spoke of societies based not on the hoarding of wealth but on its flow; that is, societies where wealth is perceived to increase if it is kept in motion and to decrease if it lies stagnant. I did not expect to find such a dynamic in 13th century central Europe. Of course, such incessant giving was probably not the reality. I imagine that many a lord sat on his bags of gold, glowering at every passing stranger. Nonetheless, it is interesting that this is the ideal portrayed in The Nibelungenlied, one of wealth shared over and over. The ideal noble is noble because he or she gives without restraint.

Another surprise was the degree to which characters—kings, lords, knights, husbands and wives—consult and seek advice from each other. It undermines the authoritarian image I had of those distant times. Oh, and the women are strong. Prunhilt literally: she trusses up her new husband and hangs him by a nail for the night when he gets too frisky. But also morally, Kriemhilt for example.

And lastly, the entirely secular tint of the work. Christianity is mentioned here and there, and Jesus is invoked on occasion, but overwhelmingly the world portrayed is secular, with the pleasures and torments very much earthbound. Again, my image of a medieval Europe in a Christian deep freeze was altered.

There’s a curious narrative device that occurs often: the paragraph that ends with a comment in brackets by the author. These comments often announce some future event in the story, usually tragic. It may remove an element of suspense in the story, but a highly effective sense of foreboding is created in its stead. Since the story was initially spoken, not read, I do wonder how these brackets were signalled. These are some of the intellectual perks of The Nibelungenlied. Mostly, though, the ride is just to be enjoyed.

There’s a sad postscript that needs to be mentioned. The Nibelungenlied vanished from notice in the 16th century. It was rediscovered some two hundred years later and became one of the canonical elements of German nationalism in the 19th century, used by Wagner, for example, in his Ring of the Nibelung cycle of operas. And then, alas, the Nazis exploited Sivrit’s fate, or Siegfried’s, as the name had become, as a literary warning of what might befall the Aryans if they did not resist the treachery of “lesser races”. In such ways do politicians sometimes pervert literature.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

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