Customer Reviews

Rules for the Endgame: The World of the Nibelungenlied (Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society)

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At last there is a really serious study of the Nibelungenlied completely on a par with the type of scholarship that has long been given to the ancient Greek and Roman classics. Mueller treats of all the obvious main topics, such as variant readings and the societal background (this last is especially thorough), and major literary themes are traced very clearly and boldly. The think-pieces such as "The Shrouding of Invisibility" and "Space," and much more, are very well done. And they are not "designer" essays, but things you will find really need to be discussed.

The author's level of erudition on and related to the subject is immense, you've just gotta love this kind of German scholar. He has marshaled a lot more information than I, for one, had much clue was even out there. And the level of discussion is quite profound, opening areas of thought that I had thought were created by Wagnerian stage designers, such as the deservedly famous last ones at Bayreuth by the Wagner family themselves (the last such was in 1975); these were of Wagners denazified by the American government, though it must be said they were eager to get on with it. At the time, in the post-War years, most people thought their new preferred influence was Carl Jung, but it turns out the spacial staging ideas come directly from the Nibelungenlied itself (whether or not Wagner suggests them), as becomes clear in Mueller's chapter on "Space." This is not some kind of vague postmodernist/structuralist collage, it's meaty literary analysis. It begins: "Hagen's account of Sivrit's youth sketches a strange world with no reliable system of space-time coordinates." And you're off. While the literary metaphors in Wagner's Ring are of light and dark, Mueller tells in the first line of "The Shrouding of Invisibility" that "The Nibelungen world is basically constructed in terms of visibility." He doesn't waste words.

It should be observed that there is no reliance on Wagner, to whom there is no reference in the Index; this is historical and literary scholarship far above any possible partisanship. Still, for those of us with some experience in the field it will be interesting to see whether there are any of the predictable idiotic accusations of which anything conceivably, even if wrongly, thought to be Wagnerian (or German for that matter) is usually quickly accused. I only anticipate this sort of thing because experience shows that certain topics will be pounced on; for example, I was accused here at Amazon of being a "crypto-Nazi" because I had shown an interest in Icelandic saga. If you find such reviews here, ignore them. This is a book of really righteous scholarship.