The medieval Song of the Nibelungs, which Steiner read as the record of reincarnated mythic beings whose earlier lives still echo through Siegfried and Brunhilde.
The Nibelungenlied in Anthroposophy is the medieval German Song of the Nibelungs read as a record of souls who carry forces from earlier incarnations. In a lecture given at Dornach on 28 March 1915, printed in GA 161, Rudolf Steiner treated Wilhelm Jordan's mid-nineteenth-century alliterative renewal of the saga as a window onto its hidden spiritual content. Steiner saw Brunhilde of Isenstein as the later embodiment of a Valkyrie being, and Siegfried of the Lower Rhine as a sun-hero in whom the power of the sun stood more developed than his earthly life allowed. The poem's old alliteration, where word-initial sounds chime rather than end-rhyme, he read as the trace of a time when the human soul still wove intimately with language. The Nibelungenlied thus becomes, for Steiner, a document of reincarnation and of an older, organic relation between speech and soul.
In Steiner's Own Words
In a later incarnation, Brunhilde appears to us as having become, as it were, less than she was when she was a Valkyrie. Yet in her soul life she brings with her that which makes her a demonic being. But something similar appears in Siegfried. ... But this brings us face to face with Siegfried, as if in him that which makes a man a man, the power of the sun, was more developed in a previous incarnation than could be developed in a personality during the time in which Siegfried lived as Siegfried. Just as the power of the Earth Mother lived more in Brunhilde than she could live in a personality, in a female personality, during the time when Brunbilde appears as Brunhilde.
What it Means Today
Steiner's reading places the Nibelungenlied inside a long line of poets returning to the Germanic alliterative line to recover something prose had lost. The clearest modern continuation is J.R.R. Tolkien's The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, composed in the 1920s and 1930s and published posthumously by HarperCollins in 2009, edited by his son Christopher Tolkien. There Tolkien retells the Völsung and Nibelung matter in modern English fornyrðislag, the Old Norse short alliterative metre, precisely the word-initial chiming that Wilhelm Jordan had tried to revive in German two generations earlier. Tolkien, who lectured on Beowulf at Oxford, shared Jordan's conviction that the older verse held a binding force the end-rhyme of later centuries could not supply, a felt unity of sound and meaning rather than an ornament added on top.
Thalira synthesis: where Tolkien sought in alliteration a philological homecoming and Jordan a national renewal, Steiner heard in the same word-initial rhyme the audible signature of a soul-stage when speech still rose, in his phrase, out of the organism of the language itself. Read this way, the practical value of the Nibelungenlied is not nostalgia but an exercise in spoken attention. Reciting an alliterative line aloud, letting the hammered initial consonants set the breath, is a small training in the older intimacy of soul and word that Steiner described, and a way to feel why Siegfried and Brunhilde could carry more than one life within a single name.
Where to Read More
- Wilhelm Jordan as the Renewer of the Nibelungenlied, GA 161
- Find related volumes at SteinerBooks
- The Minotaur and the Labyrinth: Theseus, the Beast, and the Path to the Centre
- The Conference of the Birds by Attar: The Sufi Journey to the Self
- The Elysian Fields: The Greek Paradise and the Reward of the Heroic Dead