Kudrun

But when it becomes clear that those rescued are to be held for ransom, Hagen uses his strength to take control of the ship and force the crew to sail to Ireland.

Suddenly a group of warriors hidden in one of them emerges, Hilde and her ladies in waiting are abducted, and the ships all sail back to Germany.

Hagen then returns to Ireland, laden with gifts and full of praises for how worthy Hetel is as the husband of his daughter.

Chapters 9-12: How Herwic of Sealand[3] Woos Kudrun of Germany Now it is Hetel's turn to become the father of a famously beautiful daughter who he feels compelled to protect from all suitors.

Chapters 13-19: How Kudrun Is Abducted During that interim period, the jealous King Sifrit invades Herwic's lands with an army of 80,000 and puts his kingdom to the torch.

Meanwhile, the equally jealous Norman Prince Hartmuot gathers an army of 23,000 and invades Hetel's lands in his absence.

When Hetel learns of this, he makes alliance with Sifrit and then, with all of his allies, pursues Hartmuot to the island of Wulpensand off the Dutch coast.

Unfortunately, bad weather sends the invasion fleet off course into the Sea of Darkness and near Mount Aetna's magnetic cliffs, where the whole campaign is put in great jeopardy.

She announces to the Normans that she has finally decided to relent and marry Hartmuot, but can do so only if she and her entourage are allowed to bathe, don proper clothes, and get a good night's sleep.

Meanwhile, during the night, Wate directs the invading forces to sneak up close to the Norman castle so the attack can be launched suddenly at dawn.

Bloody fighting quickly erupts, with massive casualties on both sides, until Hartmuot determines it would be prudent to retire.

So Kudrun, shouting from a castle window, begs Herwic to intervene between Hartmuot and Wate to stop the fighting.

Chapters 30-32: How Kudrun Restores Peace After Hartmuot's entire realm has been conquered, the invasion force returns to the land of the Hegelings with its captives and shiploads of booty.

The scribe of that manuscript has modernized the language of the poem, but he has done it in such a way that the text is often incomprehensible unless translated back into Middle High German.

[5] The earliest date that it could have been composed is around 1240;[6] the author has to have known the Nibelungenlied and the text portrays the relationship between kings and vassals in a manner suggestive of Emperor Frederick II's Statutum in favorem principum.

[7] This accords with the linguistic analysis of the poem, which locates it in the Austro-Bavarian dialect area; potential places of composition include Styria and Regensburg.

[7] The first half of the Kudrun is a reworking of a common Germanic oral tradition that likely has its origins around the North Sea, with the portrayal of warfare being similar to that of the Viking Age.

[8] The core of this tradition is the story of Hilde's abduction and a battle on an island between her father Hagen and her abductor Hetel.

[8] The version of events reported by Priest Lambrecht accords generally with other attestations, namely from Scandinavia, where it is known as Hjaðningavíg.

Snorri Sturluson reports two versions of the tale in the Prose Edda: in one, Hildr (Hilde) attempts to mediate between her father Högni (Hagen) and Heðin (Hetel) during the battle and awakens the dead to life every night.

The earliest attestation of the saga appears to be a picture stone (Smiss I) from Gotland, Sweden, which shows a woman attempting to mediate between warriors on land and on a ship.

[10] The saga is also attested in Anglo-Saxon England of the ninth and tenth centuries, where the poems Deor and Widsith mention the names Hagena (Hagen), Heoden (Hetel), Wada (Wate), and Heorrenda (Horant) without, however, giving any indication of their story.

[8] The name Kudrun shows signs of having migrated with the oral tradition south to Baviara/Austria: it would be *Gundrūn if it had arisen in the High German area.

[16] The story of Hagen's youth in the wilderness is thought to have been invented by the poet using motifs taken from Herzog Ernst, the Nibelungenlied, and Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival.

[19] Gerlint, however, receives Kriemhild's epithet vâlentinne (Kudrun 629,4; "she-devil"), while Wate seems to combine features of the Nibelungenlied's portrayal of Hagen and Hildebrand.

[22] The poem features female protagonists who are far more active than is typical; in particular, Kudrun herself intervenes repeatedly to prevent bloodshed and to secure peace.

[25] Its lack of influence may have to do with the fact that it is a more consciously literary text than the Nibelungenlied or the other late medieval heroic epics about Dietrich von Bern.

For a lack of a direct connection between the two epics speaks Dukus Horant's use of the name "Etene" for Hetel; this more closely matches the Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon material than Kudrun.

[27][28] Perhaps for the same reasons that the epic was unpopular as heroic poetry in the Middle Ages, namely its literary character, the Kudrun became extremely popular with nineteenth-century philologists.

In 1868, author Mathilde Wesendonck published a play Gudrun, which was among her more popular pieces and which Johannes Brahms offered to base an opera on.