The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Ninth Lecture

[ 1 ] This evening is dedicated to a poet who sought to delve deeper into certain mysteries of poetic creation—and to do so more meaningfully—than he believed his contemporaries had done. We would like to highlight the reviver of the Nibelungenlied, Wilhelm Jordan,, who reached the height of his creative powers in the mid-19th century and at the beginning of the last third of the 19th century—a poet of whom one can certainly say that, particularly with regard to his intentions, he has been little appreciated, as have so many similar artistic figures.

[ 2 ] Wilhelm Jordan sought, through the material of the Nibelungenlied, to bring back into contemporary poetic practice the style—I might say the very essence—the artistic form of the Nibelungenlied. Once Dr. Steiner has recited a few samples of Wilhelm Jordan’s poetry, I will attempt, in a concluding reflection on this evening’s program, to shed some light on the value and significance of this attempt to renew an ancient poetic style from the perspective of our Spiritual Science worldview. But first, let us allow a few examples to pass before our souls, which are intended to illustrate how Wilhelm Jordan strove to renew the old poetic style from the inner power of language.

[ 3 ] We know, of course—for who is not familiar with the actual content of the Nibelungen saga?—how this saga gives expression to human nature, human deeds, human feelings, and human will from times long past. To what extent such human nature, human will, and human actions seek to express themselves specifically through the Nibelungenlied is what we will discuss shortly. But each of us knows that two figures stand out as central in the Nibelungenlied, two female figures: Kriemhilde from Burgundy and Brunhilde of Isenstein, from far across the sea. We know that Kriemhilde was to be married to Siegfried of the Lower Rhine, and we know that this marriage takes place under difficult circumstances. We know that Kriemhilde’s brother, Gunther, wishes to woo Brunhilde, but that Brunhilde is very, very difficult to win, and Gunther is not the sort of man who can win Brunhilde. But Gunther promises Siegfried of the Lower Rhine that he will give him Kriemhilde as his wife if Siegfried would assist him, Gunther, in his courtship of Brunhilde. And Siegfried is—we will speak of this later—the mighty hero who can overcome the seemingly invincible Brunhilde in battle. But Siegfried is also, one might say, the hero shrouded in occult powers, and this is how it comes to pass that, when Gunther is to win Brunhilde in battle, Siegfried—made invisible to her by occult means, the magic cap—can assist him, and that it is actually Siegfried who can overcome Brunhilde. And Gunther, who is regarded as the victor because Siegfried, the true victor, was not seen at his side, is able to bring Brunhilde home to Worms.

[ 4 ] And once again, Gunther must fight Brunhilde, even though she is already his wife. But once again Siegfried must intervene on his behalf, and Siegfried seizes Brunhilde’s ring and belt, while she is led to believe that Gunther has taken them from her. This, however, is the cause of the most intense jealousy breaking out between the two, between Kriemhilde and Brunhilde. All of this is, of course, so well known that I need not recount it at length. I would like to say that it is also clearly evident to us in the Nibelungenlied how, little by little, as events unfold, Brunhilde becomes increasingly jealous of Kriemhilde, and how this finds a kind of echo in Kriemhilde’s heart. We see the flame of rivalry between the two female characters looming menacingly. But this is particularly evident when Kriemhilde, in possession of the ring and the belt—Brunhilde’s adornments—now confronts Brunhilde with them and, by virtue of this possession, can confirm that Siegfried, her husband, is the true conqueror of Brunhilde, and that she is, in essence, a weakling

[ 5 ] as her husband by her side. Then the thought occurs to Brunhilde that Siegfried must die, because he has, in a sense, betrayed her. For he should never have given Kriemhilde the ring and the belt, never should he have betrayed the secret that was meant to remain between him, Siegfried, and Brunhilde.

[ 6 ] All of this is, in a certain sense, also reflected in the Nibelungenlied. Yet when we examine the Nibelungenlied in all its motifs, something remains incomprehensible to us. This incomprehensibility becomes immediately clear when we imagine the Nibelungenlied supplemented by what is no longer present in it, but which ancient legends from a time even more remote than that in which the Nibelungenlied was composed still tell us about: when we become aware of how Brunhilde is essentially the representative of an ancient being, a Valkyrie, how she is, as it were, placed within the narrative—this Brunhilde—as a later incarnation dwelling in an earthly body of an older, powerful being, a Valkyrie being, and how all of this influences the present. As I said, it is not explicitly stated in the Nibelungenlied, but it is characteristic of the older legend.

[ 7 ] If we take this into account from the older legend, we come to understand the demonic peculiarity of Brünnhilde; but we also realize that something greater and more significant is unfolding in the events of The Nibelungenlied than what might otherwise occur between individuals as a matter of personal relations in the earthly realm. Brunhilde then appears to us as if, in a later incarnation, she had, so to speak, become less than what she once was as a Valkyrie, yet as if she were bringing into the soul-world, as a Valkyrie, that which makes her a demonic being. Yet something similar appears to us in Siegfried. With him, too, we might say: Let us look at how Siegfried was embodied in ancient times, when he was still a different person, from whose essence he brought something into the Siegfried incarnation. This made it possible for him to overcome Brunhilde, who is also more than the Brunhilde manifesting herself in the earthly body. But through this, Siegfried stands before us as if that which makes a man a man—the solar power—was more developed in him in an earlier incarnation than could be developed in a personality at the time when Siegfried lived as Siegfried. Just as the Earth Mother force lived more fully in Brunhilde than it could have lived in a personality—in a female personality—during the time when Brunhilde appeared as Brunhilde.

[ 8 ] Thus, the external incarnated souls—the personalities—appear to us as enigmatic beings. And so we understand that all this mystery, which ties in with many ancient legends and ancient forces not contained in the Nibelungenlied itself, is what Wilhelm Jordan sought to bring to light when he attempted to portray that which lives in the events—not in the Nibelungenlied itself— but lives on in the events of the Nibelungenlied, and that a jealousy existing between Brunhilde, with her Valkyrie soul, and Kriemhilde—who is portrayed in the most eminent sense as the earthly woman of her time—breaks out particularly not as in the Nibelungenlied, but differently in Wilhelm Jordan’s work, namely at a time depicted as a festival, a solstice festival for that era: as depicted when the sun god Baldur is overcome by Hödur, and is mourned by Nanna, his wife, from whom he has vanished from the realm of light to descend through death—caused by Hödur—into the realm of Hel. In Kriemhild’s own soul, something like a premonition may arise: Just as the festival depicts here how the sun god was snatched from the ancient goddess, so will the sun hero be snatched from me—she knows this only in her premonishing soul! She certainly does not call him the Sun Hero, but all this reigns in the subconscious of this enigmatic personality, who may have carried it up from incarnations in which the soul reigned even more than in later times, when souls became earthly human beings—which is also the time of the Nibelungenlied. Hence we understand that the passions in Brunhilde and Kriemhilde flare up particularly intensely when the play of the old Sun God has unfolded before them. Then it happens that later, while bathing, Kriemhilde reproaches Brunhilde for what she has to reproach her for, and Brunhilde resolves to make Hagen, the Grim, to whom she entrusts herself, the murderer of Siegfried, who has betrayed her.

[ 9 ] Thus Wilhelm Jordan seeks to revive what once lived in ancient times; but he also attempts to revive it in such a way that this revival is governed by that active weaving which was at work in poetry when the human soul was more intimately connected with language than is the case in our time; when the human soul still felt its surging, weaving, working, and being as a woven whole, expressing this surging, working, and weaving in the words of language. And the strange thing, as it is, when a poet in turn revives this oneness with language, which was the distinctive feature of the old verse, of the old art of poetry—we would like to present a few examples of this to your soul. But there is nothing in these ancient verses of the external synthesis of end-rhyme, which introduces the intellectual into the artistic form—which, after all, is always something architecturally added to the language from the outside. What was the art of verse in ancient times sprang from the very organism of speech. And it already sounds strange to people today when real value is placed on this art of verse. And if one particularly highlights this inner interwoven-ness arising from the soul with the weaving of the active soul, then it no longer appears natural to people today. But Wilhelm Jordan had the courage to do this: to bring out that inner essence of the word-initial rhyme in alliteration, in our language, which is not really well-suited to alliteration. And when he himself recited his Nibelungenlied, he sought once again to present this very old, peculiar nature of verse—of alliteration in verse—to the contemporary audience. There, one could hear the alliteration emerging from the meaning of the speech:

Where Rhineland vines now blend the world-famous
Fiery Milk for Men
From the earth’s juices and the sun’s rays,
In the vicinity of Worms, there once
Neither spade nor rake was allowed to touch the ground;
For there, in the midst of the vast May field
On a gentle hill lay the sacred grove.
At its edge, facing the Rhine,
A viewing platform now stood erected,
The stately stage for the Balderspiel.

[ 10 ] Today, there is no longer any sense of this innermost, most intimate relationship with language:

Where Rhineland vines now produce the world-famous ...

[ 11 ] Let us now set before us this old song that inspired it, and first listen to it—as a sample of the revival of alliteration—the old Balderlied.

... As the setting sun bathed the river of legend,
The emerald Rhine, blushing as it parted,
With a garland of molten gold,
Numerous boats glided through the shimmering waves near Worms
Up and down the river
And carried the people home from the festival.
To the steady rush and thud of the oars
Melodically joined at the boats’ sides
The clear tones also rang out in time
From human throats: in several boats,
Which sailed close together downstream,
The people sang the song of longing,
Which had also driven Nanna down into the realm of night,
When the mistletoe had slain her husband.

Listening at the window of the prince’s palace
Lay Krimhilde, awaiting her husband.
In anxious fear of the bitterest reproach
Her anxious soul, full of longing and pain,
Now yearned for her distant beloved.
She felt guilty and sensed the approach
Of fate’s footsteps. Thus, startled
And with a heavy heart, she heard the dirge.
While the sweet sound of the ancient melody
Echoed up from the Rhine, her lips moved softly
And let the words of the song,
Which she had known since earliest childhood,
Reach her own ears:

“O Balder, my lover,
Where are you hidden?
Hear, then, how Nanna
Anxiously yearns.

Appear, O fair one,
And bend down to Nanna,
Caressing and kissing,
Her loving mouth.”

There resound with lament
The flaming fields,
With sighing voices
And death songs:

The flower withers,
Paling, shedding its petals;
Summer strips it of life
With scorching rays.

At the funeral
Of the divine spring
She crumbles and follows him
In fiery death.

“O Balder, my lover,
Longing love,
Unspeakable yearning
Burns my breast.”

Then from the depths
The voice of the beloved sounds:
“I have left the world of light,
You seek me in vain.”

“O Balder, my beloved,
O are you hidden?
Give word, how Nanna
Loves you and redeems you!”

“You do not call me back
From the depths of death.
What you love, you must let go
And only the suffering is long.”

“O Balder, my beloved,
Darkness now covers you;
So take Nanna too
Down into the night!”

[ 12 ] The ancient clairvoyance is dying, fading away; humanity stands alone, forsaken, searching for what has vanished, longing for it. Nanna, the World Soul, searches for Baldur, the Sun God, who has gone to Hel in Niflheim.

[ 13 ] Hagen must now gradually make the necessary preparations to bring about Siegfried’s death. It is impossible to describe everything that Wilhelm Jordan has so beautifully drawn from the legend and his own imagination to show just how meticulously Hagen prepares for Siegfried’s death. It suffices to note that these preparations include setting a tower ablaze. The glow of this fire enters Gunther’s chamber through the window. And now Wilhelm Jordan magnificently revives something that is actually connected to a topic I will discuss later, if time permits: something is reawakened for us from that very peculiar old sense of nature, of which today’s modern human being no longer has any mental image. In the glow of the fire, the conscience of the human being is kindled—a conscience that is still connected to what is the immediate manifestation outside, that still possesses, so to speak, a hint of the manifestation of the soul detaching itself in the dreamlike realm, and that can unite with the forces of nature outside. And as fate descends upon Siegfried, and as death is woven into his destiny by the Norns, this triggers in the soul of the person most deeply affected the ancient Norn song, the song of the elements of fate:

Hasn't the fire over there long since gone out,
The smoke long since dissipated? — Behold, a gloomy wisp
Rises from the black ruins.
It rises like a shadow in the starlight
Like dream figures driven by the storm.
Across the Rhine on smoky wings
It comes, floating. Three gray sisters,
Giant figures, now stand resting
High in the air above the ruler’s palace.
Spindle and spool, shuttle and reed,
Warp stone and scissors hold their hands.
And they spin and wind and stretch the threads
And weave and weave and sharpen the scissors
And shape a song so soul-crushing,
That, shaken by shivers of death, the deaf
Sleepers in the castle sob in their dreams;
For though the ears slumber in ignorance,
Conscience watches in the listening heart:

Envy has woven the nets
Of the curse,
The house is desecrated,
Hell rules it.
The serpent crept into it,
And there continued to proliferate
The seed of sin,
The lust for gold.

Indeed, on the tree
Full of fermenting poison
The loving God of Light
Formed a purer shoot;
And bold recognition
Of the goal of the future
Preserved the miracle
On Hinderberg’s heights.

In vain! The tempters
Corrupted this one too
With hunger for gold,
With burning desire.
Then the will
Became a cramp for the crown,
A man’s word a perjury,
Loyalty a betrayal.

The pattern is clouded,
And tomorrow let the scissors
Of guilt sever
The fabric of wonder.
If sons of the same
Lineage slay one another,
Then even the infant
Sips murder with his milk.

From the blood they bloom
The tendrils of vengeance
And, wreaking destruction,
They cast the clan into the dust.
Now you must slay one another
In restless fury;
Let the daughter destroy
The serpent lineage.

The Norns’ Webs
Interwoven with curses
To the hounds of hell
This accursed house.
Its boasting and pomp
With shining fortune
Now pay tenfold
For the Nibelung’s woe.

[ 14 ] And as Siegfried moves ever closer to his fatal destiny, it is then that he, too, becomes interwoven with nature—as I said, in ancient times this clear perception of nature could still be experienced quite differently, in a tragically profound way—it is then that Siegfried, through his growing sensitivity to nature, sees his destiny rising up before him. But interwoven, intimately interwoven with the entire course of the Earth’s development, Siegfried sees the working of the destiny of his own soul as well. And it is as if the destiny of the Earth’s soul, in its weaving and surging, were condensing in his mind, which is becoming clairvoyant in that moment. As if, through the occurrence of a solar eclipse—which in Siegfried evokes the feeling of the sun’s power waning—the waning of the sun’s power for the Earth as a whole were simultaneously brought before his soul, in the coming times of the Earth’s winter, when the inner power of the sun is to die away and that which flows spiritually from the sun into human beings is also to wane. Siegfried feels this rising within his own soul as he goes to meet his fate. And from contemplating the solar eclipse, the realization dawns upon him of the gradual fading of the sun’s blaze in the weaving and ruling of the cosmos, and in the interplay of this weaving and ruling of the cosmos with earthly weaving and ruling. And so he sees, as it were, the embers of his own soul, of his own mind, fading away in the dying power of the sun. And an old song, learned over in Iceland, across the sea, where Brunhilde comes from, comes to mind for him, who has suddenly become clairvoyant. A foreboding sense settles upon his soul: it reflects, in the most intimate connection with the feeling of nature, his very own destiny.

... The hero obeyed
And now hurried down alone toward the evening.

And evening fell within him as well.
A gloomy foreboding of a sad end
Cast a shadow over his sunny fate.

But to dwell on the gruesome words
Of the mad woman and to sift through the madness
Of her sick soul
Something else prevented him: Evening fell
All around him as well. But high in the sky
The sun still shone; not a single wisp
of drifting clouds did he see,
as far as he could see. Yet this blue
resembled that of steel. The birds fell silent,
hiding quietly in the treetops
and concealing their heads in their colorful plumage.
Only the swallows still whirled in fearful swarms,
And their chirping sounded like despair.
The mouse scurried out of its hiding place;
The marten crept up on the sleepy birds
like a secret assassin;
ugly moths flew up, and bats;
the giggling owl and the groaning eagle owl
cheered with delight, hunting so early.

Darker it grows, and yet
all things remain wondrously clear,
Yes, shadows and light are even more sharply defined.
But right there in the shade of the sheltering linden tree
At his feet, he grasps the mystery:
Where the trembling light filters through the gaps in the foliage
And reaches the lawn, there it forms on the ground
Not little discs as usual, no, sharp crescents.
He looks toward the sky—there it blazes like a crescent moon,
Still too dazzling to gaze upon.
He peers around, and behold, there reflects
A blackish marsh, dimmed and softened
The sun clearly in crescent form.

Then the heart of the fearless hero
Was seized by a foreboding of coming doom,
But no longer for himself. As if to the soul of the earth
His darkened spirit now expanded, full of nocturnal thoughts
The twilight of the gods,
The wrathful day of ruin rose from the future,
And an ancient song, learned in Iceland,
Escaped loudly from the hero’s lips:

Even up there, there is tribulation
And the threat of destruction.
Even in the heavens, so I hear,
Lights have already gone out
And the proudest stars
Await destruction.
Even the night will one day draw near,
Followed by no more mornings;
For the sun will grow feeble
In summers to come.

Once there was a winter,
That lasted endlessly,
Through which no balmy breezes
Ever blew.
Just as the Alps now stand frozen
In eternal ice,
So lay the lands
Burdened with glaciers;
For the sun was fading
In summers past.

And once again there will be
Such a winter,
Where terrible frosts
Follow spring.
A smoke darkens
The source of existence
Until it is barely recognizable
As coal glows;
For the sun grows weak
Around the summer solstice.

There a whale rolls
Through icy waters
And swings its tail
Swimming southward.
In the icy flood
Its fins grow stiff,
Its pulse freezes
On the palm-lined shore;
For the sun has grown weak,
And summer is nowhere to be found.

With such a song, Siegfried wandered
Lonely toward evening, until at last
He perceived from afar the prince’s camp,
Where, strangely illuminated by the fading sun,
The Burgundians appeared like ghosts and shadows,
Who still await salvation in the twilight grove
At the pathless foot of the rocks of Idha.

[ 15 ] We can only come close to this subject matter—which Wilhelm Jordan attempted to revitalize in his own way during the last third of the 19th century—if we are convinced that the perspective of Spiritual Science is actually necessary in order to establish any kind of relationship with what is contained in this subject matter, which is so profound in its content. Content and language—even in these matters, they belong together from the perspective of the Spiritual Science—and so let us briefly touch upon the content and language of these matters today.

[ 16 ] What was recorded in the Nibelungen verses as memories of significant events from medieval times was, in the era that followed—an era that was, in terms of its intellectual content, quite different from the earlier one—one might say, lost and forgotten. What uplifts us today when we immerse ourselves in the Nibelungenlied was, in a sense, not there for the people of the 16th and 17th centuries; nor was it there—truly not there—for the people of the first half of the 18th century. Before that, it was there; before that, when it was presented to the people by reciters, as was the custom, it formed the content of an elevation to the greatness “and significance of the human being.” But when Central Europe had been overrun by foreign rule, it was the fate of intellectual life in this Central Europe that everything which had once constituted that former greatness had to be forgotten. Only thus could it come to pass that the material of the Nibelungenlied first had to be rediscovered from individual manuscripts. And for many great treasures of bygone times, in which such significance lives on, this truly peculiar fate applies, just as it was destined for the treasure of the Nibelungenlied and the Nibelungen saga.

[ 17 ] What, then, do we actually encounter in the tales of this Nibelungenlied? People appear before us, and as soon as we become acquainted with them through the Nibelungenlied, we know that there is actually more alive within them than what can be directly expressed or revealed in this earthly shell in which they wage their life’s struggles and grapple with their life’s sorrows. There is more to all these souls than the body can bring into outward reality; and this applies to a great extent to Brunhilde, to a great extent to Siegfried, and also, in a certain way, to Hagen; whereas with Kriemhilde and Gunther we already see how they are people who, through what their souls are, fit more readily into their time.

[ 18 ] Brunhilde and Siegfried embody beings who no longer truly belong in the era in which they live. Siegfried is still a sun hero; Brunhilde is a Valkyrie, a mother of the world. That is why they are kindred spirits, and why Brunhilde, the Valkyrie, can only be overcome by Siegfried, the sun hero. Kriemhilde and Gunther are beings who fit more into the time in which they live, having already lost the old clairvoyance. Brunhilde and Siegfried still possess it to some extent, as does Hagen to a certain degree, but Siegfried must still live in this time; Siegfried must still live out the essence of his soul in his time. Just as he lives it out, this soul reveals to the Spiritual Science gaze: it was once in the body of an ancient initiate, an ancient human in earlier incarnations, who was deeply acquainted with the peculiarities of the spiritual worlds. And when we allow the Brunhilde soul—this Valkyrie soul—to work upon us from a Spiritual Science perspective, it shows us: that what it contains within itself is something of a soul-essence which, in ancient times, could still appear to human beings through their dreamlike clairvoyant vision, but which in more recent times can become visible at most to heroes when, guided by their warrior courage, they pass through the gate of death into the spirit realm, where they encounter souls such as the Brunhilde soul as Valkyrie souls.

[ 19 ] Now these people have been brought into the world of physical earthly events. Therefore, hanging over these souls is that which can only take shape as a tragic fate. Even amidst the spirit of battle and the turmoil of war, the suffering, the tragedy, and the lament that pervade the entire Nibelungenlied are spiritually preparing themselves. For these souls carry within them something that can no longer fully assert itself in their immediate present. One might say that in the subconscious memory of these souls lives something of past earthly grandeur; in these souls much still lives on from the ancient Atlantean times: so great and mighty were these souls. How earthly events unfold within such souls, what can play out there in terms of loyalty between such souls and in terms of fate—this is precisely what the Nibelungenlied seeks to portray, just as the older sagas so beautifully depicted it in the case of such personalities as Siegfried.

[ 20 ] Let us suppose for a moment that Siegfried, in a previous incarnation, was a soul: familiar with the workings of the spiritual worlds, so deeply immersed in them with his soul forces, his soul life, within the spiritual worlds and their workings. And now he is born as Siegfried. Then something of those powers emerges in his soul that are drawn to what he was once interwoven with—what now exists only as dreamlike clairvoyance, what is now hidden in the depths of physical existence. He is drawn toward what he can no longer truly see, except perhaps in particularly vivid moments. He is drawn toward dragons and enchanted beings, and there what he can no longer see becomes interwoven with the courage and the fighting spirit that live in his heart. And a cornea forms from the dragon’s blood, because he carries within himself as a force that which he once possessed as the sense of sight. There is infinite depth in this material, infinite significance. Above all, the entire memory is contained within it: Yes, there once was a clairvoyant, a dreamlike-clairvoyant humanity, for whose souls a part of the supersensible worlds, their working and weaving, lay open. But this power of sun-gazing, this power of the sun-seer, has sunk down; it has sunk down. Baldur has sunk down, and Nanna, the human soul, feels the tragedy of the sinking of the old power of sun-gazing. Let us thus immerse ourselves in the mood from which the Nibelungen material is woven, in the sorrow over the sinking of the old power of sun-gazing, in the knowledge: Now it is present at most only in the forces of the will, this power of sun-gazing, transformed into the weaving of the forces of the will!

[ 21 ] Emptiness, 19th-century professoritis—it has managed to transform this profoundly tragic mood, arising from the decline of the ancient power of sun-gazing for the human soul of a later age, into the abstract parable of spring’s descent into Baldur, and the like, just like all these abstract, scholarly, convoluted, perverted symbols that have been conjured up by the scholarship, perversion, and perversion that has maltreated the Great, the Mighty, which lies in the knowledge of the descent of the ancient, dreamlike power of sun-gazing from the human soul. In Nanna we must see the human soul, which mourns for Baldur, who was once connected to it as the power of sun-gazing, and who now dwells below in Hel’s dark realm, since all that remains in man is the gold of the sensory intellect, which he can seek only with the power of reason bound to the brain and the forces of the earth, that is, sensory matter. Only when we understand this entire mood that runs through the Nibelungen material do we truly understand what lives and weaves within it. Then we also understand how, in the events, something can be perceived as a protrusion of that which lived in ancient times and which only lived on in a faint echo in the people of that time.

[ 22 ] Thus we see how, in earlier times, what arose in the human soul through clairvoyance connected with what lived in the soul of another human being through clairvoyance; but we also see how, in times when it is no longer possible for soul-seeing powers to unite with soul-seeing powers, people who seem destined for one another can no longer find each other, because they have reincarnated soul powers that were once mighty soul powers, but in a body that does not fully express these ancient soul-seeing powers. Siegfried cannot find Brunhilde. Siegfried woos Kriemhilde, who was actually born into the present time. And Gunther, who was born into the present time, woos Brunhilde, who actually carries within her a soul endowed with the powers of the ancient time, the soul’s power of sun-seeing. And so, in the age that prepares the way for materialism, the souls become confused. Thus their tragic fate unfolds. |

[ 23 ] The destiny of humankind reflects the transition from the ancient, spiritually inspired age of vision to the more recent, purely rational age of the senses. And when we eventually reach a point where we have drawn even more from the depths of spiritual science, we will find infinite depth precisely in such material as the Nibelungen saga. What lives in these wonderful old legends will one day be brought to light; today, I would say, we can only hint at the deep content of the Nibelungen material with a few strokes. But a spirit like Wilhelm Jordan, though he did not have a clear awareness—for Spiritual Science did not yet exist in his time—of all that I have just spoken of, but he had a sense of that time, which I also hinted at yesterday, when Ludwig Feuerbach in the 1840s, even though he was an opponent of all spirituality, conceived an eminently spiritual thought in order to combat it. The gods provide everything; it is only a matter of how capable human beings are of grasping it. But Wilhelm Jordan had truly immersed himself profoundly in the surging, swelling, weaving, and flowing of his time. He had an intuitive sense in his profound immersion in all of this, and he now sought, in his own way, to renew that which lives in the Nibelungenlied.

[ 24 ] It wasn’t as bad as it had been in the 17th and early 18th centuries, when, amid burgeoning materialism, the Nibelungenlied had been completely forgotten along with everything else of a spiritual nature, when no one knew anything about it, and when it was inevitable that a profound Swiss man, who became a professor at the Joachimsthaler Gymnasium in Berlin, Christoph Heinrich Müller, was the one who first drew attention once again to the full grandeur and significance contained in the Nibelungen material. It was Müller, after all, who first published the initial treasures from the Hohenems manuscript in [Vorarlberg]—he found two manuscripts there—under the title “Kriemhild’s Revenge.” Thus, what had served to uplift countless souls over the centuries had to be rescued from oblivion once again. And when the Swiss Müller, who was a professor in Berlin, pointed out the great significance of the Nibelungenlied, it was Voltaire’s protégé, Frederick II, who wrote to this Swiss Müller:

Most learned, dearest, and most faithful friend. You judge far too favorably those poems from the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries, the publication of which you have promoted, and which you consider so useful for the enrichment of the German language. In my opinion, such works are not worth a single grain of gunpowder and do not deserve to be pulled from the dust of oblivion. In my own book collection, at least, I would not tolerate such wretched rubbish, but would throw it out. The copy sent to me may await its fate there in the great library. However, such works do not promise to be in high demand; Your otherwise gracious King.

Potsdam, February 22, 1784.

[ 25 ] I don’t know if this is still the case, but our friends in Zurich will know: for a long time, this letter was kept under glass at the Zurich Central Library, so that anyone who visited the library could see it. But, as I said, in the first half of the 19th century, some people gradually began to grasp the full magnitude of the Nibelungen material. And Wilhelm Jordan now felt the need to somehow reawaken the very era in which the Nibelungen material could thrive; for that was a time when people related to language in a completely different way than we do today. And anyone who felt, for example, that there was something unnatural in the peculiar alliteration of the language that Wilhelm Jordan sought to recreate, thereby shows that they can no longer revive within themselves that old, intimate relationship with language, where one still knew: that something of the divine Word lives in the workings of language, when people still felt how that which lived in their thoughts through the interconnection of things also had to find its way out into language, into the weaving, life, workings, and essence of language.

[ 26 ] Indeed, we live in a time when materialism has taken hold of everything, everything—including our relationship to language. In everyday speech, we no longer have any idea what language once was, how it flowed from the living life of the soul, where the soul was intimately interwoven with language. Wilhelm Jordan still had a sense that the spiritual was connected to language. Today, language has become abstract; it consists only of signs for what is to be expressed. The spiritual no longer resonates within it. It is no longer a welling up of inner life, of the human breath, of the human breathing. Just as the hand is a part of me, just as I shape it into a gesture, so in earlier times the speaker sensed in the weaving and life of the word something like a gesture, like a sign of his airy human being, of his elemental human being within himself. But for this to be the case, language had to be richer, richer than it can be today, where it has become a sign, and where the soul no longer feels the connection between sounds and thoughts.

[ 27 ] Today we say, quite thoughtlessly—and I mean thoughtlessly—“a brave hero.” If a medieval person were to rise from the dead in his body, and he were to hear us say “a brave hero,” he wouldn't be able to keep from laughing; he would say: A brave hero? — What’s that supposed to mean? — for he still has the feeling that “brave” is supposed to mean “to plod along.” He would say: You can call a hippopotamus or an elephant brave, but certainly not a hero! — And he would never have dared to call a hero great. “Great” and “small” were merely sensory concepts to him. We call our heroes “great” because we no longer have any concept of what the word expresses, namely only the sensory towering. But in return, these people certainly possessed a richer treasure, a truly richer treasure for the way they wanted to describe a hero, for example. A hero was “bold,” that is, daring—to put it in our language—and in “bold,” the medieval person still sensed what lay within. Or a hero was “strict,” a strict hero. What would a person today think of that? The medieval person would know that a strict hero has powerful muscles. “Streng” was the term for the hero’s physique in terms of his muscles. A medieval person would also laugh heartily if someone were to say, “A hero is brave.” They would say: Well, what do you actually mean by that? A brave hero is someone whose courage, whose spirit, runs away, gets the better of them—a person who is particularly passionate. —No one would ever have said “a brave hero.” But you see, the language was simply much richer, infinitely richer in words than it is today. The language has lost many words, for that inner relationship to language has been lost. Let’s take just one example, a very obvious example—I’d like to share this with you—let’s suppose someone wanted to say: “The men were on the watch for the horses” or “were waiting for the horses.” He could have said:

Why do we have to wait so long?

[ 28 ] Here we have alliteration. But if, for example, someone had wanted to say, “The man was at home among the servants,” and had used this form for “men” as well, the alliteration would not have worked. For this sentence: “The man was at home among the servants,” one could say:

Say something to Selda and the others.

[ 29 ] So one has the option of combining this “selda” (home) with “segg,” which could also be used to mean “the man.” Or, for example, one could say: “The most expensive of the men was Dietrich”:

Degano dechisto Diotrihhe.

[ 30 ] So there used to be a variety of ways to express “man” and “men.” All of that has been lost, and we now have to translate all these sentences uniformly using “man” and “men.” Our language has completely lost its intrinsic connection to thought and expression.

[ 31 ] Wilhelm Jordan has now attempted to reestablish such a relationship; and he has done what he could. But of course he could no longer bring forth what the old language possessed: an inner interwoven connection with the meaning of the living thought-being within the words. How satisfied is anyone today if they can only say: “The man has a home” or “the man has a house.” A medieval person would not have expressed so simply something that in their language meant “house and farmstead.” Nor would this medieval person have easily said, “With my senses I perceive something,” but rather he would have sought to break down what was perceived by the senses, so that it appeared to him more concrete, more definite, more meaningful, and more saturated, as if he had said, for example, “hugi endi herta.” Both, one might say, mean “sense and sense,” because this distinction between hugi and herta is blurred. Time and again, you sense an infinite richness of meaning in this ancient language.

[ 32 ] Wilhelm Jordan, at least, sought to salvage something of this inner life of language. And so a struggle arose within him between this desire and the abstract nature of our modern language. And he wanted to save what still exists—and indeed exists solely in the German language—of the possibility of preserving these old intimacies in language. Today, people will naturally be tempted to read something like the lines I have read to you in a way that conveys the meaning, so that what is written in the lines is merely a linguistic sign for the meaning. The majority of Europeans have no other sense at all than that language is a sign for meaning, and they will be satisfied when they hear:

Where Rhineland vines now blend the world-famous
Fiery Milk for Men
From the juices of the earth and rays of the sun,
In the vicinity of Worms, ...

(read without emphasizing the alliteration).

[ 33 ] Certainly, in such cases language is used merely as a sign. Indeed, there are already languages today that have dropped many syllables because the language has become nothing but a sign, since nothing is alive in what is spoken anymore. Above all, one will never be able to penetrate the true, living principle of art if one feels that language is merely a sign, for that can suffice at most for prose. Poetry demands that language be internally structured—and not merely mechanically through the end rhyme, but internally structured, just as a living organism is structured, through alliteration or assonance. Just as the mechanism relates to life, so does the end rhyme relate to alliteration.

[ 34 ] Wilhelm Jordan wanted to restore this power of language; he wanted to imbue language with what stems from the ancient age of the seers. In the ancient age of vision, people could not have spoken as they do today in our materialistic age, where there is no longer any feeling for the inner weaving of language. In the ancient age of vision, there was a longing and a desire to truly imbue the very essence of the word with the light that lives in thought. And Wilhelm Jordan had a sense of this. In particular, I often heard his brother—with whom I was friends—read aloud in the very style of Wilhelm Jordan, and there was a special longing to emphasize the alliterative nature, to highlight the artistic over the inartistic, the merely rationally meaningful.

Where Rhineland vines now blend the world-famous
Fiery Milk for Men
From the earth's juices and the sun's rays
In the vicinity of Worms ...

[ 35 ] I can well imagine that today’s materialistic, rational-minded people regard this as nothing more than a gimmick. Since 1907, we have been working to find a form suitable for modern recitation, in order to present what should thus be resurrected from ancient times. The first attempt we intended to undertake at the time of the Munich Congress in 1907 did not come to fruition. But I think that the possible and the impossible in relation to the present-day language will be laid bare before your souls in this very attempt. For we can say nothing other than: No one can achieve the impossible; and our language has become such that it is impossible to bring forth in it, in the full sense, all that lived in the ancient age of the sun-seers, through alliteration, for example. And that he wanted to do so is certainly—one might even say—a mistake on the part of Wilhelm Jordan; it is a heroic attempt, but also, in a certain sense, a heroic error. But what follows from this? It follows that it is no longer possible to truly revive what alliteration was in ancient times, in times that still had the immediate resonance of dreamlike clairvoyance. Language has become material, has become abstract. But Spiritual Science will bring forth a new artistic creation, a creation with inner forms of meaning, whereby, through the direct grasping of the spiritual, we also grasp the word. Such attempts have been made. Take the seventh image, the image of the spirit realm in The Portal of Initiation, and many others, where the attempt has again been made to enter into the linguistic realm precisely through grasping the spiritual, where an effort has been made to reintroduce such art into language so that, in a sense, the spiritual expresses itself and resonates within the words. Only in the German language is it still halfway possible today to express this.

[ 36 ] Here, too, we have a field today through which we can see how it is foreshadowed in the course of human development: to enliven the spiritual so that it may be strong, so that this spiritual does not remain merely at the level of intellectual understanding, but may once again take hold of the greater power of the word. Then what has become a new rune will once again rhyme in speech and speak through rhyme. A rune is the direct interweaving of expression with the thing itself, so that the expression is not merely a sign. Here again we have a realm where the necessity of a worldview based on Spiritual Science for our time expresses itself in a profound and also serious sense. May many people soon come to realize that in very, very many areas it can be observed how much the life of humanity withers away if it is not fertilized by a new ray of spirituality. For that which lives among human beings as in a physical aura—language itself—has become abstract, materialistic, and intellectual; and by speaking, not merely by thinking, we have become materialists. But that which has already become straw in the word, so that in “tapfer” we no longer feel the “tapsen,” must regain its soul, soul instead of mechanism. For language has become mechanism.

[ 37 ] The Spiritual Science must also breathe life into language. And we can sense this struggle with language—this effort to breathe life into it—when we immerse ourselves in artistic endeavors such as those of an eminent thinker like Wilhelm Jordan. But that forgery known as the literary history of the 19th century will have to be completely rewritten if people ever wish to gain a true understanding of what actually happened. One will then read entirely different poets’ names in the literary histories than those who have been designated as great poets, whereas genuine, honest artistic endeavor—such as Wilhelm Jordan demonstrated in the mid-19th century in the “Demiurgos” he published—has been trampled underfoot by such literary court counselors as Mr. Karl Rudolf von Gottschall was trampled into the ground. Who knows today that Wilhelm Jordan endeavored, in his “Demiurgos,” to depict how people wander here on earth, and that this earthly wandering of humans is actually a reflection of something that takes place in the supernatural, so that the human being standing there is a sign of something that is simultaneously unfolding in the supernatural! Who knows today that a personality such as Wilhelm Jordan wrestled with such great, formidable problems at the dawn of the modern era? But the sun of the modern era, the sun of Spiritual Science, will awaken something entirely different from the stream of artistic life than the forgeries that are served up to us today in schools and outside of schools as literary history—in which the new materialistic soul merely reflects itself and finds great value in that which, as the saying goes, it can “lick its fingers over,” because it finds it so similar to itself.

[ 38 ] Let us feel the magnitude of the task of Spiritual Science thinking and Spiritual Science feeling. Let us sense it in something like this: that we become aware when we speak empty words instead of the living plant of the word, which once sprouted and grew between souls that wish to understand one another. Life—true life—will flow into the stream of existence when the spirit, emerging from Spiritual Science, once again permeates humanity with the meaning of life.