SOURCE: “Rüdiger's Dilemma,” Studies in Philology, Vol. LVII, No. 1, January, 1960, pp. 7-21.

In the following essay, Jones explains how the Germanic ethics of the Nibelungenlied differ from modern values, and urges that the reader be aware of these differences in trying to understand the motivation of the characters in the work.

We smile at jousts before the walls of Troy in medieval epics and at cannons in early illustrations of Old Testament battlefields; yet we tend to be less critical of modern thoughts and sentiments attributed to historical characters by recent novelists and even by historians and literary critics. Restricted as we are to our own culture, we find it hard to realize that people can experience reality through a completely different set of terms and values, unless by chance we have read anthropological studies of primitive civilizations. Unfortunately, it is a difficult task to enter the...