SOURCE: “Hagen: A Negative View,” Semasia, Vol. 2, 1975, pp. 43-59.

In the following essay, Dickerson argues against viewing Hagen as heroic, contending instead that he should be regarded as an evil character.

Much progress has been made in recent years toward a modern and comprehensive view of the Nibelungenlied. The pioneering studies of D. W. Mowatt,¹ Hugh Sacker² and Hugo Bekkar³—to choose only three—have suggested new solutions to the problem of the work's inconsistencies which up to now have either been left unexplained or attributed to the “postulate” that the poet was courtly but his subject matter was not.⁴ The new discoveries that the poem deals with entire social groups rather than individuals,⁵ that it depicts a world fragmented by the intrusion of foreign elements,⁶ that irony⁷ and “self-referential patterns”⁸ play an important role in structure have made it possible to view these inconsistencies in a new...