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Sigurd Fáfnisbani is one of the most famous heroes of Old Norse sagas and heroic songs. His legend has not only survived the Christianization of Scandinavia, but also inspired 19th and 20th century artists. The reason for the popularity of the story of Sigurd was undoubtedly the Indo-European myth of the dragon-slayer, the echo of which is present in the legend much deeper than previously assumed, making Sigurd an almost god-like hero. After Christianization, however, Sigurd could become a link between the heroic past and the new faith and an expression of hope for the salvation of noble pagans. Absorbing other Germanic heroic tales, the legend simultaneously acquired a new moral meaning of the story of the struggle between Good and Evil, greed, lust for power, and betrayal, showing an impressive ability to adapt to changing conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the psychic concept of adaptation, the original manifests itself as an archetype in culture. The film producer who employs archetypal hero myth creates yet another version of myth. A medieval narrative - a secularised sacred narrative - is translated into a cinematic narrative by a gallery of images. This kind of translation reveals similar semiotic complexity to that of the original. The film producer imitates the art of the medieval epic singer and remains faithful to the spirit of myth. This paper aims at deciphering the symbolic world of "The Nibelungen: Siegfried" ("Die Nibelungen: Siegfried"), a silent film created by Fritz Lang (1924). The novelty of the research lies in comparing the artistic expression of the film producer with the poetic expression of the medieval epic minstrel. The authors' argument proceeds as follows: (1) consider the archetypal hero myth - its plot, theme, and motifs - as narratologically embedded in the adaptation of the epic legend of Siegfried; (2) reveal the interaction between the formulaic structure of the intertitles and oral epic poetry; (3) highlight mimesis as the imitative representation of the sacred world from the perspective of the symbolic world created in the film. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jung's dream of the killing of Siegfried poses a riddle: why did the unconscious choose precisely Siegfried as the hero to be murdered? Jung himself declares that he does not know. This paper attempts to decipher this riddle using three distinct methodological approaches accepted by Jung, two of them in fact grounded in his theories of dream interpretation. Besides presenting some possible answers to the riddle of Siegfried, this interpretative reflection brings to light the discrepancy of the psychological perspectives created by the heterogeneity of methods within analytical psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Four hundred years ago, it was recognized by Marquart Freher that the figure of Sigfrid was the reflex of the Merovingian king Sigibert (535-575). This article identifies historical allusions in the Nibelungenlied to another source, the Danish viking Gotefrid, who was killed in the Netherlands in 885, but whose name was displaced by that of his comrade-in-arms, Sigifridus. The Sîvrit of the Nibelungenlied is thus a conflation of various features of the Merovingian Sigibert and the Carolingian Sigifred. Also addressed are references in theNibelungenlied to certain place-names and geographical features that appear in association with these persons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though the crusades have garnered significant critical interest of late, little attention has been paid to the effects of the crusades on the literature of medieval Scandinavia. This article seeks to shed light on this understudied area by exploring the representation of crusading in the Old Icelandic Magnussona Saga, a narrative that tells the story of Sigurðr I of Norway and his crusade to the Holy Land in the early 12th century. Exploring the saga's global vision - and how it differs from that seen in other European texts - allows for a fuller understanding of the representations of the crusades during the global Middle Ages, particularly in terms of how these campaigns affected European literatures, even those produced on the fringes of the known world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recapitulatory gestures are a central figure of Wagner’s Ring, but rarely does one character explicitly quote another. One such quotation is found in a passage in Act III of Götterdämmerung, when Siegfried recalls the Woodbird’s song from the previous opera as he recounts heroic adventures of his youth. His altered reprise, bound up with a series of musical and dramatic recapitulations, reveals Siegfried as a reflective shaper of his tale. Close attention to Wagner’s evolving texts and their eventual musical settings sheds light on Siegfried’s story, his role in Wagner’s completed drama, and the artistic license he employs in his final song. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article describes an undergraduate, German-language course that aimed to improve students' language skills, critical thinking, and declarative knowledge of German history and culture by studying multiple manifestations of the legend of Siegfried the Dragonslayer. The course used web-based e-learning tools to address two major learning challenges. Because learning to think and work with chronological data was required, a web-based timeline building tool, Google Docs Simile, was used to put students in charge of navigating the enormous historical range of the material. The second, related challenge emerged from the geographic, linguistic, and evidentiary diversity of the surviving material, which challenged students to acquire a degree of cultural literacy for an entire region and to apply appropriate interpretive tools to different kinds of evidence. To support this learning outcome, students used blog tool to write a final, collaborative project, in which they designed a simulated alumni tour. The course enhanced students' language skills and built critical historical knowledge essential for understanding German-speaking lands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores how German opera composer Richard Wagner characterized the struggle between Siegfried and Mime over sexual difference along with conceiving descent, knowledge and love either epic or the anti-epic. The character of Siegfried is associated with the fairy tale in struggling the two kinds of families laying claim to his paternity and asexual reproduction of the self-same. In addition, Wagener depicts his own speculations on sexuality, race and history of idiosyncratic reading of German pessimist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer's opposition with moral significations.

Swan Lake has a central place in the ballet repertoire. Generally seen as the ballerina's ballet, one of the greatest difficulties in presenting Swan Lake as a credible drama has been the historically marginal role played by Siegfried, the Prince. As choreographer-producers have struggled in the challenge to make the ballet work dramatically, his character has been transformed from onlooker to major influence in a series of reinterpretations of this classic work. In this article Gregory Sporton raises questions about what motivates Siegfried and why that is important for our understanding of the ballet, offering an alternative view of Siegfried's character. Gregory Sporton is Director of the Visualisation Research Unit in the Department of Art at Birmingham Institute of Art and Design. His interest in Swan Lake emerges from his background as a dancer and long periods of research in the former Soviet Union during 2004-2006, when he was able to see at first hand most of the Russian productions referenced in this article. His other published work includes ethnographic accounts of dance and its place in the flow of culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emperor Maximilian I was intensely engaged with material relics of the ancient Roman and medieval German past. Maximilian's historical imagination, creative and participatory rather than objective and distancing, guided his own monumental projects. This essay analyzes, among other episodes, the quest for the bones of the historical Siegfried in Worms and an apparently archeological drawing by Albrecht Dürer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the opera about the serpent-conqueror Siegfried and "Remember Alberich?," by Anna Russel in Berlin, Germany. The author questions why the serpent or the dragon has turned into a worm in the opera. The serpent is assumed to represent the Jews and the opera is a Jewish remainder of Germany's anti-Semitic economy.

From the Iron Age to the modern period, authors have repeatedly restructured the ecomythology of the Siegfried saga. Fritz Lang's Weimar film production (released in 1924-1925) of Die Nibelungen presents an ascendant humanist Siegfried, who dominates over nature in his dragon slaying. Lang removes the strong family relationships typical of earlier versions, and portrays Siegfried as a son of the German landscape rather than of an aristocratic, human lineage. Unlike The Saga of the Volsungs, which casts the dwarf Andvari as a shape-shifting fish, and thereby indistinguishable from productive, living nature, both Richard Wagner and Lang create dwarves who live in subterranean or inorganic habitats, and use environmental ideals to convey anti-Semitic images, including negative contrasts between Jewish stereotypes and healthy or organic nature. Lang's Siegfried is a technocrat, who, rather than receiving a magic sword from mystic sources, begins the film by fashioning his own. Admired by Adolf Hitler, Die Nibelungen idealizes the material and the organic in a way that allows the modern ''hero'' to romanticize himself and, without the aid of deities, to become superhuman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on a music history conference held on October 23-25, 2009 in Hamburg, Germany on the subject of the character Siegfried in composer Richard Wagner's opera cycle "Ring des Nibelungen." Topics discussed focused on the conceptual and symbolic relations between Siegfried and the Greek mythological figure of Heracles, as well as the legendary Arthurian character of Perceval. Presentations were given by musicologists including Mischa Meier, Nikolaus Henkel, and Martin Geck.