Wagner's Literary and Dramatic Language in the Ring

Reactions to Wagner's literary writing style are often as extreme as those towards his music. Some regard him writing style as comically bad, others have likened him to Shakespeare. The truth often lies in between the two extremes. George Bernard Shaw thought his writing style was good while ridiculing comparisons to Shakespeare. When Wagner first completed the written text to the Ring of the Nibelungs, he sent a signed copy to the text's dedicatee, Arthur Schopenhauer, who wrote back suggesting that he stick to writing and give up composition altogether!

One of the characteristics of Wagner's writing is alliteration. When alliteration is applied to Old Germanic verse, it is called Stabreim in German. This term goes back Snorri Sturluson (1178–1241), the editor of the Snorra-Edda, who called it Reimstab.

Germanic examples of Stabreim can be found going back as far as the 8th century AD, when it was used in Christian stories told by missionaries. Here is a Scandinavian example from the 13th century:

Og vil du ikke danse hos mig,
Sót og Sýgdom skal følge dig!

There are also English examples, where it was used by missionaries to tell Christian stories to the people up till around the 11th century. It is not surprising then to find Tolkien, of all writers, using Stabreim in his writing:

Arise now, arise, Riders of Théoden!
Dire deeds awake, dark is it eastward.
Let horse be bridled, horn be sounded!
Forth Eorlingas!

From The Two Towers


It is another reminder just how deeply Tolkien's "Ring cycle" is influenced by Wagner. If there were a Wagner vs Tolkien plagiarism court case, I am sure Wagner would win.

I don't think I have ever seen a satisfactory English translation of the Ring. I am not really sure it is possible to fully preserve the rhythm and the Stabreim. What is often totally missing in most translations is the fact that the original is written in a deliberately archaic, Medieval, German. When the Middle English of Chaucer's time is read, especially in period pronunciation, it can be almost incomprehensible to a modern audience. Not so with Medieval German, for the German language has remained much more stable than English. Nonetheless, a native German speaker will usually need to have seen the original text in writing to fully make sense of much of it.

Siegfried's opening line die Walküre goes "wes Herd dies auch sei, hier muß ich rasten". If you said that today, most Germans would struggle to understand that you are trying to say "whoever's home this is, I must rest here". The original German goes more like "whose hearth this be, here must I rest". The word "wes" is the genitive (possessive) form of "wer" (who), but this word is not used in modern German. The word for "rest" is "rasten", and again, it is not a normal German word.  The subjunctive mood of the word "sei" (I have translated is as "be") is certainly used in modern written German, but is rare in conversational language. Nobody seems to even try to convey the archaic character of the language.

I find this odd, when you consider that in the musical word there is an painful habit of translating the titles of the sections in Richard Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra into King James Bible English, for example Thus Spake Zarathustra. If you read the  original titles in German, every one of them in perfect normal modern German. In the early decades of the twentieth century, some translators did translate Nietzsche's work of the same name into King James Bible English. These days, this is universally considered bad form as the original is written in standard modern German. Unfortunately, the habit persists in the musical world.

Yet oddly enough, when Nietzsche's one time close friend, Wagner, does write in Medieval German - what do they do? - They translate him into plain modern English of course!