Der monströse Heros oder Wenn der ungeheure Held zum Ungeheuer wird: Zur Rezeptionsgeschichte des Figuren-Typus ‚Drachenkämpfer‘ in der altnordischen und altenglischen Literatur

• Autores: Matthias Teichert
• Localización: Narration and hero: recounting the deeds of heroes in literature and art of the early medieval period / Víctor Millet (ed. lit.), Heike Sahm (ed. lit.), 2014, ISBN 9783110336139, págs. 143-173
• Idioma: alemán
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• Resumen

  • The encounter with and the slaying of a dragon – or some other dragon-like monstrous creature, e.g. a giant serpent, werewolf or sea monster – can be regarded as the heroic deed kat’ exochen. Consequently, it appears as the climax of the fictional biographies of many heroes from Germanic lore (and beyond).Since dragons are imagined as beings of tremendous size, strength, and power it seems consequent from a narrator’s viewpoint to assign ‘dragonish’ traits to the hero in terms of both physical shape and psychological constitution in order to provide equal fighting power. The future dragon-slayer therefore often bears superhu-man and sometimes ‘monstrous’ traits himself even before encountering this oppo-nent. Fighting and slaying the dragon, then, he increasingly adopts the monster’s characteristics and attributes, eventually following in the footsteps of the subdued beast.Based upon research conducted by Klaus von See, Walter Haug, Thomas Klein, Joyce Tally Lionarons, and Michael Koch, this paper sets out to explore both the dragon-slayer’s physical and mental metamorphosis into a dragon and the literary devices employed to mirror this process in epic narrative. The dragon-slayers’ tales considered are those of Beowulf and Sigemund from Old English heroic poetry, and Sigurd, Sigmundr, Sinfjǫtli, Ragnar lodbrok and Thor from Old Norse-Icelandic poetry and prose, the hammer-wielding deity Thor being counted as a ‘semi-heroic’ charac-ter because of the far-reaching structural parallels his encounters with the Midgard Serpent share with the ‘classical’ heroic dragon-slayers’ episodes.The story of Sigurd slaying the lindworm Fáfnir recorded in Edda and Vǫlsunga saga is a prime example of the transformation of a dragon-slayer into a dragon. Sigurd introduces himself to Fáfnir as “beast” (dýr), i.e. non-human, and Fáfnir alludes to Sigurd’s shining eyes, a motif usually associated with serpents and dragons but also often ascribed to superhuman heroes. After killing Fáfnir, Sigurd drinks the dragon’s blood and eats a part of its heart thereby incorporating the monster’s nature into his own self and gaining the ability to understand the language of the birds. Sigurd also takes possession of Fáfnir’s treasure and his helmet of terror. Thenceforward Sigurd is repeatedly referred to by his epithet Fafnirsbane (“Fafnir-killer”). There is a remar-kable reciprocity between the hero Sigurd adopting the dragon’s identity and the dragon being portrayed as ‘heroic’.In Vǫlsunga saga, Sigurd’s father Sigmundr and his half-brother Sinfjǫtli turn into werewolves after Sigmundr has slain a monstrous she-wolf and Sinfjǫlti has killed a venomous snake. Since in Norse lore both snakes and wolves are almost identical in terms of semiotics and cultural significance, father and son can be said to transform into the creature they have vanquished before.In Ragnars saga loðbrókar, the titular hero Ragnar slays a lindworm guarding a princess. In preparation for his monster-fight Ragnar puts on protective clothing ren-dering him invulnerable to the serpent’s poison, i.e. Ragnar equips himself with an artificial snakeskin, a motif resembling the horny skin ascribed to Sigurd-Siegfried in the Old Norwegian Þiðreks saga and the Middle High German Nibelungenlied.The narratives relating Thor’s fight with the Midgard Serpent on the open sea emphasize the physical resemblance of dragon-slayer and dragon insofar as both characters are described with a nearly identical vocabulary centred round the motif of bright eyes symbolizing both heroism and draconitas. As for structure and compo-sition, there are striking analogies between the Sigurd vs. Fáfnir legend and the Thor vs. Midgard Serpent myth.The narrative strategy of identifying the monster-slayer and the monster by assigning common features and terminology to both characters is also detectable in Beowulf where the eponymous hero is partially referred to with the same ‘monstrous’ keywords as his adversaries Grendel, Grendel’s mother and the dragon. The case of Sigemund, who unlike in the German and Norse Volsung tradition acts as a dragon-slayer himself in the Anglo-Saxon epic, is very similar.Next to Sigurd and Sigmundr, Dietrich of Bern is the Germanic hero whose meta-morphosis into a monster is the most elaborate. Associated with a fire breath in medi-eval German and Norse sources, Dietrich in a Faroese ballad actually turns into a dragon, a grotesque visualization of the process that Nietzsche described in “Beyond Good and Evil”: “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby becomes a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.”Finally, the literary text itself may assume ‘monstrous’ traits. This applies to Vǫlsunga saga, Þiðreks saga and Beowulf with their anti-linear, unruly composition and Dionysian, distorted structure. A reoccurring device of narrating the hero’s mon-strous metamorphosis is the use of elements of horror and of the abject, enabling the recipient to dissociate his own human identity from the dragon-slayer’s monstrous superhumanity.