The Nibelungenlied

Siegfried

Siegfried arrives at Worms as a prince with no court to call his own, winning Brunhilda for Gunther and Kriemhilda for himself through feats no other knight could attempt. His flaw is a kind of shining carelessness: he treats his invulnerability as a fact to be boasted about rather than a secret to guard, and he cannot imagine that the men who feast beside him might one day want him dead. When Kriemhilda lifts his bloodied head from the floor and finds no sword-dint on his shield, the poem's central question becomes not who killed him but which of his friends allowed it.

Kriemhilda

Kriemhilda begins as the sheltered jewel of the Burgundian court, warned by her mother that dreams of falcons mean sorrow and choosing to marry Siegfried anyway. When she finds his body laid deliberately at her chamber door, her grief curdles into something the poem watches with dread — she knows Hagen's hand before anyone names it, and she never forgets. Her refusal to let Siegmund's men avenge the murder on the spot, because she fears they will be slaughtered, shows a woman already calculating: she will need patience, and she will need allies, and she will need to outlive the men who did this.

Hagen

Hagen of Tronjé is the poem's most unsettling figure because he is not a villain in his own mind: he is a loyal councillor doing what the security of his king requires. He watches Siegfried's wealth and invincibility with the same calculating eye he turns on Brunhilda's humiliation, and when the moment comes he arranges the hunt, the spear, and the body laid at Kriemhilda's door with the efficiency of a man who has thought it all through. His boast that the Nibelung hoard could one day come to Burgundy is the poem's quietest and most terrifying line — it tells you exactly what he is willing to do for his kingdom.

King Gunther

Gunther is a king who wants what he cannot win alone — Brunhilda's hand, which requires feats of strength only Siegfried can perform — and he accepts the help without fully reckoning what it will cost. He is not cruel, but he is weak in the specific way that matters: he lets Hagen do the things he will not do himself, and he lets Siegfried pay for the victories he claims as his own. When Kriemhilda warns Siegmund's men not to attack because Gunther has too many warriors, she is describing the real problem: her brother's power is borrowed, and the men who lend it to him are not gentle.

Etzel

Etzel enters the poem as a widower and a great king, powerful enough that his offer of marriage gives Kriemhilda something she could not otherwise obtain: a kingdom of her own, far from Burgundy, with warriors who answer to her. He is not a villain — the poem treats him with a kind of grave dignity — but he is also not the point. He is the instrument Kriemhilda has been waiting for, and the feast he hosts is the trap she has been setting for years. His tragedy is that he loves her honestly and does not understand, until too late, what she has been planning in his halls.

Brunhilda

Brunhilda is introduced as a queen who will marry only the man who can outdo her in three contests of strength, and she means it: she has killed suitors before. When Siegfried, invisible, defeats her on Gunther's behalf, she is not merely tricked — she is violated in the one arena where she was invincible, and the poem lets her feel the full weight of that. Her later weeping over Siegfried's body, and Hagen's determination to make good her scorn, reveal that she understood the deception long before Kriemhilda exposed it. She is not a villain either; she is the first person in the poem to be wronged, and the wrong never stops echoing.