Bishop Pilgrim and the Nibelungenlied

Pilgrim, born about 920 in Bavaria, became bishop of Passau in 971. He was a scholar, a diplomat, a lover of stories. Under his rule the see of Passau acquired its own chancery, a scriptorium, and pilgrims came from Salzburg, Vienna, Munich to pray in Passau by the relics of St Stephen and St Valentine.

Pilgrims brought stories with them. Above all the tale of Siegfried — the fair hero who married Kriemhild, owned the Nibelung gold, and was betrayed by Hagen — was passed by mouth along the Danube. Pilgrim, who heard it when at evening from his window he saw pilgrims singing on the Danube bank, one day said to his scribe Konrad: «Write down what they sing. Else it is lost.»

Konrad was a Latinist of the scriptorium. He wondered how to bring the German heroic verses to parchment — for church texts were written in Latin, not in the vernacular. Pilgrim decided: «Make two versions. One in Latin for the library. One in German for the people.» Konrad wrote between 974 and 980 both. The Latin version was called «Liber Nibelungorum».

Konrad added one passage of his own to the tale: Bishop Pilgrim received in his palace at Passau King Etzel (Attila) and his wife Kriemhild on their journey from Worms to the Hunnish realm — the turning point in the second part of the Nibelungenlied. It is literary fiction, but it gave Passau a fixed place in the greatest German epic.

Pilgrim died in 991. Konrad shortly after. The Latin Liber Nibelungorum was lost in 1006 in a fire in the Passau palace. But the German version was carried on by pilgrims: to Vienna, to Salzburg, to Worms. Two hundred years later, about 1200, an unknown poet at the Passau court (perhaps commissioned by Bishop Wolfger von Erla) wrote the definitive version of the Nibelungenlied. In it Pilgrim is named in the last part, the Klage.

The three principal manuscripts of the Nibelungenlied (A, B, C, all of the 13th c.) make Passau one of the geographical anchors of the tale. Today Passau is a «Nibelungenstadt»: there is a Nibelungen hall, a Nibelungen bridge across the Danube, and Bishop Pilgrim is to be seen on a gable of the main church, scroll in hand. What he had Konrad write down in 974 still lives — in every edition of the Nibelungenlied, in every Wagner opera, in every film version. A bishop saved a story by bringing it from the spoken to the written. Not bad work for a Bavarian church-prince of the tenth century.