BRUNHILD, BUGS BUNNY

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When I read the word “god,” I often picture Bugs Bunny. No other figure comes as close to divinity: omnipotent, Bugs seems to know the end as soon as the story begins; all-powerful, Bugs avoids death, causes death, dies then comes back to life. A costume change happens imperceptibly. Just as sudden: how did he materialize that weapon? Trickster God, God of Revelry, Narrator of His Own Resurrection. 

The world of Bugs Bunny—one which he seems to create just as it is created for him—tends toward amorality. One way of examining Looney Tunes is the threshold by which violence becomes either entertaining or repulsive (especially when compared to studios that, early on, innovated styles of animation; think Walt Disney). The veneer of comedy depends on the length of silence: how long do we pause after Elmer Fudd is shot in the face, how long until the smoke clears to reveal he is merely stunned rather than fatally wounded?   

To this casual viewer, the worst episodes of Looney Tunes and its off-shoots are those in which the animation colludes with the story to create a knowing artifice: the viewer, not Bugs, anticipates the punches and bruises as soon as our short begins. Violence will happen. An antagonistic figure may even die—though if the fatal anvil drops, the figure will almost certainly return (resurrected or as a cartoon ghost). We must be suspended in a certainty that, no matter what happens, pain is and will continue to be entertaining. Death, for the toons, cannot quite be devastating so long as their exaggerated grief is temporary. We can laugh as soon as the unbroken arc of tears stops dribbling from the puffy face of Sylvester the Cat.      

Yet the acknowledgement of a formula is just as important for determining the relationship between characters; small inflections in that relationship make the episode thrilling to watch. The road runner will escape the coyote; you know this. Marvin the Martian, in his futuristic Roman garb, will try to destroy Earth (which blocks his view of Venus); the alien will fail. Elmer Fudd will hunt for Bugs Bunny during wabbit season and will often come close to ensnaring the elusive bunny. You know how this ends. There must always be a failure. The knowledge feels surprisingly new as soon as we get there, to the end, because the process of each short will be different. 

“What’s Opera, Doc?” (1957) is a famous example of the Bugs-Fudd formula: Bugs anticipates the shape of the story; Fudd too may be aware of his impending failure, but part of the joke must be that Elmer is witless, too suburban to outsmart a trickster god. Bugs, voiced by Mel Blanc, and Fudd, voiced by Arthur Q. Bryan, exaggerate their familiar dynamic. They perform themselves in new roles to suit the opera’s narrative: Siegfried’s rescue of an enchanted Brünnhilde overlays Fudd’s murderous pursuit of Bugs. Their performance is a selection of work from Richard Wagner, more than a half-dozen operas—though the episode most notably draws from Die Walküre, which premiered in 1870, the second section of Der Ring des Nibelungen. Wagner sourced the narrative of his operatic cycle in part from the Nibelungenlied, an epic poem written in Middle High German, composed around the start of the thirteenth century. The epic tells the story of Kriemhild and Siegfried, their courtship and marriage; the betrayal and murder of Siegfried by Kriemhild’s family; then Kriemhild’s remarriage and revenge against her family—ultimately the destruction of the Nibelungs.

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When Tanja and I first started spending part of each year in her hometown, a village in the Black Forest, I asked her for a syllabus of German literature: everything she read in high school, at least. I wanted to anticipate the kind of learning our daughter, Lola, would experience if we were to permanently settle there. Let’s start at the beginning, I thought. It felt thrilling to commit myself to a literature over which I had no personal claim, except for what our daughter might come to love. There was a practical concern: my daughter understands a language with greater fluency than I do, and so the verbal shape of her emotions might, I fear, seem at times illegible to me. An ongoing act of translation happens silently. Though committing myself to this kind of schoolboy project also became a way to imagine her life: between countries, maybe, across national identities. Not to create expectations for her life before she can create them for herself—because I did not read poetry, even consider its existence, as a child. I watched hours of Looney Tunes; I hold “What’s Opera, Doc?” in my mind as I read the Nibelungenlied. 

A foundational epic can work to delimit national identity. Mikhail Bakhtin famously notes in “Epic and Novel” how “the epic past, walled off from all subsequent times by an impenetrable boundary, is preserved and revealed only in the form of national tradition. The epic relies entirely on this tradition.”. Bakhtin’s “absolute past” is a finished boundary, isolated from personal experience. The reader is not Aeneas any more than the viewer is Bugs Bunny. The manuscript of the Nibelungenlied was rediscovered in the eighteenth century, after nearly three centuries of obscurity; the Nibelungenlied, upon rediscovery,was promoted as the German national epic. Of thirty-seven extant manuscripts of the poem (including poem fragments) dated between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, three are considered primary manuscripts: Manuscript A, in Munich; Manuscript B, in the St. Gallen Library; Manuscript C, the oldest of the three, now in Karlsruhe. 

In a lineage of German Romanticism, Wagner hoped that his more expansive version of the lore—also based on Norse legend—would unify a German national identity. Wagner structured his operatic cycle on the festival dramas of ancient Greece. In “The Art-Work of the Future” (1849), he writes, “The Folk will thus fulfil its mission of redemption, the while it satisfies itself and at like time rescues its own foes. Its procedure will be governed by the instinctive laws of Nature; with the Necessity of elemental forces, will it destroy the bad coherence that alone makes out the conditions of Un-nature’s rule.” To witness the performance of a tragedy synthesizes, in Wagner’s terms, the political sensibility of a people—writing elsewhere in the same year, “It is for Art therefore, and Art above all else, to teach this social impulse its noblest meaning, and guide it toward its true direction.” Wagner later imagined this communal process occurring at the Bayreuth Festival, where Der Ring first premiered as a cycle in 1876, and where, in later years, Adolf Hitler was welcomed as an honored guest. The Third Reich embraced Siegfried as their national symbol: a hero betrayed by the court to whom he had selflessly given himself, for the sake of romance. Nibelungentreue (“Nibelung loyalty”), a slogan first used in 1909 to emphasize the loyalty between Germany and Austria-Hungry, describes an undying commitment to a cause or person, a shared national solidarity. Jan Vermeiren’s study The First World War and German National Identity (2016) accounts for how Franz Von Liszt, a member of the Reichstag and a Professor of Law at the University of Berlin, manipulated the term away from association with the epic itself. This would force the propaganda machine to acknowledge its disastrous end, the slaughter of the Nibelungs. 

To be clear: Der Ring and the Nibelungenlied are very different texts in structure and in their relationship to national identity. Brunhild of the epic is a comparably insignificant figure to that of Wagner’s cycle, Brünnhilde. Kriemhild does not exist in Der Ring. Yet I cannot write about Bugs Bunny, my sense of his formal omnipotence as a character, without making a leap here. What Bugs performs for us—and, in a different way, for Elmer Fudd, because the internal machination of their awareness is notably different—is Wagner’s opera. The episode makes no reference to the epic as distinct from the opera cycle, and the epic is not key to understanding the animated short. Yet the Nibelungenlied stays in my mind, as I think about what our daughter might learn and love,underneath the obvious allusion to the Nibelungs. The Looney Tunes franchise began in 1930, though many of the characters appeared with their recognizable design in the mid-forties. Since then, as the characters move from environ to specific place, as the animation reinterprets the production of art—see “The Rabbit of Seville” (1950)—a subterranean history stages their violence. Remember, the length of silence after a gag determines whether the punch is funny; if the animation pauses for a moment too long, the misdirection turns viscerally serious. The final sequence of the Nibelungenlied parallels in bloodiness Odysseus’s return to Ithaca. 

“What’s Opera, Doc?” ends with Bugs Bunny dead—or performing his death. After manipulating a storm through the mountains where Bugs has fled, Fudd discovers a limp rabbit—no costume, this time—sprawled over a rock, a flower halved at the stem dripping rainwater on his head. “What have I done? I’ve killed the wabbit. Poor Wittle Bunny, Poor Wittle Rabbit.” Fudd carries Bugs up a sunlit staircase as the rabbit picks up his head and speaks to us: “Well, what did you expect in an opera? A happy ending?” 

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That was the ending—what did you expect?—so here is the beginning. The shadow of a titanic figure, its torso as long as the cliff against which it is projected: horned helmet, hands of a conductor who controls the weather. The clouds part to a purple sky, purple parts to blue. The camera pans down in intervals with the music: the figure is tiny, making himself larger on the cliff by the light behind him, reveling in his size. Elmer Fudd sings: “be vewwy quiet. I’m hunting wabbits.” A horn plays the famous melody of “Ride of the Valkyries” from Die Walküre. Wabbit Trax: Kill the Wabbit, Kill the Wabbit, Kill the Wabbit. 

After hearing Fudd’s song, Bugs Bunny pops halfway out of his hole. He is unadorned, still the archetype of Bugs who might appear anywhere, with any kind of power. He has not yet joined the opera. The threat needs to exist first, even though Bugs knows how this will end. “Oh, mighty warrior of great fighting stock, might I inquire to asking: what’s up, Doc?” Throughout the short, the character of Bugs signals to us a formal awareness of the performance itself—though unlike other shorts, we are not positioned before a visible audience, and no audience is shown on screen. We exist internal to the opera, which is significant given how Fudd does not share the same formal awareness. In the Looney Tunes world, is it so unlikely that the dimwitted Fudd could start singing, could control the weather with his rage, and suddenly believe he is Siegfried? We know the rules, and so long as the relationship between characters follows their formula, we can trust a more-than-zany logic. 

In Anvils, Mallets & Dynamite: the Unauthorized Biography of Looney Tunes (2021), Jaime Weinman notes how “cartoon violence carries the slightly antisocial message that the most horrifying things imaginable are funny if they happen to someone else.” Looney Tunes shorts are memorable partly because they exaggerate this dynamic, and the “antisocial message,” in the history of these production studios, is starkly positioned against the moralism of Walt Disney Animation. Weinman writes of Bob Clampett, one of the lead Looney Tunes directors and animators, “Of course, Clampett isn’t just saying that violence is funny. The war is funny. Air-raid readiness is funny. Childish innocence is a lie, and so are friendship and compassion. The Warner Bros. attitude is that Disney has been lying to you.” This seems more a money race in the early days of animation than moral prerogative—though who can forget Adorno and Horkheimer’s admonition, in “The Culture Industry” (1947), to prioritize the viewership of Betty Boop: “Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate victim in real life receive their beatings so that the spectators can accustom themselves to theirs.” The formula quietly embeds itself in the moral sensibilities of our passive American audience. 

Weinman writes of the Bugs-Fudd formula, “He wants to drive Elmer mad in a systematic way. This is something new: the screwball as strategist.” When Bugs first appears in “What’s Opera, Doc?” he decides to participate in Fudd’s performance only after hearing the Valkyrie cry of “Kill the Wabbit.” He is stunned, or he performs for us a stunned affect: gloved-hand-to-chest incredulous, Bugs echoes Fudd’s chant as a question, looks at the camera, pleads with us to help. Is his fear real? He does not need our help, and we cannot help him. After Fudd displays the power of his magic helmet, Bugs flees into the forest and transforms into Brünnhilde. Fudd stands frozen, enraptured by the image of Bugs-Brünnhilde posing on top of a stocky white stallion, garlanded, charging downhill towards the singer. This is a familiar dynamic: Bugs, often costumed in drag, seduces Fudd and thereby distracts him from his hunt. This, too, becomes the first moment in which Bugs embraces the performance narrative that Fudd seemingly believes is real. Only after Bugs’s costume wig falls off, as it must fall off, does our hunter-singer reactivate his murderous pursuit (paralleling his deluded, hypnotic pursuit of courtly Romance). “I’ll kill the wabbit.” 

When Bugs, finally, turns his head to the audience to ask “what did you expect,” he signals that his participation in Fudd’s performance could only end one way—and that he, all-knowing manipulator, allowed this ending to happen to him. Like Bugs after her, Kriemhild knows the end of the story from the very first section of the Nibelungenlied: a dream-prophecy. Like Agamemnon before her, Kriemhild cannot quite accept the terms of a prophecy. What stories will our daughter be told, and which of them will she remember when she exceeds childhood? Which of these stories will shape her temperament, her relationship to language and storytelling? Will she read the Nibelungenlied in English or in German; will she read it at all? With these questions (and Bugs Bunny) lodged in my head, I began to translate the poem for her, something I can read to her later in life. Here, then, is the first episode of the Nibelungenlied (Manuscript B, edited by Ursula Schulze), in which the prophecy first appears: 

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KRIEMHILD’S DREAM

In ancient tales we’ve heard the wonders
Of heroes celebrated for mighty struggles, 
Pleasures, festivals, weeping and wailing, 
Bold warriors fighting—

Now you can hear the song of these wonders. 

In Burgundy a noblewoman grew up,
None more beautiful there or anywhere else. 
Her name was Kriemhild. She became a woman,
Beauty for which many knights would die.  

Watched over by three kings, noble and rich— 
Gunther and Gernot, famed warriors, 
And young Giselher, excellent knight—
She was their sister. She lived in the care

Of this generous nobility their bravery,     
The strength of three unmatched warriors. 
Their country was Burgundy 
Though later they wrought 
Wonders from Etzel’s land.

They ruled in Worms beside the Rhine
And were served by the knights of their country
Until the end of their lives. They died
Miserably between the hatred of two noble ladies. 

The queen their mother was named Uote; 
Their father Dancrat, who bequeathed them 
Land and property, had earned 
Fame as a brave knight in his younger years.  

As I’ve already said these three kings
Were always ready for a fight, aided 
By the best warriors whose deeds were also 
Valiant in tough battles. There was 

Hagen of Troneck and his plucky brother 
Dancwart, Ortwin of Metz, the margraves
Gere and Eckwart, and Volker of Alzei

(Yet another man of unmatched courage).  
Rumolt, Lord of Kitchen, excellent knight, 
And the Lords Sindholt and Hunolt, all vassals 
Of the three kings, maintained the court.
There were many other warriors
Whom I cannot name, still  

Dancwart was stall-marshal, and his kin
Ortwin of Metz was royal steward; Sindolt,
Cupbearer, and Hunolt was Chamberlain; 
These men served the honor of the court. 

Nobody can tell you everything about the court: 
The extent of its power, its provincial reach, 
Or the honor and chivalry that gratified
These lords throughout their lives. 

Beside such greatness Kriemhild dreamed
She reared a falcon—strong, beautiful, wild—
When two eagles attacked her bird; forced
To watch, she felt no greater suffering
Could shake her in this world. 

She told the dream to mother Uote 
Who could provide her daughter with no better
Interpretation than this: “The falcon you raise 
Is a nobleman. Without God’s protection

He will be taken from you.”

“Mother, why do you talk to me of a man? 
I plan to abstain my whole life from the love
Of a warrior. I intend to stay beautiful
Until I die, never gnarled by love.”

 “Don’t renounce it so firmly,” mother answered,
“If you’re ever to feel true happiness
In this world, it will come from the love of a man.  
If God provides you with a worthy knight 

You will grow into a beautiful woman.” Kriemhild
Then: “Please do not continue, my lady. 
So many women have suffered for love—
There are examples—so I’ll avoid both

Suffering and love, and nothing
Bad will ever happen to me. 

Privately, to her mind, Kriemhild resigned
And lived a while without meeting 
Anyone she may have otherwise loved. 
Later a time came when she would wed

A brave warrior, the falcon that appeared 
In the dream interpreted by her mother. 
Terrible, the revenge she’d inflict on 
Her closest family, those who later slayed

This man. For his death 
Many sons of mothers had to die.   

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I continue to feel like working on this translation is a way for me to tell my daughter a story: in my language, from her history. I cross the invisible divide. This first section (or “Âventiure”) of the epic suggests the stories that will later unfold—the various figures, the central themes—by way of retroactive anticipation: from the future, after the events of these stories, “There were many other warriors / Whom I cannot name” and “Nobody can tell you everything about the court.” The history is distant from even the present telling of the poem. At the same time: the character of Kriemhild is asked to imagine the future, the certainty of interpretation, and refuses to do so. She rejects an inevitable knowledge of the future by choosing abstinence; from the present, we are told this knowledge of the past is limited.  

What I exclude in my translation of the poem is a pattern of end-rhymes. What else do you notice from the first quatrain of the text in Middle High German? 

Uns ist in alten mæren      wunders vil geseit 

von helden lobebæren,      von grôzer arebeit,

von fröuden, hôchgezîten,      von weinen und von klagen,

von küener recken strîten      muget ir nu wunder hœren sagen. 

Allow me a brief technical explanation for thinking about this translation. This stanza is called the “Nibelungenstrophe” and, according to the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetics, predates the composition of the Nibelungenlied. The caesura divides two hemistichs, “according to which hemistichs 1 to 7 contain three stresses each, and the eight 4; further 1, 3, 5, and 7 as a rule show feminine and 2, 4, 6, and 8 masculine endings.” The stanza patterns a certain number of inflected syllables per hemistich, working with the endings of each half-line, then accentuated end-rhyme and the occasional caesura rhyme. Another explanation I reference comes from The Oxford Companion to German Literature: “composed of four long lines (Langzeilen), which rhyme in pairs (aabb); each ‘Langzeile’ is divided into two short sections (Kurzzeilen, of which the first has a ‘feminine’, the second a ‘masculine’ ending. The last ‘Kurzzeile’ is usually extended.” So the last half-line of each strophe tends to carry extra syllables than the previous lines. I have tried to manage the rhythmic expanse by simultaneously addressing pace. Ray M. Wakefield, in his 1976 study Nibelungen Prosody, argues against “performance-oriented prosody” by way of Northrop Frye in English and Andreas Heusler in German. He challenges, in other words, the idea that a four-beat line naturally guides German verse (similar to how blank verse has been ineffectively used to describe the natural cadence of English speech). Using data analysis to study the number of syllables across a line throughout Codex B, Wakefield argues that two rhythmic patterns operate against and within each other: “the Nibelungen stanza…provides for both short and long actualizations of the metrical halfline.” From all of these descriptions, it’s clear that the half-line—especially the syllable that precedes the caesura—provides a generative tension with the full line. Each stanza is end-stopped, moderate and self-contained. What to do in English, then? To standardize a blank-verse line does not seem to replicate the rhythmic motion of the original. This needs to be faster in our English idiom: the line needs to harness a rhythmically pleasing movement that creates a tension with the narrative. Pleasure will come from a pattern established then modified internal to the line, as the stanza organizes syntax by way of narrative structure. My stepped couplets and interstanza lines act as formal hinges. Harder still to capture from the original is the tedium expressed in the language, the sense that—yes, we get it, “as I’ve already said,” these are knights with mighty struggles.

William Gass, describing the thrilling challenges of translating Rilke, reflects, “What we get when we’re done is a reading, a reading enriched by the process of arriving at it, and therefore, really, only the farewells to a long conversation.” This is one reason for including a translation here, in the context of this essay—which is itself a process of holding in my mind Bugs Bunny and the Nibelungenlied. Another reason is to get the words on the page. We hear an echo of antiquity within familiar speech. The artifice of courtly Romance tenses itself against the present. The translation performs for the text, just as the reader performs the translation; its defamiliarization then asks for our return to this multi-layered site of creation. A similar process happens when watching the seven minutes of “What’s Opera, Doc?”  

Nearly a thousand years after their composition, these verses give, in my mind, a renewed political context to Bugs Bunny. I watch the short and leap to the poem, the way it resonates throughout German history. The epic itself is connected to the earlier migration of Germanic tribes in the fifth and sixth centuries, preserved in oral tradition. How does one carefully parse the palimpsest: does experiencing the poem today require first working through that history, including its continued utility for German nationalists? Édouard Glissant, speaking about the epic with Derek Walcott at Poets House in 1991, relevantly explains: 

Speaking of Western cultures, the greatest epics are based not on victory but on defeat, or on trickery. The Greek epic turned on trickery, not on victory. La Chanson de Roland is a defeat. They were defeated by the Arabs and they made an epic poem of it. The sagas, the Icelandic sagas, are always recounting death and destruction and defeat. That is why I said that epic is fundamentally errantry and not dogmatism. I can’t imagine epic as victory. And think about the Civil War in the States. Who created the epic from this war? The vanquished, the people from the South. Real epic like Faulkner or false epic like Gone With the Wind. The people who won the war didn’t need the epic, because they won.

Ideological utility succeeds by failing itself. Siegfried of the Nibelungenlied is tricked by Hagen during a hunt, then killed: literally stabbed in the back, the one vulnerable sliver of his body. Elmer Fudd will always be tricked by Bugs Bunny, and in “What’s Opera, Doc?” the trick depends on Bugs choosing to engage in the performance. Everyone in Looney Tunes is always failing—even the franchise itself—because the formula depends on it. Wile E. Coyote will never capture Roadrunner, and if he does, something has gone very wrong. To engage with “What’s Opera, Doc?” in this way reminds me of generative failure: how to make these pieces cohere, if that is possible; how to annotate the nationalism embedded in a silly phrase; the impossibility of imagining the stories our daughter will remember. “What’s Opera, Doc?” is considered by many animation scholars to be one of the greatest of its kind, the first animated short to be included in the National Film Registry through the Library of Congress. The short neither embraces nor ignores, formally speaking, the nationalist undertones of the source text. Yet the formal awareness Bugs Bunny shows internal to the performance—combined with the absence of a seated audience on-screen—suggests to me an anarchic relationship to the material and its various sources. If Donald Duck placates his Western public, as Adorno and Horkheimer point out, Bugs Bunny provides a different model for engagement: to participate in the performance, to translate into our contemporary idiom, you also choose to participate in a multidirectional history.  

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The symbolic power of Kriemhild’s falcon—both her child and her lover—asks for her interpretation, an authority she grants to her mother, Queen Uote. Kriemhild chooses abstinence: from betrothal and its political implications, though also from figurative intelligence. To acknowledge that her dream might in fact suggest a future reality would also position Kriemhild to think about the power of symbols. Easier, instead, to simply denounce the legitimacy of the symbol with a committed abstinence.

The nationalist symbols contrived through the Nibelungenlied continue today in far-right German politics. The Kampf der Nibelungen, for example, hosts neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups in a popular mixed martial arts competition—a literal training in violence. Al Jazeera reported in 2020 that “a very long list of racist attacks comes out of the network of Kampf der Nibelungen.” The event, which began in 2013, was initially organized to take place underground; by 2019, the event had become so popular that it was banned by German authorities. Al Jazeera also reported that “the last Kampf der Nibelungen event in October 2018 attracted 850 fights and spectators from across Europe.” Since this article was published, replacement events have been created with other alt-right groups from across western Europe. 

I have chosen to write about “What’s Opera, Doc?” because it enacts the kind of association these symbols demand from the public, certainly those who might not otherwise pay attention. It feels partly ridiculous to think about how Bugs Bunny acts as this sort of demonstrator, though along with Donald Duck and Betty Boop, the rabbit is lodged in the American cultural imagination. Of course, Bugs and his ilk are not always as functional as I have noticed in this particular short. Neither is the formula static across the several decades during which these cartoons have been made. Daffy Duck most famously has two distinct characterizations: 1) the anti-hero counterpart to Bugs who must always prove his heroism and 2) the lunatic bird hellbent on chaos. 

Popular across several generations due, in part, to those long Nike commercials called Space Jam (1996) and Space Jam 2: A New Legacy (2021), the Looney Tunes enter and exit worlds while preserving the logic of their own. A scene from Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003)—a failed attempt to resist the Nike commercialization of the franchise—features Elmer Fudd chasing both Bugs and Daffy through the Louvre. By through, I mean within the paintings: by entering each artwork, the animation changes to fit style and context. The characters enter Dali’s The Persistence of Memory (1931),and their movement begins to slow, limbs elongating enough to droop like the infamous clocks. Daffy: “Well, this is surreal.” Next: The Scream (1893), in which Bugs stomps on Fudd’s barreled boot, and in pain, the hunter imitates the famous bug-eyed expression. Last: A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884) by Georges Seurat, a pointillist Fudd threatening, “Oh, I’m going to blast ya.” Outside the painting, in the three-dimensional world, Fudd keeps his pointillist form, and before blowing the particles of the character away with a handheld fan, Bugs explains, “Pointillism: a technique of using individual dots of pigment which, taken together, make an image. I think when you go to the movies you should learn something.” 

In paying attention to the figurative capacities of ordinary language, we behave similarly, accommodating style (or formal context) while adapting a symbol to the present. Our sense of language preserves itself under the literal, which becomes a means for communicating association(s). When Lola cries something in German, I understand the feeling before I understand the words which shape that feeling. When Kriemhild, in the Nibelungenlied, is told by an attendant of a slayed knight brought to her doorstep, she immediately knew it was Siegfried. First speechless, then she shrieks with such intensity it shakes the hall. The knowledge she felt viscerally before confirmation: she knew how this would end as soon as the story began. 

Works Cited

Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, University of Texas Press, 1981. 

Colborne, Michael. “‘The Far Right Is Training and Professionalising Their Violence.’” Al Jazeera, 9 Oct. 2020, www.aljazeera.com/features/2020/10/9/far-right-combat-sports-a-dangerous-training-ground-for-violence.

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noeri. Translated by Edmund Jephcott, Stanford University Press, 2020. 

Garlard, Henry and Mary Garland. “Nibelungenstrophe.” The Oxford Companion to German Literature. Third Edition, Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 625.

Gass, William H. Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problem of Translation. Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. 

Glissant, Édouard, and Derek Walcott. “In Conversation About the Epic.” Poets House, 16 Oct. 2018, poetshouse.org/from-the-archive-edouard-glissant-derek-walcott-in-conversation/.

Goldsmith, U.K. and E.R. Haymes. “Nibelungenstrophe.” The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics, edited by Roland Green et al., Fourth Edition, Princeton University Press, 2012, pp. 945. 

Maltese, Michael, et al. What’s Opera, Doc? Warner Bros., 1957. 

Schulze, Ursula, editor. Das Nibelungenlied: Mittelhochdeutsch/Neuhochdeutsch. Translated by Siegfried Grosse, Reclam, Philipp, 2011.

Vermeiren, Jan. The First World War and German National Identity: The Dual Alliance at War. Cambridge University Press, 2016. 

Wagner, Richard. The Art-Work of the Future and Other Works. Translated by W. Ashton Ellis, University of Nebraska Press, 1993.

Wakefield, Ray M. Nibelungen Prosody. Mouton, 1976.