Nibelungenlied vs. Bruni's Florentine History: Agenda in Fiction and Fact

Introduction: Fiction, Nonfiction, and Historical Agenda

The Nibelungenlied and Bruni's History of the Florentine People are, respectively, an unselfconsciously fictional and a self-consciously nonfictional work of historical literature. Both tell tales of nation-founding in completely different genres. However, fiction and nonfiction were not the rigorously divided categories they are in media constructions today. This flexibility between fiction and nonfiction — between history and myth — was true when Bruni authored his early Renaissance chronicle of the city and people of Florence, and when the Nibelungenlied was composed at a date historians of the Austrian and Germanic provinces tenuously assign to the twelfth century. Bruni attempted to create a posture of returning to the ancient historical ideals of apparent objectivity, as embodied by the Greek historian Thucydides and the Roman historian Livy. The Nibelungenlied, with its poetry, makes no such pretense. Yet both works still carry clear ideological agendas, despite their different factual genres.

It is important to note, when placing these works in context, that when a modern reader thinks of "nonfiction," he or she is likely to think of something purely true — a narrative made of verifiable facts. Anything else is fictional or false. Fiction, although it can be based on a kind of truth, is often criticized as mere gossip if it is a thinly disguised memoir. But ancient authors were more apt to play fast and loose with the truth, spinning myths out of real history and using history to tell moral myths about political and ideological conflicts.

Bruni's Humanist Chronicle and Its Roman Genealogy

According to Raphael Falco, Bruni "invented a moral-philosophical-literary continuum between themselves and ancient Roman and Greek civilization, imputing a genealogical relationship where only a voluntary one existed. This suppression of actual cultural continuity in favor of a fabricated continuity with the ancients characterizes the humanists' myth of cultural genealogy, and, for all its distortions, continues to influence our concept of the relationship between cultures."¹ Simply put, by tracing contemporary Florentine history back to the ancients of Rome and employing a self-consciously ancient historical framework, Bruni made his belief clear: that current Florentine governance was wrong and incommensurate with true Roman republican ideals.

The factual, matter-of-fact style of the Italian can be seen as Bruni begins: "the founders of Florence were Romans sent by Lucius Sulla to Faesulae. They were his veterans who had given outstanding service in the civil war as well as in other wars, and he granted them part of the territory of Faesulae in addition to the town itself and its old inhabitants." Thus Bruni traces the beginnings of the city back to the Roman tradition whose style he self-consciously copies. "That is how Sulla's veterans came to Faesulae and divided the fields among themselves. Many of them decided, however, that amidst the security of the Roman Empire it was unnecessary to inhabit an inaccessible hill town. So they left the mountain and began to form settlements along the banks of the Arno and the Mugnone in the plain below. The new city located between these two waterways was at first called Fluentia and its inhabitants Fluentini. The name lasted for some time, it seems, until the city grew and developed. Then, perhaps just through the ordinary process by which words are corrupted, or perhaps because of the wonderfully successful flowering of the city, Fluentia became Florentia." (I.1–3)²

The Nibelungenlied as Mythological Political Critique

Despite its mythical, fictional, poetic structure, the Nibelungenlied has a clear ideological agenda and frames of reference that function as a critique of the feudal society that produced it. To criticize the current state of affairs, it casts its eyes back to a better era — like Bruni — an age when gods walked the earth. The poem evolves with intensity of character, with narrative energy and a structure of rising and falling action, functioning as a myth of morality that explains how the world came to be, much in the manner of a fictional story with interconnected plots.

Conclusion: Both Works as Portraits of Their Age

Some have called Bruni's genealogical and moral approach to history equally "irrational" as the Nibelungenlied, "combining a belief in divine inspiration with a further belief in its transportability." Falco writes that "the logic of Bruni" and his "remarks on the transmigration of divine poetic authority from one generation to the next"³ are more rooted in faith than in verifiable history — faith in a clear ideology. Falco thus invites us to read both works as portraits of how men and women of the era thought about themselves, about history, and about society, rather than as textual reproductions of what actually transpired.