Volker of Alzey, the Fiddler with the Sword

In the Nibelungenlied, written down around 1200, Volker’s name falls as early as the first adventure, among the best warriors of the Burgundian kings. Only in the second part, though, does he grow into a fighter who is the equal of Hagen of Tronje. He is no ordinary man of war but a minstrel, a videlaere, an artist on the fiddle. When he joins the fighting at the court of King Etzel, the king laments that a man is fighting within who is called Volker, like a wild boar and yet a minstrel, and that his notes strike many a hero dead.

Even Hagen, himself the grimmest of the Burgundians, bows to him. Never, he says, has he seen a fiddler stand so gloriously as Volker did that day, with tunes that ring through helmet and shield rim. In the poem the two keep the famous night watch together: while the others sleep in Etzel’s hall, Volker and Hagen keep guard through the night at the door, the fiddle on the knee and the sword within reach. The thirtieth adventure bears their names, of how Hagen and Volker kept the watch.

The ending is dark, as the whole Nibelungenlied is dark. In Etzel’s burning hall Volker fights at Hagen’s side to the bitter close, until he too falls, struck down by the hand of old Hildebrand. So the minstrel dies with the sword in his fist, and it is precisely this double nature, artist and hero in one man, that made him the figure Alzey bound to itself for ever.

Whether Volker ever really lived, nobody knows. The historical kernel of the Nibelungenlied lies in the Burgundian realm of the fifth century, among whose centres Alzey was counted, yet the poet of around 1200 dressed that distant memory in the courtly world of his own age. And still the bond with Alzey is not spun from nothing. Since the eleventh century a family of castle vassals is documented in the town who bore the name Volker of Alzey and carried a fiddle in their arms.

So poetry and reality became inseparably entwined. Whether the poet named his minstrel after that real family, or whether the family only later adorned itself with the hero of the poem, can no longer be decided today. What remained is the fiddle. It wandered out of the story and into the town’s coat of arms: beneath the crowned Palatine lion, Alzey to this day bears a red fiddle set aslant, and the arms of the district of Alzey-Worms carry the instrument as well.

Thus a stringed instrument became the sign of a whole town. Whoever reads the arms reads two histories at a glance: the lion of the Electoral Palatinate, to which Alzey belonged for centuries, and the fiddle of the minstrel, which gives the town its own unmistakable face. The person behind the name may stay wrapped in mist, but the myth has stayed vividly alive.

Alzey has honoured its hero with a whole series of monuments: two fountains, a carillon, a plaque and two coats of arms. The oldest is the Volker fountain, raised in 1902 in a niche beneath a canopy at the corner of the old inn called the Deutsches Haus. The relief on the front shows Volker and Hagen at the night watch, exactly that scene from the thirtieth adventure of the poem.

A few steps further stands the town hall, a Renaissance building. Between ten in the morning and eight in the evening a carillon sounds every two hours, and in the stair tower a window opens in which the figure of Volker appears with his fiddle. The best known tribute, though, is younger: in 1985 the sculptor Gernot Rumpf created for the Roßmarkt the work that the people of Alzey call Volker’s horse. One might expect an elegant mount for a musical knight, a slender palfrey, yet Rumpf chose a heavy cold-blood, a war horse like a farm nag.

On the left flank hangs the fiddle, on the right the shield with Volker’s name and arms. The squat, sturdy animal invites children above all to climb onto it. Even the basin of the fountain points to the poem, to the legend in which Hagen of Tronje sank the hoard of the Nibelungs in the Rhine. So Volker, half invented, half historical, remains in bronze and chiming bells the faithful guardian of Alzey.