The Song of Death

The Song of Death is Goldmund’s name for the sound and meaning of mortality as he wanders through the Black Death. It is at once a public catastrophe, encountered in abandoned homes and communities fractured by fear, and a personal summons that he hears as autumnal, intimate, and maternal. The expression gathers the contradictions of his journey: he recognizes the inevitability of death, yet remains drawn toward the vulnerable lives and fleeting pleasures still present around him.

The Plague as Lived Experience

Goldmund and Robert first encounter the epidemic’s social boundaries before they understand them. Armed peasants drive the travelers away from a village, and the next morning an isolated farm offers a terrible explanation: its household has died, leaving the buildings silent and a cow unmilked. Goldmund explores the house and discovers five dead family members. Robert, horrified by the bodies and afraid of contagion, realizes why strangers were being kept out and wants to flee from Goldmund. Goldmund restrains him and insists that they face the danger together rather than leave one another to die alone.

As they continue, the epidemic transforms the landscape and the habits of daily life. Some villages bar strangers while others allow them through; farms are deserted, corpses remain unburied, and livestock wander or starve. Goldmund and Robert milk and feed animals, kill some for food, and take provisions from unattended cellars. This apparent abundance does not make their circumstances easy: Robert remains preoccupied with infection, holds his head and hands in the smoke of their fire as a supposed precaution, and checks his body for signs of illness even while asleep. Goldmund, by contrast, is fascinated and saddened by the devastation, his attention fixed on the many forms of death around him.

The catastrophe also produces abandonment and violence. Goldmund sees parents leave sick children and husbands leave sick wives; looters prey on empty houses, while frightened people avoid one another or seek escape in feverish drinking, dancing, and sexual revelry. Communities blame supposed enemies for the disease, including Jews, the poor, the French, and doctors. In one town Goldmund watches authorities’ violence and a mob burn the ghetto, driving people back into the fire. The Song of Death therefore belongs not just to the fact of dying, but to a world in which fear both exposes vulnerability and becomes a pretext for persecution.

Goldmund’s Response to Mortality

Goldmund does not experience plague as a danger he can master through resistance. He remembers that, when threatened by Viktor and later by hunger and cold, death had seemed something a person could fight; plague is different, a force that must be endured rather than defeated. After leaving Lene behind in the burning hut, he feels little attachment to his own survival. What keeps him moving is curiosity: he watches death at close range and enters the life of the stricken land rather than turning aside from it.

His participation takes many forms. He eats in abandoned houses, joins desperate gatherings, loves women in the plague region, and helps carry or bury the dead in return for food or a small payment. These acts place him among the living and the dead without making him their rescuer or setting him apart as an untouched observer. His goal remains Master Niklaus’s city, but the road is repeatedly lengthened by what he encounters. A hungry young boy stays with him for several days before a peat digger’s wife takes the child in; a stray dog accompanies him for a time, sharing his food and warmth before wandering away. The journey’s governing image is thus not a single encounter, but Goldmund’s sustained attention to lives that are transient and exposed.

The Painted Dance of Death

In a cloister, Goldmund studies a recently painted Dance of Death. Its skeletons lead people of every station—king and bishop, abbot and earl, knight, doctor, peasant, and soldier—while skeletal musicians play. He respects the unknown painter’s work as an effective warning that death comes for everyone, but finds that its meaning is not his own. The fresco presents death as a severe, inescapable end, a lesson proclaimed to its viewers with the force of a sermon.

Goldmund’s experience makes mortality sound different. For him the death song is not only harsh or martial; it is also sweet, seductive, and motherly. Death can appear as a mother and a mistress, and its call as an invitation to come home. The difference does not cancel the painting’s truth: both images confront the same universal ending. Rather, Goldmund’s interpretation joins mortality to the intensification of life as it approaches its limit. The little lamp of life seems to glow more brightly at death’s approach, so that the song can carry grief and attraction together.

Rebekka and the Limits of Consolation

Goldmund’s meeting with Rebekka tests what his intimacy with death means in practice. He finds her grieving outside a town after her father and fourteen other Jews have been burned by order of the authorities. She has escaped and returned, blaming herself for surviving. At her request, Goldmund helps gather her father’s bones from the ashes and bury them in a concealed place in the field. He then offers to protect her, but at first frames that offer through his attraction to her beauty and presses her to come with him.

Rebekka rejects his attempt to turn care into courtship. She condemns the Christians who first help a daughter bury her murdered father and then expect her to belong to them. Her accusation makes visible a distance between Goldmund’s broad meditation on death and the particular injustice she has suffered. He recognizes that his words have failed her, admits that she may be right, and asks forgiveness. Later, when speaking with Narcissus, Goldmund recounts Rebekka’s story in detail and asks whether the world in which such things happen is hell. Narcissus agrees that the world is as Goldmund describes it. The episode gives the Song of Death an ethical edge: its language of a universal summons cannot erase the human responsibility and violence that shape an individual death.