Part 252

See CANADA: A. D. 1756.

NIAGARA: A. D. 1759. The fort taken by the English.

See CANADA: A. D. 1759 (JULY-AUGUST).

NIAGARA: A. D. 1763. The ambuscade and massacre at Devil's Hole.

See DEVIL'S HOLE.

NIAGARA: A. D. 1764. Sir William Johnson's treaty with the Indians. Cession of the Four Mile Strip' along both banks of the river.

See PONTIAC'S WAR.

NIAGARA: A. D. 1783. Retention of the Fort by Great Britain after peace with the United States.

See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1784-1788.

NIAGARA: A. D. 1796. Surrender of the fort by Great Britain.

See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1794-1795.

NIAGARA: A. D. 1813. Surprise and capture of the fort by the British.

See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1813 (DECEMBER).

NIAGARA: End--------

NIAGARA, OR LUNDY'S LANE, Battle of.

See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1814 (JULY-SEPTEMBER).

NIAGARA FRONTIER: A. D. 1812-1814. The War. Queenstown. Buffalo. Chippewa. Lundy's Lane. Fort Erie.

See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1812 (SEPTEMBER-NOVEMBER); 1813 (DECEMBER); 1814 (JULY-SEPTEMBER).

NIAGARA PEACE MISSION, The.

See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1864 (JULY).

NIAGARA RIVER, Navigated by La Salle (1679).

See CANADA: A. D. 1669-1687.

NIBELUNGEN LIED, The.

"Of the bequests made to us of the [German] Popular Poetry of the time of the Hohenstauffen, by far the most important, in fact the most important literary memorial of any kind, is the epic of between nine and ten thousand lines known as the Nibelungen Lied. The manuscripts which have preserved for us the poem come from about the year 1200. For full a thousand years before that, however, many of the lays from which it was composed had been in existence; some indeed proceed from a still remoter antiquity, sung by primitive minstrels when the Germans were at their wildest, untouched by Christianity or civilization. These lays had been handed down orally, until at length a poet of genius elaborated them and intrusted them to parchment."

_J. K. Hosmer, Short History of German Literature, part 1, chapter 1._

"In the year 1757, the Swiss Professor Bodmer printed an ancient poetical manuscript, under the title of Chriemhilden Rache und die Kluge (Chriemhilde's Revenge, and the Lament); which may be considered as the first of a series, or stream of publications and speculations still rolling on, with increased current, to the present day. … Some fifteen years after Bodmer's publication, which, for the rest, is not celebrated as an editorial feat, one C. H. Müller undertook a Collection of German Poems from the Twelfth, Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries; wherein, among other articles, he reprinted Bodmer's Chriemhilde and Klage, with a highly remarkable addition prefixed to the former, essential indeed to the right understanding of it; and the whole now stood before the world as one Poem, under the name of the Nibelungen Lied, or Lay of the Nibelungen. It has since been ascertained that the Klage is a foreign inferior appendage; at best related only as epilogue to the main work: meanwhile out of this Nibelungen, such as it was, there soon proceeded new inquiries and kindred enterprises. For much as the Poem, in the shape it here bore, was defaced and marred, it failed not to attract observation: to all open-minded lovers of poetry, especially where a strong patriotic feeling existed, the singular antique Nibelungen was an interesting appearance. Johannes Müller, in his famous Swiss History, spoke of it in warm terms: subsequently, August Wilhelm Schlegel, through the medium of the Deutsche Museum, succeeded in awakening something like a universal popular feeling on the subject; and, as a natural consequence, a whole host of Editors and Critics, of deep and of shallow endeavour, whose labours we yet see in progress. The Nibelungen has now been investigated, translated, collated, commented upon, with more or less result, to almost boundless lengths. … Apart from its antiquarian value, and not only as by far the finest monument of old German art; but intrinsically, and as a mere detached composition, this Nibelungen has an excellence that cannot but surprise us. With little preparation, any reader of poetry, even in these days, might find it interesting. It is not without a certain Unity of interest and purport, an internal coherence and completeness; it is a Whole, and some spirit of Music informs it: these are the highest characteristics of a true Poem. Considering farther what intellectual environment we now find it in, it is doubly to be prized and wondered at; for it differs from those Hero-books, as molten or carved metal does from rude agglomerated ore; almost as some Shakspeare from his fellow Dramatist, whose Tamburlaines and Island Princesses, themselves not destitute of merit, first show us clearly in what pure loftiness and loneliness the Hamlets and Tempests reign. The unknown Singer of the Nibelungen, though no Shakspeare, must have had a deep poetic soul; wherein things discontinuous and inanimate shaped themselves together into life, and the Universe with its wondrous purport stood significantly imaged; overarching, as with heavenly firmaments and eternal harmonies, the little scene where men strut and fret their hour, His Poem, unlike so many old and new pretenders to that name, has a basis and organic structure, a beginning, middle and end; there is one great principle and idea set forth in it, round which all its multifarious parts combine in living union. … With an instinctive art, far different from acquired artifice, this Poet of the Nibelungen, working in the same province with his contemporaries of the Heldenbuch [Hero-book] on the same material of tradition, has, in a wonderful degree, possessed himself of what these could only strive after; and with his 'clear feeling of fictitious truth,' avoid as false the errors and monstrous perplexities in which they vainly struggled. {2358} He is of another species than they; in language, in purity and depth of feeling, in fineness of invention, stands quite apart from them.' The language of the Heldenbuch … was a feeble half-articulate child's-speech, the metre nothing better than a miserable doggerel; whereas here in the old Frankish (Oberdeutsch) dialect of the Nibelungen, we have a clear decisive utterance, and in a real system of verse not without essential regularity, great liveliness, and now and then even harmony of rhythm. … No less striking than the verse and language is the quality of the invention manifested here. Of the Fable, or narrative material of the Nibelungen we should say that it had high, almost the highest merit; so daintily yet firmly is it put together; with such felicitous selection of the beautiful, the essential, and no less felicitous rejection of whatever was unbeautiful or even extraneous. The reader is no longer afflicted with that chaotic brood of Fire-drakes, Giants, and malicious turbaned Turks, so fatally rife in the Heldenbuch: all this is swept away, or only hovers in faint shadows afar off; and free field is open for legitimate perennial interests. Yet neither is the Nibelungen without its wonders; for it is poetry and not prose; here too, a supernatural world encompasses the natural, and, though at rare intervals and in calm manner, reveals itself there. … The whole story of the Nibelungen is fateful, mysterious, guided on by unseen influences; yet the actual marvels are few, and done in the far distance; those Dwarfs, and Cloaks of Darkness, and charmed Treasure-caves, are heard of rather than beheld, the tidings of them seem to issue from unknown space. Vain were it to inquire where that Nibelungen-land specially is: its very name is Nebel-land or Nift-land, the land of Darkness, of Invisibility. The 'Nibelungen Heroes' that muster in thousands and tens of thousands, though they march to the Rhine or Danube, and we see their strong limbs and shining armour, we could almost fancy to be children of the air."

_T. Carlyle, The Nibelungen Lied (Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, volume 3)._

"The traditions of German heroic poetry extend over more than 300 years, and are drawn from various German tribes. King Ostrogotha reigned over the Goths about the year 250, and was the contemporary of the emperors Philip and Decius. Ermanaric governed the Ostrogoths about 100 years later, and was a very warlike king, ruling over a large extent of territory. The invasion of the Huns drove him to despair, and he fell by his own hand before the year 374. Soon after the year 400 the Burgundians founded a mighty empire in the most fertile part of the Upper Rhine, where Cæsar had already fought with the Germans, near Spiers, Worms, and Mayence. The Roman Aëtius, who ruled Gaul with the aid of his Hun allies, defeated the Burgundians by means of these barbarians in a terrible battle about the year 437; 20,000 men fell, amongst them their king Gundicarius (Gunther). The Burgundians seemed to be annihilated, and soon after retreated to Savoy. About the same time Attila was king of the Huns and Ostrogoths to the terror of the world. His name is Gothic, the arrangements of his court were Gothic, and he reckoned among his knights Theodomer; the king of the Ostrogoths. The West had just learnt all the terror of this 'Scourge of God,' when news came of his sudden death (453), and in the following year his followers succumbed to the attacks of the Germans (454). Twenty-two years later, Odoacer deposed the last shadow of a Roman emperor; and again, twelve years later, Theodoric led the Ostrogoths into Italy and Odoacer fell by his hand. About the same period the Merovingian Clovis founded the kingdom of the Franks; about the year 530 his sons destroyed the Thuringian empire; and his grandson Theodebert extended his kingdom so far, that, starting from Hungary, he planned an attack on the Byzantine emperor. The Merovingians also offered a successful resistance to the Vikings, who were the terror of the North Sea, and who appeared even at the mouths of the Rhine. From another quarter the Longobards in little more than a century reached Italy, having started from Lüneburg, in the neighbourhood of Brunswick, and their King Alboin took possession of the crown of Italy in 568. These wonderful transferences of power, and this rapid founding of new empires, furnished the historical background of the German hero-legends. The fact that the movement was originally against Rome was forgotten; the migration was treated as a mere incident in the internal history of the German nation. There is no trace of chronology. … Legend adheres to the fact of the enmity between Odoacer and Theodoric, but it really confuses Theodoric with his father Theodomer, transplants him accordingly to Attila's court, and supposes that he was an exile there in hiding from the wrath of Odoacer. Attila becomes the representative of everything connected with the Huns. He is regarded as Ermanaric's and Gunther's enemy, and as having destroyed the Burgundians. These again are confused with a mythical race, the Nibelungen, Siegfried's enemies, and thus arose the great and complicated scheme of the Nibelungen legend. … This Middle High-German Epic is like an old church, in the building of which many architects have successively taken part. … Karl Lachmann attempted the work of restoring the Nibelungen lied and analysing its various elements, and accomplished the task, not indeed faultlessly, yet on the whole correctly. He has pointed out later interpolations, which hide the original sequence of the story, and has divided the narrative which remains after the removal of these accretions into twenty songs, some of which are connected, while others embody isolated incidents of the legend. Some of them, but certainly only a few, may be by the same author. … We recognise in most of these songs such differences in conception, treatment, and style, as point to separate authorship. The whole may have been finished in about twenty years, from 1190-1210. Lachmann's theory has indeed been contested. Many students still believe that the poem, as we have it, was the work of one hand; but on this hypothesis no one has succeeded in explaining the strange contradictions which pervade the work, parts of which show the highest art, while the rest is valueless."

_W. Scherer, History of German Literature, chapters 2 and 5 (volume 1)._

ALSO IN: _B. Taylor, Studies in German Literature, chapter 4._