Part 2

"It was once upon a time when King Jörmunrek rode out of the forest from hunting with his men that Swanhild the Queen sat bleaching her hair. Then they rode upon her and trod her to death under the horses' hoofs. And when Gudrun learned this, she egged on her sons to avenge Swanhild. And when they made ready for the journey, she got them mail, and helmets so strong that iron would not take hold upon it. She said the plan for them to follow was that when they came to King Jörmunrek they should fall upon him at night while he slept; Sörli and Hamdir should then hew off his hands and feet, and Erp his head. When, however, they came on the way, they asked Erp what assistance they might have of him if they met King Jörmunrek. He replied that he would give them such aid as the hand gave the foot. They replied that naught at all did the foot depend upon the hand. They were so angry at their mother that she had led them out with words of hatred, that they desired to do that which should be the worst thing of all to her and they killed Erp, since she loved him most. A little while after, as Sörli walked along he slipped with both feet, but held himself up with his hand. Then he said: 'The hand does now help the foot; better it were that Erp were alive!' And when they came to King Jörmunrek's at night, and went in where he slept and hewed off his hands and feet, he awoke and called upon his men and bade them awaken. Then said Hamdir: 'Off were now his head, if Erp were alive!' Then the men-at-arms arose and attacked them, but could not overcome them with weapons. Jörmunrek then called out that stones should be hurled at them, and this was done. Then Sörli and Hamdir fell, and then were dead all the race and descendants of the Gjukings."

The Eddic poems and the "Völsunga Saga" give us even much more fully in detail than does this epitome the deeds of Sigurd's youth of which the "Nibelungenlied" knows so little. The latter, too, has forgotten the early relationship of Sigurd to Brynhild and her whole early history, although her superhuman character is still remembered and obscure reference is made to their previous acquaintance. There is no longer a reason why Siegfried and Brunhild should die together, as in the "Edda." That the ultimate catastrophe falls out differently in the two versions of the story is due to this very fact of the loss of original detail. In that her brothers who had murdered Sigurd live in triumph afterward and no true reconciliation can be possible between them, Kriemhild must of necessity avenge herself upon them, instead of upon Atli, as in the earlier form of the story. And, as has already been remarked, the real significance to the action of the fateful "Ring of the Nibelungs" and the accursed hoard has wholly vanished to give place to reasons that have much more affinity with human motives of conduct.

The "Nibelungenlied," like the Northern poems before it, is legendary, with only here and there a historical fact as a nucleus about which has gathered in the course of the centuries material for many times and places. The destruction of the Burgundians, under their King Gunther, by the Huns, which occurred in the year 437, has undoubtedly furnished the ultimate catastrophe. It is not known, however, that Attila, the Atli of the "Edda" and the Etzel of the "Nibelungenlied," was the leader of the Huns on this occasion, although the event did take place during his lifetime. Attila's brother Bleda appears in the poem as Blœdelin. Giselher, the brother of Gunther, is also mentioned in the old Burgundian law-code, the _Lex Burgundionum_. Of Siegfried and Brunhild history knows no trace, although an attempt has been made to connect the one with Arminius and the other with Brünehild of Austrasia. The appearance in the poem of Dietrich of Bern, Theodoric the Great, the Ostrogothic conqueror of Italy, who lived from 475 to 526, is an example of the absorption of material from another cycle into the original legend, material which, in its turn, clusters about a historical character. The Bishop Pilgrin, of Passau, represented in the poem as the uncle of the Burgundian kings and of Kriemhild, has a historical prototype in an actual Pilgrin who held the see of Passau from 971 to 991 and has, it may be, been here introduced by the poet to honor him. As for the rest, facts that may have been ultimately historical have been freely used by the poet of the "Nibelungenlied" and his predecessors until it is no longer possible to tell where legend begins and history ends.

That Siegfried and Brunhild are at the end mythical, rather than at all historical, has been surmised, rather than proved. It has been attempted, in point of fact, to show that the whole story has arisen in its earliest form through a union of an old myth of Siegfried with the historical materials that have been indicated and others whose real significance has subsequently been obliterated and lost. The believers of this theory have pointed to the thoroughly mythical character of the version of the story in the "Edda" and particularly of its earliest part as plausible evidence, and they would see in the whole the union of a Frankish myth of Siegfried, originally independent, with a Burgundian historical narrative. Siegfried and Brunhild, in this way, have been thought to embody, at the beginning, the nature-myth of the awakening earth-goddess from the sleep of winter at the reanimating touch of summer. Lachmann makes the fundamental fact at the outset a myth of the death of Balder, and Wilhelm Müller a myth of Freyr, both light-gods of the old mythology. It is, nevertheless, impossible to follow the upholders of these theories into the details of their interpretation, and the whole main assumption of a mythical origin is a matter of doubt. That Siegfried and Brunhild, however, have mythical characteristics that they have retained after all memory of the ancient mythology as such has been absolutely forgotten, no reader of the story can deny, and in this respect the "Nibelungenlied" is no different from the legendary literature of all the nations of the world.

Early German poems on the story of the Nibelungs, although it is altogether likely that they once existed, have not been preserved. The "Nibelungenlied" itself it is not possible to follow back of the twelfth century, by the middle of which it seems to have already had the form in which it has come down to us. The internal evidence of metre, rhyme, and language shows, too, beyond a doubt, that it could not have arisen at a much earlier time.

The author of the poem is unknown. The most plausible hypothesis as to his actual personality makes him an Austrian knight of about 1140, possibly a member of the Kürenberg family, who lived in the neighborhood of Linz, on the Danube. A Kürenberg of the twelfth century is the oldest court poet who used in his lyrics the same strophic form that is characteristic of the "Nibelungenlied," but that the two poets are identical is by no manner of means a certainty. In the same way, the place of origin of the poem is a matter of supposition. In all probability, however, it arose in southeastern German territory in Austria. Although the poet knows the region on the Rhine about Worms, he has an infinitely wider acquaintance with Austrian localities of which he makes specific mention. It was in Austria, too, at this time that the beginnings arose of the court lyric poetry, that Minnesangs Frühling, as the Germans strikingly characterize the period, that presently blossomed out into one of the fullest expressions in all its history of German life and thought.

Bartsch, in the introduction to his edition of the "Nibelungenlied," has most admirably summarized this whole matter. According to him, it was an Austrian poet who, before the middle of the twelfth century, united songs sung at his time and oral tradition, known to him as well as to everybody else, into a single whole. How far folk-song and tradition had anticipated him in this is no longer to be ascertained, but it may be inferred from the Northern form of the legend that it had long since taken place. It remained to him, however, to arrange the whole in its details of sequence of action, to fill out the gaps left by popular song and story, and to give it the impress of his own day, which it so unmistakably bears. That this is not in accord with other ideas of authorship and origin must nevertheless be stated. Karl Lachmann, one of the most astute, if not one of the most mistaken, critics of the poem, taking Wolf's Prolegomena to Homer for his model, set up the theory that has since played an important part in the discussion of the genesis of the "Nibelungenlied."

According to the Lachmann theory, the poem consists of no less than twenty distinct lays, each differing inherently from the rest, and each, with the exception of the Eighth and Ninth, by different authors. To arrive at this result, more than a third of the entire number of stanzas has, for one reason or another, been rejected as not genuine. As Lettsom has cleverly put it in the original preface to his translation, where this whole matter is presented with some detail: "He [Lachmann] has in fact put every stanza and every verse on its trial. Some have been condemned by him to italics, as interpolations; others to brackets, as continuations by different hands; others again, which he supposes to be the latest additions, so far from being pitied for their youth, have been visited with both kinds of punishment. He has not, however, sentenced any of the delinquents to transportation from the text; or, perhaps it would be more correct to say that he has sentenced them, but has not carried the sentence into execution. The result of the whole assize has been that out of the 2,316 stanzas 1,437 have been honorably acquitted; the rest have been italicised, bracketed, or both.... The twenty lays," he continues, "which had already suffered from the interpolations and corruptions incident to oral tradition, were first collected, committed to writing, and patched together into one poem about the year 1210 by some unknown compiler, whose handiwork was afterward corrected or depraved by two separate but equally unknown revisers. It is his opinion that scarcely a stanza of what we possess is older than 1190, while even the latest additions are not more recent than 1225. The whole poem, therefore, is, according to Professor Lachmann, the work of contemporary authors, whether we call their compositions spurious or genuine; and the task undertaken is neither more nor less than to distribute a mass of unowned literary property among nineteen or twenty poets and an indefinite number of poetasters, of whom nothing, not even their existence, is known except by conjecture, and of whose distinguishing characteristics we are of course completely ignorant, except as far as we may guess at them from the internal evidence, real or imagined, of the poem itself."

Lachmann's theory of separate authorship of portions of the poem has not maintained itself against the critics. That there are contradictions in its statements and different values in its parts cannot be denied, but they are not explained on the grounds here set forth. The attempted restoration of the poem by elimination and rearrangement has not left twenty or any number of lays that have actually the air of being separate poems. "It is just here," continues Lettsom, "that the failure of the hypothesis is most conspicuous.... Some of the lays are not ill-adapted, from the nature of their contents, to form separate poems, but they are by no means out of place as episodes in a long work, and are, besides, connected with the rest, while the latter, from the insignificance of their contents alone, from their reference to one another, from their allusions to the past and anticipations of the future, from their abrupt commencements and still more abrupt conclusions, and from their general fragmentary nature, could never have been independent lays.... The dream of Kriemhild forms a strange opening for a lay that just brings Siegfried to Worms, and there leaves him. Nobody, in fact, would have composed a separate poem on so insignificant a matter. The dream, however, is beyond all doubt the introduction, the fit and appropriate introduction, to a poem that must go on at least to the marriage of Kriemhild and the death of her husband.

"Professor Lachmann himself seems to be in doubt whether this First Lay be complete; he talks of 'this lay, or what has been preserved of it;' he tells us that 'it several times indicates a continuation, and might have deserved a better than that which follows;' but though he expresses a doubt, he gives no reasons for entertaining one. It certainly would require far less ingenuity to assign cogent reasons for a doubt, and indeed for much more than a doubt, on this point; the lay, as it stands, is a 'passage that leads to nothing,' a mountain in labor that does not produce even so much as a mouse; but it is not singular in this respect; its brethren for the most part keep it in countenance; or, if they contain matter of interest, they too often try the temper of the reader by disappointing his expectations at the most critical moment, and coming to an abrupt conclusion in the midst of an action. Thus the Eighteenth Lay ends just after the battle between Huns and Burgundians has begun; the Nineteenth stops short just at the moment when Etzel has brought up 20,000 fresh men and commenced another attack on Gunther and his followers.

"It really is a waste of words to dwell on the peculiarities of such whimsical arrangements as these. I will merely add a word or two on the Fourteenth Lay, which, inasmuch as it is an introduction to what follows, bears some resemblance to the First. The dream of Uta, the prophecy of the mermaids, and all the gloomy forebodings which give a peculiar character to this lay, are ludicrously out of place as component parts of a short poem, which merely conducts the Burgundians to Rudeger's castle, where, so far from being destroyed, they do not even run any risk whatever, except that of being killed with kindness; but in fact the whole tenor of the lay (one might almost say, every line, every word of it) proves beyond dispute that we are there in the midst of an extensive poem, which can end only with the destruction of the last Burgundian. An attentive examination of the three or four lays just noticed, would, I think, convince every unprejudiced reader that the hypothesis of twenty separate lays by different authors is utterly untenable.... The wisest course," he concludes, and it is easy to concur with him, "is, in such uncertainty, to take the poem as we find it, and to prefer the authority, however occasionally unsatisfactory, of manuscripts to the speculations of the most ingenious critics."

The metre of the "Nibelungenlied" needs a word of explanation. The characteristic strophe in which it is written consists of four verses, the first three of equal length, the fourth somewhat longer, rhymed in couplets on the final syllable. The rhythmical system is dependent, not upon measure, but upon accent, with considerable freedom in the addition or suppression of unaccented syllables. Every verse, with the exception of the last, is made up of two half-verses each containing three accented syllables and separated by a ringing cæsura, that is, a cæsura on an unaccented syllable. The last half-verse contains an additional accent, or four, instead of three, as in the others. A strophe in the original Middle High German, the second of the poem, will make this analysis clear:

Ez wúohs in Búregónden ein vil édel magedî́n, dáz in állen lánden niht schœ́ners móhte sî́n, Kríemhilt gehéizen: diu wart ein schœ́ne wî́p dar úmbe múosen dégene víl verlíesen den lî́p.

The metre of the present translation follows the original, except for the lengthening of the fourth line of the stanza which the author only occasionally differentiates in this respect from the rest.

The "Nibelungenlied," like other poems of the Middle Ages that were widely read and widely copied, was subjected all along its career of transmission to additions and alterations, and has consequently come down to us not in a single form, but in a number of different versions that deviate to a greater or less extent from the original poem and from each other. Whole or in part there are no less than twenty-eight MSS. Ten of these are complete: three of them, usually cited A, B, C, are parchment MSS. of the thirteenth century, two are parchments of the fourteenth century, four are paper MSS. of the fifteenth century, and one is a parchment of the sixteenth century. Of all these manuscripts it is commonly conceded that only A, B, C have independent authenticity. It is not necessary here to go into the details of the long discussion as to the relative value of the MSS. with regard to the age and original condition of the particular text which each contains. Each one has by different critics been given the preference over the others.

Zarncke, who is one of the most rational and impartial of the critics of the poem in all its bearings, makes C, a beautifully written MS. from the dividing line between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, preserved in the court library of Donaueschingen, the nearest in every essential way to the original form of the poem. Subsequently, the whole, according to him, was subjected to a revision which brought it more into accord with contemporary taste. The text is amplified by the introduction of new episodes into the narrative, although some of the older strophes are omitted, and, unfortunately, the old dignity and simplicity of the diction is frequently sacrificed in favor of a more pronounced effect. This stage of the poem in its full form is not represented in either of the oldest MSS. B, a manuscript from the middle of the thirteenth century, in the monastery of St. Gallen, occupied an intermediate position in length. It is made by Bartsch, who regards it "as relatively the most faithful picture of the original form of the lost poem," the basis of his edition of the "Nibelungenlied." A, a carelessly written MS. in the Munich Library, is the shortest form of the poem, but is, nevertheless, in its turn regarded by Lachmann as inherently the oldest and best version that we possess. Lettsom's translation, in that it follows the text and modern German version of Braunfels, published in 1846, is based upon A, but with the inclusion of other strophes, particularly from C.

The "Nibelungenlied" was first published at Zurich, by Bodmer, in 1757, and since then has appeared in many editions and modernized versions at home, and in numerous translations abroad, among them Low German, French, Italian, Dutch, and Hungarian.

In English, the first translations of parts of the "Nibelungenlied" are contained in the "Illustrations of Northern Antiquities," by Weber, published in 1814, in Edinburgh. The version here given consists in part only of a metrical translation, in part of prose. Lockhart, in his biography of Sir Walter Scott, states that he has no doubt but that the rhymed versions came from that poet's pen, although of this there is no more direct proof. The second attempt in this direction is not less notable. This is from 1831, when Thomas Carlyle wrote in the "Westminster Review" an essay on the "Nibelungenlied" as a review of Karl Simrock's German translation of the poem, in which are contained a number of strophes given with characteristic vigor and a genuine appreciation of the real spirit of the original. The next translation, that of Gostik, in his "Spirit of German Poetry," 1846, is metrical, but, like its predecessors, consists only of parts of the poem. The first translation to lay claim to any degree of completeness was that of Jonathan Birch, published in 1848. It is a metrical version, as its title states, of Lachmann's text, and, like it, divides the poem into twenty lays. The first complete edition of the poem in English does not, however, appear until this of Lettsom's, which has admirably retained the form of the original and much of its spirit, and which for the first time gave to English readers an adequate idea of the real work as it is.

For those who care to pursue the subject further than these pages it may be stated that the best editions of the "Nibelungenlied" in the original are those of Friedrich Zarncke, "_Das Nibelungenlied_," originally published in 1856 and since then in several editions, and of Karl Bartsch, "_Das Nibelungenlied_," originally published in 1866, both of which have abundant critical apparatus. The "Nibelungenlied" is not yet sufficiently well known among us, for it is, in the way that has been indicated, not alone the great epic of Germany, but in its widest sense an epic of the Germanic race.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, May 1, 1901.

CONTENTS

FIRST ADVENTURE: PAGE Kriemhild's Dream 1

SECOND ADVENTURE: Of Siegfried 4

THIRD ADVENTURE: How Siegfried Went to Worms 8

FOURTH ADVENTURE: How Siegfried Fought with the Saxons 23

FIFTH ADVENTURE: How Siegfried First Saw Kriemhild 44

SIXTH ADVENTURE: How Gunther Went to Woo Brunhild 53

SEVENTH ADVENTURE: How Gunther Won Brunhild 64

EIGHTH ADVENTURE: How Siegfried Came to the Nibelungers 78

NINTH ADVENTURE: How Siegfried was Sent to Worms 86

TENTH ADVENTURE: How Brunhild was Received at Worms 94

ELEVENTH ADVENTURE: How Siegfried Brought his Wife Home 111

TWELFTH ADVENTURE: How Gunther Invited Siegfried to the Festival 117

THIRTEENTH ADVENTURE: How They Went to the Festival 126

FOURTEENTH ADVENTURE: How the Two Queens Reviled One Another 131

FIFTEENTH ADVENTURE: How Siegfried was Betrayed 141 SIXTEENTH ADVENTURE: How Siegfried was Slain 147

SEVENTEENTH ADVENTURE: How Siegfried was Bewailed and Buried 161

EIGHTEENTH ADVENTURE: How Siegmund Returned Home 173

NINETEENTH ADVENTURE: How the Treasure of the Nibelungers was Brought to Worms 177

TWENTIETH ADVENTURE: How King Etzel Proposed for Kriemhild 185

TWENTY-FIRST ADVENTURE: How Kriemhild Departed 207

TWENTY-SECOND ADVENTURE: How the Huns Received Kriemhild 215

TWENTY-THIRD ADVENTURE: How Kriemhild Thought of Revenging her Injuries 222

TWENTY-FOURTH ADVENTURE: How Werbel and Swemmeline Delivered the Message 228

TWENTY-FIFTH ADVENTURE: How the Lords all Came into Hungary 241

TWENTY-SIXTH ADVENTURE: How Dankwart Slew Gelfrat 254

TWENTY-SEVENTH ADVENTURE: Rudeger's Hospitality 264

TWENTY-EIGHTH ADVENTURE: How Kriemhild Received Hagan 275

TWENTY-NINTH ADVENTURE: How Hagan Refused to Rise to Kriemhild 281

THIRTIETH ADVENTURE: How the Knights Kept Watch 291

THIRTY-FIRST ADVENTURE: How the Knights Went to Church 296

THIRTY-SECOND ADVENTURE: How Blœdel was Slain 309