famous as a violinist, playing with great success at various continental capitals. It was to him that in 1803 Beethoven dedicated his famous violin sonata (op. 47) known as the “Kreutzer.” Apart, however, from his fame as a violinist, Kreutzer was also a prolific composer; he wrote twenty-nine operas, many of which were successfully produced, besides nineteen violin concertos and chamber music. He died at Geneva in 1831.
KREUZBURG, a town of Germany, in the Prussian province
of Silesia, on the Stober, 24 m. N.N.E. of Oppeln. Pop. (1905),
10,919. It has an Evangelical and a Roman Catholic church, a
gymnasium and a teacher’s seminary. Here are flour-mills,
distilleries, iron-works, breweries, and manufactories of sugar and
of machinery. Kreuzburg, which became a town in 1252, was
the birthplace of the novelist Gustav Freytag.
KREUZNACH (Creuznach), a town and watering-place of
Germany, in the Prussian Rhine province, situated on the Nahe,
a tributary of the Rhine, 9 m. by rail S. of Bingerbrück. Pop.
(1900), 21,321. It consists of the old town on the right bank
of the river, the new town on the left, and the Bade Insel (bath
island), connected by a fine stone bridge. The town has two
Evangelical and three Roman Catholic churches, a gymnasium,
a commercial school and a hospital. There is a collection of
Roman and medieval antiquities, among which is preserved a
fine Roman mosaic discovered in 1893. On the Bade Insel
is the Kurhaus (1872) and also the chief spring, the Elisabethquelle,
impregnated with iodine and bromine, and prescribed
for scrofulous, bronchial and rheumatic disorders. The chief
industries are marble-polishing and the manufacture of leather,
glass and tobacco. Vines are cultivated on the neighbouring
hills, and there is a trade in wine and corn.
The earliest mention of the springs of Kreuznach occurs in 1478, but it was only in the early part of the 19th century that Dr Prieger, to whom there is a statue in the town, brought them into prominence. Now the annual number of visitors amounts to several thousands. Kreuznach was evidently a Roman town, as the ruins of a Roman fortification, the Heidenmauer, and various antiquities have been found in its immediate neighbourhood. In the 9th century it was known as Cruciniacum, and it had a palace of the Carolingian kings. In 1065 the emperor Henry IV. presented it to the bishopric of Spires; in the 13th century it obtained civic privileges and passed to the counts of Sponheim; in 1416 it became part of the Palatinate. The town was ceded to Prussia in 1814. In 1689 the French reduced the strong castle of Kauzenberg to the ruin which now stands on a hill above Kreuznach.
See Schneegans, Historisch-topographische Beschreibung Kreuznachs und seiner Umgebung (7th ed., 1904); Engelmann, Kreuznach und seine Heilquellen (8th ed., 1890); and Stabel, Das Solbad Kreuznach für Ärzte dargestellt (Kreuznach, 1887).
KRIEGSPIEL (Kriegsspiel), the original German name,
still used to some extent in England, for the War Game (q.v.).
KRIEMHILD (Grîmhild), the heroine of the Nibelungenlied
and wife of the hero Siegfried. The name (from O. H. Ger. grîma,
a mask or helm, and hiltja or hilta, war) means “the masked
warrior woman,” and has been taken to prove her to have been
originally a mythical, daemonic figure, an impersonation of the
powers of darkness and of death. In the north, indeed, the name
Grimhildr continued to have a purely mythical character and
to be applied only to daemonic beings; but in Germany, the
original home of the Nibelungen myth, it certainly lost all trace
of this significance, and in the Nibelungenlied Kriemhild is no
more than a beautiful princess, the daughter of King Dancrât
and Queen Uote, and sister of the Burgundian kings Gunther,
Giselhêr and Gêrnôt, the masters of the Nibelungen hoard. As
she appears in the Nibelungen legend, however, Kriemhild
would seem to have an historical origin, as the wife of Attila,
king of the Huns, as well as sister of the Nibelung kings. According
to Jordanes (c. 49), who takes his information from the contemporary
and trustworthy account of Priscus, Attila died of
a violent hemorrhage at night, as he lay beside a girl named
Ildico (i.e. O. H. Ger. Hildikô). The story got abroad that he
had perished by the hand of a woman in revenge for her relations
slain by him; according to some (e.g. Saxo Poeta and the Quedlinburg
chronicle) it was her father whom she revenged; but
when the treacherous overthrow of the Burgundians by Attila
had become a theme for epic poets, she figured as a Burgundian
princess, and her act as done in revenge for her brothers. Now
the name Hildikô is the diminutive of Hilda or Hild, which again—in
accordance with a custom common enough—may have
been used as an abbreviation of Grîmhild (cf. Hildr for Brynhildr).
It has been suggested (Symons, Heldensage, p. 55) that
when the legend of the overthrow of the Burgundians, which
took place in 437, became attached to that of the death of Attila
(453), Hild, the supposed sister of the Burgundian kings, was
identified with the daemonic Grîmhild, the sister of the mythical
Nibelung brothers, and thus helped the process by which the
Nibelung myth became fused with the historical story of the
fall of the Burgundian kingdom. The older story, according to
which Grîmhild slays her husband Attila in revenge for her
brothers, is preserved in the Norse tradition, though Grîmhild’s
part is played by Gudrun, a change probably due to the fact,
mentioned above, that the name Grîmhild still retained in the
north its sinister significance. The name of Grîmhild is transferred
to Gudrun’s mother, the “wise wife,” a semi-daemonic
figure, who brews the potion that makes Sigurd forget his love
for Brunhild and his plighted troth. In the Nibelungenlied,
however, the primitive supremacy of the blood-tie has given
place to the more modern idea of the supremacy of the passion of
love, and Kriemhild marries Attila (Etzel) in order to compass
the death of her brothers, in revenge for the murder of Siegfried.
Theodor Abeling, who is disposed to reject or minimize the
mythical origins, further suggests a confusion of the story of
Attila’s wife Ildico with that of the murder of Sigimund the
Burgundian by the sons of Chrothildis, wife of Clovis. (See Nibelungenlied.)
See B. Symons, Germanische Heldensage (Strassburg, 1905); F. Zarnke, Das Nibelungenlied, p. ii. (Leipzig, 1875); T. Abeling, Einleitung in das Nibelungenlied (Freiburg-im-Breisgau, 1909). (W. A. P.)
KRILOFF (or Kruilov), IVAN ANDREEVICH (1768–1844), the great national fabulist of Russia, was born on the 14th of February 1768, at Moscow, but his early years were spent at Orenburg and Tver. His father, a distinguished military officer, died in 1779; and young Kriloff was left with no richer patrimony than a chest of old books, to be brought up by the exertions of a heroic mother. In the course of a few years his mother removed to St Petersburg, in the hope of securing a government pension; and there Kriloff obtained a post in the civil service, but he gave it up immediately after his mother’s death in 1788. Already in 1783 he had sold to a bookseller a comedy of his own composition, and by this means had procured for himself the works of Molière, Racine, Boileau; and now, probably under the influence of these writers, he produced Philomela and Cleopatra, which gave him access to the dramatic circle of Knyazhin. Several attempts he made to start a literary magazine met with little success; but, together with his plays, they served to make the author known in society. For about four years (1797–1801) Kriloff lived at the country seats of Prince Sergius Galitzin, and when the prince was appointed military governor of Livonia he accompanied him as official secretary. Of the years which follow his resignation of this post little is known, the common opinion being that he wandered from town to town under the influence of a passion for card-playing. Before long he found his place as a fabulist, the first collection of his Fables, 23 in number, appearing in 1809. From 1812 to 1841 he held a congenial appointment in the Imperial Public Library—first as assistant, and then as head of the Russian books department. He died on the 21st of November 1844. His statue in the Summer Garden is one of the finest monuments in St Petersburg.
Honours were showered upon Kriloff while he yet lived: the Academy of Sciences admitted him a member in 1811, and bestowed upon him its gold medal; in 1838 a great festival was held under imperial sanction to celebrate the jubilee of his first
