first onslaught of the Huns strikes off the head of Ortlieb, the
son of Etzel and Kriemhild, and who, amid the smoke and
carnage of the burning hall, bids the Burgundians drink blood if
they are thirsty.
Besides Hagen, during the ride into Hunland and in the final fight, another figure comes to the front, that of Volkêr the Fiddler, so far only mentioned as a hero of the Saxon war in Avent. ii. He rides fiddling at the head of the host; he plays to the weary warriors in the intervals of the battle in the court of Etzel’s palace; but he is also expert at performing other music, with “a strong fiddle-bow, mighty and long, like to a sword, exceeding sharp and broad.” He is the type of the medieval knightly minstrel of the age of the Minnesang.
But for all their prowess, after a prolonged struggle (Avent. xxix.-xxxvii.), the Burgundians were at last overwhelmed. Most of the chief figures of heroic saga had come up against them: Attila, Hildebrand, the Ostrogoth Theodoric (Dietrich von Bern). To the last-named even Hagen armed with Siegfried’s sword had to yield (Avent. xxxviii.). Kriemhild came to him as he lay in bonds and demanded the Nibelung treasure. He refused to reveal its hiding-place so long as Gunther, also a prisoner, should live. Gunther was accordingly slain by the queen’s orders and his head was brought to Hagen, who cried out when he saw it that all had been accomplished as he had foretold:
“Now none knows where the hoard is save God and I alone:
That to thee, devil-woman, shall nevermore be known!”
Whereupon Kriemhild slew him with Siegfried’s sword. But Kriemhild was not destined, like Gudrun, to set out on further adventures. Hildebrand, horrified at her deed, sprang forward and cut her to pieces with his sword.
In sorrow now was ended the king’s high holiday,
As ever joy in sorrow ends and must end alway.
To some MSS. of the Nibelungenlied is added a supplementary poem called the Klage or Lament, a sequel of 2160 short-line couplets, describing the lament of the survivors—notably Etzel—over the slain, the burying of the dead, and the carrying of the news to the countries of the Burgundians and others. At the end it is stated that the story was written down, at the command of Bishop Pilgrim of Passau, by a writer named Konrad (Kuonrât) in Latin, and that it had since been sung (getichtet) often in the German tongue.
Sources of the Story.—The origin and nature of the various elements that go to make up the story of the Nibelungenlied have been, and continue to be, the subject of very lively debate. The view at one time most generally accepted was that first propounded by Karl Lachmann in his “Kritik der Sage von den Nibelungen” (Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, Num. 249, 250, 1829, republished in his Zu den Nibelungen . . . Anmerkungen in 1836), namely, that the story was originally a myth of the northern gods, modified into a heroic saga after the introduction of Christianity, and intermingled with historical elements. This view is maintained by Richard von Muth in his Einleitung in das Nibelungenlied (Paderborn, 1877), who thus sums up the result of his critical researches: “The basis of all is an old myth of a beneficent divine being (Siegfried), who conquers daemonic powers (the Nibelungen), but is slain by them (the Burgundians turned Nibelungen); with this myth was connected the destruction of the Burgundian kingdom, ascribed to Attila, between 437 and 453, and later the legend of Attila’s murder by his wife; in this form, after Attila and Theodoric had been associated in it, the legend penetrated, between 555 and 583, to the North, where its second part was developed in detail on the analogy of older sagas, while in Germany a complete change of the old motif took place.” To this theory the objection is raised that it is but a theory; that it is unsupported by any convincing evidence; and that the process which it postulates, that, namely, of the transformation of the gods into heroes by the popular imagination, is contrary to all that we know of the fate of dethroned deities, who are apt to live on in fairy stories in very unheroic guise. So early as 1783 Johannes von Müller of Göttingen had called attention to the historical figures appearing in the Nibelungenlied, identifying Etzel as Attila, Dietrich of Bern as Theodoric of Verona, and the Burgundian kings Gunther, Giselhêr and Gêrnot as the Gundaharius, Gislaharius and Godomar of the Lex Burgundiorum; in 1820 Julius Leichtlen (Neuaufgefundenes Bruchstück des Nibelungenliedes, Freiburg-im-Breisgau) roundly declared that “the Nibelungenlied rests entirely on a historical foundation, and that any other attempt to explain it must fail.” This view was, however, overborne by the great authority of Lachmann, whose theory, in complete harmony with the principles popularized by the brothers Grimm, was accepted and elaborated by a long series of critics. It is only of late years that criticism has tended to revert to the standpoint of Müller and Leichtlen and to recognize in the story of the Nibelungen as a whole a misty and confused tradition of real events and people. Mythical elements it certainly contains; and to those figures which—like Siegfried, Brunhild, Hagen and the “good margrave” Ruedegêr of Bechlâren—cannot be traced definitively to historical originals, a mythical origin is still provisionally ascribed. But criticism is still busy attempting to trace these also to historical originals, and Theodor Abeling (Das Nibelungenlied, 1907) makes out a very plausible case for identifying Siegfried with Segeric, son of the Burgundian king Sigimund, Brunhild with the historical Brunichildis, and Hagen with a certain Hagnericus, who, according to the Life of St Columban, guided the saint (the chaplain of the Nibelungenlied), who had incurred the enmity of Brunichildis, safe to the court of her grandson Theuderich, king of the West Franks.
Herr Abeling’s theory of the sources of the Nibelungen story is one among many; but, as it is one of the latest and not the least ingenious, it deserves mention. That the Icelandic Eddas contain the oldest versions of the legend, though divided and incomplete, is universally admitted. It is equally well established, however, that Iceland could not have been its original home. This Herr Abeling locates among the Franks of what is now southern France, whence the stories spread, from the 6th century onwards, on the one hand across the Rhine into Franconia, on the other hand westwards and northwards, by way of Ireland—at that time in close intercourse with continental Europe—and the northern islands, to Iceland. Hence the two traditions, the German and the Icelandic, of which the latter alone is preserved in something of its primitive form,[1] though primitive elements survive in the Nibelungenlied.
The basis of the story is then, according to this view, historical, not mythical: a medley of Franco-Burgundian historical traditions, overlaid with mythical fancies.[2] The historical nucleus is the overthrow of the Burgundian kingdom of Gundahar by the Huns in 436; and round this there gathered an accretion of other episodes, equally historical in their origin, however distorted, with a naïve disregard of chronological possibility: the murder of Segeric (c. 525), the murder of Sigimund by the sons of Chrothildis, wife of Clovis (identified by Abeling with Kriemhild), the murder of Attila by his Burgundian wife Ildico (see Kriemhild). In the Eddas the identity of the original Franco-Burgundian sagas is fairly preserved. In the Nibelungenlied, on the other hand, the influence of other wholly unconnected stories is felt: thus Hildebrand appears during the final fight at Etzel’s court, and Theodoric the Great (Dietrich von Bern; see Theodoric), for no better reason than that the Dietrich legend had sent him into exile there, and that he must have been there when the Burgundians arrived.
Origin of the Poem.—The controversy as to the underlying elements of the Nibelung legend extends to the question of the authorship and construction of the poem itself. Was it from the first—whatever additions and interpolations may have
- ↑ The Eddas were first written down, as is commonly assumed, by Bishop Saemund Sigfusson (1056–1133).
- ↑ The process of this overlaying is easy to realize if we remember how usual it was to transfer characteristics and episodes drawn from immemorial folk-lore to successive historical personages. A good example is the “Swan-maiden” myth connected with the house of Bouillon (see Lohengrin). See also other interesting cases cited in the chapter on the “Geste of John de Courci” in Mr J. H. Round’s Peerage and Pedigree (London, 1910).
