Page:EB1911 - Volume 13.djvu/231

 and their capital Deraiya in Nejd taken by Ibrahim Pasha in 1817. Hejaz remained in Egyptian occupation until 1845, when its administration was taken over directly by Constantinople, and it was constituted a vilayet under a vali or governor-general. The population is estimated at 300,000, about half of which are inhabitants of the towns and the remainder Bedouin, leading a nomad or pastoral life. The principal tribes are the Sherarat, Beni Atiya and Huwetat in the north; the Juhena between Yambu’ and Medina, and the various sections of the Harb throughout the centre and south; the Ateba also touch the Mecca border on the south-east. All these tribes receive surra or money payments of large amount from the Turkish government to ensure the safe conduct of the annual pilgrimage, otherwise they are practically independent of the Turkish administration, which is limited to the large towns and garrisons. The troops occupying these latter belong to the 16th (Hejaz) division of the Turkish army.

The difficulties of communication with his Arabian provinces, and of relieving or reinforcing the garrisons there, induced the sultan Abdul Hamid in 1900 to undertake the construction of a railway directly connecting the Hejaz cities with Damascus without the necessity of leaving

Turkish territory at any point, as hitherto required by the Suez Canal. Actual construction was begun in May 1901 and on the 1st of September 1904 the section Damascus-Maʽan (285 m.) was officially opened. The line has a narrow gauge of 1·05 metre = 41 in., the same gauge as that of the Damascus-Beirut line; it has a ruling gradient of 1 in 50 and follows generally the pilgrim track, through a desert country presenting no serious engineering difficulties. The graver difficulties due to the scarcity of water, and the lack of fuel, supplies and labour were successfully overcome; in 1906 the line was completed to El Akhdar, 470 m. from Damascus and 350 from Medina, In time to be used by the pilgrim caravan of that year; and the section to Medina was opened in 1908. Its military value was shown in the previous year, when it conveyed 28 battalions from Damascus to Maʽan, from which station the troops marched to Akaba for embarkation en route to Hodeda. The length of the line from Damascus to Medina is approximately 820 m., and from Medina to Mecca 280 m.; the highest level attained is about 4000 ft. at Dar el Hamra in the section Maʽan-Medina.

 HEJIRA, or (Arab. hijra, flight, departure from one’s country, from hajara, to go away), the name of the Mahommedan era. It dates from 622, the year in which Mahomet “fled” from Mecca to Medina to escape the persecution of his kinsmen of the Koreish tribe. The years of this era are distinguished by the initials “” (anno hegirae). The Mahommedan year is a lunar one, about 11 days shorter than the Christian; allowance must be made for this in translating Hegira dates into Christian dates; thus 1321 corresponds roughly to 1903. The actual date of the “flight” is fixed as 8 Rabia I., i.e. 20th of September 622, by the tradition that Mahomet arrived at Kufa on the Hebrew Day of Atonement. Although Mahomet himself appears to have dated events by his flight, it was not till seventeen years later that the actual era was systematized by Omar, the second caliph (see ), as beginning from the 1st day of Muharram (the first lunar month of the year) which in that year (639) corresponded to July 16. The term hejira is also applied in its more general sense to other “emigrations” of the faithful, e.g. to that to Abyssinia (see ), and to that of Mahomet’s followers to Medina before the capture of Mecca. These latter are known as Muhajirun.

 HEL, or Hela, in Scandinavian mythology, the goddess of the dead. She was a child of Loki and the giantess Angurboda, and dwelt beneath the roots of the sacred ash, Yggdrasil. She was given dominion over the nine worlds of Helheim. In early myth all the dead went to her: in later legend only those who died of old age or sickness, and she then became synonymous with suffering and horror. Her dwelling was Elvidnir (dark clouds), her dish Hungr (hunger), her knife Sullt (starvation), her servants Ganglate (tardy feet), her bed Kör (sickness), and her bed-curtains Blikiandabol (splendid misery).  HELDENBUCH, DAS, the title under which a large body of German epic poetry of the 13th century has come down to us. The subjects of the individual poems are taken from national German sagas which originated in the epoch of the Migrations (Völkerwanderung), although doubtless here, as in all purely popular sagas, motives borrowed from the forces and phenomena of nature were, in course of time, woven into events originally historical. While the saga of the Nibelungs crystallized in the 13th century into the  (q.v.), and the Low German Hilde-saga into the epic of  (q.v.) the poems of the Heldenbuch, in the more restricted use of that term, belong almost exclusively to two cycles, (1) the Ostrogothic saga of Ermanrich, Dietrich von Bern (i.e. Dietrich of Verona, Theodorich the Great) and Etzel (Attila), and (2) the cycle of Hugdietrich, Wolfdietrich and Ortnit, which like the Nibelungen saga, was probably of Franconian origin. The romances of the Heldenbuch are of varying poetic value; only occasionally do they rise to the height of the two chief epics, the Nibelungenlied and Gudrun. Dietrich von Bern, the central figure of the first and more important group, was the ideal type of German medieval hero, and, under more favourable literary conditions, he might have become the centre of an epic more nationally German than even the Nibelungenlied itself. Of the romances of this group, the chief are Biterolf und Dietlieb, evidently the work of an Austrian poet, who introduced many elements from the court epic of chivalry into a milieu and amongst characters familiar to us from the Nibelungenlied. Der Rosengarten tells of the conflicts which took place round Kriemhild’s “rose garden” in Worms—conflicts from which Dietrich always emerges victor, even when he is confronted by Siegfried himself. In Laurin und der kleine Rosengarten, the Heldensage is mingled with elements of popular fairy-lore; it deals with the adventures of Dietrich and his henchman Witege with the wily dwarf Laurin, who watches over another rose garden, that of the Tyrol. Similar in character are the adventures of Dietrich with the giants Ecke (Eckenlied) and Sigenot, with the dwarf Goldemar, and the deeds of chivalry he performs for queen Virginal (Dietrichs erste Ausfahrt)—all of these romances being written in the fresh and popular tone characteristic of the wandering singers or Spielleute. Other elements of the Dietrich saga are represented by the poems Alpharts Tod, Dietrichs Flucht and Die Rabenschlacht (“Battle of Ravenna”). Of these, the first is much the finest poem of the entire cycle and worthy of a place beside the best popular poetry of the Middle High German epoch. Alphart, a young hero in Dietrich’s army, goes out to fight single-handed with Witege and Heime, who had deserted to Ermanrich, and he falls, not in fair battle, but by the treachery of Witege whose life he had spared. The other two Dietrich epics belong to a later period, the end of the 13th century—the author being an Austrian, Heinrich der Vogler—and show only too plainly the decay that had by this time set in in Middle High German poetry.

The second cycle of sagas is represented by several long romances, all of them unmistakably “popular” in tone—conflicts with dragons, supernatural adventures, the wonderland of the East providing the chief features of interest. The epics of this group are Ortnit, Hugdietrich, Wolfdietrich, the latter with its