Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/517

Rh NIBELUNGENLIED 475 Gunnar and Hogni fall, Atli renews his demand, promising to spare Gunnar s life if he will reveal the secret. Gunnar declines to do so until he sees the heart of his brother Hogni. The heart of a slave is laid before him, but he declares that it cannot be Hogni s, since it quakes. Hogni s heart is then cut out, the victim laughing in the midst of his pain ; but Gunnar is still resolute, proclaim ing that he alone knows where the hoard is, and that no one shall share the knowledge with him. His hands being bound, he is put into the court of serpents, where he plays so sweetly on a harp with his toes that he charms all the reptiles except an adder, by which he is stung to death. Gudrun avenges the murder of her brothers by killing the sons she has borne to Atli, and causing him unwittingly to drink their blood and eat their hearts. In the night she kills Atli himself, burns his hall, and leaps into the sea, by the waves of which she is carried to new scenes, where she has adventures not connected with those recorded in the Nibelungenlied. The tale of which this is one version, pieced together from many poetical fragments, assumed different forms until it was put into its final shape in the Nibelungenlied. The heroine of the German poem is Kriemhild, who repre sents Gudrun. She lives at Worms, the capital of the Burgundian kingdom, with her brothers Gunther, Gernot, and Giselher, of whom the eldest, Gunther, is king of the Burgundians. To Worms comes Siegfried (an older form than Sigurd), the son of Siegemund and Siegelind, the king and queen of the Netherlands. Siegfried possesses the magic hoard, but he does not obtain it as Sigurd obtains it in the Norse form of the tale. He takes it from two princes of Nibelungen-land, to whom it has been bequeathed by their father, King Nibelung. Quarrelling as to their respective shares, they appeal to Siegfried to decide between them ; and he, irritated by their unreasonableness, kills them and seizes the treasure, together with the sword Balmung and the Tarnkappe, or cloak of darkness, which renders the wearer invisible and gives him the power of twelve men. Although this is how the hoard comes into his hands, he is still represented as slaying a dragon, in whose blood he bathes, being thus rendered invulnerable except in one spot between the shoulders, on which a leaf falls before the blood is dry. At the Burgundian court Siegfried wins the hand of Kriemhild ; but before their marriage he establishes a claim to the gratitude of King Gunther, the lover of Brunhild, the young and stalwart queen of Iceland, who requires that any one wishing to be her husband shall surpass her in three games. Gunther and Siegfried with their followers sail to Iceland ; and with the aid of Siegfried, who during the trial of skill and vigour makes himself invisible by donning the Tarnkappe, Gunther overcomes the powerful maid. On the night of the wedding Brunhild scoffs at Gunther, struggles with him, binds him, and lets him hang on the wall ignominiously until the morning. Next night, with out the knowledge of Brunhild, Siegfried goes to the help of his friend, and as a token of his conquest takes her ring and girdle, after which she is incapable of giving Gunther farther trouble. Siegfried and Kriemhild then go to the Netherlands, where they live for some years in perfect happiness and with great splendour, the Nibelungen hoard being sufficient to provide them with the means of lavish display. Invited to visit the Burgundian court, they quit Santen, the capital of the Netherlands and Siegfried s birthplace, and, attended by a brilliant retinue, make for Worms. Up to this point the tone of the poem is bright and cheerful ; we now begin to see the working of tragic forces which from petty complications lead to strife and disaster. Brunhild, who is of a proud and sullen temper, has always shown bitter animosity towards Siegfried, whom she is represented as recognizing when they meet in Iceland. She insults Kriemhild by vaunting the superior greatness of Gunther, and by claiming precedence. Kriemhild resents these pretensions, and in an animated scene before the cathedral of Worms asserts her right to enter first with her attendants. The quarrel becoming furious, Kriemhild pretends that Siegfried had taken an unfair advantage of Brunhild on the night when he had fought with her in her bridal chamber, and produces the girdle and ring (of the seizure of which Brunhild had been unconscious) as evidences of her disgrace. In vain Siegfried tries to restore harmony by rebuking his wife for this malicious invention : Brunhild is too deeply wounded to forgive so bitter a wrong, and meditates a fearful vengeance. At last she decides that Siegfried shall die ; and Hagen, one of Gunther s bravest warriors, under takes to do her bidding. Inducing Kriemhild to tell him where her husband is vulnerable, he achieves his purpose during a hunting expedition, from which Kriemhild, warned by a dream, has entreated Siegfried to stay away. Kriemhild is overwhelmed with grief and rage, and the rest of the story relates chiefly to her thirst for revenge, and the manner in which she slakes it. For thirteen yeara she remains quietly at Gunther s court. Then Riidiger, margrave of Bechlaren, appears as the ambassador of Etzel (Attila), king of the Huns, and entreats Kriemhild to be come Etzel s wife. She consents, and again thirteen years pass without any important incident. At the end of that time Gunther and his followers are invited by Etzel and Kriemhild to the land of the Huns ; and, despite super natural intimations and Hagen s presentiments, they resolve to go. The ultimate result is that in a terrible conflict the Burgundian visitors are destroyed. When all of them have fallen save Gunther and Hagen, these survivors are overcome by Dietrich, a resident at Etzel s court, and delivered by him to Etzel and Kriemhild. The closing scenes are complicated by reference to the hoard of the Nibelungen, which had been taken after Siegfried s death by Gunther as Kriemhild s brother. In virtue of his pos session of it he and his people are called Nibelungen ; but he possesses it only in name, for Hagen, who had brought it to Worms, fearing that it would work evil, had buried it (as Gunnar and Hogni are represented to have done) beneath the Rhine. Kriemhild commands Hagen to reveal its resting-place, but he answers that he has sworn not to tell the secret as long as the king lives. The head of Gunther being exhibited to him, he still refuses ; where upon, snatching the sword Balmung, which Hagen has used since Siegfried s death, Kriemhild rids herself of her enemy by beheading him. Immediately afterwards she herself is killed by Hildebrand, a Hunnish warrior, who is horrified by her savage cruelty. Many elements embodied in the Norse rendering of the primitive tale are retained in the Nibelungenlied} and, indeed, it is impossible to understand the latter thoroughly without reference to the former. For instance, the recognition of Siegfried by Brunhild in Iceland, and her misery in beholding his happiness with Kriemhild, are unintelligible until we know that Siegfried and Brunhild are supposed to have been lovers before the action of the poem begins. Again, we cease to be puzzled by the malign power of the hoard only when we learn how an evil fatality has been associated with it by the wrath of Andwari. After all, however, the points in which the later version agrees with the earlier one are not more remarkable than those in which they differ. In the Norse poems the only historical character is Atli or Attila; but in the Nibelungenlied Attila (Etzel) is associated with Theodoric the East Goth (Dietrich), while the relations of Gunther to Siegfried seem to be a reminiscence of the absorption