Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/439

Rh After Siegfried's murder the treasure passes into Gunther's hands. It is to gain possession of the treasure that Attila weds the Burgundian princess, invites her brothers to his court, and there has them treacherously slaughtered. It is to avenge her brethren that Grimhild first slays the two children she had by Attila, and then fires the latter's hall and thereby slays him too.

This is the form of the legend as it must have existed towards the middle of the fifth century, and as it occurs substantially in the Northern version (in certain heroic poems found in a collection commonly known as the Song Edda, and ranging in date from the ninth to the eleventh centuries, and in the twelfth-century Volsunga Saga based upon those poems and upon others now lost). The chief difference to be noted in the Northern version is that the heroine is styled Gudrun, and not Grimhild, the latter name being assigned to her mother, who gives Siegfried a magic potion and thereby ensures his wooing of Brunhild for Gunther. But to effect this wooing Siegfried must deceive the warrior maiden. This deceit is the tragic cause of his own death, whilst the faithlessness of Gunther to his blood-brother and the avaricious lust of Atli (Attila) for the Niblung treasure, are the tragic causes of the woe pictured in the second part of the story.

Between the legend as it is found in the Norse sources and as it appears in the German ones (whether the Low-German ballads paraphrased in the thirteenth century Norse Thidreks saga or the High-German Nibelungenlied) there is a profound difference. Siegfried is no longer moved to wed Kriemhild by the power of a magic potion; they have loved one another from the first, they are destined for each other. Kriemhild's love survives beyond the grave. Instead of being, as in the earlier stage of the legend, the representative of the principle of the blood-feud in its most extreme form, sacrificing children and husband to avenge her brothers, she becomes the incarnation of wifely devotion, consumed by passion for her husband during his life, by