Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/440

384 the desire to avenge him even upon her own brothers after his death. The legend resolves itself into a struggle between Siegfried and Hagen, terminated by the former's treacherous slaughter, and followed by the vengeance taken upon Hagen by Siegfried's widow. The character of Etzel (Attila) changes in consequence; he is no longer the treacherous and avaricious despot who lures the Burgundians to their doom, but sinks into a mere nonentity. Again many of Siegfried's youthful feats are omitted as inconsistent with his passion for Kriemhild. The Brunhild episode is seriously modified and its tragic import obscured.

Such is the legend as we have it in the Nibelungenlied, though careful scrutiny reveals many traces of the earlier version. The Nibelungenlied itself is a recueil factice of ballads woven into a continuous series. In its present form it dates from the end of the twelfth century. In the description of manners, customs, and feelings it shows the marked influence of the poems of knight-errantry introduced into Germany from France. In the characterisation of the personages it frequently accepts the conventions current in the contemporary narrative poems of the Rhenish valley, such as King Rother or Orendel. Yet through the twelfth-century dress we can plainly distinguish the stern and gigantic forms of the fifth-century warriors.

So far M. Lichtenberger summarising and harmonising the views of many German scholars. One is at once struck by the infinitesimal influence which historic fact has exercised upon the growth of the legend. The historic Attila had no hand in the destruction of the historic Gunther; the historic Ildico, if she had any hand in the death of Attila—and this is doubtful in the last degree—had nothing whatever to do with the Burgundian chiefs, slain when she was a babe, or perhaps even before her birth. If the legend really started with these two historic events (overthrow of the Burgundians, sudden death of Attila) it forthwith utterly transformed them. But did it start thus? The first part