Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/441

Rh of the legend (the saga of Siegfried) has admittedly no historic basis that we can trace. It is by common consent mythic, though whether the myth represents a natural or an historic process is not settled. But as the legend comes before us in its oldest, the Northern, form it is an organic whole. We cannot separate the youth and tragic fate of the hero from the doom wrought upon his slayers, and from the final catastrophe which the same doom brings with it. We cannot, even if there were not present in the story an element I have hitherto left unnoticed. Apart from the moral forces involved, sufficient themselves alone to furnish the thread and to necessitate the tragic result, there is a mythological force—the curse upon the Nibelung treasure pronounced by the first owner from whom it was wrung by craft and violence. This motif mingles with, and singularly reinforces, the human passions, the growth and shock of which make up the story. Hatred, treachery, and lust of gold are thereby invested with a fateful character from which they gain dignity and pathos. This is so in the Northern version, but in the Nibelungenlied the significance of the hoard is completely obscured. It continues to exist in the story, but the story-tellers know not what to make of it. So far from reinforcing the moral motive, the hoard weakens it. Kriemhild, who can only win our sympathy in virtue of her overpowering love for her treacherously slain lord, is made to hanker after the treasure in a repulsive fashion; at times avarice seems to guide her as much as revenge.

Bearing all the facts in mind, I ask. Is it likely that the second part of the legend (the doom on Siegfried's slayers) originated solely in certain historic occurrences of the fifth century, and that the Nibelung saga is the result of the fusion of this narrative with one of the birth, youth, and tragic death of Siegfried? It may be so, but then the, presumably, Northern poet to whom we owe the version preserved in the Edda and the Volsunga saga should have his due as one of the greatest creative poets of all time.