Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/444

388 part of the story. The grandmother of Siegfried is wedded, even as his wife is later, to a surly and treacherous tyrant; he invites her father and brethren and has them slaughtered; she avenges her kin even to the death of her husband and children. Have we here the representative of the conclusion of the original Siegfried-Nibelung saga before it was remodelled to fit a framework furnished by the lives of fifth-century personages, or is the story of Siegfried's grandmother a Northern imitation of the doom wrought upon his slayers, and of the vengeance enacted therefor? M. Lichtenberger's failure to grapple with these questions is to my mind the chief defect in his work.

The growth of the legend, according to M. Lichtenberger, is chiefly due to the individual singers who made it their theme, and who were subject to all the influences, social and literary, of their day. This insistence on the part played by those countless minstrels, who wandered from land to land keeping the old stories alive, is timely. But M. Lichtenberger should not have passed over Dr. Wolfgang Golther's theory accounting for the shapes which the legend successively assumed by the fusion in it of independent, and at times contradictory, folk-tales. The harmonising process needed to weld these into an organic whole determined the form of the whole.

The problems of the Nibelung saga are those of heroic legend generally. In how far is the latter indebted to historic fact; in what manner does it transform historic fact to its own needs; what is the nature of the portion which owes nothing to history and which we call mythic; does this picture forth man's memory of his past, or embody his ancient imaginings of the material universe; is the marked similarity which obtains between the great heroic cycles due to a common conception of life, to descent from a common original, or to borrowing one from another? Any answer to these questions must satisfy the case of each special saga. The first requisite is to grasp clearly all the elements of the problem. This M. Lichtenberger enables us to do