Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 5.djvu/65

 SIEGFRIED 33 self is, in the " Edda," described as a Hunic king. His kith and kin dwell in Huna-land. " Hune " probably meant a bold and powerful warrior. The word still lingers in Germany in various ways ; gigantic grave-monuments of prehis- toric times are called Hunic Graves or " Hiinen-Betten," and a tall, strong man a " Hune." In his " Church History " the Anglo-Saxon monk Baeda, or Bede, when speaking of the various German tribes which had made Britain into an Angle-land, or England, mentions the Hunes. In the Anglo-Saxon "Wanderer's Tale " they 'also turn up, apparently in connection with a chieftain Aetla ; that is, Atli. In Friesland, the Hunsing tribe long preserved the Hunic name. The word occurs in many personal and place names both in Germany and in Eng- land ; for instance : Hunolt (a Rhenish hero), Hunferd, Hunlaf, Hunbrecht (champions among Frisians and Rhinelanders in the " Beowulf " epic) ; Hune- boldt (bold like a Hune) ; Ethelhun (noble Hune) ; then there are, in German geography, the Hunsriick Mountain ; Hunoldstein, Hunenborn, Hunnesruck, near Hildesheim, etc. Again, in England : Hundon, Hunworth, Hunstanton, Huncote, Hunslet, Hunswick, and many other places from Kent and Suffolk up to Lancashire and Shetland, where certainly no Mongolic Hunns ever penetrated. The Hunic Atli name is also to be found on English soil, in Attiebridge and Attleborough. After the Great Migrations the various tribes and races became much inter- mixed. It was by a misunderstanding which arose then between the German Hunes and the Hunns under Attila's leadership, that Kriemhild's revenge after the murder of Siegfried was poetically transferred from the Rhine to the Danube. The name of the Rhenish Atli, which is preserved in the " Edda," and which also occurs as a German chieftain's name on the soil of conquered Britain, easily served to facilitate the confusion. Even the composition of Attila's army lent itself to this transplantation of the second part of the Siegfried story to Danubian lands. For, though Attila was overthrown on the Catalaunian fields, mainly by Germanic hosts, to which Roman and Gallic troops were added, he had a great many Teutonic warriors in his own army. From this military intermingling of races so utterly dissimilar in blood and speech as the Hunns and the Germans, one of whose tribes were called Hunes, it is not difficult to conceive the shifting of the tragic issue of the Nibelung story to the East. Attila, the Hunn, slid into the previous Teutonic hero-figure of Atli, the Hune. This change will the more easily be understood when the deep impression is remembered which the terrible Mongolic war-leader had made on the popular mind in southern Germany, where the Nibelungen epic was cast into its present shape. The hold which the Siegfried story has had on the German people, through ages, can be gathered from the fact of its having kept its place, down to our days, in the workman's house and the peasant's hut, first by oral tradition, and then by rudely printed and illustrated chap-books (" Die Geschichte vom hurne- nen Siegfried"). In this "Volksbuch" there are remarkable details concerning the hero's early life in a smithy and the prophecy of his assassination, which are lost in the " Nibelungen Lied," but preserved in the " Edda." This circumstance