Page:Gummere (1909) The Oldest English Epic.djvu/188

172 ; for proof, one needs but to mention such a distant and modern treatment of it as the Sohrab and Rustum of Matthew Arnold. Scholars have found it in widely spread and varying forms; and a German ballad, many centuries later, has actually given to the grim scene a happy ending. In its present shape the story has become part of the Theodoric legend, and as such must be credited to the romantic and highly poetical Goths; would that some kindly fate had preserved the rich and sonorous words of their version! The Nibelungen, as every one knows, places old Hildebrand as Dietrich’s right-hand man, who, with his lord, has been long among the Huns, in that banishment of which Deor speaks in the Anglo-Saxon lyric,—only in the Hildebrand Lay one is told that Odoacer is cause of the flight. Kögel points out the curious perversity of legend when it deals with historical facts: it was Odoacer whom Theodoric really shut up in Ravenna and put to death. That Attila and Theodoric became contemporary in this cycle of legends, and are treated as overlord and chief vassal, is another license of the legendary muse. But the poem is the thing. Undoubtedly it is much closer than such epic verse as the Beowulf, and even the Waldere fragments, to the old songs which minstrels had come to sing and which warriors still made about their own deeds or the deeds of their friends. The nervous directness is here which one was tempted to find characteristic of Finnsburg. Full of blunders as the manuscript is, with patches of something very like prose when the scribe failed to remember his original,—one should think of a schoolboy writing out from memory The Charge of the Light Brigade,—the whole effect is that of contact with strong and resonant verse.