Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/154

122 BOOK as Helen did to the fleet, the armies, and the cities of Hellas. But as the forsaken Ariadne was wedded to Dionysos, so the messengers of Etzel tell Kriemhild that she shall be the lady of twelve rich crowns, and rule the lands of thirty princes. Kriemheld refuses to give an immediate answer; and the great struggle which goes on within her answers to the grief and sickness of soul which makes the mind of Helen oscillate between her affection for her husband Menelaos and the unhallowed fascinations of the Trojan Paris. So is brought about the second marriage of the bride of Siegfried, a marriage the sole interest of which lies in the means which it affords to her of avenging the death of Hagen's victim. This vengeance is now the one yearning of her heart, although outwardly she may be the contented wife of Etzel, just as Odysseus longed only to be once more at home with Penelope even while he was compelled to sojourn in the house of Kirke or the cave of Kalypso ; and if the parallel between Etzel and Paris is not close, yet it is closer than the likeness between the Etzel of the Niblungs' Lay and the Attila of history. The poet declares that her deadly wrath is roused by the reflexion that at Hagen's instigation she has given herself to a heathen ; but through- out it is clear that her heart and her thoughts are far away in the grave of the golden-haired youth who had wooed and won her in the beautiful spring-time, and that of Etzel she took heed only so far as it might suit her purpose to do so. Her object now is to get Hagen into her power, and she sends messengers to Gunther bidding him bring all his best friends, whom Hagen can guide, as from his child- hood he has known the way to the Huns' land.^ All are ready to go except Hagen, and he is loth to put his foot into the trap which he sees that Kriemhild is setting for him ; but he cannot bear the taunts of his brother Gunther, who tells him that if he feels guilty on the score of Siegfried's death he had better stay at home. Still he advises that if they go they should go in force. So Gunther sets out with three thousand men, Hagen, and Dankwart, his brother, and other chiefs with such as they can muster; and with them goes Volker, the renowned musician, who can figlit as well as he can play.

is one of the passages which imiily the parison with other legends, and which, legend contained in " Walthar of Aqui- taken together, show the amount of taine," where Hagen is represented as material which the poets of the Nibe- a fellow hostage with Walthar at Etzel's lung song, like those of the Iliad and court." — Popidar Epics, i. 130. It Odyssey, found ready to their hand, may be so ; yet the phrase resolves itself The close agreement of the framework into the simple statement that the I'anis of the poem with that of the Volsung know their way to the land whence they story and the legends of the Ilelgis, and steal the cattle of Indra. the identity of all these with the myth
 * Mr. Ludlow here remarks that "this tions of the epic which call for a com -


 * I must confine myself to those por- of Baldur, has been already shown. It