Page:The Nibelungenlied - tr. Shumway - 1909.pdf/23

Rh has been handed down to us in five different forms. The first of these is the poetic or older Edda, also called Saemund's Edda, as it was assigned to the celebrated Icelandic scholar Saemundr Sigfusson. The Codex Regius, in which it is preserved, dates from the middle of the thirteenth century, but is probably a copy of an older manuscript. The songs it contains were written at various times, the oldest probably in the first half of the ninth century, the latest not much before the date of the earliest manuscript. Most of them, however, belong to the Viking period, when Christianity was already beginning to influence the Norwegians, that is, between the years 800 and 1000. They are partly heroic, partly mythological in character, and are written in alliterative strophes interspersed with prose, and have the form of dialogues. Though the legends on which these songs are based were brought from Norway, most of them were probably composed in Iceland. Among these songs, now, we find a number which deal with the adventures of Siegfried and his tragic end.

The second source of the Siegfried story is the so-called Völsungasaga, a prose paraphrase of the Edda songs. The MS. dates from the beginning of the thirteenth century, but the account was probably written a century earlier. The adventures of Siegfried and his ancestors are here related in great detail and his ancestry traced back to Wodan. Although a secondary source, as it is based on the Edda, the Völsungasaga is nevertheless of great importance, since it supplies a portion of the Codex Regius which has been lost, and thus furnishes us with the contents of the missing songs.