Page:The Nibelungenlied - tr. Shumway - 1909.pdf/49

Rh than in the Norse version. In the latter she feels herself deeply wronged by Siegfried’s faithlessness, and resolves on his death because she will not be the wife of two men. In our poem she has no reason for wishing his death except her wounded pride. In the Nibelungenlied, too, she disappears from view after Siegfried’s death, whereas in the Norse tradition she ascends his funeral pyre and dies at his side.

The circumstances of Siegfried’s death are likewise totally different in the two versions. In the Norse, as we have seen, he is murdered while asleep in bed, by Gunnar’s younger brother Gutthorm. In our poem he is killed by Hagen, while bending over a spring to drink. This is preceded by a scene in which Hagen treacherously induces Kriemhild to mark the one vulnerable spot on Siegfried’s body, on the plea of protecting him. This deepens the tragedy, and renders Kriemhild’s misery and self-reproaches the greater. After Siegfried’s burial his father, who had also come to Worms with his son, vainly endeavors to persuade Kriemhild to return with him to the Netherlands. Her refusal is unnatural in the extreme, for she had reigned there ten years or more with Siegfried, and had left her little son behind, and yet she relinquishes all this and remains with her brothers, whom she knows to be the murderers of her husband. This is evidently a reminiscence of an earlier form in which Siegfried was a homeless adventurer, as in the Thidreksaga.

The second half of the tale, the destruction of the Nibelungs, is treated of very briefly in the early Norse versions, but the Nibelungenlied, which knows so little of Siegfried’s youth, has developed and en-