Page:The lay of the Nibelungs; (IA nibelungslay00hortrich).pdf/15

Rh of the widely-spread legend of Theodoric, differing little from the version found in the German epic. But inasmuch as the former, no less than the latter, is generally admitted to be of Teutonic origin, however much infused with Scandinavian mythology, we have not come much nearer to the ultimate sources of the mythical, as distinguished from the historical, elements of the story.

Lachmann, one of the earliest editors of the Nibelungenlied, went so far as to analyze it into twenty different legends, rejecting on various grounds more than one-third of what is here given. Between that phase and the last, it is evident that there are several stages in which the poem existed as a whole. It is known that, at the request of Bishop Pilgrim of Passau in the tenth century, the story was translated into Latin prose by Conrad, called “The Scribe,” and to him is attributed the inclusion of the name of the said bishop as that of an actor in events which, so far as they are historical, belong to the fifth century. After Conrad’s time there may have been several augmented German editions before the twelfth century, to which our version belongs. There are more than twenty extant MSS., of which, however, only three are regarded as having any independent authenticity. They are designated as “A,” “B,” and “C”; of which the first, used by Lachmann, is the shortest, but betrays fewest signs of deviation from an older and good version. “C,” on the contrary, is said to be considerably altered, from an earlier popular form, to suit the more courtly taste of a later period of culture. The remaining, “B”—a fine MS. preserved in the monastery of St. Gall—is intermediate in length, and, retaining as it does many stanzas of evident antiquity, has become what may be called the textus receptus; as edited by Bartsch it is the basis of the present translation. A facsimile of one of the pages from Dr. Otto