KRIEMHILD (GRIMHILD), heroine of the Nibelungenlied and wife of Siegfried. The name means "the helmed warrior woman," and has been taken to prove her to have been originally a mythical figure representing darkness and death. In the north, indeed, the name Grimhildr was applied only to daemonic beings., but in the Nibelungenlied Kriemhild is merely a beautiful prin cess, daughter of King Dankrat and sister of the Burgundian kings Gunther, Giselher and GernOt, the masters of the Nibelun gen hoard. As wife of Attila and sister of Gunther, she seems to be of historical origin. According to Jordanes (c. 49), borrowing from the contemporary and trustworthy account of Priscus, Attila died of a violent haemorrhage at night, as he lay beside a girl named Ildico. The story got abroad that he was killed by her in revenge for her relations slain by him ; according to some (e.g., Saxo and the Quedlinburg chronicle) it was her father whom she revenged; but when the overthrow of the Burgundians by Attila had become a theme for epic, she figured as a Burgundian princess, and her act as done in revenge for her brothers. Now the name of Hildiko is the diminutive of Hild, which again by a common custom may have been used as an abbreviation of Grim hild (cf. Hildr for Brynhildr). It has been suggested (Symons, Heldensage, p. 55) that when the legend of the overthrow of the Burgundians, which took place in 437, became at tached to that of the death of Attila (453), Hild, the supposed sister of the Burgundian kings, was identified with the daemonic Grimhild, the sister of the mythical Nibelung brothers, and thus helped the fusion of the Nibelung myth with the historical story of the fall of the Burgundian kingdom. The older story, accord
ing to which Grimhild slays her husband Attila in revenge for her brothers, is preserved in the Norse tradition, though Grimhild's part is played by Gudrun, the name of Grimhild being trans ferred to Gudrun's mother, a semi-daemonic figure, who brews the potion that makes Sigurd forget his love for Brunhild. In the Nibelungenlied, the primitive supremacy of the blood-tie has given place to the idea of the supremacy of love, and Kriemhild mar ries Attila (Etzel) in order to compass the death of her brothers, in revenge for the murder of Siegfried. Theodor Abeling further suggests a confusion of the story of Ildico with that of the mur der of Sigimund the Burgundian by the sons of Chrothildis, wife of Clovis. (See NIBELUNGENLIED.) See B. Symons, Germanische Heldensage (Strassburg, 1905) ; Jiric zek, (Strassburg, 1898) ; T. Abeling, Einleitung in das Nibelungenlied (Freiburg-im-Breisgau, 1909).