or Der Nibelunge Not Nibelungenlied

The basis of the story is then, according to this view, historical, not mythical; a medley of Franco-Burgundian historical traditions, overlaid with mythical fancies. The historical nucleus is the over throw of the Burgundian kingdom of Gundahar by the Huns in 436; and round this there gathered an accretion of other epi sodes, equally historical in their origin, however distorted, with a naïve disregard of chronological possibility. In the Eddas the identity of the original Franco-Burgundian sagas is fairly pre served. In the Nibelungenlied, on the other hand, the influence of other wholly unconnected stories is felt : thus Hildebrand ap pears during the final fight at Etzel's court, and Theodoric the Great (Dietrich von Bern; see THEODORIC).

Origin of the Poem.

The controversy as to the underlying elements of the Nibelung legend extends to the question of the authorship and construction of the poem itself. Was it from the first—whatever additions and interpolations may have followed —conceived as a single, coherent story, or is it based on a number of separate stories, popular ballads akin to the Eddas, which the original author of the Nibelungenlied merely collected and strung together? The answer to these questions has been sought by a succession of scholars in a critical comparison of the mediaeval mss. of the poem still surviving. Of these 33 are now known, of which ten are complete, the rest being more or less fragmentary. The most important are those first discovered, viz., the mss. lettered C (Hohenems 1755), B (Schloss Werdenberg, 1769), A (Hohenems 1779) ; and round these the others more or less group themselves. They exhibit many differences : put briefly C is the most perfectly finished in language and rhythm; A is rough, in places barbarous ; B stands half-way between the two. Which is nearest to the original? Karl Lachmann (Zu den Nibe lungen und zur Klage, Anmerkungen, 1836) decided in favour of A. He applied to the Nibelungenlied the method which Friedrich August Wolf had used to resolve the Iliad and Odyssey into their elements. The poem, according to Lachmann, was based on some 20 popular ballads, originally handed down orally, but written down about I Iqo or I zoo. This original is lost, and A—as its roughness of form shows—is nearest to it ; all other mss. including B and C are expansions of A. Lachmann's view was first seriously assailed by Adolf Holtzmann (Untersuchungen caber das Nib., Stuttgart,

1854), who argued that the original could not have been strophic in form—the fourth lines of the strophes are certainly often of the nature of "padding"—that it was written by Konrad (Kuonrat of the Klage) writer to Bishop Pilgrim of Passau about 970-984, and that of existing mss. C is nearest to this original, B the copy of a ms. closely akin to C, and A an abbreviated corrupt copy of B. This view was adopted by Friedrich Zarncke, who made C the basis of his edition of the Nibelungenlied (Leipzig, 1856). A new hypothesis was developed by Karl Bartsch in his Unter suchungen fiber das Nibelunglied (Leipzig, 1865). According to this the original was an assonance poem of the 12th century, which was changed between 1190 and 1200 by two separate poets into two versions, in which pure rhymes were substituted for the earlier assonances ; the originals of the Nibelungenlied and Der Nibelunge Not respectively. Bartsch's subsequent edition of the Nibelunge Not (1st ed., Leipzig, 1870) was founded on B, as the nearest to the original. To this view Zarncke was so far converted that in the 1887 edition of his Nibelungenlied he admitted that C shows signs of recension and that the B group is purer in certain details.

It is impossible here to follow the further developments of the question. Theodor Abeling's Das Nibelungenlied and seine Literatur gives a very full bibliography from 1756 to 1905. Other important contributions since are : Andreas Heusler, in the Sitzungsberichte der Konigl. Preuss. Akad. der Wissenschaf ten, xlvii. (1914), in which he investigates anew the genesis of the saga ; Hermann Fischer, fiber die Entstehung des Nibelungenliedes, in Sitzungsber der Konigl. Bayer. Akad. der Wiss., Philos. find hist. Klasse, 1914, who traces the various influences at work on the poem and concludes that it was written under that of Bishop Wolfger of Passau. With this Friedrich Wilhelm (in Miincher Archiv, part 7, 1916) is in agreement. There have also been during latter years advocates of a Latin original of the poem; e.g., R. Pestalozzi, Die Nibelungias (Neue Jahrbicher, 39, 1916-17), but this idea is generally discredited.

There are English translations of the poem by A. G. Foster Barham (1887) and Margaret Armour (prose, 1897) ; and Alice Horton (1898). (W. A. P.)