NIBBY, ANTONIO, a Roman arclucologist of high celebrity, was b. in 1792. He was one of those who, following in the footsteps of Winekelmann, made an elaborately minute investigation of the remains of antiquity their special study. The first work that made him known was his translation of Pansanias, with antiquarian and critical notes. In 1820 lie was appointed professor of archaeology in the university of Rome. In the same year appeared his edition of Nardini's Roma Antica; and in 1837-38, his learned and edmirattle 11nctIzsi. Storicolopografico-antaluaria della curia de Cvntorni di Roma, to which was added (1833-40) a description of the city of Rome itself. Among his other writings, may be mentioned his La Mara di Roina disegnate da 1V. Gell, and it large num ber of valuable treatises on the form and arrangement of the earliest Christian churches, the circus of Caracal!a, the temple of Fortuna at Prameste, the graves of the Horatii and the Curiatlii, etc. Nibby d. Dec. 29, 1880.
NrBELUNGENLIED, or as the words are written in the oldest manu scripts, is one of the most finished specimens of the genuine epic of Germany belonging to the middle ages. There exist twenty more or less perfect manuscript copies of this curious poem, the earliest of which belong to the beginning of the 13th c., from which period till the middle of the 16th c. it enjoyed the greatest popularity among Germans of all classes. Nothing certain is known of the author or authors of the work beyond the fact, that it was put into its present form by a wandering minstrel in Austria about or prior to the year 1210, which is the date of the oldest accredited manuscript. According to W. Grimm and Lachman's critical analysis of the poem, it is in. itself a compilation of pre-existing songs and rhapsodies, strung together into one whole upon a plan remark able for its grand simplicity, although less skill is shown in some instances in the man ner in which the several parts are connected. In the more authentic manuscripts the poem consists of only twenty parts, and it is conjectured that the latter portions of the epic, which are given only in some of Ihe texts, as that of St. Gall, are the composition of later compilers. The epic cycle embraced in the Nibelungenlied may be more spec ially regarded as the fusion of the history of the mythical people, called in the poem the .Nibelungen, with five leading groups of myths, in which are incorporated the adventures of some of the most universally popular personages belonging to the semi-historic myths of mediaeval German folk-lore, as, for instance, the hero Siegfried with his mantle of invisibility, and the lovely Icelandic heroine Brunhilt; Gunther of Burgundy, and his fair sister, Kriemhilt, the wife of Siegfried; Haw of Norway, Dietrich (Theodorie the great king of the Ostrogoths) of Berne (Verona), and Etzel (Attila), king of the Huns.
The loves and feuds; and the stormy lives and violent deaths of these national heroes and heroines, arc skillfully intertwined in the Nibelungenlied, and artistically made to center round the mythical treasure of the Nibelungen, which, after the murder of Sieg fried, who had brought it from the far north, is secretly buried by his murderer Ilaco beneath the Rhine, where it still remains. The poem, in its rude but strict versification, tells the tale of Kriemhilt's vengeance for her husband's death with a passionate earnest ness that carries the sympathies of the reader with it, until the interest culminates in the catastrophe of the fierce battle between the Burgundians and Huns at the court of Etzd, whose hand Kriemhilt the better to accomplish her purposes of revenge. The tale of horrors fitly closes with the murder of Kriemhilt herself, after she has satisfied her vengeance by slaying with Siegfried's sword his murderer Haeo. This talc, which seemed to echo back the elfish of arms and strife of passion which char acterized the early periods of German history, kept a firm hold on the imaginations of the people till the taste for polemic writings, fostered, if not created, at the period of the reformation, caused this as well as many other of folk-lore to be almost lost sight of and forgotten. Attention was again, however, drawn to it in the 18th a, by the publication of detached portions of the poem by Bodrncr, Crienzhilden-Rache (Zurich, 1751), and by Midler in his ..-Zammly all deutsche?. Gedichte accts dem 12-14 Jahrb. (Berlin, 1782); but it was dot until comparatively recent times that the value of the work in an historical mid philological point of view was recognized. Lachmanu madeltnown the result of his investigations in 1826. His views were supported by MiAllenhoff and Rieger (1856). Holtzmaun (1854), on the other hand. asserted that the longest version is the more ancient, and was followed by Zarucke, Hermann, and Fischer. Pfeiffer tried, in 1869, to prove that the author of the present _Nibelungenlied was the Austrian Von Knrenberg (circa 1140). See Paul's statement of the case in Die Niaelangenf•age (1877). All the manuscripts in the Nibehm,genlied comprise another poem under the title of Die Kluge, which treats of the burial of the heroes who fell in the conflict at Etzel's court, and the laments which were composed in commemoration of that event. It is of greater antiquity than the Nibelungenlied. and, like it, the work of an unknown author. A criti cal analysis of the Nibelungenlied will be found in Carlyle's Miscellaneous Essays