Burton's work was issued by subscription in 1885-1886 in ten volumes and is a monument to his Oriental scholarship. Burton left at his death the manuscript of another celebrated Oriental work, The Scented Garden, but Lady Burton, who was made his executrix, although offered £25,000 for the copyright, destroyed the manuscript. She declared that she did this to protect her husband's name, as the world would look upon his notes as betraying undue fondness for the erotic, whereas she knew and his close friends knew that this interest was purely scholarly. Scholars all over the world mourned over this destruction of Burton's work.
Another noteworthy unexpurgated translation was by John Payne, prepared for the Villon Society, and issued in 1882-1884.
The best English translation is by E. W. Lane, an English Orientalist, whose notes are valuable. The editions of The Arabian Nights are endless, and many famous artists have given the world their conception of the principal characters in these Arabian wonder stories.
THE NIBELUNGENLIED
The Nibelungenlied is the German Iliad and dates from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. No less than twenty-eight manuscripts of this great epic have come down through the ages. From the time of the Reformation down to the middle of the eighteenth century it seemed to be forgotten. Then a Swiss writer, Bodmer, issued parts of it in connection with a version of the Klage, a poem describing the mourning at King Etzel's Court over the famous heroes who fell to satisfy the vengeance of Kriemhild.
The real discoverer, who restored the epic to the world, was Dr. J. H. Oberiet, who found a later version of the poem in the Castle of Hohenems in the Tyrol, June 29, 1755.
C. H. Myller in 1782 published the first complete edition, using part of Bodmer's version. It was not until the opening of the nineteenth century and during the Romantic movement in Germany that The Nibelungenlied was seriously studied. Partsch, a German critic, developed the theory that The Nibelungenlied was written about 1140 and that rhyme was introduced by a later poet to take the place of the stronger assonances in the original version.
The legend of Siegfried's death, resulting from the quarrel of the two queens, and all the woes that followed, was the common property of all the German and Scandinavian people. From the banks of the Rhine to the northernmost parts of Norway and Sweden and the Shetland Isles and Iceland this legend of chivalry and revenge was sung around the camp-fires. William Morris' Sigurd the Volsung is derived from a prose paraphrase of the Edda songs.
Many English versions of The Nibelungenlied have been made but most of them are harsh. Carlyle's summary of the epic in his Miscellanies is the most satisfactory for the general reader. A good prose version of The Nibelungenlied is by Daniel Bussier Shumway, Professor of German Philology in the University of Pennsylvania. It contains an admirable essay on the history of the epic. (Boston, 1909.)
William Morris has made fine renderings in verse of portions of The Nibelungenlied but he has drawn much of his material from the kindred Norse legends. Two translations into English verse are those of W. N. Lettson, The Fall of the Nibelungen (London, 1874), and of Alice Harnton, The Lay of the Nibelungs (London, 1898).