The literary remnants of the pre-Carlovingian era are too scanty to permit us to form from them a perfect picture of Teutonic woman during the centuries of migrations. We are, however, able fairly to reconstruct the record by the aid of the rich treasures transmitted to us from a period five or six centuries later, a time epochal in the stormy youth of the German peoples. Though the original songs were partly destroyed through the antagonism of the Church and her efforts to root out the pagan memories and traditions, and, though these causes, to a large extent, made futile the strenuous efforts of Charlemagne to collect and preserve the ancient lays and sagas, the people continued to be influenced by their memories. The spirit of the "Legend from Ancient Times," of which Heine writes in his beautiful poem, Lorelei, never died out in the soul of the race. The spirit of expansion, of enlargement of horizon, fostered by the crusades and by the broad policy of the great Hohenstaufen dynasty brought about an extensive knowledge of the poetic, romantic, and historic materials and forms among the older French and Italian literatures. The old heroes of the German legend and history awakened from the long slumber of vague recollection and lived again in their influence upon the ideals of the people. The origin of the German heroic epic is thus closely connected with the most decisive period of the political birth of the nation. The heroic epic in its entirety, therefore, flows from, and is reflected in, the great revolution of power and in the changes of habitation which, for the first time, awakened the historical self-consciousness of the German war nobility and made possible a new development in the national literature. The hour of birth of the German heroic epic is the Migration period. In the heroic epic the story is clothed in a romantic garment. The epic poets, looking backward from their own stirring times as far as the formation period, symbolize the progress of history in the time when it may be said that ancient Europe was broken to pieces, and the Germans in a new formation and in a new soil came uninjured and even strengthened from the general devastation.
The type of heroes and heroines formed in the fifth and sixth centuries, and the heroes grown and developed from those ancient, yet largely mythological ideas and ideals were adapted to the new type of chivalrous manhood of the eleventh and twelfth centuries by the poets and singers of the circles of the princes and nobles whose high culture promoted the first classical period of bloom. The heroic saga is then the crystallization of the treasure of traditions formed in the heroic period of the race.
The saga material is divisible into the group or tribal cycles, and every cycle revolves around a galaxy of great, good, heroic, or evil women. This saga literature, in fact, furnishes us with a perfect portrait gallery of the German women of the two most important and formative periods of their race. We have mentioned in the previous chapter a few of the Hunnish cycle around Attila (Etzel). Of these Ildico and Hildegund are preeminent. We have alluded to the historical women of the Ostrogoth cycle those associated with the great Theodoric or, as called in the saga, Dietrich von Bern (Verona). Other cycles there are: the Norse, embracing Beowulf, King of the Jutes, and the Scandinavian heroes Wittich and Wieland, belongs to our theme but incidentally; the Langobard cycle, singing the Langobard heroes King Rother, Ortnit, Hugdietrich, and Wolfdietrich, and their adventures on the Mediterranean Sea and in a legendary Byzantine Empire, with a type of Oriental-Greek or Byzantine women, lies a little aside from our present consideration of German women. We can well confine ourselves to the Nibelungen Saga and Gudrun, the German Iliad and Odyssey, for these two heroic sagas of the German nation are the true exponents of all the characteristics of German women and men. The heroic epic in its germ is historical, but its growth freed it from its fetters of fact and decked it with ornaments from the domain of imagination. Historical and mythical elements are, then, strangely blended in these sagas. They develop exotically, scarce one that does not grow outside its original sphere, assimilate foreign unhistorical matter, blur all chronology, and anachronistically poetize the dim recollections of a historical but long-forgotten underground. The resultant of the convolutions and accretions is a complex epic cycle of sagas originating at different times, but always deeply rooted in the Migration period, wherein lay all the origins of Germanic historical existence.
The Nibelungenlied is the crystallization of the Burgundian Low Rhenish Hunnish cycle of Sagas. No more complete psychological record in poetic form of all the emotions, love and hate, vice and virtue, vanity and modesty, chastity and passion, piety and wickedness, womanly gentleness and virulence, is imaginable. All the phases of human existence are put before us in the lives of the Burgundian royal brothers Gunther, Gernot, Giselher; their mother Ute; and their sister Kriemhilde, whose character, as outlined, is the grandest and the most complex woman's character in the literature of the world. Kriemhilde, as the wife of the Low Rhenish hero Siegfried, and Brunhild, in the Norse version of the Saga, a former Valkyrie, humanized only to make it possible for her to be the wife of Gunther and to bear a deep love for Siegfried, are the opposite poles of womanhood.
It is, however, very difficult to obtain through the epics a correct estimate of the status of woman at a definite period. This difficulty is due not only to the poetic and fictitious characterization of the womanly types, but especially to the constant blending of ancient Germanic elements and twelfth century chivalry, knighthood, and romantic love (Minne), from which results an almost inextricable web of mythical and historical and purely romantic threads.
Siegfried wins Kriemhilde by a long wooing in the truly romantic fashion of the period of Minne song, but later inflicts upon her, in the truly old Germanic fashion, a severe physical chastisement for her quarrelsome temper. We find in the story traces of the primeval Germanic beliefs of the power of divination and prophecy. Kriemhilde has a momentous dream; she sees a beautiful falcon that she had reared with care seized and overpowered by two eagles. Her mother, Ute, interprets the dream correctly as foreshadowing the fate of her future husband:
"The falcon, whom thou cherished, he was a noble man,
May God in safety keep him, for no one other can."
In the morning before the final catastrophe overtook Siegfried, Kriemhilde related to him with a sorrowful heart another dream:
"I dreamed last night of trouble, and how that two wild boar