Siegfried is the name of the mythic national hero of the Germans, whose tragic fate is most powerfully described in the "Nibelungen Lied," and in a series of lays of the Icelandic Edda. A matchless warrior, a Dragon-killer and overthrower of Giants, who possesses a magic sword, he conquers the northern Nibelungs and acquires their famed gold hoard. In the great German epic he is the son of Siegmund and Siegelinde, who rule in the Netherlands. Going Rhine-upward to Worms, to Gunther, the King of the Burgundians, he woos and wins Kriemhild, the beautiful sister of that king, after having first helped Gunther to gain the hand of Brünhild, a queen beyond sea, in Iceland. No one could obtain that valiant virgin's consent to wedlock unless he proved a victor over her in athletic feats, and in trials of battle. By means of his own colossal strength and his hiding hood, Siegfried, standing invisibly at the side of Gunther, overcomes Brünhild. Even after the marriage has been celebrated at Worms, Siegfried has once more to help the Burgundian king in the same hidden way, in order to vanquish Brünhild's resistance to the accomplishment of the marriage. When, in later times, Kriemhild and Brünhild fall out in a quarrel about their husbands' respective worth, the secret of such stealthy aid having been given, is let out by the former in a manner affecting the honor of the Burgundian queen as a wife. Thereupon Hagen promises her to effect a revenge. Having deftly ascertained from Kriemhild the single vulnerable part of the hero, whose skin had otherwise been made impenetrable by being dipped into the Dragon's blood, Hagen treacherously murders Siegfried at a chase. The gold hoard is then sunk in the Rhine by Hagen, lest Kriemhild should use it as a means of bribing men for wreaking her own revenge. She afterward becomes the consort of Etzel, the heathen king of the Hiunes (Hunns) in Hungary, who resides at Vienna. Thither she allures the Burgundians, Hagen alone mistrusting the invitation. In Etzel's eastern land all the Burgundian knights, upon whom the Nibelung name had been conferred, suffer a terrible death through Kriemhild's wrath. Hagen, who refuses to the end to reveal to her the whereabouts of the sunken gold hoard, has his head cut off with Siegfried's sword by the infuriated queen herself. At last, she, too, is hewn down by the indignant, doughty warrior, Hildebrand; and so the lofty Hall, into which fire had been thrown, is all strewn over with the dead. "Here," says the poem, "has the tale an end. These were the sorrows of the Nibelungs."
In this "Iliad of the Germans," which dates from the end of the twelfth century, the Siegfried story is given as a finished epic. But its originally heathen Teutonic character is overlaid there with admixtures of Christian chivalry. In the Edda and other Scandinavian sources, the tale appears in fragmentary and lyrical shape, but in a purer version, without additions from the new faith or from mediæval chivalry. It is in the Sigurd-, Fafnir-, Brynhild-, Gudrun-, Oddrun-, Atli-, and Hamdir Lays of the Norse Scripture that the original nature of the older German songs, which must have preceded the epic, can best be guessed. Rhapsodic lays, referring to Siegfried, were, in all probability, part of the collection which Karl the Great, the Frankish Kaiser, ordered to be made. Monkish fanaticism afterward destroyed the valuable relics. Fortunately, Northmen travelling in Germany had gathered some of those tale-treasures, which then were treated by Scandinavian and Icelandic bards in the form of heroic lyrics. Hence the Eddic lays in question form now a link between our lost Siegfried "Lieder" and our national epic.
Even as in the "Nibelungen Lied" so also in the "Edda," Sigurd (abbreviation for Siegfried) is not a Scandinavian, but a Southern, a Rhenish, a German hero. The whole scene of the tragic events is laid in the Rhinelands, where the killing of the Worm also takes place. On a hill in Frank-land Sigurd frees Brynhild from the magic slumber into which Odin had thrown her on a rock of punishment, because she, as a Valkyr, or shield-maiden of his, had brought about the death of a Gothic king to whom the god of battle had promised victory. In the south, on the Rhine, Sigurd is murdered. In the Rhine, Högni (Hagen) hides the Nibelung treasure. Many German tribes—Franks, Saxons, Burgundians, Goths, even a Svava-land, or Suabian land, are mentioned in the "Edda." The "Drama of Revenge," after Sigurd's death, though motives of the act somewhat different from those stated in the "Nibelungen Lied" are assigned, is also localized on the Lower Rhine, in the Hall of Atli, the King of the Hunes. In the "Nibelungen Lied," that name appears as Etzel (Attila), King of the Hunns.
In the "Edda" and in the "Vilkina Saga," Germans are referred to as sources for some details of the Sigurd story. So strong was, in Scandinavia, the tradition of the Teutonic origin of the tale, down to the twelfth century, that, in a geographical work written in Norse by the Abbot Nicolaus, the Gnita Heath, where Sigurd was said to have killed the Dragon, was still placed half-way between Paderborn and Mainz. Thus it was from Germany that this grand saga spread all over the North, including the Faröer. In the "Hvenic Chronicle," in Danish songs, we even find Siegfried as "Sigfred;" Kriemhild as "Gremild;" and she is married to him at Worms, as in the "Nibelungen Lied," while in the "Edda" Sigurd's wife is called Gudrun, and the remembrance of Worms is lost. The scene of the Norse poems is wholly on Rhenish ground.
Siegfried slaying the Dragon.
Now, in that neighborhood, in the northwest of Germany, a Teutonic tribe once dwelt, called Hunes, which is also traceable in Scandinavia. Sigurd himself is, in the "Edda," described as a Hunic king. His kith and kin dwell in Huna-land. "Hune" probably meant a bold and powerful warrior. The word still lingers in Germany in various ways; gigantic grave-monuments of prehistoric times are called Hunic Graves or "Hünen-Betten," and a tall, strong man a "Hüne." In his "Church History" the Anglo-Saxon monk Baeda, or Bede, when speaking of the various German tribes which had made Britain into an Angle-land, or England, mentions the Hunes. In the Anglo-Saxon "Wanderer's Tale" they also turn up, apparently in connection with a chieftain Aetla; that is, Atli. In Friesland, the Hunsing tribe long preserved the Hunic name. The word occurs in many personal and place names both in Germany and in England; for instance: Hunolt (a Rhenish hero), Hunferd, Hunlaf, Hunbrecht (champions among Frisians and Rhinelanders in the "Beowulf" epic); Huneboldt (bold like a Hune); Ethelhun (noble Hune); then there are, in German geography, the Hunsrück Mountain; Hunoldstein, Hunenborn, Hunnesrück, near Hildesheim, etc. Again, in England: Hundon, Hunworth, Hunstanton, Huncote, Hunslet, Hunswick, and many other places from Kent and Suffolk up to Lancashire and Shetland, where certainly no Mongolic Hunns ever penetrated. The Hunic Atli name is also to be found on English soil, in Attlebridge and Attleborough.
After the Great Migrations the various tribes and races became much intermixed. It was by a misunderstanding which arose then between the German Hunes and the Hunns under Attila's leadership, that Kriemhild's revenge after the murder of Siegfried was poetically transferred from the Rhine to the Danube. The name of the Rhenish Atli, which is preserved in the "Edda," and which also occurs as a German chieftain's name on the soil of conquered Britain, easily served to facilitate the confusion. Even the composition of Attila's army lent itself to this transplantation of the second part of the Siegfried story to Danubian lands. For, though Attila was overthrown on the Catalaunian fields, mainly by Germanic hosts, to which Roman and Gallic troops were added, he had a great many Teutonic warriors in his own army. From this military intermingling of races so utterly dissimilar in blood and speech as the Hunns and the Germans, one of whose tribes were called Hunes, it is not difficult to conceive the shifting of the tragic issue of the Nibelung story to the East. Attila, the Hunn, slid into the previous Teutonic hero-figure of Atli, the Hune. This change will the more easily be understood when the deep impression is remembered which the terrible Mongolic war-leader had made on the popular mind in southern Germany, where the Nibelungen epic was cast into its present shape.