1. Attila, called Etzel in the Lied. The Atli of the Volsunga-saga much more nearly resembles the Attila of the historians of Rome and Constantinople than does Etzel. He here appears as a just and generous king, whose court is a rendezvous of foreign knights from every land, proud to enlist in his service. Not only is he no party to the treacherous entrapping of the Nibelungs, but he is utterly ignorant of it; and is only driven to countenance hostilities against them by their slaughter of his child and the intolerable insults they hurl at himself. The reason for this presentment of him may be, that Attila really was just, generous, and merciful to his own subjects, and to the large numbers of foreign mercenaries, many of them Germans, who took service under him. Some of these, on their return home, would always speak of him as a great king and a good master, whose court was magnificent; and this character of him might well persist in tradition through the generations, and be an essential part of the popular lays which formed the groundwork of the finished epic.
2. Theodoric, called in the Lied Dietrich of Bern, where Bern has nothing to do with Switzerland, but is the German form of Verona. The poet no doubt meant the great Theodoric the Ostrogoth, conqueror of Italy. But he (born 455 A.D.) lived a generation after Attila (died 453). Theodoric, king of the Visigoths, was indeed a contemporary of Attila, but he was an enemy, and died fighting against him in the great battle of Châlons, in 451. In Carlyle’s words, “some commentators have fished out another Theodoric, eighty years prior to him of Verona, and who actually served in Attila’s hosts with a retinue of Goths and Germans.” If this last be really historical, or was even traditional, he might have been the original Dietrich of the old lays who in the Lied serves in proud independence in Attila’s palace-guard. But popular tradition and the poets knew as their only Dietrich the great Theodoric, and were serenely unconscious that for him it was, on every ground, as possible to have served under Attila, as for our Alfred the Great to have served under Charlemagne.
3. Bishop Pilgrim. His introduction is a gross anachronism indeed, for he lived more than 500 years after Attila’s time. He owes his inclusion, or intrusion, to the fact that he had the Saga rendered into Latin verse by his secretary, Konrad, as he heard it from the lips of bards, some two hundred years before the poem took shape as a German epic. No doubt this Latin poem was used by the composers of the epic; and, if they were conscious at all of the anachronism, it would have troubled them as little as Walter Scott was troubled by the anachronisms, of which he cheerfully makes confession, in Ivanhoe.
We have spoken of a “poet”; but in truth there was a long succession of them. While the names of the authors of several of those trivial romances, the Court Epics, have been carefully handed down, there is no record of the authorship of the great National Epic; and this is the more remarkable, as, during the period of the Literary Revival, successive remodellings of it by different hands were produced, each, we may presume, regarded as an improvement on its predecessor; yet no trustworthy clue survives to the name of the composer of any one of them.
The following would appear to have been the different stages through which the Nibelungenlied, as a distinct poem, passed:—
I. The original form, in alliterative verse. (Not extant.) If we could recover this, we might find it, both in metrical form and in literary style, more like our Anglo-Saxon poem of Beowulf than the existing versions of the Lied.
II. The first 12th century version, cir. 1140, by an Austrian court poet (the Kürnberg Knight for whom Bartsch argues), in four-line stanzas, or “strophes,” of iambic basis, with assonant endings. (Not extant.)
III. The second 12th century version, cir. 1170, in which rhyme was partially substituted for assonance. (Not extant.)
IV. The third 12th century versions, of two contemporaneous poets, cir. 1190-1200, in which assonances are almost entirely superseded by rhymes. Extant in several MSS. which fall under two heads:—
1. MS. A. The Munich manuscript, of which only one single copy exists; this perhaps represents the poem just as this rédacteur left it. It is based on a good and ancient original, but is very carelessly written, and omits (apparently through oversight) a number of strophes. This, the shortest version, was adopted by Lachmann as the basis of his edition.