([St. XXXIX.]) I scarcely know whether I have translated this stanza properly. The variegated work (expressed by geströut in the original) seems to have been produced by different sorts of fur. The grâ unde bunt of St. XVI, Third Adventure, seems to mean the same thing. Gold thread or wire, and something like gold lace appear to have been fashionable ornaments in the dress of both sexes. Precious stones, too, were in great request. But I own I have been much puzzled by the milliners' and tailors' work in the poem, and I dare say have made mistakes. I may observe that the women were both tailors and milliners. Kriemhild herself was an accomplished cutter (see St. XLIV, Sixth Adventure), and, if it had not been for her assistance, her brother and his companions would not have been fit to be seen at the splendid court of Brunhild. The men were expert cutters in their line, but their instrument was the broadsword.
([St. XL.]) In this poem the edges of a sword are constantly spoken of in the plural. The warriors seem to have had only two-edged swords.
([St. LIV.]) The fourth line of this stanza, which is admitted as genuine by Professor Lachmann, is one of those passages which are at variance not merely with his theory, but with that which attributes the two parts of the poem to two different authors. It refers to the slaughter toward the close of the second part, and would be impertinent and out of place in a poem that concluded with the death of one hero only.
([St. LVIII.]) The poet says the broad linden, according to Lachmann, assuming that the story of Siegfried's death under a linden tree was generally known.
([St. LXII.]) Intelletto veloce più che pardo.—"Petrarch, Sonn." 286.
([St. LXIV.]) Johnson quotes from Ecclesiasticus, "I have no thank for all my good deed." So in St. Luke vi. 33—"If ye do good to them that do good to you, what thank have ye?"
SEVENTEENTH ADVENTURE
([St. II.]) Lachmann's Ninth Lay begins here and ends with St. LXXI, Seventeenth Adventure. The Professor has no objection to considering this and the preceding Lay as works of the same author.
([St. IX.]) The two last lines of this stanza and the two first of the next are rejected by Professor Lachmann, because, as he thinks, they contradict the last line of St. XI, where Kriemhild professes her ignorance of the murderer. But Kriemhild is not a witness on oath, but a woman in a frenzy of grief, who does not weigh her words, but one moment utters an obvious suspicion, as if it were an ascertained fact, and the next confesses that she has no positive proof, and cannot act upon what she feels to be true. There is no very great inconsistency in saying, "A. and B. are at the bottom of this: if I could only bring it home to them, I'd make them smart for it." But the neuter pronoun in the third line, referring to houbet in the second, proves that the second line is not interpolated. Professor Lachmann, indeed, gets over the difficulty by altering the gender of the pronoun to the masculine.