"Professor Lachmann himself seems to be in doubt whether this First Lay be complete; he talks of 'this lay, or what has been preserved of it;' he tells us that 'it several times indicates a continuation, and might have deserved a better than that which follows;' but though he expresses a doubt, he gives no reasons for entertaining one. It certainly would require far less ingenuity to assign cogent reasons for a doubt, and indeed for much more than a doubt, on this point; the lay, as it stands, is a 'passage that leads to nothing,' a mountain in labor that does not produce even so much as a mouse; but it is not singular in this respect; its brethren for the most part keep it in countenance; or, if they contain matter of interest, they too often try the temper of the reader by disappointing his expectations at the most critical moment, and coming to an abrupt conclusion in the midst of an action. Thus the Eighteenth Lay ends just after the battle between Huns and Burgundians has begun; the Nineteenth stops short just at the moment when Etzel has brought up 20,000 fresh men and commenced another attack on Gunther and his followers.
"It really is a waste of words to dwell on the peculiarities of such whimsical arrangements as these. I will merely add a word or two on the Fourteenth Lay, which, inasmuch as it is an introduction to what follows, bears some resemblance to the First. The dream of Uta, the prophecy of the mermaids, and all the gloomy forebodings which give a peculiar character to this lay, are ludicrously out of place as component parts of a short poem, which merely conducts the Burgundians to Rudeger's castle, where, so far from being destroyed, they do not even run any risk whatever, except that of being killed with kindness; but in fact the whole tenor of the lay (one might almost say, every line, every word of it) proves beyond dispute that we are there in the midst of an extensive poem, which can end only with the destruction of the last Burgundian. An attentive examination of the three or four lays just noticed, would, I think, convince every unprejudiced reader that the hypothesis of twenty separate lays by different authors is utterly untenable.... The wisest course," he concludes, and it is easy to concur with him, "is, in such uncertainty, to take the poem as we find it, and to prefer the authority, however occasionally unsatisfactory, of manuscripts to the speculations of the most ingenious critics."
The metre of the "Nibelungenlied" needs a word of explanation. The characteristic strophe in which it is written consists of four verses, the first three of equal length, the fourth somewhat longer, rhymed in couplets on the final syllable. The rhythmical system is dependent, not upon measure, but upon accent, with considerable freedom in the addition or suppression of unaccented syllables. Every verse, with the exception of the last, is made up of two half-verses each containing three accented syllables and separated by a ringing cæsura, that is, a cæsura on an unaccented syllable. The last half-verse contains an additional accent, or four, instead of three, as in the others. A strophe in the original Middle High German, the second of the poem, will make this analysis clear:
Ez wúohs in Búregónden ein vil édel magedî́n,
dáz in állen lánden niht schœ́ners móhte sî́n,
Kríemhilt gehéizen: diu wart ein schœ́ne wî́p
dar úmbe múosen dégene víl verlíesen den lî́p.
The metre of the present translation follows the original, except for the lengthening of the fourth line of the stanza which the author only occasionally differentiates in this respect from the rest.
The "Nibelungenlied," like other poems of the Middle Ages that were widely read and widely copied, was subjected all along its career of transmission to additions and alterations, and has consequently come down to us not in a single form, but in a number of different versions that deviate to a greater or less extent from the original poem and from each other. Whole or in part there are no less than twenty-eight MSS. Ten of these are complete: three of them, usually cited A, B, C, are parchment MSS. of the thirteenth century, two are parchments of the fourteenth century, four are paper MSS. of the fifteenth century, and one is a parchment of the sixteenth century. Of all these manuscripts it is commonly conceded that only A, B, C have independent authenticity. It is not necessary here to go into the details of the long discussion as to the relative value of the MSS. with regard to the age and original condition of the particular text which each contains. Each one has by different critics been given the preference over the others.
Zarncke, who is one of the most rational and impartial of the critics of the poem in all its bearings, makes C, a beautifully written MS. from the dividing line between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, preserved in the court library of Donaueschingen, the nearest in every essential way to the original form of the poem. Subsequently, the whole, according to him, was subjected to a revision which brought it more into accord with contemporary taste. The text is amplified by the introduction of new episodes into the narrative, although some of the older strophes are omitted, and, unfortunately, the old dignity and simplicity of the diction is frequently sacrificed in favor of a more pronounced effect. This stage of the poem in its full form is not represented in either of the oldest MSS. B, a manuscript from the middle of the thirteenth century, in the monastery of St. Gallen, occupied an intermediate position in length. It is made by Bartsch, who regards it "as relatively the most faithful picture of the original form of the lost poem," the basis of his edition of the "Nibelungenlied." A, a carelessly written MS. in the Munich Library, is the shortest form of the poem, but is, nevertheless, in its turn regarded by Lachmann as inherently the oldest and best version that we possess. Lettsom's translation, in that it follows the text and modern German version of Braunfels, published in 1846, is based upon A, but with the inclusion of other strophes, particularly from C.
The "Nibelungenlied" was first published at Zurich, by Bodmer, in 1757, and since then has appeared in many editions and modernized versions at home, and in numerous translations abroad, among them Low German, French, Italian, Dutch, and Hungarian.
In English, the first translations of parts of the "Nibelungenlied" are contained in the "Illustrations of Northern Antiquities," by Weber, published in 1814, in Edinburgh. The version here given consists in part only of a metrical translation, in part of prose. Lockhart, in his biography of Sir Walter Scott, states that he has no doubt but that the rhymed versions came from that poet's pen, although of this there is no more direct proof. The second attempt in this direction is not less notable. This is from 1831, when Thomas Carlyle wrote in the "Westminster Review" an essay on the "Nibelungenlied" as a review of Karl Simrock's German translation of the poem, in which are contained a number of strophes given with characteristic vigor and a genuine appreciation of the real spirit of the original. The next translation, that of Gostik, in his "Spirit of German Poetry," 1846, is metrical, but, like its predecessors, consists only of parts of the poem. The first translation to lay claim to any degree of completeness was that of Jonathan Birch, published in 1848. It is a metrical version, as its title states, of Lachmann's text, and, like it, divides the poem into twenty lays. The first complete edition of the poem in English does not, however, appear until this of Lettsom's, which has admirably retained the form of the original and much of its spirit, and which for the first time gave to English readers an adequate idea of the real work as it is.
For those who care to pursue the subject further than these pages it may be stated that the best editions of the "Nibelungenlied" in the original are those of Friedrich Zarncke, "Das Nibelungenlied," originally published in 1856 and since then in several editions, and of Karl Bartsch, "Das Nibelungenlied," originally published in 1866, both of which have abundant critical apparatus. The "Nibelungenlied" is not yet sufficiently well known among us, for it is, in the way that has been indicated, not alone the great epic of Germany, but in its widest sense an epic of the Germanic race.