Finding her first attempt at midnight assassination fail, the Queen first commits her cause to Bloedel, the brother of Etzel; but in an instant his head was severed from his body by the might of Sir Dankwart. A terrible massacre ensues, during which the banqueting hall of King Etzel is turned into a charnel-house. Then Iring, the Danish Margrave, falls in single combat with Hagan. An infuriate rush is now made by the Huns against the Burgundians, who had fortified themselves in the hall; but against such men as Dankwart, Hagan, and Volker, they avail no more than hail against the granite rock.
"Thereafter reigned deep silence, the din of war was hushed;
Through every crack and cranny the blood on all sides gushed
From that large hall of slaughter; red did the gutters run.
So much was through their prowess by those of Rhineland done."
Kriemhild then, finding all her efforts with the sword baffled, sets fire to the hall; but, the roof being vaulted, even this application of the terror that scared Napoleon from Moscow, did not subdue the Promethean endurance of the Burgundians. The noble Margrave Rudeger is at last appealed to, as bound by his promise made to Kriemhild at Worms to prosecute the bloody work of her revenge to the last; but he also, with five hundred of his men, falls in the bloody wrestling, and with him his adversary Gernot, the brother of Gunther. Last of all, the haughty defiant spirit of the unsubdued Hagan draws, though unwilling, the redoubted Dietrich of Bern into the fight; and before his might Hagan himself is not slain, but taken captive, that he may be reserved to glut the private appetite of the sanguinary queen. "Bring me here John the Baptist's head in a charger!" Nothing less than this will satisfy the terrible revenge of Kriemhild. With her own hand she lifts up the terrible sword Balmung, and, meeting Hagan face to face in the dark prison, and charging him hot to the heart with his deadly wrongs, severs the head from his body. Kriemhild's revenge is now complete. But the revenge of Him who rules above required one other blow. This was immediately executed by the aged master Hildebrand, one of Dietrich's company. And the poem concludes, like a battle-field, many to weep for, and only a few to weep.
"There now the dreary corpses stretched all around were seen;
There lay, hewn in pieces, the fair and noble queen.
Sir Dietrich and King Etzel, their tears began to start;
For kinsmen, and for vassals, each sorrowed in his heart.
The mighty and the noble there lay together dead;
For this had all the people dole and drearihead.
The feast of royal Etzel was thus shut up in woe.
Pain in the steps of pleasure treads ever here below."
On the singular poem, of which a brief but complete outline now stands before us, many remarks of a critical and historical nature might be made; but we confine ourselves to three short observations, and with these leave the matter to the private meditations of the reader. First, that the poem is not "snapt out of the air," as the Germans say, but has a historical foundation, seems sufficiently manifest—Etzel being plainly the famous Attila, Dietrich, Theodoric the Goth, and counterparts to Siegfried and Gunther being producible from the early history of the Franks.[17] Besides this, it is perfectly plain, from the analogy of the Cid, and other popular poetry of the narrative character, that not religious allegory—as some Germans would have it—but actual, though confused and exaggerated history, is the real staple of such composition. The nucleus of the story of the Burgundian Kings, and the revenge of Kriemhild, belongs, probably, to the century following that in which Attila was so prominent a character. But the complete poem, in its present shape, is not later than the thirteenth century. Its author is not known.
Secondly, the lay of the Niebelungen is extremely interesting, as disproving, so far as analogy may avail to do so, the Wolfian theory above alluded to, of the composition of the Iliad out of a number of separate ballads. Lachmann has tried the same process of disintegration with the unknown Homer of his own country; but a sound-minded Englishman needs but to read the poem as it has been given us, for the first time, complete by Mr Lettsom,[18] in order to stand aghast at the extreme trouble which learned men in Germany often give themselves, in order to prove nonsense. "Nihil est tam absurdum quod non scripserit aliquis Germanorum."
Thirdly, as a poetical composition, the Lay of the Niebelungen will not bear comparison for a moment with the two great Greek works of the same class; it is even, in our opinion, inferior to its nearest modern counterpart, the Cid. The author of the Iliad possessed a soul as sunny and as fiery as those lovely island-fringed coasts that gave him birth; and in describing battles he rushes on himself to the charge, like some old French-eating Marshal Blucher, the incarnation of the whirlwind of battle which he guides. Our German minstrel takes matters more easily, and, while his pen revels in blood, sits all the while in his easy chair, rocking himself delectably, and, like a true German, smoking his pipe. His quiet serene breadth is very apt to degenerate into Westphalian flats and sheer prosiness. When, again, he would be sublime and stirring, as in the bloody catastrophe, he is apt to overshoot the mark, and becomes horrible. His heroes are too gigantic, and do things with a touch of their finger which no Homeric hero would have dreamt of without the help of a god. The fancy, also, of the old German is very barren and monotonous, as compared with the wealthy Greek. His similes are few; he has no richness of analogy. Nevertheless, the Niebelungen Lay remains for all Europe a very notable poem—for all lovers of popular poetry an indispensable study. Whatever else it wants, it has nature and health, simplicity and character about it; and these things are always pleasurable—sometimes, where a taint of vicious taste has crept in, your only curatives.