“The warriors of the country no whit displeased were
To see behind her coming so many ladies fair,
Their eyes upon these daughters of noble knights did rest,
Good lodging was provided for every noble guest.
“The bishop into Passau, his niece beside him, rode;
And when among the burghers the news was noised abroad
That coming was Kriemhilda, their prince’s sister’s child,
Right gladly was she welcomed by all the merchant guild.”
Not only does a bishop of Passau thus play his small part in the wonderful epic of the Nibelungs, but to one of their number, it is said, we owe it that the poem was ever written—that the legends on which it was based were rescued from oblivion. Says Planché, “Pelegrin, or Pilgerin, Bishop of Passau, who died in 991, collected the then current legends of the Nibelungen, which he committed to writing in the favourite Latin tongue, with the assistance of his scribe, Conrad, whose name has occasioned the Swabian poems to be sometimes ascribed to Conrad of Wurtzburg, who lived long after.” This reference to Bishop Pelegrin as rescuer of the legends might seem curious, seeing that it is a bishop of the same name, who, as uncle of Kriemhilda, welcomes her to Passau in the poem; but it is thus explained by Mr. Edward Bell in the introduction to the translation in Bonn’s Libraries, from which the above passage is quoted:[6] “It is known that, at the request of Bishop Pilgerin of Passau in the tenth century, the story was translated into Latin prose by Conrad, called ‘the Scribe;’ and to him is attributed the inclusion of the name of the said bishop as that of an actor in events which, so far as they are historical, belong to the fifth century.” Kriemhilda’s cavalcade we shall meet again on the journey down the river, for her bishop uncle accompanied her the greater part of the way onwards from Passau.
During the Thirty Years’ War a “spell” by means of which fainthearted warriors secured themselves against sword and bullet, was associated with Passau. The Passau spell is like that of some primitive peoples who cure diseases by swallowing articles inscribed with magic words. All the soldier who feared his fate too much had to do, was to swallow a slip of paper containing certain potent sentences concluding: “Teufel hilf mir; Leib und Seel geb ich dir” (Devil help me; body and soul give I thee). The spell needed twenty-four hours of digestion before becoming operative—the penalty being that if the swallower died within those hours of disgrace, he went straight to the Devil whose aid he had sought!