All the Aryan peoples have had their heroic age, the achievements of
which form the basis of later saga. For the Germans this was the period
of the Migrations, as it is called, in round numbers the two hundred
years from 400 to 600, at the close of which we find them settled in
those regions which they have, generally speaking, occupied ever since.
During these two centuries kaleidoscopic changes had been taking place in
the position of the various Germanic tribes. Impelled partly by a native
love of wandering, partly by the pressure of hostile peoples of other
race, they moved with astonishing rapidity hither and thither over the
face of Europe, generally in conflict with one another or buffeted by the
Romans in the west and south, and by the Huns in the east. In this stern
struggle for existence and search for a permanent place of settlement
some of them even perished utterly; amid the changing fortunes of all of
them deeds were performed that fixed themselves in the memory of the
whole people, great victories or great disasters became the subject of
story and song. We need only to recall such names as those of Ermanric
and Theodoric to remind ourselves what an important part was played by
the Germanic peoples of that Migration Period in the history of Europe.
During it a national consciousness was engendered, and in it we have the
faint beginnings of a national literature. Germanic saga rests almost
entirely upon the events of these two centuries, the fifth and sixth.
Although we get glimpses of the Germans during the four or five preceding
centuries, none of the historic characters of those earlier times have
been preserved in the national sagas.
With these sagas based on history, however, have been mingled in most
cases primeval Germanic myths, possessions of the people from prehistoric
times. A most conspicuous example of this union of mythical and
originally historical elements is the Nibelungen saga, out of which grew
in course of time the great national epic, the Nibelungenlied.
The Nibelungen saga is made up of two parts, on the one hand the mythical
story of Siegfried and on the other the story, founded on historic fact,
of the Burgundians. When and how the Siegfried myth arose it is
impossible to say; its origin takes us back into the impenetrable mists
of the unrecorded life of our Germanic forefathers, and its form was
moulded by the popular poetic spirit. The other part of the saga is based
upon the historic incident of the overthrow of the Burgundian kingdom by
the Huns in the year 437. This annihilation of a whole tribe naturally
impressed itself vividly upon the imagination of contemporaries. Then the
fact of history soon began to pass over into the realm of legend, and,
from causes which can no longer be determined, this tradition of the
vanished Burgundians became united with the mythical story of Siegfried.
This composite Siegfried-Burgundian saga then became a common possession
of the Germanic peoples, was borne with many of them to lands far distant
from the place of its origin, and was further moulded by each according
to its peculiar genius and surroundings. In the Icelandic Eddas, the
oldest of which we have as they were written down in the latter part of
the ninth century, are preserved the earliest records of the form it had
taken among the northern Germanic peoples. Our Nibelungenlied, which is
the chief source of our knowledge of the story as it developed in
Germany, dates from about the year 1200. These two versions, the Northern
and the German, though originating in this common source, had diverged
very widely in the centuries that elapsed between their beginning and the
time when the manuscripts were written in which they are preserved. Each
curtailed, re-arranged, or enlarged the incidents of the story in its own
way. The character of the chief actors and the motives underlying what we
may call the dramatic development assumed widely dissimilar forms. The
German Nibelungenlied may be read and appreciated as one of the world's
great epic poems without an acquaintance on the part of the reader with
the Northern version of the saga. In order, however, to furnish the
setting for a few episodes that would in that case remain either obscure
or colorless, and with a view to placing the readers of this translation
in a position to judge better the deeper significance of the epic as the
eloquent narrative of a thousand years of the life of the people among
whom it grew, the broad outlines of the saga in its Northern form will be
given here.