Hand in hand with the discussion of the relative authenticity of the
manuscripts went the consideration of another more important literary
question,--the evolution of the poem itself. Even if we knew nothing of
the history of the Nibelungen saga as revealed in the Edda and through
other literary and historic sources, a reading of the poem would give us
unmistakable hints that it is not, in its present form, a perfect
literary unit. We detect inconsistencies in matter and inequalities of
style that prove it to be a remodelling of material already existing in
some earlier form. What, then, has been the history of its evolution? How
did this primeval Siegfried myth, this historical saga of the Burgundians
and Attila, first come to be part of the poetic stock of the German
people? What was its earliest poetic form, and what series of
transformations did it pass through during seven centuries of growth?
These and many kindred questions present themselves, and the search for
answers to them takes us through many winding labyrinths of the nation's
contemporary history. Few products of German literature have so exercised
and tantalized critics as the Nibelungenlied.
In this connection we have to remind ourselves that comparatively little
of what must have been the large body of native poetry in Germany
previous to the eleventh century has come down to us. Barely enough has
been preserved to show the path of the nation's literary progress. Some
of the important monuments have been saved by chance, while others of
equal or perhaps greater value have been irrecoverably lost. The interest
in the various incidents of the Nibelungen story was sufficient to keep
it alive among the people and hand it down orally through many
generations. If we could observe it as it passed from age to age we
should doubtless see it undergoing continuous change according to the
time and the class of the people that were the preservers of the native
literature in its many ups and downs. Lachmann in the year 1816 was the
first to bring scientific criticism to bear on the question of the
Nibelungenlied and its origin. Applying to it the same methods as had
recently been used by Wolf in his criticism of the Homeric poems, he
thought he was able to discover as the basis of the complete epic a cycle
of twenty separate _lieder_, ballads or shorter episodic poems, on the
strength of which belief he went so far as to publish an edition of the
poem in which he made the division into the twenty separate lays and
eliminated those strophes (more than one third of the whole number) that
he deemed not genuine. It is now generally admitted, however, that the
pioneer of Nibelungen investigation fell here into over-positive
refinements of literary criticism. Separate shorter poems there doubtless
existed narrating separate episodes of the story, but these are no longer
to be arrived at by a process of critical disintegration and pruning of
the epic as we have it. An examination of the twenty _lieder_ according
to Lachmann's division convinces us that they are not separate units in
the sense he conceived them to be. Though these twenty _lieder_ may be
based upon a number of earlier episodic poems, yet the latter already
constituted a connected series. They were already like so many scenes of
a gradually developing drama. Events were foreshadowed in one that were
only fulfilled in another, and the incidents of later ones are often only
intelligible on the supposition of an acquaintance with motives that
originated in preceding ones. It is in this sense only, not according to
Lachmann's overwrought theory, that we are justified in speaking of a
_liedercyclus_, or cycle of separate episodic poems, as the stage of the
epic antecedent to the complete form in which we now have it. But beyond
this cycle we cannot trace it back. How the mythical saga of Siegfried
and the Nibelungen, and the story of the Burgundians and Attila, were
first sung in alliterative lays in the Migration Period, how as heathen
song they were pushed aside or slowly influenced by the spirit of
Christianity, how with changing time they changed also their outward
poetical garb from alliteration to rhyme and altered verse-form, till at
last in the twelfth century they have become the cycle of poems from
which the great epic of the Nibelungenlied could be constructed--of all
this we may form a faint picture from the development of the literature
in general, but direct written record of it is almost completely wanting.