In the Northern Edda and in the German Nibelungenlied the Nibelungen saga
found its fullest and most poetic expression. But these were not to be
the only literary records of it. Both in Scandinavian lands and in
Germany various other monuments, scattered over the intervening
centuries, bear witness to the fact that it lived on in more or less
divergent forms. The Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus of the latter part
of the twelfth century has a reference to the story of Kriemhild's
treachery toward her brothers. About the year 1250 an extensive prose
narrative, known as the Thidrekssaga, was written by a Norwegian from
oral accounts given him by men from Bremen and Munster. This narrative is
interesting as showing the form the saga had taken by that date on Low
German territory, and holds an important place in the history of the
development of the saga. It has much more to say of the early history of
Siegfried than we find in the Nibelungenlied, and yet in the main
outlines of the story of Kriemhild's revenge it corresponds with the
German epic and not with the Northern Edda. A chronicle of the island of
Hven in the Sound, dating in its original form from the sixteenth
century, as well as Danish ballads on the same island that have lived on
into modern times, tell of Sivard (Siegfried), Brynhild, and also of
Grimild's (Kriemhild's) revenge. In Norway and Sweden traces of the saga
have recently been discovered; while songs that are sung on the Faroe
Islands, as an accompaniment to the dance on festive occasions, have been
recorded, containing over six hundred strophes in which is related in
more or less distorted form the Nibelungen story.
In Germany the two poems known as the _Klage_ and _Hurnen Seyfrid_ are
the most noteworthy additional records of the Nibelungen saga, as
offering in part at least independent material. The _Klage_ is a poem of
over four thousand lines in rhymed couplets, about half of it being an
account of the mourning of Etzel, Dietrich, and Hildebrand as they seek
out the slain and prepare them for burial, the other half telling of the
bringing of the news to Bechlaren, Passau, and Worms. The poem was
written evidently very soon after the Nibelungenlied, the substance of
which was familiar to the author, though he also draws in part from other
sources. Compared with the Nibelungenlied it possesses but little poetic
merit and is written with distinctly Christian sentiment which is out of
harmony with the ground-tone of the Germanic tragedy.
The _Hurnen Seyfrid_ is a poem of 179 four-lined strophes which is
preserved only in a print of the sixteenth century, but at least a
portion of whose substance reaches back in its original form to a period
preceding the composition of the Nibelungenlied. It is evidently, as we
have it, formed by the union of two earlier separate poems, which are
indeed to a certain extent contradictory of each other. The first tells
of the boyhood of Seyfrid (Siegfried) and his apprenticeship to the
smith; how he slew many dragons, burned them, and smeared over his body
with the resulting fluid horny substance (hence his name _hurnen_), which
made him invulnerable; how he further found the hoard of the dwarf
Nybling, and by service to King Gybich won the latter's daughter for his
wife. The second part tells how King Gybich reigned at Worms. He has
three sons, Gunther, Hagen, Gyrnot, and one daughter, Kriemhild. The
latter is borne off by a dragon, but finally rescued by Seyfrid, to whom
she is given in marriage. The three brothers are jealous of the might and
fame of Seyfrid, and after eight years Hagen slays him beside a cool
spring in the Ottenwald.
The poem _Biterolf_, written soon after the Nibelungenlied, and
_Rosengarten_ of perhaps a half-century later, represent Dietrich in
conflict with Siegfried at Worms. The famous shoemaker-poet Hans Sachs of
Nuremberg in 1557 constructed a tragedy, _Der hornen Sewfriedt_, on the
story of Siegfried as he knew it from the _Hurnen Seyfrid_ and the
_Rosengarten_. A prose version of the _Hurnen Seyfrid_, with free
additions and alterations, is preserved in the _Volksbuch vom gehornten
Sigfrid_, the oldest print of which dates from the year 1726. Of the vast
number of Fairy Tales, those most genuine creations of the poetic
imagination of the people, in which live on, often to be sure in scarcely
recognizable form, many of the myths and sagas of the nation's infancy,
there are several that may with justice be taken as relics of the
Siegfried myth, for instance, The Two Brothers, The Young Giant, The
Earth-Manikin, The King of the Golden Mount, The Raven, The Skilled
Huntsman, and perhaps also the Golden Bird and The Water of Life;[6]
though it would seem from recent investigations that Thorn-Rose or the
Sleeping Beauty, is no longer to be looked upon as the counterpart of the
sleeping Brynhild. Finally, it is probable that several names in Germany
and in Northern countries preserve localized memories of the saga.
[6] These will be found in Grimm's Marchen as numbers 60, 90-93, 111, 57,
and 97.