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Now, in that neighborhood, in the northwest of Germany, a Teutonic tribe once dwelt, called Hunes, which is also traceable in Scandinavia. Sigurd himself is, in the "Edda," described as a Hunic king. His kith and kin dwell in Huna-land. "Hune" probably meant a bold and powerful warrior.
He imagined the former name to be absurd, because Siegfried was not a Hunn; but Vigfússon was unacquainted with the wide historical distribution of the Hunic name in Germany and England. Gundahari, who first threw himself with an army of 20,000 men against the Hunnic leader, gloriously fell with all his men.
The Hunic Atli name is also to be found on English soil, in Attlebridge and Attleborough. After the Great Migrations the various tribes and races became much intermixed. It was by a misunderstanding which arose then between the German Hunes and the Hunns under Attila's leadership, that Kriemhild's revenge after the murder of Siegfried was poetically transferred from the Rhine to the Danube.
Recently, the Norse scholar, Gudbrand Vigfússon, has once more started this "Armin" interpretation of the tale, under the impression that he was the first to do so; whereas, in Germany, Mone and Giesebrecht had worked out that idea already some sixty years ago. In order to support his theory, Vigfússon boldly proposed to change the Hunic name of Sigurd, in the Eddic text, into "Cheruskian."
The word still lingers in Germany in various ways; gigantic grave-monuments of prehistoric times are called Hunic Graves or "Hünen-Betten," and a tall, strong man a "Hüne." In his "Church History" the Anglo-Saxon monk Baeda, or Bede, when speaking of the various German tribes which had made Britain into an Angle-land, or England, mentions the Hunes.
In the Anglo-Saxon "Wanderer's Tale" they also turn up, apparently in connection with a chieftain Aetla; that is, Atli. In Friesland, the Hunsing tribe long preserved the Hunic name. Again, in England: Hundon, Hunworth, Hunstanton, Huncote, Hunslet, Hunswick, and many other places from Kent and Suffolk up to Lancashire and Shetland, where certainly no Mongolic Hunns ever penetrated.
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