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In the popular epic like the Nibelungen story, there is more objectivity than in the epic of art like Jerusalem Delivered or Paradise Lost.
But now you are free to do what pleases you. If, as you said yesterday, you would fain return to Nibelungen Land, you may send your warriors on the way to-day, for they are already equipped for the journey. But abide you with us another day, and to-morrow we will bid you God-speed, and you may easily overtake your Nibelungen friends ere they have reached our own boundaries."
Once again I took up the threads of my negotiations with Hartel about the Nibelungen, but I was obliged to put them down as unfruitful, and little calculated to end in any success for this work.
Whether or not I perform my "Nibelungen" at some future time is at bottom a matter of indifference to me. I shall complete it in any case, for my enthusiasm and strength for such works I do not derive from any hopes, for the realisation of which I should require certain people.
If we may believe that Gudrun, like Chriemhild in the Nibelungen Lied, married Atli in order to gain vengeance for Sigurd, we might suppose that there was confusion here: that she herself incited the murder of her brothers, and killed Atli when he had served his purpose. This would strengthen the part of Gudrun, who as the tale stands is rather a futile character.
In France, Rousseau introduced the idea of the natural man, following his instincts in disregard of social conventions. In Germany Bodmer published, in 1753, the first edition of the old German epic, the Nibelungen Lied.
We must not judge, as I have said, either by poems of much earlier date, like the Nibelungen and the Carolingian chansons de geste, which merely received a new form in the early Middle Ages; still less from the prose romances of Mélusine, Milles et Amys, Palemon and Arcite, and a host of others which were elaborated only later and under the influence of the quite unfeudal habits of the great cities; and least of all from that strange late southern cycle of the Amadises, from which, odd as it seems, many of our notions of chivalric love have, through our ancestors, through the satirists or burlesque poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, been inherited.
The two variants in the Poetic Edda have evident marks of contamination with the Volsung cycle, and some points of superficial resemblance. Helgi Hjörvardsson's mother is Sigrlinn, Helgi Hundings-bane's father is Sigmund, as in the Nibelungen Lied Siegfried is the son of Sigemunt and Sigelint.
"And what are you doing here with this gold and these glittering stones?" "This is the great Nibelungen Hoard, which our father not long ago brought from the South-land. Others say that he found it lying on the Glittering Heath, where Fafnir the Dragon had guarded it zealously for ages past, until he was slain by a hero who cared nought for his gold.
But I have made these complaints a thousand times, and there is no help for it. Some unfortunate person has again sent me a whole heap of ridiculous nonsense about my "Nibelungen," and probably expects an approving answer in return. With such puppets have I to deal when I look for human beings.
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