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It was written in monkish Latin at any time between the eighth and ninth centuries, and is connected with later versions of the Nibelungenlied, which contains numerous allusions to it.
Not so did the Germans adhere to old metres. The poem that, in the oldest MS., is written in assonances, in later MSS. is reduced to regular rhymes and is retouched in many essential respects. The matter of the Nibelungenlied is of heathen origin.
The language of the "Nibelungenlied" is the so-called Middle High German, that is, the High German written and spoken in the period between 1100 and 1500, the language of the great romances of chivalry and of the "Minnesingers". More exactly, the poem is written in the Austrian dialect of the close of the twelfth century, but contains many archaisms, which point to the fact of its having undergone a number of revisions.
We know that the mythologies of the ancient Germans and the Scandinavians were in many respects, though not in all, one and the same system, and we find many of the characters of the Nibelungenlied among the divine beings alluded to in the Edda. It is unlikely that the dramatis personae of a German murder story would find its way into even the most decadent form of Scandinavian belief.
Then the process begins again, and again fulfils itself, in the series which goes from Beowulf, the Song of Roland, and the Nibelungenlied, through Camoens and Tasso up to Milton. And in this case Milton is plainly the climax. There is nothing like Paradise Lost in the preceding poems, and epic poetry has done nothing since but decline from that towering glory.
It is idle to ask whether that epic ideal which our own day has formed from Homer and the 'Nibelungenlied' is or is not realized in these works; an ideal of their own age certainly was.
In the Nibelungenlied we have a case in point. What the exact mythological elements contained in it represent it would indeed be difficult to say. Students of the Müllerian school have seen in Siegfried a sun-god, who awakens Brunhild, a nature goddess.
We possess in all twenty-eight more or less complete manuscripts preserved in thirty-one fragments, fifteen of which date from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Its Fragmentary Nature Even a surface examination is sufficient to testify to the fragmentary nature of the Nibelungenlied.
It is to Norway, however, that we must go for our knowledge of the story, for, singularly enough, with the exception of the "Nibelungenlied" and the popular ballad, German literature has preserved almost no trace of the legend, and such as exist are too late and too corrupt to be of much use in determining the original features of the story.
It treated of the search for the precious blood of Christ, which was said to have been brought in a cup or charger into Northern Europe by Joseph of Arimathea. During this period the old ballads were thrown into an epic form; among them, the Nibelungenlied, the Iliad of Germany.
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