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"I will gladly do as you ask," said he; "but first I must know more about your father, who he was, and whether this is really the Hoard of the Glittering Heath." Then Niblung answered, as well as his feeble voice would allow, "Our father was, from the earliest times, the ruler of this land, and the lord of the fog and the mist.
Their arms fell helpless at their sides, their feet slipped beneath them, their limbs failed: they sank fainting, each upon his pile of treasures. "O my dear, dear gold!" murmured Niblung, trying to clasp it all in his arms, "my dear, dear gold! Thou art mine, mine only. No one shall take thee from me. Here thou art, here thou shalt rest. O my dear, dear gold!"
So before the wise-heart Hogni shrank the champions of the East As his great voice shook the timbers in the hall of Atli's feast, There he smote and beheld not the smitten, and by nought were his edges stopped; He smote and the dead were thrust from him; a hand with its shield he lopped; There met him Atli's marshal, and his arm at the shoulder he shred; Three swords were upreared against him of the best of the kin of the dead; And he struck off a head to the rightward, and his sword through a throat he thrust, But the third stroke fell on his helm-crest, and he stooped to the ruddy dust, And uprose as the ancient Giant, and both his hands were wet: Red then was the world to his eyen, as his hand to the labour he set; Swords shook and fell in his pathway, huge bodies leapt and fell; Harsh grided shield and war-helm like the tempest-smitten bell, And the war-cries ran together, and no man his brother knew, And the dead men loaded the living, as he went the war-wood through; And man 'gainst man was huddled, till no sword rose to smite, And clear stood the glorious Hogni in an island of the fight, And there ran a river of death 'twixt the Niblung and his foes, And therefrom the terror of men and the wrath of the Gods arose."
In the Nibelungen Lied, when Siegfried finds Schilbung and Niblung, the wierd heirs of the famous 'Hoard', striving for the possession of that heap of red gold and gleaming stones; when they beg him to share it for them, promising him, as his meed, Balmung, best of swords; when he shares it, when they are discontent, and when in the struggle which ensues he gets possession of the 'Tarnhut', the 'cloak of darkness', which gave its wearer the strength of twelve men, and enabled him to go where he would be unseen, and which was the great prize among the treasures of the dwarfs ; who is there that does not see the broken fragments of that old Eastern story of the heirs struggling for their inheritance, and calling in the aid of some one of better wit or strength who ends by making the very prize for which they fight his own?
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