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The second half of the tale, the destruction of the Nibelungs, is treated of very briefly in the early Norse versions, but the "Nibelungenlied", which knows so little of Siegfried's youth, has developed and enlarged upon the story, until it overshadows the first part in length and importance and gives the name to the whole poem.
All the mutilations in the world could not make the old Scandinavian tales of betrayed trust, of revenge and triumphant bloodshed, at all sympathetic to men whose religious and social ideals were those of forgiveness and fidelity; even stripped of its incestuous mysteries and of its fearful tribal love, the tale of Sigurd and Brynhilt, reduced to the tale of Chriemhilt's revenge, was unpalatable: no more attempts were made at re-writing it, and the poems of Walther, of Gottfried, of Wolfram, of Ulrich, and of Tannhäuser, full as they are of references to stories of the Carolingian and Arthurian cycles, nay, to Antique and Oriental tales, contain no allusion to the personages of the Nibelungenlied.
Hesiod is a clear instance of the poet who masters epic material after it has passed into popular possession; and the Nibelungenlied is thought to be made out of matter that has passed from the people back again to the courts. Epic poetry, then, as distinct from mere epic material, is the concern of this book.
This will be obvious to any folklorist of experience who will take the trouble to compare the Scandinavian and German versions. The Historical Theory Abeling and Boer, the most recent protagonists of the historical theory, profess to see in the Nibelungenlied the misty and confused traditions of real events and people.
Think of the forces at work in producing a poem like ‘Sigurd.’ Think of the mingling of the drudgery of the Dryasdust with the movements of an imaginative vision unsurpassed in our time; think, I say, of the collaborating of the ‘Völsunga Saga’ with the ‘Nibelungenlied,’ the choosing of this point from the Saga-man, and of that point from the later poem of the Germans, and then fusing the whole by imaginative heat into the greatest epic of the nineteenth century.
M. Reynaud lived at a time when it was all the fashion to suggest that old works that had come down to us, like the Iliad and the Odyssey, and even such national epics as the Cid and the Arthur Legends and the Nibelungenlied were to be attributed to several writers rather than to one.
The Nibelungenlied was put into its present shape between the middle and the end of the twelfth century. The poet has changed more than one feature of the original saga, has blended, not unskillfully, primitive Teutonic myth with historic personages and events of the early Middle Ages, and has interpolated sayings and traditions of his own times.
The old, consistent, grandly tragic tale of the mysterious incests and revenges of a race of demi-gods has lost its sense, its point in the attempt to arrange it to suit Christian and feudal ideas. The really fine portions of the Nibelungenlied are exactly those which have no real connection with the original story, gratuitous additions by mediæval poets.
This reduced the whole to twenty lays, which he considered the work of twenty separate minstrels; but if certain ballads relating to episodes in the Nibelungenlied once existed in Germany it is the spirit of these more than the matter which is incorporated into the great epic.
It is highly artificial and inartistic, and Grimm points out that it is obvious that in penning it the author did not have the Nibelungenlied, as we know it, before him. As it is practically unknown to English-speaking readers, a résumé of it may not be out of place here.
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