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It exhibits the intimate blending of the German and Christian elements, and their full development in splendid productions, for this was the period of the German national epos, the "Nibelungenlied," and of the "Minnegesang." This was a period which has nothing to compare with it in point of art and poetry, save perhaps, and that imperfectly, the heroic and post-Homeric age of early Greece.
The late German bearbeiter of the Nibelungenlied has no idea of unity of plot enfin, Germany, having excellent and ancient legendary material for an epic, but producing no parallel to ILIAD and Odyssey, only proves how absolutely essential a Homer was to the Greek epics. It is our own argument that Sir Richard states.
Whatever the cause may have been, the result is obvious: a sudden liberation, a delighted expansion, of numerous private individualities. But the various appearances of the Heroic Age cannot, perhaps, be completely generalized. What has just been written will probably do for the Heroic Age which produced Homer, and for that which produced the Nibelungenlied, Beowulf, and the Northern Sagas.
The King Gundahar, the Gunther of the "Nibelungenlied", who also fell in the battle, became the central figure of a new legend, namely, the story of the fall of the Burgundians.
Prominent among this popular literature were the love-songs of the Minnesingers, the epics drawn from mediæval traditionary versions of the legend of Troy, of the career of Alexander the Great, and, to come to more recent times, to legends of Charles the Great and his Court, of Arthur and the Holy Grail, the Nibelungenlied in its present form, and Gudrun.
This bathing in the blood is also related in the Seyfrid ballad and in the "Nibelungenlied", with the difference, that the vulnerable spot is caused by a linden leaf falling upon him. The fact that all but one of these names alliterate, shows that the Norse version is here more original.
The dwarf legend is the more southern; it is told in detail in the "Nibelungenlied". The dragon legend probably originated in the Cimbrian peninsula, where the "Beowulf" saga, in which the dragon fight plays such an important part, likewise arose.
Older times more distant from our own in spirit, though not necessarily in years have presented us with many themes of guilt: the guilt which exists according to our own moral standard, but not according to that of the narrator, as the magnificently tragic Icelandic incest story of Sigmund and Signy; the guilt which has come about no one well knows how, an unfortunate circumstance leaving the sinner virtually stainless, in his or her own eyes and the eyes of others, like the Homeric Helen; the heroic guilt, where the very heroism seems due to the self-sacrifice of the sinner's innocence, of Judith; the struggling, remorseful guilt, hopelessly overcome by fate and nature, of Phædra; the dull and dogged guilt, making the sinner scarce more than a mere physical stumbling-block for others, of the murderer Hagen in the Nibelungenlied; and, finally, the perverse guilt, delighting in the consciousness of itself, of demons like Richard and Iago, of libidinous furies like the heroines of Tourneur and Marston.
That poets of an uncritical period, when treating of the themes of ancient legend or song, carefully avoid everything modern is an opinion not warranted by the usage of the authors of the Chansons de Geste, of Beowulf, and of the Nibelungenlied.
William Morris; which, although written down at the end of the twelfth century, in the very time therefore of Chrestien de Troyes, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and Gottfried von Strassburg, and subsequently to the presumed writing of "The Chanson de Roland" and the Nibelungenlied, shows us in reality the product of a people, the distant Scandinavians of Iceland, who were five or six hundred years behind the French, Germans, and English of the twelfth century.
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