THE HELGI SAGAS. VI. 115 Volsungs, he yet treacherously stabs Helgi (another of the many CHAP. forms of Baldur's death), and tells Sigrun that he is dead. The sequel, although essentially the same, shows the working of a new vein of thought. Sigrun curses Dag as one who had broken his oath, and refuses to live Unless a glory should break from the prince's grave, And Vigblar the horse should speed thither with him ; The gold-bridled steed becomes him whom I fain would embrace. Her tears disturb the repose of Helgi in his grave, and he rebukes her as making his wounds burst open afresh. But Sigrun is not to be scared or driven away. She prepares a common resting-place for him and for herself, a couch free from all care, and enters of her own free will the land of the dead. Helgi. The third Helgi, Haddingaheld, is but a reproduction of the second The Third Helgi, while Kara, the daughter of Halfdan, takes the place of Swava or Sigrun. In all these tales the heroes and the heroines stand in precisely the same relations to each other; and thus, having seen that the myths of these heroes merely reproduce the legends of Baldur and of Sigurd the Volsung, we are prepared for the conclusion that the story of Siegfried, in the Lay of the Nibelungs, is only another form of the oft-repeated tale. For the most part the names are the same, as well as the incidents. The second Helgi is a son of Sigmund, his mother also being called Sigurlin; and so Sigurd of the Volsung and Siegfried of the Nibelung Saga are each the son of Sigmund. The slaying of Hunding by Helgi answers to the slaughter of Fafnir and Regin by Sigurd, Siegfried being also a dragon-slayer like Phoibos, or Oidipous, or Heraklês. So too, as Sigurd first won the love of Brynhild and then marries Gudrun, for whose brother Second Lay of Helgi Hundingsbana, 46, 47. This is the legend of Lenore, of which Bunsen says that "Bürger caught the soul of the story as it was on the point of extinction, and lent it a new and immortal life among the German people."-God in For a tabular view of these paral· BOOK I. he finally wins Brynhild as a wife, so Siegfried in his turn marries Kriemhild, sister of the Burgundian Gunther, having wooed Brynhild for his brother-in-law. If, again, Brynhild causes the death of Sigurd, the man in whom she has garnered up her soul, so Siegfried is murdered at Brynhild's instigation. If in the Helgi Saga the son of Hogni bears the news of Helgi's death to Sigurd, so in the Volsung tale Hogni informs Gudrun of Sigurd's death, and in the Nibelung song Hagen brings to Kriemhild the tidings of the death of Siegfried. Like Swava and Sigrun, Brynhild kills herself that her body may be burnt with that of Sigurd; and as in the story of the Volsungs, Atli (who appears as the comrade of the first Helgi) gets possession of Gunnar and Hogni and has them put to death, so Kriemhild in the Nibelungenlied marries Etzel, who catches Gunther and his brothers in the same trap in which Gunnar and Hogni had been caught by Atli.1 On the historical residuum which ment constitutes the basis of the Sigurd may fairly be asserted that two or three names, with which not a single known historical event is associated, and of which the stories told cannot be reconciled with anything which comes down to us on genuine historical testimony, furnish a miserably insecure foundation for any historical inferences. If this is all that we learn from the popular tradition, can we be said to learn anything? In the one Bleda is the brother of Attila, in the other he is not it seems rash, then, to speak of Bludi as a "perfectly historical person.' To us they must remain mere names; and while we turn aside from the task of measuring the historical authority of these Sagas as a mere waste of time, we cannot on the same plea refuse consideration to evidence which may seem to trace such names as Atli, Bleda, and Gunnar to a time long preceding the days of Attila, Bludi, and Gunther. It might have been supposed that this question had been long since set at rest. But the controversy has been reopened with singular boldness of assertion by Mr. Mahaffy in his Prolegomena to Ancient History. Mr. Mahaffy takes comfort from the thought that the his torical basis of the Nibelungenlied is so certain that not even the mythologers can gainsay it; but he admits that this basis is one resting on the names of some few of the actors in the drama, and on these alone. Nor does he pretend to believe that the historical Attila, or Siegbert, or Gundicar, did any of the things which they are said to do in the THE NIBELUNGEN LAY. VI. 117 The Nibe lungen That the later forms into which the Volsung story has been CHAP. thrown may contain some incidents which may be either truly told or else travestied from real history, it is impossible to deny. When at the best they who insist most on the historical character of these Lay. poems can but trace a name here and there, or perhaps see in the account of some fight a reference to some actual battle with which it has no likeness beyond the fact that men fought and were killed in both, as the fishes swim in the streams of Macedon and Monmouth, it seems useless to affirm it. When the motives are alike in all, when in each case there is a wealthily dowered maiden whose hoard is stolen, a robber who refuses to disclose the secret of the lost treasure, and bloody vengeance by those who lay claim to this wealth, when thousands are murdered in a single hall, and men lie down contentedly in flaming chambers floating in blood, treading out the falling brands in the gore and recruiting their strength by sucking the veins of the dead, we can scarcely regard it as a profitable task to search amidst such a mass of impossibilities the materials for a picture of society as existing whether amongst Northmen or amongst Greeks. That the colouring thrown over them is in part reflected from the manners of the age, there is no room to doubt; but when the groundwork of the story has been shown to be purely mythical, this fact will not carry us far. We are confined to mere names or mere customs; and the attempt to advance further lands us in the region of guesswork. Thus to Mr. Kemble's assertion that Attila "drew into his traditional history the exploits of others, and more particularly those of Chlodowic and his sons in the matter of the Burgundian kingdom," and that this fact will be patent to any one who will look over the accounts of the Burgundian war in Gregory of Tours, Mr. Ludlow replies that the search yields only two names, Godegiselus namely, and Theudericus, answering to the Giselher and Dietrich of the Nibelungen Lay. Nor do we gain much if we find Gundicar, the Burgundian king, as one of the sovereigns conquered by Attila, if the Atli of the Volsung story belonged to the myth long before the days of the Hunnish devastator. The name of the Bishop Pilgrim seems to be more genuinely historical; but even if he can be identified as a prelate who filled the see of Passau in the tenth century, we know no more about him from the poem than we learn of Hruodlandus from the myth of the Roland who fell at Roncesvalles. poem. The end at which Mr. Mahaffy aims is clear enough, but it is scarcely one which reflects much credit on the critic. I have examined his position more at length in Appendix II. of the Introduction to Comparative Mytho- Ludlow, Popular Epics of the BOOK I. Sigurd, The points of difference between the Norse and the German traditions are simply such as the comparison of one Greek myth with another would lead us to expect. Phoibos may be called the child of the darkness, as strictly as he may be said to be born in Delos or Ortygia. The offspring of Chrysâôr, the lord of the golden sword of day, is the three-headed Geryoneus; and Echidna, the throttling snake, who is united with Heraklês, is the daughter of Kallirhoê, the fair-flowing stream of the ocean. Hence there is nothing surprising in the fact that in the one set of myths Sigurd fights with, or is slain by, the Niflungs, while in the other he is said to be a Niflung himself. The real difference between the Teutonic and the Greek epics lies, not so much in the fact that a complex poem exhibits a being like Paris, sometimes in the garb of the Panis, sometimes with the attributes of Surya, as in the greater compass of the northern poems, The Iliad relates the incidents only of a portion of a single year in the Trojan war; the Nibelung lay adds two or three complete histories to the already completed history of Siegfried. The antiquity of these several portions of a poem, which by the confession of all has certainly been pieced together, is a question into which we need not enter. It is possible that the portion which relates to Siegfried may have been added at a later time to explain the intense hatred of Kriemhild for her brothers, and that this may be the most modern addition to the Nibelungenlied; but it is not less certain that the myth of Siegfried is the myth of Baldur, and has existed in many shapes in every Aryan land. The Volsung story may represent the rougher songs of Norse sea-rovers, while the Nibelung song may introduce us to the more stately life and elaborate pageants of German kings and princes; but the heroes have changed simply their conditions, not their mind and temper, by crossing the sea or passing into another land. The doom of perpetual pilgrimage is laid on Perseus, Theseus, Bellerophôn, Heraklês, Odysseus; and Sigurd and Siegfried are not more exempt from it. In their golden locks and "So it was in the morning of the morrow's day he went away without dog, without man, without calf, without child. "He was going and going and journeying; there was blackening on his soles, and holes in his shoes; the black clouds of night coming, and the bright quiet clouds of the day going away, and without his finding a place of staying or rest for him." He is, in short, the wandering Wuotan (Wegtam), Savitar, Odysseus, Bellerophôn, Phoibos, Dio. SIGURD AND SIEGFRIED. 119 VI. godlike countenances, in their flashing swords and unerring spears, CHAP. there is no difference between them; and every additional point of likeness adds to the weight of proof that these epic poems represent neither the history nor the national character of Northmen, Greeks, or Germans. In each case the spirit of the tradition has been carefully preserved, but there is no servile adherence. In the Volsung story, Gudrun becomes the wife of Siegfried; in the Nibelung song, her mother Kriemhild takes her place. The Hogni of the former tale becomes in the latter the Hagen of Tronege, against whom Siegfried is warned when he desires to marry Kriemhild, the sister of Gunther, Gernot, and Giselher, and who recognises Siegfried as the slayer of the Niblungs, the conqueror of their magic sword, Balmung, and of all their treasures, and the possessor of the tarnkappe, or cape of darkness-all of them features with which the earlier legend has made us familiar. The story of Thetis or Dêmêtêr plunging Achilleus and Triptolemos into the bath of fire is here represented by the myth that Siegfried cannot be wounded, because he had bathed himself in the blood of a dragon whom he had slain-the Fafnir or Python of the Norse and Delphic legends. At the first glance Kriemhild is filled with love for Siegfried, but the latter cannot see her until he has sojourned for a year in the country of King Gunther-a condition which answers to that under which Hades suffered Orpheus to lead away Eurydikê. Here, like Sigurd in the Volsung myth, Siegfried wins Brynhild for Gunther or Gunnar; but though there is here not the same complication, the narrative scarcely becomes on this account the more human. Like Perseus with the helmet of Hades, Siegfried can make himself invisible at will, and like Apollôn Delphinios, he pushes a ship through the sea-a myth in which we recognise also the Wish breeze.1 Here also, as in the Norse story, the ring and girdle of Brynhild nysos, Heraklês, Perseus, Sigurd, Indra, Oidipous, Theseus; and it is unnecessary to say that in the end he becomes the husband of the Dame of the Fine Green Kirtle, who is none other than Medeia with the magic robe of Helios. (Campbell, ii. 435.) The power of the Fish Sun is strikingly shown in the German stories of the Gold Children and of the Fisherman and his Wife. In the former a poor man catches the Golden Fish which makes him the possessor of the palace of Helios, and bids the man divide him into six pieces; two to be given to his wife, two to his mare, and two to be come through Siegfried into the put into the ground. The necessary |