[Footnote 27: See the author's "Legends of the Middle Ages."]

[Footnote 28: See the author's "Stories of the Wagner Operas."]




THE NIBELUNGENLIED[29]


The Nibelungenlied, or Song of the Nibelungs, was written about the
beginning of the thirteenth century although it relates events dating
back to the sixth or seventh. Some authorities claim it consists of
twenty songs of various dates and origin, others that it is the work
of a single author. The latter ascribe the poem to Conrad von
Kürenberg, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, or
Walther von der Vogelweide. The poem is divided into thirty-nine
"adventures," and contains two thousand four hundred and fifty-nine
stanzas of four lines each. The action covers a period of about thirty
years and is based on materials taken from the Frankish, Burgundian,
Austro-Gothic, and Hunnish saga cycles.

Dietrich von Bern, one of the characters, is supposed to be Theodoric
of Italy, while Etzel has been identified with Attila the Hun, and the
Gunther with a king of the Burgundians who was destroyed with all his
followers by the Huns in 436.

_1st Adventure._ Three Burgundian princes dwell at Worms on the Rhine,
where, at the time when the poem opens their sister Kriemhild is
favored by a vision wherein two eagles pursue a falcon and tear it to