budding earth from the bonds of winter.[2]

[2] For the Siegfried saga in general see Symons in Paul's Grundriss der
germanischen Philologie, 2d ed., vol. III, pp. 651-671.

In the course of time this nature-myth became transformed into a
hero-saga; the liberating power of light was humanized into the person of
the light-hero Siegfried. This stage of development had already been
reached at the time of our earliest records, and the evidences point to
the Rhine Franks, a West Germanic tribe settled in the fifth century in
the country about Cologne, as the people among whom the transformation
from nature-myth to hero-saga took place, for it is among them that the
saga in its earliest form is localized. By the Rhine Siegfried is born,
there he wins the Nibelungen hoard, and in Frankenland he finds the
sleeping valkyrie. By the Rhine, too, he enters into service with the
Nibelungen kings and weds their sister.

The Franks had as neighbors up-stream in the first half of the fifth
century the Burgundians, an East Germanic tribe. These Burgundians, who
were closely allied to the Goths, had originally dwelt in the Baltic
region between the Vistula and the Oder, whence they had made their way
south westward across Germany and settled in the year 413 in _Germania
prima_ on the west bank of the Rhine about Worms. Here a tragic fate was
soon to overtake them. In the year 435 they had already suffered a
reverse in a conflict with the Romans under Aetius, and two years later,
in 437, they were practically annihilated by the Huns. Twenty thousand of
them, we are told, fell in battle, the remainder were scattered
southward. Beyond the brief record by a contemporary, Prosper, we know
but little of this event. It has been conjectured that the Huns were on
this occasion acting as auxiliaries of Aetius. At any rate it is fairly