of twenty separate _lieder_, ballads or shorter episodic poems, on the
strength of which belief he went so far as to publish an edition of the
poem in which he made the division into the twenty separate lays and
eliminated those strophes (more than one third of the whole number) that
he deemed not genuine. It is now generally admitted, however, that the
pioneer of Nibelungen investigation fell here into over-positive
refinements of literary criticism. Separate shorter poems there doubtless
existed narrating separate episodes of the story, but these are no longer
to be arrived at by a process of critical disintegration and pruning of
the epic as we have it. An examination of the twenty _lieder_ according
to Lachmann's division convinces us that they are not separate units in
the sense he conceived them to be. Though these twenty _lieder_ may be
based upon a number of earlier episodic poems, yet the latter already
constituted a connected series. They were already like so many scenes of
a gradually developing drama. Events were foreshadowed in one that were
only fulfilled in another, and the incidents of later ones are often only
intelligible on the supposition of an acquaintance with motives that
originated in preceding ones. It is in this sense only, not according to
Lachmann's overwrought theory, that we are justified in speaking of a
_liedercyclus_, or cycle of separate episodic poems, as the stage of the
epic antecedent to the complete form in which we now have it. But beyond
this cycle we cannot trace it back. How the mythical saga of Siegfried
and the Nibelungen, and the story of the Burgundians and Attila, were
first sung in alliterative lays in the Migration Period, how as heathen
song they were pushed aside or slowly influenced by the spirit of
Christianity, how with changing time they changed also their outward
poetical garb from alliteration to rhyme and altered verse-form, till at
last in the twelfth century they have become the cycle of poems from
which the great epic of the Nibelungenlied could be constructed--of all
this we may form a faint picture from the development of the literature