Germany various other monuments, scattered over the intervening
centuries, bear witness to the fact that it lived on in more or less
divergent forms. The Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus of the latter part
of the twelfth century has a reference to the story of Kriemhild's
treachery toward her brothers. About the year 1250 an extensive prose
narrative, known as the Thidrekssaga, was written by a Norwegian from
oral accounts given him by men from Bremen and Munster. This narrative is
interesting as showing the form the saga had taken by that date on Low
German territory, and holds an important place in the history of the
development of the saga. It has much more to say of the early history of
Siegfried than we find in the Nibelungenlied, and yet in the main
outlines of the story of Kriemhild's revenge it corresponds with the
German epic and not with the Northern Edda. A chronicle of the island of
Hven in the Sound, dating in its original form from the sixteenth
century, as well as Danish ballads on the same island that have lived on
into modern times, tell of Sivard (Siegfried), Brynhild, and also of
Grimild's (Kriemhild's) revenge. In Norway and Sweden traces of the saga
have recently been discovered; while songs that are sung on the Faroe
Islands, as an accompaniment to the dance on festive occasions, have been
recorded, containing over six hundred strophes in which is related in
more or less distorted form the Nibelungen story.

In Germany the two poems known as the _Klage_ and _Hurnen Seyfrid_ are
the most noteworthy additional records of the Nibelungen saga, as
offering in part at least independent material. The _Klage_ is a poem of
over four thousand lines in rhymed couplets, about half of it being an
account of the mourning of Etzel, Dietrich, and Hildebrand as they seek
out the slain and prepare them for burial, the other half telling of the
bringing of the news to Bechlaren, Passau, and Worms. The poem was
written evidently very soon after the Nibelungenlied, the substance of