which was familiar to the author, though he also draws in part from other
sources. Compared with the Nibelungenlied it possesses but little poetic
merit and is written with distinctly Christian sentiment which is out of
harmony with the ground-tone of the Germanic tragedy.

The _Hurnen Seyfrid_ is a poem of 179 four-lined strophes which is
preserved only in a print of the sixteenth century, but at least a
portion of whose substance reaches back in its original form to a period
preceding the composition of the Nibelungenlied. It is evidently, as we
have it, formed by the union of two earlier separate poems, which are
indeed to a certain extent contradictory of each other. The first tells
of the boyhood of Seyfrid (Siegfried) and his apprenticeship to the
smith; how he slew many dragons, burned them, and smeared over his body
with the resulting fluid horny substance (hence his name _hurnen_), which
made him invulnerable; how he further found the hoard of the dwarf
Nybling, and by service to King Gybich won the latter's daughter for his
wife. The second part tells how King Gybich reigned at Worms. He has
three sons, Gunther, Hagen, Gyrnot, and one daughter, Kriemhild. The
latter is borne off by a dragon, but finally rescued by Seyfrid, to whom
she is given in marriage. The three brothers are jealous of the might and
fame of Seyfrid, and after eight years Hagen slays him beside a cool
spring in the Ottenwald.

The poem _Biterolf_, written soon after the Nibelungenlied, and
_Rosengarten_ of perhaps a half-century later, represent Dietrich in
conflict with Siegfried at Worms. The famous shoemaker-poet Hans Sachs of
Nuremberg in 1557 constructed a tragedy, _Der hornen Sewfriedt_, on the
story of Siegfried as he knew it from the _Hurnen Seyfrid_ and the
_Rosengarten_. A prose version of the _Hurnen Seyfrid_, with free
additions and alterations, is preserved in the _Volksbuch vom gehornten