The origin of Teutonic heroic saga, which may be regarded as including that of the Germans, Goths, Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians, is to be looked for in the period of the so-called migration of nations (A.D. 350-650). It consequently rests upon a distinct basis of fact, the saga (in the older and wider sense of any story said or sung) being indeed the oldest form of historical tradition; though this of course does not exclude the probability of the accretion of mythical elements round persons and episodes from the very first. As to the origin of the heroic sagas as we now have them, Tacitus tells us that the deeds of Arminius were still celebrated in song a hundred years after his death (_Annals_, ii. 88) and in the _Germania_ he speaks of "old songs" as the only kind of "annals" which the ancient Germans possessed; but, whatever relics of the old songs may be embedded in the Teutonic sagas, they have left no recognizable mark on the heroic poetry of the German peoples. The attempt to identify Arminius with Siegfried is now generally abandoned. Teutonic heroic saga, properly so-called, consists of the traditions connected with the migration period, the earliest traces of which are found in the works of historical writers such as Ammianus Marcellinus and Cassiodorus. According to Jordanes (the epitomator of Cassiodorus's _History of the Goths_) at the funeral of Attila his vassals, as they rode round the corpse, sang of his glorious deeds. The next step in the development of epic narrative was the single lay of an episodic character, sung by a single individual, who was frequently a member of a distinguished family, not merely a professional minstrel. Then, as different stories grew up round the person of a particular hero, they formed a connected cycle of legend, the centre of which was the person of the hero (e.g. Dietrich of Bern). The most important figures of these cycles are the following.