Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5: A series of pen and pencil sketches of the lives of more than 200 of the most prominent personages in History
History
Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5: A series of pen and pencil sketches of the lives of more than 200 of the most prominent personages in History
Biography
After the Great Migrations the various tribes and races became much
intermixed. It was by a misunderstanding which arose then between the
German Hunes and the Hunns under Attila's leadership, that Kriemhild's
revenge after the murder of Siegfried was poetically transferred from
the Rhine to the Danube. The name of the Rhenish Atli, which is
preserved in the "Edda," and which also occurs as a German chieftain's
name on the soil of conquered Britain, easily served to facilitate the
confusion. Even the composition of Attila's army lent itself to this
transplantation of the second part of the Siegfried story to Danubian
lands. For, though Attila was overthrown on the Catalaunian fields,
mainly by Germanic hosts, to which Roman and Gallic troops were added,
he had a great many Teutonic warriors in his own army. From this
military intermingling of races so utterly dissimilar in blood and
speech as the Hunns and the Germans, one of whose tribes were called
Hunes, it is not difficult to conceive the shifting of the tragic issue
of the Nibelung story to the East. Attila, the Hunn, slid into the
previous Teutonic hero-figure of Atli, the Hune. This change will the
more easily be understood when the deep impression is remembered which
the terrible Mongolic war-leader had made on the popular mind in
southern Germany, where the Nibelungen epic was cast into its present
shape.
The hold which the Siegfried story has had on the German people, through
ages, can be gathered from the fact of its having kept its place, down
to our days, in the workman's house and the peasant's hut, first by oral
tradition, and then by rudely printed and illustrated chap-books ("Die
Geschichte vom huernenen Siegfried"). In this "Volksbuch" there are
remarkable details concerning the hero's early life in a smithy and the
prophecy of his assassination, which are lost in the "Nibelungen Lied,"
but preserved in the "Edda." This circumstance--overlooked even by
Simrock, who, like Jacob Grimm, has done much to show the German origin
of the Norse Sigurd saga--is another curious bit of evidence of the
undeniable Teutonic source of the corresponding Scandinavian and
Icelandic stories and poems.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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