Chriemhild, a beautiful daughter of a king of the Burgundians, is wooed and won by Siegfried, a prince of Netherlands, who possesses an invisible cloak, a sword of magic power, the inexhaustible hoard of the Nibelungen, and, like Achilles, is invulnerable except in one spot. Brunhild, a princess, endowed, too, with supernatural qualities, weds at the same time king Gunther, Chriemhild's brother; having been won by force by Gunther, aided by Siegfried. Jealousy and discord grow up between the two princesses, and reach such a pitch, that Brunhild plots against the life of Siegfried, and has him treacherously assassinated by the brothers of his wife, who wound him through the vulnerable spot between his shoulders. After years of grief, during which she harbors designs of vengeance, Chriemhild accepts, as a means of avenging her wrongs, the offer of the hand of Etzel, king of the Huns, the Attila of history, and leaving Gunther's court, accompanies Etzel to Hungary. Hither, after a time, she invites with his champions, Gunther, who in the face of dark forebodings, accepts the invitation, and with a chosen army of Nibelungen, comes to Etzel's court, where by Chriemhild's contrivance, he and all his band are enclosed in an immense Minster and therein slain. Such is the outline of the story of this poem, which consists of thirty-nine books, or _Adventures_, as they are called, extending to nearly ten thousand lines. Over the whole hangs the dark northern mythology, under whose mysterious influences the action proceeds. The narrative is full of life and picturesque beauty. The story is developed with life-like truth and sequence, and with a unity of design unsurpassed in any poetic work. Naif simplicity and tragic grandeur unite to give it attraction. At the time when the song of the Nibelungen was written, Germany was richer than any European country in poetic literature. Besides this great Epic, many poems of an epic character were written, relating, in addition to national themes, to Charlemagne and his knights, King Arthur and his round table, and others noted in the times of chivalry. There too flourished the _Minnesinger_, that is, love-singers, numbers of them knights and gentlemen, who, in imitation of the Troubadours of southern France, cultivated poetry and sang of love and war. The characteristics of the _Minnelieder_, or love songs, are simplicity, truth, and earnestness of feeling, joined with beautiful descriptions of nature. The golden age of German romantic poetry, was in the beginning of the thirteenth century. After the fall of the Hohenshauffen family from the imperial throne in the middle of this century, anarchy and civil war prevailed for a time in Germany. The nobility, given up to petty warfare, soon fell back from the state of comparative culture to which, by devotion to poetry, they had ascended, into rudeness and grossness.