mental fragments of half-forgotten myths and historical
personages into a poem that is essentially national in character, and
the embodiment of all that is great in the antiquity of the race. Though
lacking to some extent the dignity of the "Iliad", the "Nibelungenlied"
surpasses the former in the deep tragedy which pervades it, the tragedy
of fate, the inevitable retribution for crime, the never-dying struggle
between the powers of good and evil, between light and darkness.

That the poem must have been exceedingly popular during the Middle Ages
is evinced by the great number of Manuscripts that have come down to us.
We possess in all twenty-eight more or less complete MSS., preserved
in thirty-one fragments, fifteen of which date from the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries. Of all these MSS., but nine are so well preserved
that, in spite of some minor breaks, they can be considered complete. Of
this number three, designated respectively as A, B, C, are looked upon
as the most important for purposes of textual criticism, and around them
a fierce battle has been waged, which is not even yet settled. (1) It
is now generally conceded that the longest MS., C, is a later redaction
with many additional strophes, but opinions are divided as to whether
the priority should be given to A or B, the probabilities being that B
is the more original, A merely a careless copy of B.

In spite of the great popularity of the "Nibelungenlied", the poem was
soon forgotten by the mass of the people. With the decay of courtly
chivalry and the rise of the prosperous citizen class, whose ideals and
testes lay in a different direction, this epic shared the fate of many
others of its kind, and was relegated to the dusty shelves of monastery
or ducal libraries, there to wait till a more cultured age, curious
as to the literature of its ancestors, should bring it forth from
its hiding places. However, the figures of the old legend were not
forgotten, but lived on among the people, and were finally embodied in a
popular ballad, "Das Lied vom Hurnen Segfrid", which has been preserved
in a print of the sixteenth century, although the poem itself is thought
to go back at least to the thirteenth. The legend was also dramatized by
Hans Sachs, the shoemaker poet of Nuremberg, and related in prose form
in a chap book which still exists in prints of the eighteenth century.
The story and the characters gradually became so vague and distorted,
that only a t