rained eye could detect in the burlesque figures of the
popular account the heroes of the ancient Germanic Legend.

The honor of rediscovering the "Nibelungenlied" and of restoring it to
the world of literature belongs to a young physician by the name of J.H.
Obereit, who found the manuscript C at the castle of Hohenems in the
Tirol on June 29, 1755; but the scientific study of the poem begins with
Karl Lachmann, one of the keenest philological critics that Germany
has ever produced. In 1816 he read before the University of Berlin
his epoch-making essay upon the original form of the "Nibelungenlied".
Believing that the poem was made up of a number of distinct ballads
or lays, he sought by means of certain criteria to eliminate all parts
which were, as he thought, later interpolations or emendations. As a
result of this sifting and discarding process, he reduced the poem
to what he considered to have been its original form, namely, twenty
separate lays, which he thought had come down to us in practically the
same form in which they had been sung by various minstrels.

This view is no longer held in its original form. Though we have every
reason to believe that ballads of Siegfried the dragon killer, of
Siegfried and Kriemhild, and of the destruction of the Nibelungs existed
in Germany, yet these ballads are no longer to be seen in our poem. They
formed merely the basis or source for some poet who thought to revive
the old heroic legends of the German past which were familiar to his
hearers and to adapt them to the tastes of his time. In all probability
we must assume two, three, or even more steps in the genesis of the
poem. There appear to have been two different sources, one a Low German
account, quite simple and brief, the other a tradition of the Lower
Rhine. The legend was perhaps developed by minstrels along the Rhine,
until it was taken and worked up into its present form by some Austrian
poet. Who this poet was we do not know, but we do know that he was
perfectly familiar with all the details of courtly etiquette. He seems
also to have been acquainted with the courtly epics of Heinrich von
Veldeke and Hartman von Ouwe, but his poem is free from the tedious and
often exaggerated descriptions of pomp, dress, and court ceremonies,
that mar the beauty of even the best of the courtly epics. Many
painstaking attempts have been made to discover the identity of the
writer of our poem, but even the most plausible of all t