he broad policy
of the great Hohenstaufen dynasty brought about an extensive knowledge
of the poetic, romantic, and historic materials and forms among the
older French and Italian literatures. The old heroes of the German
legend and history awakened from the long slumber of vague recollection
and lived again in their influence upon the ideals of the people. The
origin of the German heroic epic is thus closely connected with the most
decisive period of the political birth of the nation. The heroic epic in
its entirety, therefore, flows from, and is reflected in, the great
revolution of power and in the changes of habitation which, for the
first time, awakened the historical self-consciousness of the German war
nobility and made possible a new development in the national literature.
The hour of birth of the German heroic epic is the Migration period. In
the heroic epic the story is clothed in a romantic garment. The epic
poets, looking backward from their own stirring times as far as the
formation period, symbolize the progress of history in the time when it
may be said that ancient Europe was broken to pieces, and the Germans in
a new formation and in a new soil came uninjured and even strengthened
from the general devastation.

The type of heroes and heroines formed in the fifth and sixth centuries,
and the heroes grown and developed from those ancient, yet largely
mythological ideas and ideals were adapted to the new type of chivalrous
manhood of the eleventh and twelfth centuries by the poets and singers
of the circles of the princes and nobles whose high culture promoted the
first classical period of bloom. The heroic saga is then the
crystallization of the treasure of traditions formed in the heroic
period of the race.

The saga material is divisible into the group or tribal cycles, and
every cycle revolves around a galaxy of great, good, heroic, or evil
women. This saga literature, in fact, furnishes us with a perfect
portrait gallery of the German women of the two most important and
formative periods of their race. We have mentioned in the previous
chapter a few of the Hunnish cycle around Attila (_Etzel_). Of these
Ildico and Hildegund are preeminent. We have alluded to the historical
women of the Ostrogoth cycle those associated with the great Theodoric
or, as called in the saga, Dietrich von Bern (_Verona_). Other cycles
there are: the Norse, embracing Beowulf, King of the Jutes, and the
Scandinavian heroes W