ittich and Wieland, belongs to our theme but
incidentally; the Langobard cycle, singing the Langobard heroes King
Rother, Ortnit, Hugdietrich, and Wolfdietrich, and their adventures on
the Mediterranean Sea and in a legendary Byzantine Empire, with a type
of Oriental-Greek or Byzantine women, lies a little aside from our
present consideration of German women. We can well confine ourselves to
the _Nibelungen Saga_ and _Gudrun_, the German _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_,
for these two heroic sagas of the German nation are the true exponents
of all the characteristics of German women and men. The heroic epic in
its germ is historical, but its growth freed it from its fetters of fact
and decked it with ornaments from the domain of imagination. Historical
and mythical elements are, then, strangely blended in these sagas. They
develop exotically, scarce one that does not grow outside its original
sphere, assimilate foreign unhistorical matter, blur all chronology, and
anachronistically poetize the dim recollections of a historical but
long-forgotten underground. The resultant of the convolutions and
accretions is a complex epic cycle of sagas originating at different
times, but always deeply rooted in the Migration period, wherein lay all
the origins of Germanic historical existence.

The _Nibelungenlied_ is the crystallization of the Burgundian Low
Rhenish Hunnish cycle of Sagas. No more complete psychological record in
poetic form of all the emotions, love and hate, vice and virtue, vanity
and modesty, chastity and passion, piety and wickedness, womanly
gentleness and virulence, is imaginable. All the phases of human
existence are put before us in the lives of the Burgundian royal
brothers Gunther, Gernot, Giselher; their mother Ute; and their sister
Kriemhilde, whose character, as outlined, is the grandest and the most
complex woman's character in the literature of the world. Kriemhilde, as
the wife of the Low Rhenish hero Siegfried, and Brunhild, in the Norse
version of the Saga, a former Valkyrie, humanized only to make it
possible for her to be the wife of Gunther and to bear a deep love for
Siegfried, are the opposite poles of womanhood.

It is, however, very difficult to obtain through the epics a correct
estimate of the status of woman at a definite period. This difficulty is
due not only to the poetic and fictitious characterization of the
womanly types, but especially to the constant blending of ancient
Germanic elements a