ng his bridal night, while lying intoxicated beside his
young wife Ildico (_HildikS_). In the morning his servants found him in
his blood, but without wounds, beside him was the young wife with
downcast eyes, weeping under her veil. The circumstances of his death
were such as to throw suspicion upon the young woman. Ammianus
Marcellinus reported as a fact that "Attila came to his death at night
by the hands of a woman." But the legendists have tried to establish
motives for the deed of violence, and nothing was more natural than the
story that Ildico committed the deed out of revenge for Attila's murder
of her relatives. According to the poet Saxo and the _Quedlinburg
Chronicle_ she avenged the murder of her father.

The famous _Nibelungenlied_, however, in its fundamental Norse form
shapes the story as follows: Attila, the Terror of Europe, is the
consort of the Burgundian princess Hild. He conquers and treacherously
kills her brothers, the Burgundian kings Gundaheri, Godomar, and
Gislahari, sons of Gibica, and afterward meets his death by the hand of
their sister, his wife.

Felix Dahn has immortalized Ildico by his genius, and made her the most
ideal, heroic woman of the Migration period. Reared in the palace of her
father, King Visigast, in the land of the Rugii, she gives her tender
love to Daghar, the son of Dagomuth, King of the Sciri; but a dark cloud
hovers over her young life. Attila has heard of her incomparable beauty,
and is still further aroused by the descriptions of her charms given by
Ellak, his son by a Gothic princess. The Hun resolves upon the
possession of Ildico.

Accompanied by her father and her betrothed, Ildico appears, by order of
Attila, at the Hunnish court in Pannonia, where she is received with
barbarous splendor and conducted into the reception hall. Here she sees
the terrible Hun for the first time, but she was not frightened by the
hideousness of the man; proudly erect she looked in his face firmly,
defiantly, menacingly. He recognized in this glance such a cold,
fathomless hate that he involuntarily closed his eyes before her: a
slight shiver of a mysterious fear moved his frame; he dared not meet
again her eye which pierced him, but he drank her overwhelming charms
with the unbridled passion of the barbarian. Then the feast began,
accompanied by the wild, discordant song of a Hunnish bard, in which he
hurled scorn against the Germans. The bitter stanzas aroused Daghar to
warlike po