g to be told in the same breath that the first period of German
literature was "richer in inventive genius than any that followed it,"
and that "nothing but fragments of a single song[106] remain to us"
from this first period--fragments, it may be added, which, though
interesting enough, can, in no possible judgment that can be called
judgment, rank as in any way first-rate poetry. So, too, the habit of
comparing the _Nibelungenlied_ to the _Iliad_ and _Kudrun_ to the
_Odyssey_ (parallels not far removed from the Thucydides-and-Tennyson
order) may excite resentment. But the Middle High German verse of the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries is in itself of such interest, such
variety, such charm, that if only it be approached in itself, and not
through the medium of its too officious ushers, its effect on any real
taste for poetry is undoubted.

[Footnote 106: _Hildebrand and Hadubrand._]

The three divisions above sketched may very well be taken in the order
given. The great folk-epics just mentioned, with some smaller poems,
such as _Koenig Rother_, are almost invariably anonymous; the
translators or adaptors from the French--Gottfried von Strasburg,
Hartmann von Aue, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and others--are at least
known by name, if we do not know much else about them; and this is
also the case with the Lyric poets, especially the best of them, the
exquisite singer known as Walter of the Bird-Meadow.

[Sidenote: _Folk-epics_--_The_ Nibelungenlied.]

[Sidenote: _The_ Volsunga Saga.]

It was inevitable that the whole literary energy of a nation which is
commentatorial or nothing, should be flung on such a subject as the
_Nibelungenlied_;[107] the amount of work expended on the subject by
Germans during the century in which the poem has been known is
enormous, and might cause despair, if happily it were not for the most
part negligible. The poem served as a principal ground in the
battle--not yet at an end, but now in a more or less languid
condition--between the believers in conglomerate epic, the upholders
of the theory that long early poems are always a congeries of still
earlier ballads or shorter chants, and the advocates of their integral
condition. The authorship of the poem, its date, and its relation to
previous work or tradition, with all possible excursions and alarums
as to sun-myths and so forth, have been discussed _ad nauseam_.
Literary history, as here understood, need not concern itself much
about su