ted his return. One
o'clock came, then two--three; still there was no sign of him. Glances
of horror and pity were cast at the castellan's daughter, who now wrung
her hands in futile grief. At length a few braver spirits volunteered to
go in search of their comrade, but no trace of him could they find. His
widowed mother, of whom he had been the only son, cursed the maid
who was the cause of his ghastly fate, and not long afterward the
castellan's daughter lost her reason and died. On Walpurgis-nights she
may still be heard in Worms calling for her lost lover, whom she is
destined never to find.

The fate of the youth remains uncertain. The most popular account
is that he was torn limb from limb by the infuriated witches and his
remains scattered to the winds. But some, less superstitious than
their neighbours, declared that he had been murdered by his rivals,
the disappointed suitors, and that his body had been cast into the
Rhine--for not long afterward a corpse, which might have been that of
the missing youth, was drawn from the river by fishermen.

The Nibelungenlied

The greatest Rhine story of all is that wondrous German Iliad, the
Nibelungenlied, for it is on the banks of the Rhine in the ancient city
of Worms that its action for the most part takes place. The earliest
actual form of the epic is referred to the first part of the thirteenth
century, but it is probable that a Latin original founded on ballads
or folk-songs was in use about the middle or latter end of the tenth
century. The work, despite many medieval interpolations and the
manifest liberties of generations of bards and minnesingers, bears the
unmistakable stamp of a great antiquity. A whole literature has grown
up around this mighty epic of old Germanic life, and men of vast
scholarship and literary acumen have made it a veritable battle-ground
of conflicting theories, one contending for its mythical genesis,
another proving to his satisfaction that it is founded upon historic
fact, whilst others dispute hotly as to its Germanic or Scandinavian
origin.

So numerous are the conflicting opinions concerning the origin of the
Nibelungenlied that it is extremely difficult to present to the reader
a reasoned examination of the whole without entering rather deeply into
philological and mythical considerations of considerable complexity.
We shall therefore confine ourselves to the main points of these
controversies and refrain from entering upon the m