gland, mentions
the Hunes. In the Anglo-Saxon "Wanderer's Tale" they also turn up,
apparently in connection with a chieftain Aetla; that is, Atli. In
Friesland, the Hunsing tribe long preserved the Hunic name. The word
occurs in many personal and place names both in Germany and in England;
for instance: Hunolt (a Rhenish hero), Hunferd, Hunlaf, Hunbrecht
(champions among Frisians and Rhinelanders in the "Beowulf" epic);
Huneboldt (bold like a Hune); Ethelhun (noble Hune); then there are, in
German geography, the Hunsrueck Mountain; Hunoldstein, Hunenborn,
Hunnesrueck, near Hildesheim, etc. Again, in England: Hundon, Hunworth,
Hunstanton, Huncote, Hunslet, Hunswick, and many other places from Kent
and Suffolk up to Lancashire and Shetland, where certainly no Mongolic
Hunns ever penetrated. The Hunic Atli name is also to be found on
English soil, in Attlebridge and Attleborough.

After the Great Migrations the various tribes and races became much
intermixed. It was by a misunderstanding which arose then between the
German Hunes and the Hunns under Attila's leadership, that Kriemhild's
revenge after the murder of Siegfried was poetically transferred from
the Rhine to the Danube. The name of the Rhenish Atli, which is
preserved in the "Edda," and which also occurs as a German chieftain's
name on the soil of conquered Britain, easily served to facilitate the
confusion. Even the composition of Attila's army lent itself to this
transplantation of the second part of the Siegfried story to Danubian
lands. For, though Attila was overthrown on the Catalaunian fields,
mainly by Germanic hosts, to which Roman and Gallic troops were added,
he had a great many Teutonic warriors in his own army. From this
military intermingling of races so utterly dissimilar in blood and
speech as the Hunns and the Germans, one of whose tribes were called
Hunes, it is not difficult to conceive the shifting of the tragic issue
of the Nibelung story to the East. Attila, the Hunn, slid into the
previous Teutonic hero-figure of Atli, the Hune. This change will the
more easily be understood when the deep impression is remembered which
the terrible Mongolic war-leader had made on the popular mind in
southern Germany, where the Nibelungen epic was cast into its present
shape.

The hold which the Siegfried story has had on the German people, through
ages, can be gathered from the fact of its having kept its place, down
to our days, in the workman's house and