C.G. Child and Cornelius Weygandt, for their helpful suggestions
in starting the work, and also to acknowledge his indebtedness to
the German edition of Paul Piper, especially in preparing the
notes.

-- DANIEL BUSSIER SHUMWAY,
Philadelphia, February 15, 1909.



INTRODUCTORY SKETCH

There is probably no poem of German literature that has excited
such universal interest, or that has been so much studied and
discussed, as the "Nibelungenlied". In its present form it is a
product of the age of chivalry, but it reaches back to the
earliest epochs of German antiquity, and embraces not only the
pageantry of courtly chivalry, but also traits of ancient
Germanic folklore and probably of Teutonic mythology. One of its
earliest critics fitly called it a German "Iliad", for, like this
great Greek epic, it goes back to the remotest times and unites
the monumental fragments of half-forgotten myths and historical
personages into a poem that is essentially national in character,
and the embodiment of all that is great in the antiquity of the
race. Though lacking to some extent the dignity of the "Iliad",
the "Nibelungenlied" surpasses the former in the deep tragedy
which pervades it, the tragedy of fate, the inevitable
retribution for crime, the never-dying struggle between the
powers of good and evil, between light and darkness.