shoemaker poet of Nuremberg, and related in prose form in a chap
book which still exists in prints of the eighteenth century. The
story and the characters gradually became so vague and distorted,
that only a trained eye could detect in the burlesque figures of
the popular account the heroes of the ancient Germanic Legend.

The honor of rediscovering the "Nibelungenlied" and of restoring
it to the world of literature belongs to a young physician by the
name of J.H. Obereit, who found the manuscript C at the castle of
Hohenems in the Tirol on June 29, 1755; but the scientific study
of the poem begins with Karl Lachmann, one of the keenest
philological critics that Germany has ever produced. In 1816 he
read before the University of Berlin his epoch-making essay upon
the original form of the "Nibelungenlied". Believing that the
poem was made up of a number of distinct ballads or lays, he
sought by means of certain criteria to eliminate all parts which
were, as he thought, later interpolations or emendations. As a
result of this sifting and discarding process, he reduced the
poem to what he considered to have been its original form,
namely, twenty separate lays, which he thought had come down to
us in practically the same form in which they had been sung by
various minstrels.

This view is no longer held in its original form. Though we have
every reason to believe that ballads of Siegfried the dragon
killer, of Siegfried and Kriemhild, and of the destruction of the
Nibelungs existed in Germany, yet these ballads are no longer to
be seen in our poem. They formed merely the basis or source for
some poet who thought to revive the old heroic legends of the
German past which were familiar to his hearers and to adapt them