That the poem must have been exceedingly popular during the
Middle Ages is evinced by the great number of Manuscripts that
have come down to us. We possess in all twenty-eight more or
less complete MSS., preserved in thirty-one fragments, fifteen of
which date from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Of all
these MSS., but nine are so well preserved that, in spite of some
minor breaks, they can be considered complete. Of this number
three, designated respectively as A, B, C, are looked upon as the
most important for purposes of textual criticism, and around them
a fierce battle has been waged, which is not even yet settled.
(1) It is now generally conceded that the longest MS., C, is a
later redaction with many additional strophes, but opinions are
divided as to whether the priority should be given to A or B, the
probabilities being that B is the more original, A merely a
careless copy of B.

In spite of the great popularity of the "Nibelungenlied", the
poem was soon forgotten by the mass of the people. With the
decay of courtly chivalry and the rise of the prosperous citizen
class, whose ideals and testes lay in a different direction, this
epic shared the fate of many others of its kind, and was
relegated to the dusty shelves of monastery or ducal libraries,
there to wait till a more cultured age, curious as to the
literature of its ancestors, should bring it forth from its
hiding places. However, the figures of the old legend were not
forgotten, but lived on among the people, and were finally
embodied in a popular ballad, "Das Lied vom Hurnen Segfrid",
which has been preserved in a print of the sixteenth century,
although the poem itself is thought to go back at least to the
thirteenth. The legend was also dramatized by Hans Sachs, the