to the tastes of his time. In all probability we must assume
two, three, or even more steps in the genesis of the poem. There
appear to have been two different sources, one a Low German
account, quite simple and brief, the other a tradition of the
Lower Rhine. The legend was perhaps developed by minstrels along
the Rhine, until it was taken and worked up into its present form
by some Austrian poet. Who this poet was we do not know, but we
do know that he was perfectly familiar with all the details of
courtly etiquette. He seems also to have been acquainted with
the courtly epics of Heinrich von Veldeke and Hartman von Ouwe,
but his poem is free from the tedious and often exaggerated
descriptions of pomp, dress, and court ceremonies, that mar the
beauty of even the best of the courtly epics. Many painstaking
attempts have been made to discover the identity of the writer of
our poem, but even the most plausible of all these theories which
considers Kurenberg, one of the earliest of the "Minnesingers",
to be the author, because of the similarity of the strophic form
of our poem to that used by him, is not capable of absolute
proof, and recent investigations go to show that Kurenberg was
indebted to the "Nibelungen" strophe for the form of his lyric,
and not the "Nibelungenlied" to him. The "Nibelungen" strophe is
presumably much older, and, having become popular in Austria
through the poem, was adopted by Kurenberg for his purposes. As
to the date of the poem, in its present form it cannot go back
further than about 1190, because of the exactness of the rhymes,
nor could it have been written later than 1204, because of
certain allusions to it in the sixth book of "Parzival", which we
know to have been written at this date. The two Low German poems
which probably form the basis of our epic may have been united
about 1150. It was revised and translated into High German and