This composite Siegfried-Burgundian saga then became a common possession
of the Germanic peoples, was borne with many of them to lands far distant
from the place of its origin, and was further moulded by each according
to its peculiar genius and surroundings. In the Icelandic Eddas, the
oldest of which we have as they were written down in the latter part of
the ninth century, are preserved the earliest records of the form it had
taken among the northern Germanic peoples. Our Nibelungenlied, which is
the chief source of our knowledge of the story as it developed in
Germany, dates from about the year 1200. These two versions, the Northern
and the German, though originating in this common source, had diverged
very widely in the centuries that elapsed between their beginning and the
time when the manuscripts were written in which they are preserved. Each
curtailed, re-arranged, or enlarged the incidents of the story in its own
way. The character of the chief actors and the motives underlying what we
may call the dramatic development assumed widely dissimilar forms. The
German Nibelungenlied may be read and appreciated as one of the world's
great epic poems without an acquaintance on the part of the reader with
the Northern version of the saga. In order, however, to furnish the
setting for a few episodes that would in that case remain either obscure
or colorless, and with a view to placing the readers of this translation
in a position to judge better the deeper significance of the epic as the
eloquent narrative of a thousand years of the life of the people among
whom it grew, the broad outlines of the saga in its Northern form will be
given here.


2. The Northern Form of the Saga

Starting at the middle of the fifth century from the territory about
Worms on the Rhine where the Burgundians were overthrown, the saga soon