For this obscurity of authorship there is, in the case of the _Nibelungenlied_, more reason than with the other epics. What is conjectural with respect to the _Iliad_ and the _Chanson_, is indubitable with respect to the _Lied_, viz. that both in its origin and in its construction it was composite, that the elements of which it is a union are in date, perhaps in place of origin, widely remote from each other. The Saga of the Niblungs, of which the _Nibelungenlied_ is the finished poetical development, is a union of mythical and historical elements.
1. _The Mythical Element_, The groundwork of this is the Saga of Siegfried, or Sigurd, as he is named in the Northern versions of the myth. In the old heroic age of the Teuton tribes, perhaps during the period of the Migrations of the Peoples, in the 5th, 6th and 7th centuries, there took shape this legend of a demigod hero[3]. The supernatural pervades the whole atmosphere of this primitive form of the myth. The Gods still walk the earth, the hero is descended from a God, he woos a cloud-maiden, there is something more than earthly in his sword, in his horse, in the glance of his eyes. But as the Germanic tribes to whom this myth was a common inheritance broke up and wandered far apart, it came to pass that it was just with those who remained in the ancient home, the birth-land of the myth, that it became most modified, and that its supernatural elements were removed or toned down, as the result of admixture with more civilized peoples, and, still more, of the acceptance of Christianity by the Germans themselves. Christian teachers were too grimly in earnest to tolerate poems which assumed the existence of heathen deities, and glorified non-Christian virtues. Hence it came { P. ix} to pass that the tribes of Teutonic origin which longest preserved the original form of the myth were those which wandered farthest from the old home-land, and which were the last to abandon the old faith.
The Norse form of the legend, which is most fully preserved for us in the Eddas, or prose epics of Iceland, presents us with the original story, transfigured with all gleams of fancy and splendours of imagination which had gathered round it as it was handed down through generations of bards. There is no need here to tell the story of this Northern version of the Saga, since it has been told for all English lovers of noble poetry by William Morris in his _Story of Sigurd_, which has well been characterized as "the one great English epic of the nineteenth century," and which is the most Homeric-spirited poem since Homer. It is an expanded verse-rendering of the Volsunga-saga of the prose Edda, a literal prose version of which is also accessible to all readers, executed by the same author[4].