CHAP. VI.
extent to which the myth has been modified by the influence of Christianity and the growth of an historical sense in the treatment of national traditions. There is a certain awkwardness in the part played by Etzel, a part ludicrously unlike the action of the historical Attila; and the pitiable weakness or inconsistency which leads him throughout to favour the schemes of his wife, and then, when Hagen is slain, to mourn for him as the bravest and best of heroes, serves only to bring out more prominently the fact that it is Kriemhild who fights single-handed against all her enemies, and that she is in truth a Penelope who trusts only to herself to deal with the ruffians who have dashed the cup of joy from her lips and stolen away her beautiful treasures. But the religious belief of the poets would not allow them to make use of any other method for bringing about the terrible issue. The bards who recounted the myths of the three Helgis would have brought back Siegfried from the grave, and added another to the heroes wno represent the slain and risen gods, Baldur, Dionysos, and Adonis or Osiris. In no other way could Siegfried have been brought back to the aid of his wife, unless like Odysseus he had been represented not as slain, but as fulfilling the doom which compelled him to fight or to wander far away from his home for twenty years. The closeness with which the bards of the Niblung legend followed the Saga of Sigurd rendered this alternative impossible, and it remained only to leave Kriemhild to accomplish that which no one else had the strength or the will to achieve on her behalf. But the myth had been further weakened in other directions. The slayer of Sigurd in the Volsung tale and his kindred alike belong with sufficient clearness to the dark powers who steal the cattle of Indra or Herakles, and thus they attract to themselves but little sympathy and no love; but the Christian feeling which could brand Hagen as a murderer refused to make his brothers or his kinsfolk or his liege lords partakers of his guilt, and thus the cowards of the first part of the story become the dauntless heroes of the second.[1] But to the remark that "Kriemhild's preferring to reside in the neighbourhood of her husband's murderers remains perfectly unaccountable," we can but say that the difficulty is confined to the hypothesis which would regard the story as a picture of human character and human society. Kriemhild was under the same necessity which kept Penelopê in Ithaka, and the length of time during which the vengeance was delayed is due to the same cause. The sword which slays the darkness cannot fall until the ten long hours of the night have come to an end. Hence the many years during which Kriemhild makes
- ↑ Ludlow, Popular Epics, i. 172.
