So numerous are the conflicting opinions concerning the origin of the Nibelungenlied that it is extremely difficult to present to the reader a reasoned examination of the whole without entering rather deeply into philological and mythical considerations of considerable complexity.  We shall therefore confine ourselves to the main points of these controversies and refrain from entering upon the more puzzling bypaths which are only to be trodden by the ‘Senior Wranglers’ of the study, as they have been called.

Its Original Form

In the beginning of the nineteenth century Karl Lachmann, a philologist of some repute, put forward the theory that the poem was made up of a number of distinct ballads or lays, and he eliminated from it all parts which appeared to him to be interpolations.  This reduced the whole to twenty lays, which he considered the work of twenty separate minstrels; but if certain ballads relating to episodes in the Nibelungenlied once existed in Germany it is the spirit of these more than the matter which is incorporated into the great epic.  In medieval times, when the Nibelungenlied story was popular, minnesingers and harpers, in an attempt to please their audiences, would cast about for fresh incidents to introduce into the story.  Popular as was the tale, even a medieval audience could tire of the oft-repeated exploits of its dramatis personae, and the minstrel, dependent upon their goodwill for bed and board, would be quick to note when the tale fell flat.  Accordingly he would attempt to infuse into it some new incident or series of incidents, culled from other stories more often than not self-created.  Such an interpolation is probably to be noted in the presence of Dietrich of Bern, otherwise Theodoric the Ostrogoth, at the court of Etzel or Attila.  To say nothing of the probability of anachronism, geographical conditions are not a little outraged in the adoption of this incident, but the question arose who was to worst the mighty Hagen, whose sombre figure dominates in its gloomy grandeur the latter part of the saga.  It would not do for any Hunnish champion to vie successfully with the Burgundian hero, but it would be no disgrace for him to be beaten by Dietrich, the greatest champion of antiquity, who, in fact, is more than once dragged into the pages of romance for the purpose of administering an honourable defeat to a hitherto unconquered champion.  We can thus see how novel and subsidiary passages might attach themselves to the epic.

But a day came when the minnesingers of Germany felt that it behoved them to fix once and for all time the shape of the Lay of the Nibelungs.  Indeed, not one, but several poets laboured at this task.  That they worked with materials immediately to their hand is seen from the circumstance that we have proof of a Low German account, and a Rhenish version which was evidently moulded into its present shape by an Austrian or Tyrolese craftsman—­a singer well versed in court poetry and courtly etiquette.