Studies in German Literature Author:Bayard Taylor Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IV. THE MBELUNGEXLIED. "WE now come to that other literary element of the Middle Ages, which is of earlier origin than the courtly epics, but which only as... more »sumed its present form about the time when they were produced. I have called it the epic poetry of the People, because, more than any- thing else in the literature of the human race—not even excepting the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey"—it has the character of a growth rather than a composition. We may guess when its growth began; we can very nearly determine the time when that growth ended; but there oar knowledge stops. By whom, or under what circumstances, the first legends came into being,—how they were kept alive, increased, transformed with each generation—who took the rude, shapeless, separated parts, and united them in one grand, coherent form,— are questions which cannot be positively answered. The more carefully we study the "NiMungenlied" and its history, the more we are impressed with its exceptional character. Unnoticed in the records of the ages; ignored, perhaps contemptuously disparaged by the minstrelsy of the courts; kept alive only through the inherited fondness of the masses for their old traditions, it has been almost miraculously preserved to us, to be now appreciated as the only strong, original creation of the youth of the German race. The fact that we find in the "Nibelungenlied" traces of the ancient mythology, with various incidents which are given in the earliest prose Edda of the Scandinavians, together with characters' taken from the most stirring history of the Volkerivanderuncj, or Migration of the Races, proves the antiquity of the material. But the anachronism of making Theodoric the Great, the Gothic King of Italy, and Attila, King of the Huns, contemporaries, also gives us a clue to the ...« less