您可以在百度里搜索“National Epics 艾草文学(www.321553.xyz)”查找最新章节！

　　THE NIBELUNGEN LIED.

　　The Nibelungen Lied, or Song of the Nibelungen, was written about the beginning of the thirteenth century, though the events it chronicles belong to the sixth or seventh century. The manuscript poem was discovered about the middle of the eighteenth century.

　　Lachmann asserts that the Nibelungen Lied consists of twenty songs of various dates and authorship; other scholars, while agreeing that it is the work of a single author, ascribe it variously to Conrad von Kurenburger, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, and Walther von der Vogelweide.

　　Whoever was its author, he was only a compiler of legends that were the property of the people for centuries, and are found in many other of the popular German epics of the Middle Ages.

　　The poem consists of thirty-nine adventures, containing two thousand four hundred and fifty-nine stanzas of four lines each. The action covers thirty years. It is based on material obtained from four sources: (1) The Frankish saga-cycle, whose hero is Siegfried; (2) the saga-cycle of Burgundy, whose heroes are Günther, king of Worms, and his two brothers; (3) the Ostrogothic saga-cycle, whose hero is Dietrich of Bern; and (4) the saga-cycle of Etzel, king of the Huns, with his allies and vassals.

　　Dietrich of Bern is supposed to be Theodoric of Italy, in exile at the Hunnish court. Etzel is Attila the Hun, and Günther, Gunducarius, king of the Burgundians, who was destroyed by the Huns with his followers in the year 436.

　　The Nibelungen Lied very much resembles the Iliad, not only in the uncertainty of its origin and the impersonality of its author, but also in its objectivity, its realism, the primitive passions of its heroes, and the wondrous acts of valor performed by them. It contains many passages of wonderful beauty, and gives a striking picture of the social customs and the religious belief of the time. National Epics