The Heroic Lays 1 1 7 



Germans whom Cresar and Tacitus describe, to compose 

 these heroic ballads we may be pretty sure. How 

 otherwise than through some one or some collec- 

 tion of these could we English have obtained our 

 poem Beowulf? But still the fact remains that the 

 ballads of the Edda have to borrow from Germany 

 for their principal figure. This personage is the Siegfried 

 of the Nibelungen legend, who in these northern poems 

 appears as Sigurd or Sigrod. The family to which 

 Sigurd belongs is here called the Volsungs ; in the 

 German poem he is 'King of the Nibelungs.' But that 

 the Siegfried legend is a tradition which has travelled to 

 the north from Germany, and that it belongs to the time 

 of the great German migrations, and of the fall of Kome, 

 there can be no reasonable doubt. The German legend, 

 even in the very late form which has come down to us, 

 still preserves the names of some of the great heroes of 

 the time of the German invasions, such as Theodoric 

 the Goth, and Atila the Hun. Theodoric has in the 

 German become Dietrich. Atila survives as Etzel ; 

 in the Scandinavian poems he figures as Atli. Another 

 great personage of the same age also figures in the 

 Scandinavian myths ; Eormanrik, the Gothic king, who 

 ruled in wliat is now Eussia, and whose kingdom was 

 destroyed by the Huns. 



One might imagine that the old legend of Siegfried 

 which lingered so long in Germany, and was finally put 

 down in the ballad which we know as the Nibelungen 

 Lied, was originally a Gothic legend ; for we see that, 

 taking all the forms in which it has come down to us, 

 it preserves the names of two great Gothic heroes, — 

 Eormanrik and Theodorik, — and of one man, the special 



