Taylor, Edgar [Hrsg.]; Austin, Sarah [Hrsg.]: Lays of the minnesingers or German troubadours of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: Illustr. by specimens of the contemporary lyric poetry of Provence and other parts of Europe ; With histor. and crit. notes, and engravings from the ms. of the minnesingers in the king's library at Paris, and from other sources (London, 1825)

GERMANY. 113

bard, Francic and Saxon song; they had been popu-
lar at the court of Theoderic, and afterwards at that
of Charlemagne ; and the same subjects found their
way into the Sagas of Scandinavia, where many of
them now exist in nearly the same form as in the
Suabian romances.

The "Nibelungen Lied," or "Song of the Nibelun-
gen," is not only the most ancient in date, but the most
perfect in its epos and execution. Almost every thing
in the story is in proper keeping. The manners, tone,
thoughts and actions are in unison, and bear testimony
to an antiquity far beyond that of the present dress
of the poem : and if anachronisms in facts or allusions
sometimes appear, they are rather to be attributed to
the remodelling and dressing up than to the substance
of the fable. Its author can only be conjecturally
fixed upon. It appears that Pelegrin bishop of Passau,
who died in 991, collected the then current legends
of the Nibelungen, which he committed to writing
in the favourite Latin tongue, with the assistance of
his scribe Conrad, whose name has occasioned the
Suabian poem to be sometimes ascribed to Conrad of
Wurtzburg, who lived long after. The present poem
is most likely, to a great extent, founded on this
Latin version.

Whoever was the author, his powers are undoubt-
edly of a very high order; he belongs, apparently,
to the middle of the twelfth century; and from inter-