fashion. Marriage by capture no longer occurs, yet traces of it can be
found everywhere in the later bridal expeditions of Gunther and the
Hegelings. On the battlefield, Siegfried pays no gold for his bride, it
is true, but he has to earn her in a hard struggle against the enemies
of her three brothers.

The lot of woman is suffering and sorrow and care, as evidenced from
such verses as:

"Whatever sufferings fall to the lot of the men,
All those are wept over by the women."

This is the tenor of all the epic songs. The _Nibelungenlied_ has
devoted an epilogue, _The Lamentation_, to the expression of those
sentiments. There are constant allusions to woman's woes: here, the
death of a hero is "lamented by many a woman;" there, "heavy heartache
harasses the women;" "all the worthy women weep over him."

We may, after this brief introduction, consider the great characters of
the lay. A peculiar position in the Germanic heroic epic is occupied by
Helche, King Attila's first consort. Although a pagan, the conception
left to us of the wife of the dread Hunnish king is of a woman who has
become almost entirely Germanized. Because of her traits of mildness,
kindness, and purity, she appears as the ideal of a true German queen,
just as Attila himself, with his Germanized name (attila, little father,
from Gothic _atta_, father), appears in many lays as a good, liberal,
kind-hearted king. Helche is especially motherly toward the numerous
noblewomen who stay at the Hunnish court as hostages; she is a friend of
the conquered and the helper of the miserable and the exiled. Dietrich
von Bern, in his exile from home and throne, is under her protection.
She obtained for him from Etzel money and men for the reconquest of
Bern; and when the enterprise failed, she intervened for him with the
irate Hunnish king, and even gave him her sister's daughter in marriage.
When the king complained of the obnoxious foreign fugitives, she
convinced him that the reception of a hero like Dietrich could only be
of advantage to his realm and an honor to himself. At the death of
Helche there is universal mourning throughout the land; for, says the
chronicler, a true mother of the innocent virgins and of the entire
people has departed.

In the foreground of all the epics of the German cycles stand the two
greatest characters of ancient womanhood, Kriemhilde and Brunhild.

At Worms on the Rhine in the land of the Burgundians, the three