ting the honor of the Burgundian queen as a
wife. Thereupon Hagen promises her to effect a revenge. Having deftly
ascertained from Kriemhild the single vulnerable part of the hero, whose
skin had otherwise been made impenetrable by being dipped into the
Dragon's blood, Hagen treacherously murders Siegfried at a chase. The
gold hoard is then sunk in the Rhine by Hagen, lest Kriemhild should use
it as a means of bribing men for wreaking her own revenge. She afterward
becomes the consort of Etzel, the heathen king of the Hiunes (Hunns) in
Hungary, who resides at Vienna. Thither she allures the Burgundians,
Hagen alone mistrusting the invitation. In Etzel's eastern land all the
Burgundian knights, upon whom the Nibelung name had been conferred,
suffer a terrible death through Kriemhild's wrath. Hagen, who refuses to
the end to reveal to her the whereabouts of the sunken gold hoard, has
his head cut off with Siegfried's sword by the infuriated queen herself.
At last, she, too, is hewn down by the indignant, doughty warrior,
Hildebrand; and so the lofty Hall, into which fire had been thrown, is
all strewn over with the dead. "Here," says the poem, "has the tale an
end. These were the sorrows of the Nibelungs."

In this "Iliad of the Germans," which dates from the end of the twelfth
century, the Siegfried story is given as a finished epic. But its
originally heathen Teutonic character is overlaid there with admixtures
of Christian chivalry. In the Edda and other Scandinavian sources, the
tale appears in fragmentary and lyrical shape, but in a purer version,
without additions from the new faith or from mediaeval chivalry. It is in
the Sigurd-, Fafnir-, Brynhild-, Gudrun-, Oddrun-, Atli-, and Hamdir
Lays of the Norse Scripture that the original nature of the older German
songs, which must have preceded the epic, can best be guessed. Rhapsodic
lays, referring to Siegfried, were, in all probability, part of the
collection which Karl the Great, the Frankish Kaiser, ordered to be
made. Monkish fanaticism afterward destroyed the valuable relics.
Fortunately, Northmen travelling in Germany had gathered some of those
tale-treasures, which then were treated by Scandinavian and Icelandic
bards in the form of heroic lyrics. Hence the Eddic lays in question
form now a link between our lost Siegfried "Lieder" and our national
epic.

Even as in the "Nibelungen Lied" so also in the "Edda," Sigurd
(abbreviation for Siegfried) is not a Scandin