HKB
all his dead retainers. Other Edda songs relate the further adventures of Gudrun, but they do not concern us here, as the "Nibelungenlied" stops with the death of the Nibelungs.
This in brief is the story of Siegfried, as it has been handed down to us in the Skandinavian sources. It is universally acknowledged that this version, though more original than the German tradition, does not represent the simplest and most original form of the tale; but what the original form was, has long been and still is a matter of dispute. Two distinctly opposite views are held, the one seeing in the story the personification of the forces of nature, the other, scouting the possibility of a mythological interpretation, seeks a purely human origin for the tale, namely, a quarrel among relatives for the possession of treasure. The former view is the older, and obtained almost exclusively at one time. The latter has been gaining ground of recent years, and is held by many of the younger students of the legend. According to the mythological view, the maiden slumbering upon the lonely heights is the sun, the wall of flames surrounding her the morning red ("Morgenrote"). Siegfried is the youthful day who is destined to rouse the sun from her slumber. At the appointed time he ascends, and before his splendor the morning red disappears. He awakens the maiden; radiantly the sun rises from its couch and joyously greets the world of nature. But light and shade are indissolubly connected; day changes of itself into night. When at evening the sun sinks to rest and surrounds herself once more with a wall of flames, the day again approaches, but no longer in the youthful form of the morning to arouse her from her slumber, but in the sombre shape of Gunther, to rest at her side. Day has turned into night; this is the meaning of the change of forms. The wall of flame vanishes, day and sun descend into the realm of darkness. Under this aspect the Siegfried story is a day myth; but under another it is a myth of the year. The dragon is the symbol of winter, the dwarfs of darkness. Siegfried denotes the bright summer, his sword the sunbeams. The youthful year grows up in the dark days of winder. When its time has come, it goes forth triumphantly and destroys the darkness and the cold of winter. Through the symbolization the abstractions gain form and become persons; the saga is thus not a mere allegory, but a personification of nature's forces. The treasure may have entered the saga through the widespread idea of the dragon as the guardian of treasure, or it may represent the beauty of nature which unfolds when the season has conquered. In the last act of the saga, Siegfried's death, Wilmanns, the best exponent of this view, sees again a symbolic representation of a process of nature. According to him it signifies the death of the god of the year in winter. In the spring he kills the dragon, in the winter he goes weary to his rest and is foully slain by the hostile powers of darkness. Later, when this act was connected with the story of Gunther's wooing Brunhild, the real meaning was forgotten, and Siegfried's death was attributed to the grief and jealousy of the insulted queen.