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is seized to work in the stories of Siegfried's marriage with Kriemhild, and Gunther's with Brunhild. These are followed by the sagas of Herbort and Hilde, Walter of Aquitaine and Hildegund, and Iron and Apollonius, after which the so often broken thread of the Dietrich saga is once more taken up.

Ermenrich having outraged the wife of Sibeche (who corresponds to the Norse Bikka), the latter sets himself to avenge his honour by bringing about the death first of Ermenrich's three sons, then of his two nephews, the young Harlung princes, by means of evil counsels and false accusations. Finally he persuades Ermenrich to demand tribute from Dietrich as a test of his loyalty. On his refusal an army marches on Bern, and Dietrich takes refuge with Attila. He again takes part in wars with Osantrix, whose death during the last campaign is over-looked, and against King Waldemar of Russia and his ally Dietrich of Greece. After twenty years of exile Attila lends him an army of Huns for his first attempt to recover his throne. Ermenrich's army is defeated, but Attila's two sons and Dietrich's younger brother are among the slain, whereupon Dietrich returns with the sad news to the land of the Huns.

Here the Dietrich saga is yet again interrupted, this time in favour of the Nibelungen saga.
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Beginning with the quarrel between Brunhild and Kriemhild, the whole story of Siegfried's death and Kriemhild's vengeance is told in a form that agrees, in the main, with the version found in the Nibelungenlied. Dietrich's share in the final catastrophe differs only in minor points from the part he plays in the Middle High German epic. He refuses to lend himself to Kriemhild's plans, and holds aloof, at first, from the conflict; but on the death of his friend Rüdiger he joins in the fray, and himself takes prisoner Hagen, the last survivor of the Burgundians. When all is over he returns to Bern, accompanied only by his wife Herrat and the faithful Hildebrand, for all his men have been slain. On the way they hear that Ermenrich has died and that Sibeche has seized the throne, but that Hildebrand's son Alebrand is holding Bern for Dietrich. On arriving near Bern Hildebrand meets and fights with Alebrand, and, after forcing him to tell his name, spares his life. Joyfully welcomed in Bern, Dietrich marches against Sibich, who is defeated and slain, after which the remainder of the book consists partly of more expeditions against dragons and giants, partly of accounts of the deaths of Hildebrand, Attila, Heime, and lastly Dietrich himself.

In this summary of the Thidrekssaga we have had our second reference only to Dietrich's origin
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and our first to his end. Of the medieval German poems only Dietrichs Flucht and the Anhang zum Heldenbuch (really a sort of preface to a collection of epic poems from various saga cycles) give accounts of his origin, and these two accounts are of distinctly different types, historical and mythical. In Dietrichs Flucht, as in the Thidrekssaga, we find a genealogy based on historical tradition. Both retain the name of Theoderic's father Theodemer (in the forms of Dietmar and Thetmar); both are further true to history in giving Theodemer two brothers, and both true to an old form of the saga, though false to history, in recognising Ermanaric as one of those brothers. Beyond this, however, the two genealogies have nothing in common, except that both are free inventions. The author of the Thidrekssaga was content with the introduction of Samson as Dietrich's grandfather. But the author of the genealogy given in Dietrichs Flucht gave his fancy free play, and followed his hero's ancestry through his grandfather Amelung to the grandfather of the first husband of a princess whose second husband was Dietrich's great-great-grandfather. The name Amelung he introduced, no doubt, to account for the traditional designation of Dietrich's followers as Amelungs, but this term ought historically be confined to Dietrich himself and the other members of the royal house founded by the legendary Amalus mentioned by Jordanes.

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According to the mythical tradition, derived, presumably, from Dietrich's mythical rôle as conqueror of the giants and the dwarfs, his birth, like that of so many heroes of saga, was mysterious, and his real father was not Dietmar, but some supernatural being. Of the details of the story we know nothing, but its existence is hinted at in the Thidrekssaga and confirmed by the modified version found in the Anhang zum Heldenbuch, where an evil spirit named Machmet (= Mahomet), though not actually Dietrich's father, exercises on him a pre-natal influence.

Concerning Dietrich's end most of the poems of the cycle are silent; but from two of them, as well as from the Thidrekssaga and other sources, we know that tradition told of his mysterious disappearance. As early as the sixth century, that in which Theoderic's death took place, a story was current to the effect that after his death Theoderic's body was carried off by the devil and cast into the crater of a volcano. This story, invented by the Italian clergy to destroy the popularity of the great king whom they regarded as a heretic and the murderer of Boethius, spread beyond Italy and reappears in later centuries in various forms. A twelfth century chronicler, Otto von Freisingen, mentions a tradition that Dietrich died no natural death, but rode alive to hell on
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horseback. Similar to this is the story in the Thidrekssaga which tells how one day, as he was bathing, Dietrich saw a stag not far away and was immediately filled with a great desire to pursue it. Suddenly a coal-black steed appeared, but, when Dietrich had mounted, it carried him off with such speed that none could follow. It was, in fact, the devil himself, and Dietrich was never seen again. The same story forms the subject of a relief in Verona, and was also current in the fourteenth century in a slightly different form in Spain.

The idea, however, that Dietrich was carried off bodily to hell must have been very unpalatable to his medieval admirers, and it is probably to this fact that we owe the considerable differences between the remaining traditions and those just mentioned. According to Etzels Hofhaltung the devil in the shape of a black horse carried him of not to hell, but to the desert of Rumenei, there to fight with dragons till the Day of Judgment; the Swedish Didrikssaga tells how he rode away secretly on a black horse to take vengeance on Witege, slew the traitor, but died of his wounds on the homeward journey; in the Anhung zum Heldenbuch he is led away by a dwarf into a hollow mountain and never seen again; and in the popular belief he has become one of Wodan's Wild Huntsmen.

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Apart from Dietrich the four most important figures of the saga are Ermenrich, Hildebrand, Witege, and Heime. Of these Ermenrich represents, as we have seen, a combination of the historical Ermanaric and Odoacer. For Hildebrand, too, at least in his character of tutor and guardian, we have a historical parallel in Gensimund, whose loyal devotion to Theoderic's father and uncles during their minority preserved them their inheritance. The difference of name is sufficiently accounted for by the early incorporation in the Dietrich saga of the pre-Germanic story of combat between father and son. The Hildebrandslied
shows that the father, in the Germanic version of the story, bore the name of Hildebrand; after his introduction into the Dietrich saga he was presumably identified with the hero's aged guardian and instructor, whose real name became superfluous and disappeared.

Another partly historical figure is Witege identical in his capacity of Ermenrich's vassal, with the Vidigoia, Gothorum fortissimus, who, according to Jordanes, overcame the Sarmatians by guile and was the hero of epic songs. In his desertion from Dietrich to Ermenrich we have, perhaps, a reminiscence of Tufa's desertion from Theoderic to Odoacer, while his chief act of treachery, the surrender of Ravenna, suggests confusion with the incompetent king Witigis,
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whose capitulation in Ravenna in 540 A.D. to an inferior force under Belisarius was felt by the Goths as a national disgrace. For Heime, however, Witege's comrade in treachery, there is no trace of a historical origin; he and another Witege(?), whose deeds were afterwards ascribed to the historical Vidigoia-Witege, seem from their supernatural origin to have been the heroes of a nature-myth, and to have been introduced into the Dietrich from the Ermanaric saga.

The other characters, such as the hot-headed Wolfhart, whose impetuosity in the Nibelungenlied brings about the death of all Dietrich's followers except Hildebrand; Alphart, whose untimely end at the hands of Witege and Heime filled Dietrich's camp with mourning; and Elsan, whose failure to keep watch over Etzel's sons was atoned for by death, according to some, by retirement to a monastery, according to other versions, and who reappears in Laurin as the monk Ilsung, to whom the captive dwarf is handed over for instruction and conversion to Christianity, and in the Rosengarten zu Worms as the abusive and quarrelsome monk Ilsan, were all, so far as we can tell, introduced at later stages in the development of the saga.

We can now form some idea of the medieval Dietrich epic that might have existed had some poet of sufficient ability made a selection from
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the many separate Dietrich poems and stories, and, by the introduction of suitable motives, combined them into a harmonious whole. This task was, indeed, attempted by the original author of the Thidrekssaga, but his work was disfigured by a later redactor, a mere compiler who introduced so much extraneous matter that the Thidrekssaga as we know it, is rather a compendium of Germanic hero saga than a Dietrich epic. Heinrich der Vogler, too, the author of Dietrichs Flucht and the Rabenschlacht, seems to have aimed at uniting the historical Dietrich traditions into a continuous epic under the title Das Buch von Bern; but his powers and patience proved unequal to the task. His work is incomplete and tedious, while his style lacks both the artistic finish of the Court Epic and the sprightliness of the Popular Epic. His two poems are, in fact, aesthetically the least satisfactory of all the poems of the cycle. None of them, it must be confessed, can lay claim to much artistic finish and restraint, but all except Dietrichs Flucht and the Rabenschlacht are at least good examples of the art of the wandering gleemen. The Eckenlied and Sigenôt have the merit of life and action, and so, too, have the poems of the Virginal group, in spite of their prolixity; the Rosengarten zu Worms abounds in humour -- of a somewhat grotesque and primitive nature, it is true; Laurin is not with