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out humour of the same type, besides descriptive passages of much charm and touches of court refinement, and Alpharts Tod reaches a high standard in its directness, tragedy, and pathos.

Beyond the Thidrekssaga, however, and Heinrich der Vogler's Buch von Bern we know of no medieval attempt to use for a great epic the splendid material offered by the stories and poems of the Dietrich saga. And yet this saga, which had for its central figure a noble king, though of surpassing valour always slow to draw the sword, and though beloved by his subjects forced into exile by the treachery of his enemies and by his own chivalrous self-sacrifice; this saga, which was full of dramatic situations and not lacking in such striking figures as Ermenrich, the type of cruelty and greed, Sibeche his evil counsellor, Hildebrand, the faithful guardian, in spite of his years one of Dietrich's doughtiest warriors, and always ready with advice and help, Wolfhart, young, hot-headed, ever thirsting for the fray, and Witege, cunning and mercenary, turned traitor for the sake of gold; this saga with its record of adventures among giants and dwarfs and dragons, of long years of exile filled with valiant deeds, and of victorious return at last, seems to have all the essentials for a German Odyssey that might have borne comparison with the story of Ulysses itself.
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1. The Hildebrandslied, probably of Low German origin, but brought to Fulda (East Franconia) in the eighth century.

6. Sigenôt, a High German poem, dating perhaps from the latter part of the thirteenth century. Probably of Tyrolese origin.

7. Virginal, Dietrichs erste Ausfahrt, and Dietrich und seine Gesellen, varying versions of a Tyrolese story and probably dating as poems from the end of the thirteenth century.

8. Laurin, or Der kleine Rosengarten, dating from the end of the thirteenth century, and of Tyrolese origin.

9. Goldemar, a fragment of a poem written by a certain Albrecht von Kemenaten in the thirteenth century and based on a Tyrolese story.

10. The Thidrekssaga, in prose, originally composed in Norway, about the middle of the thirteenth century, by an Icelandic saga-writer whose sources were poems and stories then current in North Germany; recast and largely expanded a generation later by a redactor.

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11. Biterolf und Dietleib, an Austrian poem from the early part of the thirteenth century.

12. Der Rosengarten zu Worms or Der grosse Rosengarten, an Austro-Bavarian poem from the latter part of the thirteenth century.

Excluding Nos. 1 and 10, these poems, together with a few more dealing with other sagas, are frequently grouped together under the title of Das Heldenbuch, the name given by Kaspar von der Roen to a collection published by him in 1472.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Nos. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 (Virginal), 8, 9, 11 are edited in the Deutsches Heldenbuch, Berlin, 1866-78. This work is in five parts, of which Part I. contains Nos. 8 (ed. K. Mullenboff) and 11 (ed. O. Janicke). Part II. contains Nos. 2, 3, and 4 (all ed. E. Martin). Part V. contains Nos. 5, 6, 7, and 9 (all ed. J. Zupitza). No. 4, with portions of other Dietrich epics will also be found in the Sammlung Geschen, vol. 102[?].

No. 8 has been edited more recently by G. Holz, Halle, 1897.

No. 10 has been edited by Unger, Christiania, 1853, and translated into German by A. Raszmann in Die deutsche Heldensage, vol. ii., 2nd ed., Hannover, 1863;
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also by F. H. von der Hagen in his Altdeutsche und Altnordische Helden-Sagen, vols. I. and ii., 3rd ed., Breslau, 1872. No. 12 has been edited by G. Holz, Halle, 1893.

DETAILED ABSTRACTS of most of the poems of the cycle, viz. Nos. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, and 12, and in addition Ermenrichs Tod, Etzels Hofhaltung, and the Younger Hildebrandslied, are given, with copious extracts from the originals, in E. Henrici's Das deutsche Heldenbuch, vol. vii. of Kürschner's Deutsche National Litteratur.
Shorter abstracts, in English, of Nos. 3, 4, 5, 6, 11, and 12, will be found in J. M. Ludlow's Popular Epics of the Middle Ages (London and Cambridge, 1865); and a fairly full résumé of No. 10 in Thomas Hodgkin's excellent Theodoric the Goth (pp. 372-424), one of Putnam's "Heroes of the Nations" Series. POPULAR RECONSTRUCTIONS of the complete saga, such as that in G. Klee's well-known Deutsche Heldensagen (4th ed., Gutersloh, 1892) are fairly numerous. There is one in English, in M. W. Macdowall's Epics and Romances of the Middle Ages (2nd ed., London, 1884), an adaptation of W. Wagner's Unsere Vorzeit 4th ed., Lepzig, 1889).

Students desirous of investigating on their own account any of the numerous problems connected with the Dietrich cycle should study the views expressed by O. L. Jiriczek in his Deutsche Heldensagen, vol. I., pp. 119-331 Strassburg, 1898, and by B. Symons in his article on Heldensage in Paul's Grundriss der germanischen Philologie, vol. iii., pp. 689-700 (2nd ed., Strassburg, 1900), and follow up the references there given. Frequent references will there be found to the older standard works, such as W. Grimm's Die deutsche Heldensage (3rd ed., Gutersloh,)