ABSTRACT

I do not doubt the existence of single lays, and they will also have had their own artistic shape, but we are ignorant or as good as ignorant of them. We have indeed nothing other than the incompletely preserved German Hildebrandslied which could be pointed to with any certainty as an independent epic lay from the old Germanic period. Ten Brink himself makes as little appeal to Byrhtnodh and the quite wrongly so-called lays of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as he does to the various episodic poems which were composed and sung about the adventures of Dietrich or Siegfried in the Middle High German period. I also do not dispute the possibility that in Beowulf as in the Nibelungenlied single lays may have been utilised, indeed that one or another independent lay or parts of one may have been taken in word for word. For it is correct, as ten Brink remarks after the passage quoted [ten Brink 1888:4], that the religious epic ‘contains fewer of the striking hysteraprotera [“inversions”] and unbearable repetitions’ than does the Beowulf tradition, just as in the Nibelung-poem far more material contradictions appear than in the courtly epics, where they are just the same by no means absent.—But that these lays or ruins of lays should be recognisable and capable of dissection in the surviving epics, that I do most certainly doubt, because we do not possess the guiding strand for any such critical activity, namely surviving independent lays, because the divergences of narrative mode from the so-called art-poems, in poems like Beowulf and the Nibelungs, are not great enough to erect on them the hypothesis of an origin

precedence over the alternative.