Note 1 — PART I (continued 2)
Reading edition
Some of the manuscripts divide the poem into sections, each one of which is called an aventiure, or ‘adventure.’
2. M.H.G. lîp, modern Leib, meant ‘body,’ ‘person,’ ‘self.’ With a genitive it is often pleonastic and untranslatable. Eines guten Ritters Leib = einen guten Ritter.
3. Archaic for Weibern for the sake of the medial rime with bleiben. Now and then a stanza has medial as well as final rimes.
4. M.H.G. wætlîch, ‘beautiful.’
5. ‘Better.’
6. The home of Brunhild, far out over the North Sea. She is an athletic maid who kills her suitors unless they vanquish her in certain sports. Gunter has come to woo her, Siegfried promising to help him. Siegfried’s reward is to be the hand of Kriemhild.
7. Siegfried has put on his Tarnkappe, or hiding-cloak, which makes him invisible.
8. The two queens have quarreled, and Hagen, as the faithful liegeman of Brunhild, seeks the life of Siegfried, who is invulnerable except in one spot on his back. At the end of a day’s hunt in the Odenwald (across the Rhine from Worms) the thirsty Siegfried races with Gunter and Hagen to a spring.
9. The silken cross which the unsuspecting Kriemhild has sewn upon her husband’s corselet, in order that Hagen may protect him from the spears of the enemy.
10. The widowed Kriemhild has married Etzel and lived several years at the Hunnish court, always nursing plans of vengeance against Hagen, who has not only killed her husband but robbed her of her Nibelungen hoard. At last she invites her brothers to visit her. In the fierce fights that take place at Kriemhild’s instigation all the Burgundians have fallen except Gunter and Hagen. The death of his liegemen at the hands of the Burgundians constrains the mighty Dietrich of Bern to interfere.