KRIEMHILD (GRIMHILD)

This article appears in Volume V15, Page 926 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

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KRIEMHILD (GRIMHILD) , the heroine of the Nibelungenlied and wife of the hero Siegfried. The name (from O. H. Ger. grima, a mask or helm, and hiltja or hilia, war) means " the masked warrior woman," and has been taken to prove her to have been originally a mythical, daemonic figure, an impersonation of the powers of darkness and of death. In the north, indeed, the name Grimhildr continued to have a purely mythical character and to be applied only to daemonic beings; but in Germany, the

original

ORIGINAL

home

of the Nibelungen myth, it certainly lost all trace of this significance, and in the Nibelungenlied Kriemhild is no more than a beautiful princess, the daughter of King Dancrlt and Queen Uote, and

sister

SISTER

of the Burgundian kings Gunther, Giselher and Gernot, the masters of the Nibelungen hoard. As she appears in the Nibelungen legend, however, Kriemhild would seem to have an historical origin, as the wife of Attila, king of the Huns, as well as

sister

SISTER

of the Nibelung kings. According to Jerdanes (c. 49), who takes his information from the con-temporary and trustworthy account of Priscus, Attila died of a violent hemorrhage at night, as he lay beside a girl named Ildico (i.e. O. H. Ger. Hildiko). The story got abroad that hehad perished by the hand-of a woman in revenge for her relations slain by him; according to some (e.g. Saxo Poeta and the Quedlinburg chronicle) it was her father whom she revenged; but when the treacherous overthrow of the Burgundians by Attila had become a theme for epic poets, she figured as a Burgundian princess, and her act as done in revenge for her

brothers

BROTHERS, RICHARD (1757-1824)

. Now the name Hildiko is the diminutive of

Hilda

HILDA, ST

or Hild, which again in accordance with a custom common enoughmay have been used as an abbreviation of Grimhild (cf. Hildr for Brynhildr). It has been suggested (Symons, Heldensage, p. 55) that when the legend of the overthrow of the Burgundians, which took place in 437, became attached to that of the death of Attila (453), Hild, the supposed sister of the Burgundian kings, was identified with the daemonic Grimhild, the sister of the mythical Nibelung

brothers

BROTHERS, RICHARD (1757-1824)

, and thus helped the process by which the Nibelung myth became fused with the historical story of the fall of the Burgundian kingdom. The older story, according to which Grimhild slays her husband Attila in revenge for her brothers, is preserved in the Norse tradition, though Grimhild's part is played by

Gudrun

GUDRUN (KUDRUN)

, a

change

CHANGE (derived through the Fr. from the Late Lat. cambium, cambiare, to barter; the ultimate derivation is probably from the root which appears in the Gr. 冠 urmu', to bend)

probably due to the fact, mentioned above, that the name Grimhild still retained in the north its sinister significance. The name of Grimhild is transferred to

Gudrun

GUDRUN (KUDRUN)

's mother, the " wise wife," a semi-daemonic figure, who brews the potion that makes

Sigurd

SIGURD (Sigur6r)

forget his love for

Brunhild

BRUNHILD (M.H.Ger. Briinhilt or Priinhilt, Nor. Brynhild?)

and his plighted troth. In the Nibelungenlied, however, the primitive supremacy of the blood-tie has given place to the more modern idea of the supremacy of the passion of love, and Kriemhild marries Attila (Etzel) in order to compass the death of her brothers, in revenge for the murder of Siegfried. Theodor Abeling, who is disposed to reject or minimize the mythical origins, further suggests a confusion of the story of Attila's wife Ildico with that of the murder of Sigimund the Burgundian by the sons of Chrothildis, wife of Clovis. (See NIBELUNGENLIED.)
See B. Symons, Germanische Heldensage (Strassburg, t9o5) ; F. Zarnke, Das Nibelungenlied, p. ii. (

Leipzig

LEIPZIG

, 1875) ; T. Abeling, Einleitung in das Nibelungenlied (Freiburg-irn-Breisgau, 1909).
(W. A. P.)

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