nandes (in the same century) De Rebus Geticis, c. 24., narrates that King Ermanrîch having put to death his consort Svanhild, her two brothers (the sons of Guðrun) revenged her.

Now, these documentary proofs of the origin of the epos among the Goths are fully confirmed by the very admissions of the Scandinavian account.

First, the localities are admitted to be German. In the Wielandsong (Völundr), King Niðaðr asks Wieland how he had come into possession of his treasures. Wieland answers, ironically, that he has not found them in the air; and adds:

"Gold was not on Grani's ways,

Far I thought our land from the Rhine-mountains.”

The meaning of which is: "I had not Sigurd's horse, Grani (which carried the treasures he had received from the Dwarfs), nor was I near the Rhine where that treasure (der Nibelungen Hort) is submerged." Gold is called, in the Edda, "the Rhine-metal;" and likewise (in the poems of the Skalds) "the apple of discord of the Nibelungen." (Edda, p. 118 b). "Sigurdr died south of the Rhine," says the same When Gunther foresees the treason at King Etzel's court, he says to his sister Guðrun :

poem (p. 126 a).

"Too late it is, sister, to gather the Nibelungen,

Far it is to bring up for help their host,

From the Rhine-mountains the fearless heroes."

Sigmund, Sigfrid's father is called, "king of the land of the Franks," (p. 97 a). To this country, southward, Sigurdr rides, (p. 113 a). Now, these two last quotations are the work of the editor (diaskeuastes) of the Edda, who lived in the eleventh century; but in the old poem itself (p. 117 a) Sigfrid is called "Sigurðr inn Suðræni," "Sigurdr of the South."

The poem also states that Svanhild, Guðrun's daughter, is married to "the King of the Goths, Jörmunrekkr," that is to say, to Ermanrich, the historical Gothic king of the sixth century (p. 160 a. 163 a).

In short, the real Nibelungen Saga had not grown on Scandinavian soil. In the German poem, their treasure is the chief cause of the fight and extermination of the Burgundians; whereas the

Edda relates that Sigurdr acquires that treasure; after which it disappears, and has no further share in the development of the story.

The only conclusion to be drawn from this would seem to be, that the Northmen received the Nibelungen Saga in their warlike excursions about the middle of the ninth century, probably from Lothringen under Karlman and Arnulph.

Dr. A.

Thus it can be proved by the science of language, not only that the epic poetry of the Teutonic nations sprang up in gentile Germany, but also that its deepest roots lie in the soil of Asia, with those of Germanic speech and primitive philosophy. The Scandinavians preserved the principal features of the Sagas as they had learned them as gentiles, whereas in the native country the poem was cast into its modern, Christian form. The "Twenty Songs of the Nibelungen," of about the year 1100, received their present extension almost a century before the birth of Dante. The poem of the Nibelungen is the Iliad of the Germanic tribes in the outward dress of the age of Christian chivalry. It embodies in immortal verse not only the catastrophe of the Burgundians and Theoderic the Great and other heroes of the fifth and sixth centuries, but also primitive traditions, the shadows of gods and heroes whose deeds were sung at the cradle, not only of Charlemagne, but also of Arminius and Thusnelda. This national tale was first sung by the Skalds to princes and warriors. When the romances of French chivalry had come into fashion, "the blind men," as one of those romances says, sang of Sigfrid to the common people, who cared nothing for the imported outlandish ("Welsh") fictions. The blind men in their turn also disappeared, and the Saga was circulated only in a despised popular book, "printed in this year," under the title of "The Horny (invulnerable) Sigfrid," as I have seen it in my childhood hawked about and read at the fairs of my native country, in the beginning of this century. "Der Nibelungen Not" was printed, but not read, in Frederick the Great's time. It was the rising national spirit which made Hagen's edition (1810) popular, and the work itself once more the great national poem, which is now generally read throughout Germany, in Simrock's modernized version or in the original.—B.

SECOND CHAPTER.

THE LAST RESULTS OF THE ITALIC RESEARCHES AS TO THE ORIGIN AND RELATIVE POSITIONS OF THE ANCIENT INHABITANTS OF ITALY.

(Reported by Dr. AUFRECHT, Oxford.)

NIEBUHR's historical criticism had put an end to a host of groundless and unscientific conjectures and dreams respecting the languages of primitive Italy, and cleared the ground for solid linguistic research. For, as linguistic research is blind without philology, so is philology without history. Niebuhr's general tendency in language was distinction; and what he found to be essentially heterogeneous was likely to appear to him autochthonic and original from the beginning. This was the case with the Etruscan. Disgusted with the unscrupulous and rambling method of Lanzi and his followers, who had ransacked the Greek Dictionary, and drawn largely upon their own imaginations and the credulity of their readers, in order to make the Etruscan language, what its alphabet evidently is, an archaic form of the Hellenic, Niebuhr maintained that the Etruscan was a purely barbarous language; that it is wholly distinct from the other more or less Latinizing tongues of Italy Proper, of the Apennines, and even of the Alps; that the ruling nations of Etruria came from the North; and that the roots of the language must be looked for in Rætia. This verdict of Niebuhr, so far from being shaken, is confirmed by all the serious and connected philological or historical researches which have been since instituted on the subject.*

*I have too much regard for the learned, ingenious, and critical author of Varronianus, to consider Donaldson's opinion, that the Etruscan is Scandinavian, anything but a joke which that acute English philologer has indulged in.

It was, of course, this language which attracted, from the first appearance of Niebuhr's "Roman History," the united efforts of philologers and linguists. Ottfred Müller, in his truly learned work "Die Etrusker" (1828), gave the first critical outlines of the grammar, as well as of the alphabet. A general scrutiny of all the Etruscan inscriptions was undertaken, under the auspices of the Archæological Institute of Rome, by O. Kellermann, whose most conscientious and critical labours were interrupted by his premature death in 1834. In the lectures delivered by me at the Archæological Institute at Rome, in the year 1832 (some notices of which will be found in the " Annali dell' Instituto" from 1832 to 1836), I advanced the theory I still maintain, that the Etruscan bears strong marks of being a mixed language, from the circumstance of such grammatical forms as have been ascertained being evidently analogous to what we know of IndoGermanic flexions, whereas the greater part of the words which occur in the inscriptions prove most provokingly heterogeneous. On the other hand, the Tyrrhenic glosses in Hesychius (if they are of any value), and the inscription found about 1836 at Agylla, under the ruins of Etruscan Cære, and illustrated by Lepsius, contain words much more akin to the Greco-Latin stock. I do not think that the abundance of vowels can be accounted for by the assumption that this and some similar inscriptions represent a more ancient period. Until we possess bilinguar inscriptions of some extent we shall be unable to interpret them; but we cannot be mistaken as to their sounding less barbarous, or more like Greek or Latin, than the others. If, then, we have in the Etruscan a Greco-Latinizing grammar and a mixed vocabulary, and apply to this phenomenon the general theory of mixed languages, it does not follow that the

We do not know Etruscan, but we do know Icelandic. I must, however, confess that such jokes are an anachronism in our days. Dr. Freund's strictures upon him in a paper read before the Ethnological Society are seasonable; and prove that the few explanations he has attempted are inadmissible in themselves.

barbarous lexicographical elements are entirely un-Indo-Germanic; for Celtic, though decidedly barbarous, still forms a part of that family. But it does follow, from the analogy of all we know, that the groundwork of the language is indicated by the grammar, the indestructible badge of near kinship, and that in its origin the Etruscan was much more akin to Greek and Latin and the other Italic languages, than that element which forms in the monuments (that of Agylla and some smaller ones excepted) the predominant part of the vocabulary. A mixed language of this kind would be the natural consequence of a non-Italic tribe having taken possession of Tyrrhenia or the Mediterranean part of Central Italy, subdued the Italic indigenous population, and finally adopted their language, as the Norman conquerors did that of the Saxons, or the Arabs that of Persia. The coincidence of this result of an independent linguistic research with Niebuhr's demonstration of the northern (Rætian) origin of the Etruscans, attested by inscriptions found in an uninterrupted line, from that Alpine land and the Tyrol down to Tarquinii, appeared to me remarkable: the two researches seem mutually to confirm each other. The intrinsic nature of the language, as we find it in the monuments, leads also to the conclusion that the Greek words were a foreign element, received but not understood. Making every allowance for a different system of vocalization, such changes as

Pultuke from Polynikes,

Akhmiem from Agamemnon,

are unmistakeably barbarous, and betray an absolute ignorance of the elements of which the Greek name is composed.

Thus "atrium" may have been inorganically formed from alepiov. But as to haruspex, which is also said to be an Etruscan word, we shall see below that it is thoroughly Latin, and has its Indo-Germanic root: it may for all that have been Etruscan, but it is not a corruption of iɛpoσkóπos. Both also may have been ἱεροσκόπος. words of the conquered Helleno-Italic population of Etruria.