CHAPTER II.
GUDRUN.
Maximilian I., Emperor of Germany, rendered a great service to posterity by ordering that copies of many of the ancient national manuscripts should be made.

These copies were placed in the imperial library at Vienna, where, after several centuries of almost complete neglect, they were discovered by lovers of early literature, in a very satisfactory state of preservation.
These manuscripts then excited the interest of learned men, who not only found therein a record of the past, but gems of literature which are only now beginning to receive the appreciation they deserve.
[Sidenote: Origin of poem of Gudrun.] Among these manuscripts is the poem "Gudrun," belonging to the twelfth or thirteenth century.

It is evidently compiled from two or more much older lays which are now lost, which are alluded to in the Nibelungenlied.

The original poem was probably Norse, and not German like the only existing manuscript, for there is an undoubted parallel to the story of the kidnaping of Hilde in the Edda.

In the Edda, Hilde, the daughter of Hoegni, escapes from home with her lover Hedin, and is pursued by her irate father.