The Nibelungenlied

whether the priority should be given to A or B, the probabilities being that B is the more original, A merely a careless copy of B.

In spite of the great popularity of the "Nibelungenlied", the poem was soon forgotten by the mass of the people. With the decay of courtly chivalry and the rise of the prosperous citizen class, whose ideals and testes lay in a different direction, this epic shared the fate of many others of its kind, and was
relegated to the dusty shelves of monastery or ducal libraries, there to wait till a more cultured age, curious as to the
literature of its ancestors, should bring it forth from its hiding places. However, the figures of the old legend were not forgotten, but lived on among the people, and were finally
embodied in a popular ballad, "Das Lied vom Hurnen Segfrid", which has been preserved in a print of the sixteenth century, although the poem itself is thought to go back at least to the thirteenth. The legend was also dramatized by Hans Sachs, the shoemaker