Lied vom Hürnen Seyfrid
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Das Lied vom Hürnen Seyfrid ("The Song of Horn-skinned Siegfried";[1] "Lay of Seyfrid with the Horny Skin"[2][lower-alpha 1]), or Hürnen Seyfrid for short, is an anonymous Early New High German heroic ballad. The poem concerns the adventures of young Siegfried, hero of the Nibelungenlied and an important figure in Germanic heroic legend. It preserves traditions about Siegfried that are otherwise only known from Old Norse sources and thus attest their existence in oral traditions about Siegfried that circulated outside of the Nibelungenlied in Germany.
Hürnen Seyfrid tells how Siegfried was raised by a smith, killed a dragon, and made his skin invincible (got his skin as hard as horn (hürnen)). Afterwards it tells how he rescued Kriemhild, daughter of the Burgundian king Gybich, with the help of the dwarf Eugel from a cursed man who has transformed into a dragon. In doing so, Siegfried fights the giant Kuperan. In defeating the dragon, Siegfried acquires the treasure of the Nibelungen and marries Kriemhild.
The poem, together with another heroic ballad, the Jüngeres Hildebrandslied, is the piece of German heroic tradition that remained popular the longest and the only part of the tradition surrounding the Nibelungenlied to enter early print culture. The poem was re-printed into the eighteenth century, and a prose version continued to be re-printed into the nineteenth century.