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Germanic and Celtic Heroic Traditions 35
confined to the tale of Siegfried alone? Why have they
been scattered throughout Irish literature at large?
Let us face this problem cautiously. The Siegfried
tradition is at home on the borders of the Lower Rhine;
we may even point out the town of Xanten as a point of
crystallisation and the starting-point of all later poetical
treatment. I am inclined to agree with Professor Otto
Hofler in Vienna that Siegfried is in fact the famous
liberator Germaniae, the Cheruscan chieftain Arminius.w
With great acuteness Hofler has detected quite a series of
motifs peculiar to the Siegfried story that point to
a connection with the disaster of Varus. Long ago it
was argued that the proper name of Arminius might have
been Siegfried, because several of his kinsmen bore names
beginning with the element sig- 'victory'. This, however,
can be no more than a mere possibility. We want other
arguments to carry conviction. Many scholars have been
puzzled by the fact that in the Eddie Fdfnismdl the hero
says, when asked about his descent, that he has neither
father nor mother, but that he is a deer. Why should
this unimpeachable hero have told a lie? But is it a lie?
As a Cheruscan hero he could rightly say so, for the name
of this Germanic tribe may be formed from the Germanic
word herut, German hirsch. A very unexpected and at the
same time elegant solution of a problem which has hitherto
baffled all scholars.s"
If a hypothesis succeeds in solving a problem of this
kind, it may be usable in other cases too. I cannot make
mention of other demonstrations in Hofler's illuminating
book. But I should like to point out that after a careful
investigation of the classical sources Hofler comes to the
conclusion that the defeat of Varus took place on the
Knetterheide in the neighbourhood of Detmold. Who will
22 Cf. his Siegfried, Arminius und die Symbolik (1961).
sa It is, however, to be kept in mind that this etymology, first proposed by
R. Much, is only hypothetical; how can we explain the fact that already in
Roman times the t of herut has disappeared in the name Cherusci? Cf.
H. Kuhn, Gnomon (1962), 629, and H. M. Heinrichs, Lippische Mitteilungen
aus Geschichte und Landeskunde 31 (1962), 278.