In the epic family of Aymeri de Narbonne, by far the strangest figure is that of Aïmer le Chétif. Without sharing in the grotesqueness of Hernaut le Roux, Aïmer has a mysteriousness and the shadow of an unknown misfortune, which draw powerfully the sympathetic imagination. Evidently we are dealing with one of the greatest of ancient heroes, yet the complete disappearance of the epics that sang his exploits has buried in oblivion his peculiar claim to glory. If he has subsisted at all, it has been as a fallen deity. Indeed, the casual reader of the poems still extant in which he is mentioned, might suppose him the least of all his brethren, one of the humblest and most recent additions to the epic roll. It is in fact likely, as we shall see, that the meaning of his epithet le chétif was already forgotten seven hundred years ago.

When the critics of the middle of the eighteenth century discuss the conditions of the German stage at that time, they invariably complain of the great losses caused to it by the untimely death of several young and promising authors. Brawe, Cronegk, and J. E. Schlegel are mentioned in this way; and their names are still remembered, if their works are forgotten. Together with these we repeatedly find a name that nowadays seems almost to have dropped out of the memory of the historians of literature. Yet the young Nicolaï was just as eager to praise Johann Christian Krüger as those other three men, and regretted that he, too, by a premature death, had been prevented from fulfilling what his early productions had promised. For a long time confused with Gottsched's unlucky disciple, B. E. Krüger, Johann Christian Krüger's personality and writings only now begin to be understood.

One of the earliest evidences of the existence of a legend of Saint George is found in a pronunciamento of Pope Gelasius, made in connection with the first Roman council of the year 494. In the presence of seventy bishops he endeavored to separate the canonical and authentic books of the Church from those which are to be looked upon as apocryphal. After mentioning the books of the Bible, the decisions of the councils, the church fathers, and the decrees of the Popes, he cites the Lives of Saints and Martyrs, and adds that some of these latter writings are justly viewed with suspicion, both because the names of their authors are unknown, and because their contents stamp them as being the compositions of heretics or sectarians; he then cites as examples “cujusdam Quirici et Julittae, sicut Georgii aliorumque hujusmodi passiones, quae ab hereticis perhibentur compositae.”