tality of the great Greek tales of adventure and warfare and
love. Thus it came about that the epic cycle of Charlemagne, after
supplanting in men's minds the grand sagas of the pagan North, was
itself supplanted by the Arthurian cycle; that the Frankish stories
absorbed the wholly discrepant elements of their more fortunate Keltic
rivals; that both cycles, having lost all character through fusion and
through obliteration by time, became more meaningless generation by
generation and year by year, until when the Middle Ages had come to an
end, and the great poets of the Renaissance were ready to give this old
mediaeval epic stuff a definitive and durable artistic shape, there came
to the hands of Boiardo and Ariosto, of Tasso and Spenser, only a
strange, trumpery material, muddled by jongleurs and romance writers,
and reduced to mere fairy stuff, taken seriously only by Don Quixote,
and by the authors of the volumes of insane twaddle called after Amadis
of Gaul and all his kinsmen.

Such a condition of perpetual change as explains, in my belief, why the
mediaeval epic subjects were wanted, can be made clear only by examples.
I shall therefore try to show the transformations which were undergone
by one or two principal mediaeval epic subjects as a result of a mixture
with other epic cycles; of a gradual adaptation to a new state of
civilization; and finally of their gradual separation from all kind of
reality and real interests.

First of all, let us look at the epic cycle, which, although known to us
only in poems no older than those of the trouveres and minnesingers who
sang of Charlemagne and Arthur, is in reality far more ancient, and on
account of its antiquity and its consequent disconnection with mediaeval
religious and political interests, was thrown aside even by the nations
to which it belonged, by the Scandinavians who took to writing sagas
about the wars of Charlemagne against Saracens, and by the Germans who
preferred to hear the adventures of Welsh and Briton, Launcelots and
Tristrams. I am alluding to the stories connected with the family and
life of the hero called Sigurd by the Scandinavians, and Siegfried by
the Germans. Of these we possess a Norse version called the Volsunga
Saga, magnificently done into English by Mr. William Morris; which,
although written down at the end of the twelfth century, in the very
time therefore of Chrestien de Troyes, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and
Gottfried von Strassburg, a