lt is
entirely disfigured and rendered inane in the Nibelungenlied: of that
superb demi-goddess of the Scandinavians, burnt on the pyre with her
falcons and dogs and horses and slaves, by the side of the demi-god
Sigurd, whom she has loved and killed, lest the door of Valhalla,
swinging after him, should shut her out from his presence; of her there
remains in the German mediaeval poem only a virago (more like the
giantesses of the Amadis romances) enraged at having been defeated and
grotesquely and grossly pummelled into wedlock by a man not her husband,
and then slanged like a fishwife by her envious sister-in-law.

The old, consistent, grandly tragic tale of the mysterious incests and
revenges of a race of demi-gods has lost its sense, its point in the
attempt to arrange it to suit Christian and feudal ideas. The really
fine portions of the Nibelungenlied are exactly those which have no real
connection with the original story, gratuitous additions by mediaeval
poets. The delicately indicated falling in love of Siegfried and
Chriemhilt, the struggles of Markgraf Ruedger between obedience to his
feudal superior and fidelity towards his friends and guests; and, above
all, the canto of the death of Siegfried. This last is different,
intensely different, from the rugged and dreary monotony of the rest;
this most poetical, almost Spenserian or Ariostesque realization of the
scene; this beautiful picture (though worked with the needle of the
arras-worker rather than with pencil or brush) of the wood, the hunt,
the solitary fountain in the Odenwald, where, with his spear leaned
against the lime-tree, Siegfried was struck down into the clover and
flowers, and writhed with Hagen's steel through his back. This canto is
certainly interpolated by some first-rate poet, at least a Gottfried or
a Walther, to whom that passage of the savage old droning song of death
had suggested a piece of new art; it is like the fragments of
exquisitely chiselled leafage and figures which you sometimes find
encrusted--by whom? wherefore?--quite isolated in the midst of the rough
and lichen-stained stones of some rude Lombard church. All the rest of
the Nibelungenlied gives an impression of effeteness; there is no
definiteness of idea such as that of the Volsunga Saga; the battles are
mere vague slaughter, no action, no realized movement, or (excepting
Ruedger) no realized motive of conduct. Shape and colour would seem to
have been obliterated by rep