etition and alteration. Yet even these
alterations could not make the tale of Siegfried survive among the
Germans of the Middle Ages; nay, the more the alterations the less the
interest; the want of consistency and colour due to rearrangement merely
accelerated the throwing aside of a subject which, dating from pagan and
tribal times, had become repugnant to the new generations. All the
mutilations in the world could not make the old Scandinavian tales of
betrayed trust, of revenge and triumphant bloodshed, at all sympathetic
to men whose religious and social ideals were those of forgiveness and
fidelity; even stripped of its incestuous mysteries and of its fearful
tribal love, the tale of Sigurd and Brynhilt, reduced to the tale of
Chriemhilt's revenge, was unpalatable: no more attempts were made at
re-writing it, and the poems of Walther, of Gottfried, of Wolfram, of
Ulrich, and of Tannhaeuser, full as they are of references to stories of
the Carolingian and Arthurian cycles, nay, to Antique and Oriental
tales, contain no allusion to the personages of the Nibelungenlied. The
old epic of the Gothic races had been pushed aside by the triumphant
epic of the obscure and conquered Kelts.

There are few phenomena in the history of ideas and forms more singular
than that of the sudden conquest of the poetry of dominant or distant
nations by the poetic subjects of a comparatively small race, sheared of
all political importance, restricted to a trifling territory, and
well-nigh deprived of their language; and of this there can be found no
more striking example than the sudden ousting of the Carolingian epic by
the cycle of Arthur.

The Kelts of Britain and Ireland possessed an epic cycle of their own,
which came to notice only when they were dispossessed of their last
strongholds by Saxons and Normans, and which immediately spread with
astounding rapidity all over Europe. The vanquished race became
fashionable; themselves, their art and their poetry, began to be sought
for as a precious and war-enhanced loot. The heroic tales of the Kelts
were transcribed in Welsh, and translated into Latin, by order of the
Norman and Angevine kings, glad, it would seem, to oppose the Old Briton
to the Saxon element. The Keltic songs were carried all over France by
Breton bards, to whose music and rhymes, with only a general idea of the
subjects, the neo-Latin-speaking Franks listened with the sort of stolid
satisfaction with which English or