ied's)
use, and its temper was tested as here described.

[EN#4]--Sigmund The Volsung.

Sigmund the Volsung, in the Volsunga Saga, is represented as the father
of Sigurd (Siegfried); but there is such a marked contrast between him,
and the wise, home-abiding King Siegmund of the later stories, that I
have thought proper to speak of them here as two different individuals.
The word "Sigmund," or "Siegmund," means literally the mouth of victory.
The story of the Volsungs, as here supposed to be related by Mimer, is
derived mainly from the Volsunga Saga.

[EN#5]--Siegfried's Journey Into The Forest.

"In the shop of Mimer, Siegfried was nowise in his proper element, ever
quarrelling with his fellow-apprentices, nay, as some say, breaking the
hardest anvils into shivers by his too stout hammering; so that Mimer,
otherwise a first-rate smith, could by no means do with him there. He
sends him, accordingly, to the neighboring forest to fetch charcoal,
well aware that a monstrous dragon, one Regin, the smith's own brother,
would meet him, and devour him. But far otherwise it proved."--Carlyle,
on The Nibelungen Lied.

[EN#6]--The Norns.

The Norns are the Fates, which watch over man through life. They are
Urd the Past, Verdande the Present, and Skuld the Future. They approach
every new-born child, and utter his doom. They are represented as
spinning the thread of fate, one end of which is hidden by Urd in the
far east, the other by Verdande in the far west. Skuld stands ready
to rend it in pieces. --See Grimm's Teutonic Mythology, p. 405, also
Anderson's Norse Mythology, p. 209.

The three weird women in Shakespeare's Tragedy of Macbeth represent a
later conception of the three Norns, now degraded to mere witches.

Compare the Norns with the Fates of the Greek Mythology. These, also,
are three in number. They sit clothed in white, and garlanded, singing
of destiny. Clotho, the Past, spins; Lachesis, the Present, divides; and
Atropos, the Future, stands ready with her shears to cut the thread.

[EN#7]--The Idea of Fatality.

Throughout the story of the Nibelungs and Volsungs, of Sigurd and of
Siegfried,--whether we follow the older versions or the mote recent
renderings,--there is, as it were, an ever-present but indefinable
shadow of coming fate, "a low, inarticulate voice of Doom," foretelling
the inevitable. This is but in consonance with the general ideas of
our Northern ancestors regarding the