s obliged to return to animal
shape through some breach of agreement by her mortal husband. This
incident of the compact (_i.e._, to hide the swan-coat, to refrain
from asking the wife's name, or whatever it may have been) has been
lost in the Voelund tale. The Continental version is told in the late
Icelandic _Thidreks Saga_, where it is brought into connexion with
the Volsung story; in this the story of the second brother, Egil the
archer, is also given, and its antiquity is supported by the pictures
on the Anglo-Saxon carved whale-bone box known as the Franks Casket,
dated by Professor Napier at about 700 A.D. The adventures of the
third brother, Slagfinn, have not survived. The Anglo-Saxon gives
Voelund and Boedvild a son, Widia or Wudga, the Wittich who appears as
a follower of Dietrich's in the Continental German sources.

_The Volsungs_.--No story better illustrates the growth of heroic
legend than the Volsung cycle. It is composite, four or five mythical
motives combining to form the nucleus; and as it took possession
more and more strongly of the imagination of the early Germans, and
still more of the Scandinavians, other heroic cycles were brought
into dependence on it. None of the Eddic poems on the subject are
quite equal in poetic value to the Helgi lays; many are fragmentary,
several late, and only one attempts a review of the whole story. The
outline is as follows: Sigurd the Volsung, son of Sigmund and brother
of Sinfjoetli, slays the dragon who guards the Nibelungs' hoard on
the Glittering Heath, and thus inherits the curse which accompanies
the treasure; he finds and wakens Brynhild the Valkyrie, lying in
an enchanted sleep guarded by a ring of fire, loves her and plights
troth with her; Grimhild, wife of the Burgundian Giuki, by enchantment
causes him to forget the Valkyrie, to love her own daughter Gudrun,
and, since he alone can cross the fire, to win Brynhild for her son
Gunnar. After the marriage, Brynhild discovers the trick, and incites
her husband and his brothers to kill Sigurd.

The series begins with a prose piece on the Death of Sinfjoetli,
which says that after Sinfjoetli, son of Sigmund, Volsung's son (which
should be Valsi's son, Volsung being a tribal, not a personal, name),
had been poisoned by his stepmother Borghild, Sigmund married Hjoerdis,
Eylimi's daughter, had a son Sigurd, and fell in battle against the
race of Hunding. Sigmund, as in all other Norse sources, is said to be
ki