my sweet husband, is left to me." She
draws it from the sheath, and, by the hand of the long-sorrowing wife,
Siegfried's sword avenges Siegfried's death upon his murderer.

At this moment old Hildebrand, wrathful over the breach of the condition
imposed upon her by Dietrich when he delivered Gunther and Hagen to her,
cuts her down. Kriemhilde, with a frightful scream, sinks to the ground,
beside the body of her deadly enemy.

"With anguish thus had ended the monarch's revelry,
As love will to sorrow too oft become a prey."

Kriemhilde, the German woman par excellence, with her heart filled with
all the virtues of love and faith, outraged in her holiest feelings, and
thus "turning the milk of human kindness to fermenting dragon's poison,"
presents to us all the potentialities of womanhood, and withal the
entire range of the psychology of German womanhood.

When we emerge from the orgy of hate and bloodshed with which the second
part of the _Nibelungenlied_ is filled, when we have fathomed the depths
of the passion of which a high-minded, loving type of royal womanhood
such as Kriemhilde is capable, we are glad to resort to the beneficent
contrast of womanly gentleness and loveliness which we find in _Gudrun_,
the second great mediaeval German epic, whose roots and branches are
deeply set in the Migration period. We discover here a portrait of the
culture of the time, its warfare, its seafaring, its discoveries, its
geographical horizon, and, especially, its love and truth and faith. If
we were stirred in the former epic by the gloomy and lurid background
that overshadowed even its sunniest scenes; if the sinking of the
noblest, purest, most affectionate Kriemhilde into demoniacal passion
did not permit us to arrive at a serene contemplation of that gigantic
work of art, we now celebrate the triumph of the loyalty and devotion
and perseverance of a genuine womanly heart over long and bitter sorrow
and humiliations. While Kriemhilde's fierce hatred immolates both
herself and a great dynasty on the altar of revenge, in _Gudrun_ we
celebrate the victory of self-abnegation, patience, and peace, and the
reconciliation of two mighty dynasties.

The theatre of action of this, the second greatest national epic, is the
entire range of the North Sea, with its measureless limits extending
into mythical infinity, with its long coast line and sea-girt isles,
with its Viking ships storm-tossed on the watery roads of