Now the preparations for the festivities of love and marriage are begun.
The epic rings out in a sweet chant of love and reconciliation. Gudrun's
faithfulness is blessed by Herwig's marital love. But Gudrun is
unwilling to be blessed alone. The hate between the Normans and the
Hegelings must be wiped out: the Norman princess Ortrun is married to
King Ortwin. Hartmut, who for so long had cherished a hopeless love for
Gudrun, transfers his affections to noble Hildeburg, who had shared
Gudrun's sorrowful captivity.

The bridals are celebrated on one day, mourning and woe are changed to
joy, the hostile races are reconciled and reunited by the ties of blood
and love in an alliance for defence and offence. The end of the _Gudrun
saga_ stands thus, in direct contrast to the end of the
_Nibelungenlied_. The type of Kriemhilde has revealed to us one-half of
the possibilities of the German woman's soul; the type of Gudrun, its
other half, in its sweetness, its endurance, its martyrdom for all that
is great and good and noble; its patriotism, love, and virtue. Within
the range of those two natures we can differentiate all the souls of the
millions of German women that lived and loved, hated and struggled,
suffered and died in the dim ages of the foundation of Germanic social
order and institutions.

CHAPTER IV

THE CENTURIES OF SUBMERGENCE AND OF NATIONALIZATION

Charlemagne, the man typical of Teutonic force and power, a consummator
of ancient forces and an initiator of a new progress, stands between the
German and the Roman worlds as a gigantic form on the boundary line of
two nations and two civilizations. Charlemagne was the first to realize
the political unity of western Christendom as spiritually personified in
the Papacy. This is the significance of that mighty event, pregnant with
tremendous possibilities for good and for evil, when on the Christmas
day of A. D. 800, the Pope bestowed upon Charlemagne the political crown
of the Christian world with the obligation to support the church in its
spiritual and secular supremacy. Only by the imperial crown, as a
continuation of the majesty of the Roman Caesars, could Germany maintain
even its ascendancy among the other nations of Europe.

When the German races were organized as a nation and imbued with the
Christian faith by Charlemagne, this new political formation became the
bearer of a new civilization amalgamated from its various constituents
and as complex a