even inflicts upon her the disgrace of winning her
for Gunnar, whom he impersonates. In an altercation with Gudrun, the
Nibelung princess, she learns that it was Sigurd, not Gunnar, who
conquered her and subjected her. Her wrath is unbounded. She causes the
Nibelungs to murder Sigurd, but in reawakened love she kills herself to
be united in death with her beloved.

Here we have the source of the lovely fairy tales of _Dornroschen and
Sneewittchen_. In the former, the Valkyrie Brunhild is pictured as a
beautiful princess, and the glowing flame becomes a hedge of thorns.
Instead of intrepid Siegfried (Sigurd), who penetrates the flames, a
fairy prince appears, and rescues the sleeping beauty, through a magic
kiss, from the doom of eternal sleep. In the second story, the
metamorphosis of Brunhild is accomplished through a poisoned comb which
is thrust in Sneewittchen's head: as Brunhild sleeps in her brilliant
castle, so the maiden sleeps in the mountains in a glass coffin, guarded
by seven dwarfs, until the prince rescues her.

But not in all cases are the divine women thus transformed into lovely
fairies. Under the influence of mediaeval theology and scholasticism and
their hostility toward the lingering ancient faith, they are distorted
into malicious, hideous beings witches. _Thrud_, the name of a Valkyrie,
is the mediaeval designation for "witch."

In the oldest Germanic sagas we find frequently confounded with the
Valkyries, the _Norns_, the rulers of the fate of gods and men. It is
characteristic, indeed, of the Germanic world conception, as, in fact,
also of the cognate Greek and Roman mythology, that the fate of men and
gods rests in the hands of divine women; for where the Valkyries act by
order of Odin, the _Norns_ act independently and by their own free will.
They weave the web of men's lives, "stretching it from the radiant dawn
to the glowing sunset." The destiny of the world lies with them, and
nothing that is, is exempt from their irrevocable decrees. Time and
space are embraced in the domain of their influence: _Urd_ (the Past),
_Verdande_ (the Present), and _Skuld_ (the Future) supervise, as it
were, the judgment place of the gods where they meet in council at the
sacred well, _Urdharbrunn_, at the foot of the ash tree _Yggdrasil_. It
is interesting to note how their influence is reflected and depicted by
Shakespeare's genius in Macbeth, where the three witches surely, though
perhaps unconsciously, der