wback; and her own
death comes just when and as it should--not so much a punishment for
the undue bloodthirstiness of her revenge as an artistic close to the
situation. There may be too many episodic personages--Dietrich of
Bern, for instance, has extremely little to do in this galley. But the
strength, thoroughness, and in its own savage way charm of Kriemhild's
character, and the incomparable series of battles between the
Burgundian princes and Etzel's men in the later cantos--cantos which
contain the very best poetical fighting in the history of the
world--far more than redeem this. The _Nibelungenlied_ is a very great
poem; and with _Beowulf_ (the oldest, but the least interesting on the
whole), _Roland_ (the most artistically finished in form), and the
_Poem of the Cid_ (the cheerfullest and perhaps the fullest of
character), composes a quartette of epic with which the literary
story of the great European literary nations most appropriately
begins. In bulk, dramatic completeness, and a certain _furia_, the
_Nibelungenlied_, though the youngest and probably the least original,
is the greatest of the four.

[Sidenote: _Metres._]

The form, though not finished with the perfection of the French
decasyllabic, is by no means of a very uncouth description. The poem
is written in quatrains, rhymed couplet and couplet, not alternately,
but evidently intended for quatrains, inasmuch as the sense frequently
runs on at the second line, but regularly stops at the fourth. The
normal line of which these quatrains are composed is a thirteen-syllabled
one divided by a central pause, so that the first half is an iambic
dimeter catalectic, and the second an iambic dimeter hypercatalectic.

"Von einer isenstangen: des gie dem helde not."

The first half sometimes varies from this norm, though not very often,
the alteration usually taking the form of the loss of the first
syllable, so that the half-line consists of three trochees. The second
half is much more variable. Sometimes, in the same way as with the
first, a syllable is dropped at the opening, and the half-line becomes
similarly trochaic. Sometimes there is a double rhyme instead of a
single, making seven syllables, though not altering the rhythm; and
sometimes this is extended to a full octosyllable. But this variety by
no means results in cacophony or confusion; the general swing of the
metre is well maintained, and maintains itself in turn on the ear.

[Sidenote: _