Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/437



the Homeric poems more discussion has been given to the Nibelungenlied than to any other of the great impersonal heroic sagas. Discussion began shortly after the rediscovery of the poem, and has been carried on ever since in scores of special treatises, in hundreds of pamphlets and articles. In the course of research certain results have come to be generally admitted; experts are fairly agreed as to the orthodox theory by which a singularly complex mass of facts should be explained. Up to the present there has been no work in which the history and results of the research applied to the Nibelungen legend have been clearly set forth for the general reader of France and England. M. Lichtenberger has now written that work, and has made every educated man free of what hitherto was the sole domain of the specialist.

To say this is sufficient to recommend this work to many. Let me add that M. Lichtenberger has brought to his task the national gifts of lucid and orderly arrangement, of clear and lively presentment, that he deals with his text at first hand, that he is (with some exceptions to be noted presently) familiar with the entire range, vast though it be, of the literature devoted to his subject, and that he everywhere approves himself sane and sensible. In this latter respect he is at one with most German investigators of the past ten or fifteen years. A certain pedestrian soberness has of late characterised German erudition, a somewhat monotonous uniformity of method and tone. To carry oneself back from the pages of Paul's Grundriss, that most admirable and typical example of contemporary