mark of the savage intellect not to discriminate abruptly between
man and the lower animals. In the tales of the lower peoples, the
characters are just as often beasts as men and women. Now, in the
earlier and wilder parts of the "Volsunga Saga," otters and dragons
play human parts. Signy and his son, and the mother of their enemy,
put on the skins of wolves, become wolves, and pass through hideous
adventures. The story reeks with blood, and ravins with lust of
blood. But when Sigurd arrives at full years of manhood, the
barbarism yields place, the Saga becomes human and conscious.

These legends deal little with love. But in the "Volsunga Saga" the
permanent interest is the true and deathless love of Sigurd and
Brynhild: their separation by magic arts, the revival of their
passion too late, the man's resigned and heroic acquiescence, the
fiercer passion of the woman, who will neither bear her fate nor
accept her bliss at the price of honour and her plighted word.

The situation, the nodus, is neither ancient merely nor modern
merely, but of all time. Sigurd, having at last discovered the net
in which he was trapped, was content to make the best of marriage
and of friendship. Brynhild was not. "The hearts of women are the
hearts of wolves," says the ancient Sanskrit commentary on the Rig
Veda. But the she-wolf's heart broke, like a woman's, when she had
caused Sigurd's slaying. Both man and woman face life, as they
conceive it, with eyes perfectly clear.

The magic and the supernatural wiles are accidental, the human heart
is essential and eternal. There is no scene like this in the epics
of Greece. This is a passion that Homer did not dwell upon. In the
Iliad and Odyssey the repentance of Helen is facile; she takes life