In the year 1898 follows still another, by Alice Horton (edited by E.
Bell). This latest translation is based on Bartsch's text of MS. B, and
is prefaced by Carlyle's essay. First strophe:

To us, in olden legends, / is many a marvel told
Of praise-deserving heroes, / of labours manifold,
Of weeping and of wailing, / of joy and festival;
Of bold knights' battling shall you / now hear a wondrous tale.

Apart from the many faults of interpretation all of the metrical
translations of the Nibelungenlied here enumerated are defective in one
all-important respect: they do not reproduce the poem in its _metrical
form_. Carlyle and other pioneers we may perhaps acquit of any intention
of following the original closely in this regard. None of the translators
of the complete poem, however, has retained in the English rendering what
is after all the very essence of a poem,--its exact metrical quality.
Birch has created an entirely different form of strophe in which all four
lines are alike, each containing seven principal accents, with the
caesura, following the fourth foot. Lettsom makes the first serious
attempt to reproduce the original strophe. It is evident from the
introduction to his translation (see p. xxvi) that he had made a careful
study of its form, and he does in fact reproduce the first three lines
exactly. Of the fourth line he says: "I have not thought it expedient to
make a rule of thus lengthening the fourth lines of the stanzas, though I
have lengthened them occasionally"(!). What moved him thus to deprive
the stanza of its most striking feature--and one, moreover, that is
easily preserved in English--he does not make clear. The versions of
Foster-Barham and of Horton and Bell show the same disfigurement, the
latter omitting the extra accent of the fourth line, as they say, "for