the sake of euphony"(!). It is just this lengthened close of each strophe
that gives the Nibelungenlied its peculiar metrical character and
contributes not a little to the avoidance of monotony in a poem of over
two thousand strophes. In theory the form of the fourth line as it stands
in the original is no more foreign to the genius of the English language
than to that of modern German, and few of the many Germans giving a
modernized version of the epic have been bold enough to lay sacrilegious
hands upon it to shorten it.

A brief account of the Nibelungen strophe may not be out of place here,
owing to the fact that its character has generally been misunderstood.
The origin and evolution of the strophe have been the subject of much
discussion, the results of which we need not pause to formulate here. As
it appears in actual practice in our poem of about the year 1200, it was
as follows: Each strophe consists of four long lines, the first line
rhyming with the second, and the third with the fourth. The rhymes are
masculine, that is, rhymes on the end syllable. Each line is divided by a
clearly marked caesura into two halves; each half of the first three
lines and the first half of the fourth line has three accented syllables,
the second half of the fourth line has four accented syllables. The first
half of each line ends in an unaccented syllabic--or, strictly speaking,
in a syllable bearing a secondary accent; that is, each line has what is
called a "ringing" caesura. The metrical character of the Nibelungen
strophe is thus due to its fixed number of accented syllables. Of
unaccented syllables the number may vary within certain limits.
Ordinarily each accented syllable is preceded by an unaccented one; that
is, the majority of feet are iambic. The unaccented syllable may,
however, at times be wanting, or there may, on the other hand, be two or
even three of them together. A characteristic of the second half of the
last line is that there is very frequently no unaccented syllable between