' I
speak, and ought to speak, with the utmost diffidence on all these
questions of ethnology; but I must say that when I read this text in
Zeuss, I caught eagerly at the clue it seemed to offer; for I had
been hearing the Nibelungen read and commented on in German schools
(German schools have the good habit of reading and commenting on
German poetry, as we read and comment on Homer and Virgil, but do NOT
read and comment on Chaucer and Shakspeare), and it struck me how the
fatal humdrum and want of style of the Germans had marred their way
of telling this magnificent tradition of the Nibelungen, and taken
half its grandeur and power out of it; while in the Icelandic poems
which deal with this tradition, its grandeur and power are much more
fully visible, and everywhere in the poetry of the Edda there is a
force of style and a distinction as unlike as possible to the want of
both in the German Nibelungen. {120} At the same time the
Scandinavians have a realism, as it is called, in their genius, which
abundantly proves their relationship with the Germans; any one whom
Mr. Dasent's delightful books have made acquainted with the prose
tales of the Norsemen, will be struck with the stamp of a Teutonic
nature in them; but the Norse poetry seems to have something which
from Teutonic sources alone it could not have derived; which the
Germans have not, and which the Celts have.
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