great migrations which
overthrew the Roman empire in the west, and the legends which grew up
round the name of Charles the Great. They are stories of the gods and
demigods, of the Burgundian and the Hun, of the English people possibly
while still settled on the Baltic coasts, of the conflicts of the Frank
and the Saracen, of the earliest settlers in Iceland; and they vary in
their temper and their tone.

But they all represent the sense of the glory and splendour of the great
fighting man, of the stout heart, which rises with rising danger and is
never so great or so splendid as when it faces overwhelming odds and
defies the inexorable fates. The epic poet is so possessed by this sense
of the greatness of human nature that it does not matter much even
whether the man is wrong or perverse: he loves the obstinacy of Roland,
who will not, till too late, sound his horn to call Charlemagne and his
armies, but prefers to face the enemy, and if need be to die, by
himself, rather than to ask for help; he is filled with the sense of the
magnificence of the stark figure of Hagen, who had indeed treacherously
murdered the great Siegfried, but whose heart is so high and his hand so
heavy, that when he is overpowered, and Chriemhilda at last avenges upon
him the murder of her husband, the old knight standing by kills
Chriemhilda herself--it was not meet that so great a fighter should be
slain by a woman. These are the men of the epics.

And beside them stand the figures of women great and gracious, women for
whose love men die and perish, but who themselves also can hate and
love passionately and fiercely. It has sometimes been said by those who
only know the epics in one or other of the various languages, that women
and the love of women have no place in the epic, but belong to the
romance, but this is a mistake. In the mediaeval epic there is little
talk about emotion, but in the Nibelungenlied and in some of the
Icelandic sagas the woman is, like Helen in the Homeric epic, the motive
and source of all the action.

The epic is the story of great and heroic figures, abstracted in that
sense from the common or ordinary circumstances of life, but the
background of the action is always realistic and even detailed in its
realism, so that, just as again in the Homeric poems, we can frequently
reconstruct the life and manners of the time to which the poems belong
from that which they tell us. And it is impossible to say that there is