All this is very grand and weird, the reader will say, but where is the moral, the ideal essence of which these events are but the earthly reflex? To this essence we gradually ascend by inquiring into the mythological sources of the tale, by asking who is Sigurd, whence does he come, on what mission is he sent and by whom? also what is the significance of the treasure watched by a dragon and coveted by all mankind? This treasure we then shall find and the curse attaching to it ever since it was robbed from Andvari, the water-elf, is the keynote of the whole story. The curse proves fatal to all its successive owners from Andvari himself and Fafnir, who, for its sake, kills his father, down to Sigurd and Brynhild and the Niblung brothers. Nay, Odin himself, the supreme God, becomes subject to the curse of the gold through having once coveted it, and we dimly discern that the ultimate doom of the Aesir, the Ragnarök, or dusk of the Gods, of which the Voluspa speaks, is intimately connected with the same baneful influence. It further becomes evident that Sigurd the Volsung, the descendant of Odin, is destined to wrest the treasure and the power derived from it from the Niblungs, the dark or cloudy people who threaten the bright godworld of Valhall with destruction. And this leads us back to a still earlier stage of the myth in which Sigurd himself becomes the symbol of the celestial luminary conquering night and misty darkness, an idea repeatedly hinted at by Morris and splendidly illustrated by Wagner, when Siegfried appears on the stage illumined by the first rays of the rising sun. In the work of the German poet all this is brought out with a distinctness of which only dramatic genius of the highest order is capable. With an astounding grasp of detail and with a continuity of thought rarely equalled, Wagner has remoulded the confused and complex argument of the old tale, omitting what seemed unnecessary, and placing in juxtaposition incidents organically connected but separated by the obtuseness of later sagamen.