Every student of old northern literature is aware that amongst its remains none are more interesting as literary monuments, none more characteristic of the people from which they sprang than the two Eddas and the Volsunga Saga. Next to the Siege of Troy and the Arthurian legends perhaps no story or agglomeration of stories has left so many and so important traces in international fiction as the tale of Sigurd or Siegfried and his race, the heroic god-born Volsungs. Considering indeed the political insignificance and remoteness in which that story took its earliest surviving form this enormous success--if the modern term may be applied--seems at first singularly out of proportion. But it must be remembered that Iceland was little more than the storehouse of these old traditions which were the common property of the Teuto-Scandinavian race long before the Norsemen set foot on the northern isle. Of the two modern versions of the tale which are most thoroughly inspired by the ancient myth one, that of Wagner in his tetralogy _Der Ring des Nibelungen_, is dramatic in form, the other, Morris's _The Story of Sigurd the Volsung_, bears all the characteristics of the epic. To this difference of artistic aim, the difference of shape which the tale takes in the hands of the two poets may be traced. In one point however they agree. Both Wagner and Morris go back to the old Icelandic sources in preference to the mediæval German version of the tale embodied in the _Nibelungenlied_. From this the German poet borrows little more than the localization of his drama on the banks of the river Rhine, the English poet scarcely anything but his metre--the _Langzeile_ or long-line with six hightoned, and any number of unaccentuated syllables.