_Nibelungenlied_. The _Volospá_ is as far removed from the courtly odes and their manner and ingenuity as the _Marriage Hymn_ of Catullus from the _Coma Berenices_. The _Volospá_, however, has this in common with the mechanical odes, that equally with these it stands apart from epic, that equally with these it fuses epic material into an alien form. The sublimity of this great poem of the _Doom_ is not like the majesty or strength of epic. The voice is not the voice of a teller of stories. And it is here, not in true epic verse, that the Northern poetry attains its height. It is no ignoble form of poetry that is represented by the _Sibyl's Song_ and the _Lament of Gudrun_. But it was not enough for the ambition of the poets. They preferred the composition of correct and elaborate poems in honour of great men, with much expenditure of mythology and without passion;[36] one of the forms of poetry which may be truly said to leave nothing to be desired, the most artificial and mechanical poetry in the world, except possibly the closely-related kinds in the traditional elaborate verse of Ireland or of Wales. [Footnote 36: These may be found in the second volume of the _Corpus Poeticum Boreale_.] It was still possible to use this modern and difficult rhetoric, occasionally, for subjects like those of the freer epic; to choose a subject from heroic tradition and render it in the fashionable style. The _Death-Song of Ragnar Lodbrok_[37] is the chief of those secondary dramatic idylls. It is marked off by difference of verse, for one thing, from the _Hamðismál_ and the _Atlakviða_; and, besides this, it has the characteristic of imitative and conventional heroic literature--the unpersuasive and unconvincing force of the heroic romance, the rhetoric of Almanzor. The end of the poem is fine, but it does not ring quite true:-- The gods will welcome me; there is nothing to bewail in death. I am ready to go; they are calling me home, the maidens whom Odin has sent to call me. With gladness will I drink the ale, set high among the gods. The hours of life are gone over; laughing will I die. [Footnote 37: _C.P.B._, ii. 339.] It is not like the end of the sons of Gudrun; it is not of the same kind as the last words of Sorli, which are simpler, and infinitely more imaginative and true:-- We have fought; if we die to-day, if we die to-morrow, there is little to choose. No man may speak when once the Fates have spoken (_Hamðismál_, s.f.).