But while this poem of Flodden corresponds in its subject to the poem of _Maldon_, there is no such likeness between any other late alliterative poem and the older poems of the older language. The alliterative verse is applied in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to every kind of subject except those of Germanic tradition. England, however, has the advantage over Germany, that while Germany lost the old verse, England did not lose the English heroic subjects, though, as it happens, the story of King Horn and the story of Havelock the Dane are not told in the verse that was used for King Arthur and Gawain, for the tale of Troy and the wars of Alexander. The recent discovery of a fragment of the _Song of Wade_ is an admonition to be cautious in making the extant works of Middle English literature into a standard for all that has ceased to exist. But no new discovery, even of a Middle English alliterative poem of Beowulf or of Walter of Aquitaine, would alter the fact that the alliterative measure of English poetry in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, like the ancient themes of the German rhyming poems, is a survival in an age when the chief honours go to other kinds of poetry. The author of _Piers Plowman_ is a notable writer, and so are the poets of _Gawain_, and of the _Mort Arthure_, and of the _Destruction of Troy_; but Chaucer and not Langland is the poetical master of that age. The poems of the _Nibelungen_ and of _Kudrun_ are rightly honoured, but it was to the author of _Parzival_, and to the courtly lyrics of Walther von der Vogelweide, that the higher rank was given in the age of the Hohenstaufen, and the common fame is justified by history, so often as history chooses to have any concern with such things. In the lands of the old Northern speech the old heroic poetry was displaced by the new Court poetry of the Scalds. The heroic subjects were not, however, allowed to pass out of memory. The new poetry could not do without them, and required, and obtained, its heroic dictionary in the _Edda_. The old subjects hold their own, or something of their own, with every change of fashion. They were made into prose stories, when prose was in favour; they were the subjects of _Rímur_, rhyming Icelandic romances, when that form came later into vogue.[47] In Denmark they were paraphrased, many of them, by Saxo in his _History_; many of them became the subjects of ballads, in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and the Faroes. [Footnote 47: See below, p. 283.]