_Codex Regius_ is not the only source; other mythic and heroic poems are found in other manuscripts. The famous poem of the _Doom of Balder_ (Gray's "Descent of Odin"); the poem of the _Rescue of Menglad_, the enchanted princess; the verses preserved in the _Heiðreks Saga_, belonging to the story of Angantyr; besides the poem of the _Magic Mill_ (Grottasöngr) and the _Song of the Dart_ (Gray's "Fatal Sisters"). There are many fragmentary verses, among them some from the _Biarkamál_, a poem with some curious points of likeness to the English _Lay of Finnesburh_. A Swedish inscription has preserved four verses of an old poem on Theodoric. Thus there is some variety in the original documents now extant out of the host of poems that have been lost. One conclusion at least is irresistible--that, in guessing at the amount of epic poetry of this order which has been lost, one is justified in making a liberal estimate. Fragments are all that we possess. The extant poems have escaped the deadliest risks; the fire at Copenhagen in 1728, the bombardment in 1807, the fire in the Cotton Library in 1731, in which _Beowulf_ was scorched but not burned. The manuscripts of _Finnesburh_ and _Maldon_ have been mislaid; but for the transcripts taken in time by Hickes and Hearne they would have been as little known as the songs that the Sirens sang. The poor remnants of _Waldere_ were found by Stephens in two scraps of bookbinders' parchment. When it is seen what hazards have been escaped by those bits of wreckage, and at the same time how distinct in character the several poems are, it is plain that one may use some freedom in thinking of the amount of this old poetry that has perished. The loss is partly made good in different ways: in the Latin of the historians, Jordanes, Paulus Diaconus, and most of all in the paraphrases, prose and verse, by Saxo Grammaticus; in Ekkehard's Latin poem of _Waltharius_ (_c._ A.D. 930); in the _Volsunga Saga_, which has kept the matter of the lost poems of _Codex Regius_ and something of their spirit; in the _Thidreks Saga_, a prose story made up by a Norwegian in the thirteenth century from current North German ballads of the Niblungs; in the German poems of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which, in a later form of the language and in rhyming verse, have preserved at any rate some matters of tradition, some plots of stories, if little of the peculiar manner and imagination of the older poetry. The casual references to Teutonic heroic subjects in a vast number of authors have been brought together in a monumental work, _die deutsche Heldensage_, by Wilhelm Grimm (1829). THE WESTERN GROUP _Hildebrand_, _Finnesburh_, _Waldere_, _Beowulf_, _Byrhtnoth_