_Beowulf_, it may be admitted, is epic in the sense that distinguishes between the longer narrative poem and the shorter ballad. The fragments of _Waldere_ are the fragments of a poem that is not cramped for room, and that moves easily and with sufficient eloquence in the representation of action. The narrative of the _Maldon_ poem is not pinched nor meagre in its proportions. Hardly any of the other poems, however, can be compared with these in this respect. These are the most liberal in scale of all the old Teutonic poems; the largest epic works of which we know anything directly. These are the fullest in composition, the least abstract or elliptical; and they still want something of the scale of the _Iliad_. The poem of _Maldon_, for instance, corresponds not to the _Iliad_, but to the action of a single book, such as the twelfth, with which it has been already compared. If the story of the English _Waldere_, when complete, was not more elaborate than the extant Latin _Waltharius_, it must have come far short of the proportions of Homer. It is a story for a single recitation, like the story of Finnesburh in _Beowulf_. The poem of _Beowulf_ may have more in it than the story of Walter and Hildegund, but this advantage would seem to be gained at the expense of the unity of the poem. It is lengthened out by a sequel, by the addition of a new adventure which requires the poet to make a new start. In the poem of _Hildebrand_ there is a single tragedy contained in a single scene. It is briefly rendered, in a style evidently more primitive, less expansive and eloquent, than the style of _Beowulf_ or _Waldere_. Even if it had been given in a fuller form, the story would still have been essentially a short one; it could not well have been longer than the poem of _Sohrab and Rustum_, where the theme is almost the same, while the scale is that of the classical epic. If the old English epic poetry falls short of the Homeric magnitude, it almost equally exceeds the scale of the Northern heroic poems. If _Beowulf_ and _Waldere_ seem inadequate in size, the defect will not be made good out of the Northern lays of _Helgi_ or _Sigfred_. The Northern poems are exceedingly varied in their plan and disposition, but none of them is long, and many of them are in the form of _dramatic lyric_, with no place for pure narrative at all; such are the poems of _Frey's Wooing_, of _Svipdag and Menglad_, and others, in which there is a definite plot worked out by means of lyric dialogue. None of them is of anything like the same scale as _Beowulf_, which is a complex epic poem, or _Byrhtnoth_, which is an episodic poem liberally dealt with and of considerable length.