It remains true that the great story of the Niblung tragedy was never told at length in the poetical measure used for episodes of it, and for the summary form of the _Lay of Brynhild_. It should be remembered, however, that a poem of the scale of the _Nibelungenlied_, taking up the whole matter, must go as far beyond the Homeric limit as the _Lay of Brynhild_ falls short of it. From one point of view the shorter episodic poems are more Homeric in their plots than either the summary epics which cover the whole ground, as the _Lay of Brynhild_ attempts to cover it, or the longer works in prose that begin at the beginning and go on to the end, like the _Volsunga Saga_. The _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ are themselves episodic poems; neither of them has the reach of the _Nibelungenlied_. It should not be forgotten, either, that Aristotle found the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ rather long. The Teutonic poems are not to be despised because they have a narrower orbit than the _Iliad_. Those among them that contain matter enough for a single tragedy, and there are few that have not as much as this in them, may be considered not to fall far short of the standard fixed by Aristotle for the right amount of action to be contained in an heroic poem. They are too hurried, they are wanting in the classical breadth and ease of narrative; but at any rate they are comprehensible, they observe an epic unity. They do not, like certain of the endless French poetical histories, remind one of the picture of incomprehensible bulk in Aristotle's _Poetics_, the animal 10,000 stadia long.