If we take the _Nibelungenlied_, [Footnote: See chapter on the _Nibelungenlied_ in Homer _AND the Epic_, pp. 382-404.] we find that it is a thing of many rehandlings, even in existing manuscripts. For example, the Greeks clung to the hexameter in Homer. Not so did the Germans adhere to old metres. The poem that, in the oldest MS., is written in assonances, in later MSS. is reduced to regular rhymes and is retouched in many essential respects. The matter of the _Nibelungenlied_ is of heathen origin. We see the real state of heathen affairs in the Icelandic versions of the same tale, for the Icelanders were peculiar in preserving ancient lays; and, when these were woven into a prose saga, the archaic and heathen features were retained. Had the post-Christian prose author of the _Volsunga_ been a great poet, we might find in his work a true parallel to the _Iliad_. But, though he preserves the harmony of his picture of pre-Christian princely life (save in the savage beginnings of his story), he is not a poet; so the true parallel to the Greek epic fails, noble as is the saga in many passages. In the German _Nibelungenlied_ all is modernised; the characters are Christian, the manners are chivalrous, and _Maerchen_ older than Homer are forced into a wandering mediaeval chronicle-poem. The Germans, in short, had no early poet of genius, and therefore could not produce a true parallel to _ILIAD_ or Odyssey. The mediaeval poets, of course, never dreamed of archaeological anxiety, as the supposed Ionian continuators are sometimes said to have done, any more than did the French and late Welsh handlers of the ancient Celtic Arthurian materials. The late German _bearbeiter_ of the _Nibelungenlied_ has no idea of unity of plot--_enfin_, Germany, having excellent and ancient legendary material for an epic, but producing no parallel to _ILIAD_ and Odyssey, only proves how absolutely essential a Homer was to the Greek epics. "If any inference could properly be drawn from the Edda" (the Icelandic collection of heroic lays), says Sir Richard Jebb, "it would be that short separate poems on cognate subjects can long exist as a collection _without_ coalescing into such an artistic whole as the Iliad or the Odyssey." [Footnote: Homer, p. 33.] It is our own argument that Sir Richard states. "Short separate poems on cognate subjects" can certainly co-exist for long anywhere, but they cannot automatically and they cannot by aid of an editor become a long epic. Nobody can stitch and vamp them into a poem like the _ILIAD_ or Odyssey. To produce a poem like either of these a great poetic genius must arise, and fuse the ancient materials, as Hephaestus fused copper and tin, and then cast the mass into a mould of his own making. A small poet may reduce the legends and lays into a very inartistic whole, a very inharmonious whole, as in the _Nibelungenlied_, but a controlling poet, not a mere redactor or editor, is needed to perform even that feat.