Many wise teachers will dissent wholly from this view of the Arthur stories, and in many schools they are presented in some form in the fourth or fifth grade, and read in the _Idylls of the King_ in the seventh and eighth. Suggestions for literature to accompany them will be found in a later chapter. Anybody who has read thus far can easily foretell what will be said about the Siegfried legend. In the huge accumulation of sagas, romances, and operas that now go to make up the legend, there are all sorts of material--much of it totally unsuited for children. So far as I have been able to find, there has not yet been made--certainly not in English--a collection of the stories good in itself and good for children. The teacher must do his own sifting and arranging, if it seems well to study the Siegfried stories within the grades. The collection of the stories that makes up the _Niebelungen Lied_ is particularly poor in fitting material, being sordid and coarse in the domestic parts, and tediously bloody in the heroic parts. Among the mass of stories given by Morris and Magnussen in the _Völsunga Saga_, and in Morris' _Sigurd the Volsung_, one may find material for making his own epos of Siegfried, simple, heroic, triumphant--the Siegfried who killed Fafnir, escaped the snares of Regin, got the Nibelung treasure, rode through the magic fire and freed Brunhild. You may be sure some old saga-singer closed the story here and so may we. This leaves for a much later day in the child's life the tragic Siegfried, whose domestic experience, with its sordid motives, its bitter quarrels and ugly subterfuges, is surely not beautiful or fitting for the children; and whose treacherous taking-off is followed by a vengeance too grim and too merely fatalistic to be planted in a child's consciousness. As we find a sort of canon of fairy-tales, so we find a somewhat accredited list of hero-tales, and the five we have discussed comprise it. Occasionally a teacher may enrich his material by an episode from _The Cid_, from the _Song of Roland_, from the heroic sagas of Iceland, from some other mediaeval romance; but they will not detain him long, nor will any one of them constitute a really good center for a prolonged study.