_Kudrun_[110] or _Gudrun_--it is a little curious that this should be the name of the original joint-heroine of the _Nibelungenlied_, of the heroine of one of the finest and most varied of the Icelandic sagas, the _Laxdaela_, and of the present poem--is far less known to general students of literature than its companion. Nor can it be said that this comparative neglect is wholly undeserved. It is an interesting poem enough; but neither in story nor in character-interest, in arrangement nor in execution, can it vie with the _Nibelungen_, of which in formal points it has been thought to be a direct imitation. The stanza is much the same, except that there is a much more general tendency to arrange the first couplet in single masculine rhyme and the second in feminine, while the second half of the fourth line is curiously prolonged to either ten or eleven syllables. The first refinement may be an improvement: the second certainly is not, and makes it very difficult to a modern ear to get a satisfactory swing on the verse. The language, moreover (though this is a point on which I speak with some diffidence), has a slightly more archaic cast, as of intended archaism, than is the case with the _Nibelungen_. [Footnote 110: Ed. Bartsch. 4th ed. Leipzig, 1880.] As for matter, the poem has the interest, always considerable to English readers, of dealing with the sea, and the shores of the sea; and, like the _Nibelungenlied_, it seems to have had older forms, of which some remains exist in the Norse. But there is less coincidence of story: and the most striking incident in the Norse--an unending battle, where the combatants, killed every night, come alive again every day--is in the German a merely ordinary "battle of Wulpensand," where one side has the worst, and cloisters are founded for the repose of the dead. On the other hand, _Kudrun_, while rationalised in some respects and Christianised in others, has the extravagance, not so much primitive as carelessly artificial, of the later romances. Romance has a special charter to neglect chronology; but the chronology here is exceptionally wanton. After the above-mentioned Battle of Wulpensand, the beaten side resigns itself quite comfortably to wait till the sons of the slain grow up: and to suit this arrangement the heroine remains in ill-treated captivity--washing clothes by the sea-shore--for fifteen years or so. And even thus the climax is not reached; for Gudrun's companion in this unpleasant task, and apparently (since they are married at the same time) her equal, or nearly so, in age, has in the exordium of the poem also been the companion of Gudrun's grandmother in durance to some griffins, from whom they were rescued by Gudrun's grandfather.