One does not make peddling criticisms of this kind on any legend that has the true poetic character of power--of sweeping the reader along with it; but this I, at least, can hardly find in _Kudrun_. It consists of three or perhaps four parts: the initial adventures of Child Hagen of Ireland with the griffins who carry him off; the wooing of his daughter Hilde by King Hetel, whose ambassadors, Wate, Morunc, and Horant, play a great part throughout the poem; the subsequent wooing of _her_ daughter Gudrun, and her imprisonment and ill-usage by Gerlind, her wooer's mother; her rescue by her lover Herwig after many years, and the slaughter of her tyrants, especially Gerlind, which "Wate der alte" makes. There is also a generally happy ending, which, rather contrary to the somewhat ferocious use and wont of these poems, is made to include Hartmuth, Gudrun's unsuccessful wooer, and his sister Ortrun. The most noteworthy character, perhaps, is the above-mentioned Wate (or _Wade_), who is something like Hagen in the _Nibelungenlied_ as far as valour and ferocity go, but is more of a subordinate. Gudrun herself has good touches--especially where in her joy at the appearance of her rescuers she flings the hated "wash" into the sea, and in one or two other passages. But she is nothing like such a _person_ as Brynhild in the Volsung story or Kriemhild in the _Nibelungenlied_. Even the "wash" incident and the state which, in the teeth of her enemies, she takes upon her afterwards--the finest thing in the poem, though it frightens some German critics who see beauties elsewhere that are not very clear to eyes not native--fail to give her this personality. A better touch of nature still, though a slight one, is her lover Herwig's fear, when he meets with a slight mishap before the castle of her prison, that she may see it and reproach him with it after they are married. But on the whole, _Kudrun_, though an excellent story of adventure, is not a great poem in the sense in which the _Nibelungenlied_ is one. [Sidenote: _Shorter national epics._]