IF we accept as our definition of an Epic:--(a) A long poem, (b) of an interest not less than national[1], describing (c) in noble language (d) a series of naturally and organically connected actions (e) of heroic actors, we shall find that, while we must deny the name to some so-called epics[2], we have to thank the spirit, the imagination, the genius, of the Middle Ages for two great epics. If some critics are inclined to place these on a lower plane, for the alleged reason that the language is lacking in nobility, we may reply that it is a rash literary judgment which appraises the language and style of a far-off time by the standards either of a later civilization and culture, or by those of a quite different race, as of Greece. That is entitled to be called noble language which stirred with heroic impulses, and lifted above themselves, the hearers to whom it was addressed, and this great essential was, we know, amply fulfilled by the _Chanson de Roland_ and the _Nibelungenlied_. These are both Primitive Epics, as distinguished from the epics of the study. They are National Epics, in the same sense in which the _Iliad_ is, and in a sense in which the _Aeneid_ is not one. By a strange coincidence, the great national epics of the world are unfathered. Of the authorship of the epics of the study, as of Virgil, Milton, Tasso, in which the imagination of a poet bodied forth the life of a long-past age, the scenes of a far-off world, there has never been the shadow of a doubt; but those which paint in everlasting colours the life, the stir of action, the thrill of passion, of an age in which the poet lived and moved and had his being, these songs which pulsate with the very life-blood of the past--when we ask, "Who was the singer?" there comes back only a muffled voice from {P. viii} behind a veil. In India, in France, in Germany, stand thrones waiting for ever empty of the kings of song, and in Greece upon the most imperial of all sits only a featureless shadow, to whose very name is denied by some the attribute of personality. For this obscurity of authorship there is, in the case of the _Nibelungenlied_, more reason than with the other epics. What is conjectural with respect to the _Iliad_ and the _Chanson_, is indubitable with respect to the _Lied_, viz. that both in its origin and in its construction it was composite, that the elements of which it is a union are in date, perhaps in place of origin, widely remote from each other. The Saga of the Niblungs, of which the _Nibelungenlied_ is the finished poetical development, is a union of mythical and historical elements.