To an English reader there is astonishingly little in the "Nibelungenlied" in motive that is unintelligible or hopelessly remote. It is not that its manners of thought are our manners of thought, or its ethics our ethics. Its deeds, since the real story is an ancient inheritance, are tragic with battle, murder, and sudden death; but, in spite of all this, there is in us an innate appreciation of it and of its spirit that it is utterly impossible to feel in much literature that is not our own. This of course arises from the fact that it is, in a sense, our own, as, in part, at the beginning in very truth it was. The difference in its whole environment from us is still, in reality, not great, and we realize, consciously or unconsciously, that it is in many ways our own ancient past that is chronicled in the German poem. For all these reasons it comes readily about that, in the light of the poet's master touch, the characters of the "Nibelungenlied" that he has left in such actuality in his verses are to us neither vague nor shadowy, but are real persons who live and act before us. This is in fact truer of the "Nibelungenlied" than of almost any other great poem of the kind, whatever its time and place of origin. Siegfried and Kriemhild, Hagen and Rudeger are not the mere creations and impersonations of a poet's imagination; they are to us real men and women who lived their lives and died their deaths as the poet has described them. That he has told his tale with wonderful literary skill as a whole and at times with marvellous appreciation of the value of the moment, is also to be stated. Because no doubt in part from the way in which the poem has come down to us, there is at times superfluous material that had better been left away, but in this fact, too, the poem differs but little from other popular epics. As a whole, the "Nibelungenlied" is characterized by a literary unity of treatment by no means inconsiderable, and greater, in point of fact, than its origin would ordinarily promise. Its unity, however, is dramatic, rather than epic in the ordinary sense. This character it never loses throughout the whole long action. Deed follows deed, stroke upon stroke, until the final catastrophe is inevitably reached and the story is ended. That this story in its origin is not narrowly German, but is Germanic property, should be borne in mind by its reader, since many of its episodes acquire thereby a broader significance, and the whole poem assumes a wider interest.