(St. XVI.) This description of a castle (_burc_) does not materially differ from those which occur elsewhere in the poem. The castle was not one building, however large and complex, but included in the same ample circuit of its walls several extensive buildings, and afforded sufficient accommodation for a very great number of persons. The most conspicuous of the buildings within the castle seem to have been large detached erections, to which in this poem are applied the words _hûs_ (house), _palas_ (palace), _sal_ (hall), and _gadem_ (room). In the passage before us, _palas_ and _sal_ are distinguished from one another; the same is the case at St. LXXXIV, Twenty-fourth Adventure (_palas unde sal_), and at St. XXXVII, Ninth Adventure, where Etzel's and Gunther's dwellings are respectively spoken of. On the other hand, the hall where the Burgundians feast with Etzel, and where the repeated conflicts take place, is called _palas_ at St. XIX, Thirty-sixth Adventure, _sal_ at St. XX, same Adventure, _hûs_ at St. IX, same Adventure, and _gadem_ at St. XX, Thirty-ninth Adventure, not to mention other passages; and the large building in Etzel's castle, where Gunther and his knights sleep, is called _sal_ at stanzas VII and XVI, _hûs_ at stanzas XV and XVII, and _gadem_ at St. XIX, of the Thirtieth Adventure. These terms therefore seem nearly synonymous, or at least equally applicable to the large detached buildings in question, which resembled our public halls, such as Westminster hall and Guild-hall, and the halls of colleges and Inns of Court. Some of the halls in this poem seem to have been of truly poetical dimensions. Gunther (St. XXVI, of the Thirteenth Adventure) entertains in his hall twelve hundred knights of Siegfried's, besides his own Burgundians. Etzel's circle was still more numerous. The Burgundian knights were more than a thousand in number; Rudeger's five hundred or more: Dietrich had many a stately man, no doubt the six hundred mentioned at St. IV, of the Thirty-second Adventure, and we learn from stanza V, of the Thirty-fourth Adventure, that 7,000 Huns were massacred by the Burgundians; all these made up a dinner party of about 9,000 guests. The less aristocratic followers of Gunther, 9,000 in number, seem also to have been feasting in one immense room, when the Huns took advantage of their unarmed condition to massacre them. The term, indeed, applied to the building is _hûs_, but this, we have seen, is one of the words used to designate great public halls. The hall, where Gunther and his knights lay so splendidly (St. IX, Thirtieth Adventure), seems to have been an Eton Long Chamber on a gigantic scale. After allowing for the twelve knights with Dankwart and the yeomen, he must have had more than a thousand warriors in his train. Treachery and violence were so common in the Middle Ages, that a great man was not safe except with a multitude of dependents about him, and the peculiar