(St. XL.) Brunhild had been asserting that Siegfried was Gunther's vassal, or, in feudal language, his man. Kriemhild sarcastically alludes to this with more bitterness than delicacy. (St. XLI.) Brunhild seems as much annoyed by this usurpation of her trinkets as by the scandalous imputation mentioned in the preceding stanza. (St. L.) I have followed Professor Lachmann's explanation of the first line of this stanza. He makes the Seventh Lay open here, and end with St. XXXI, Fifteenth Adventure, but whatever we may think of his general theory of the poem, his prefatory remarks here are well worth an attentive perusal. It is clear that some stanzas, probably a good many, have been lost. As the work stands at present, even if we interpret the first line of this stanza to mean that many a fair woman departed, Siegfried is left behind to hear his brother-in-law and his friends discuss the expediency of knocking him on the head. In the part that is lost there was probably an account of the breaking up of the assemblage at the church door, and of the immediate summoning of a council in some more convenient place. It was no doubt explained how Siegfried's denial, which at first seemed so satisfactory, was afterward made of no account, and possibly a good deal, of which we have now only a fragment in stanzas L--LI, passed between Brunhild and Hagan, her husband's principal adviser. Probably, too, as Lachmann has observed, the invulnerability of Siegfreid was considered. FIFTEENTH ADVENTURE (St. XVIII.) The stanza, which contains this example of ancient discipline, is rejected by Lachmann on account of the _innere reim_, which, however, he thinks, suits perfectly with the "somewhat over-charged coloring" which the author has adopted. Pictures of domestic happiness in the same style of coloring are, I suppose, rarely to be met with in Germany in the present liberal and enlightened age. (St. XXIV.) See note to St. V, Third Adventure.