In her unbridled passion lies the cause of her destruction and also that of the beloved Sigurd. After their union, Sigurd abandons her for the love of Gudrun, and even inflicts upon her the disgrace of winning her for Gunnar, whom he impersonates. In an altercation with Gudrun, the Nibelung princess, she learns that it was Sigurd, not Gunnar, who conquered her and subjected her. Her wrath is unbounded. She causes the Nibelungs to murder Sigurd, but in reawakened love she kills herself to be united in death with her beloved. Here we have the source of the lovely fairy tales of _Dornroschen and Sneewittchen_. In the former, the Valkyrie Brunhild is pictured as a beautiful princess, and the glowing flame becomes a hedge of thorns. Instead of intrepid Siegfried (Sigurd), who penetrates the flames, a fairy prince appears, and rescues the sleeping beauty, through a magic kiss, from the doom of eternal sleep. In the second story, the metamorphosis of Brunhild is accomplished through a poisoned comb which is thrust in Sneewittchen's head: as Brunhild sleeps in her brilliant castle, so the maiden sleeps in the mountains in a glass coffin, guarded by seven dwarfs, until the prince rescues her. But not in all cases are the divine women thus transformed into lovely fairies. Under the influence of mediæval theology and scholasticism and their hostility toward the lingering ancient faith, they are distorted into malicious, hideous beings witches. _Thrud_, the name of a Valkyrie, is the mediæval designation for "witch." In the oldest Germanic sagas we find frequently confounded with the Valkyries, the _Norns_, the rulers of the fate of gods and men. It is characteristic, indeed, of the Germanic world conception, as, in fact, also of the cognate Greek and Roman mythology, that the fate of men and gods rests in the hands of divine women; for where the Valkyries act by order of Odin, the _Norns_ act independently and by their own free will. They weave the web of men's lives, "stretching it from the radiant dawn to the glowing sunset." The destiny of the world lies with them, and nothing that is, is exempt from their irrevocable decrees. Time and space are embraced in the domain of their influence: _Urd_ (the Past), _Verdande_ (the Present), and _Skuld_ (the Future) supervise, as it were, the judgment place of the gods where they meet in council at the sacred well, _Urdharbrunn_, at the foot of the ash tree _Yggdrasil_. It is interesting to note how their influence is reflected and depicted by Shakespeare's genius in Macbeth, where the three witches surely, though perhaps unconsciously, derive their origin from the Norse Norns. In the witches' kitchen in Goethe's Faust is brewed likewise the charm that controls the fateful lives of Faust and Gretchen.