Richard Wagner never much liked the Nibelungenlied, a Middle High German epic from around 1200 that was responsible for a certain level of nationalistic madness in Germany in the early nineteenth century. I can sympathize. When I first read the epic I was tremendously disappointed. Where were all the gods, dwarves, giants, and other mythical creatures and events that give Wagner's Ring its special glamour? The epic is grounded in a fictional world that reflects the politics and social concerns of its own times, the beginning of the thirteenth century. The opening chapter, for example, is a relatively pedestrian description of the main court offices and their holders among the Burgundians in Worms on the Rhine. It concludes with a dream that afflicts the young princess Kriemhild and its interpretation as the prophecy of her eventual marriage to a doomed hero. Not a dwarf or a giant in sight. They do appear later, but they play very minor roles on the whole, and the heathen gods naturally are banned from the Christian world of the poem. The best the poet can do with the Huns, who are heathen and who play a considerable role in the second, un-Wagnerian part of the epic, is to remark that they sing the mass very differently (Strophe 1851). And yet, as the huge bibliography on the Nibelungenlied testifies, it remains an endlessly fascinating work.