Scholarly tradition wants us to speak well of the works we study; there would be little point in talking about something that was not beautiful and truthful, not 'interesting'. Germanic legend has interest, almost too much so, but its beauty is not in the usual places. The names of heroes and nations that the poets so endlessly roll off are not there for their euphony. It is a rare ear that lingers in delight over –

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As for uplifting plots, the poets seldom tell the stories they allude to, and their allusions are elliptical to the point of obscurity. When the tales are told, they turn out to be about sibling rivalry, kin murder, incest, shaky marriages, treachery and theft. Germanic legend seldom eulogizes the figures it condemns to historical action, and its themes are the stuff that fantasies of younger brothers are made of: an underdog's defiant resistance, the fall of a leader, the automaticity of revenge (called by Auden the earth's only perpetual motion machine). And as for truth, the poets prove by their inventiveness, their cavalier reorganization of chronology and geography, that the urge to create history out of next to nothing was not lost with the Greeks and Romans.