It is my purpose in the following pages to give some account to the English reader of a work which, to say nothing of the much-disputed question as to its musical or poetical beauties, commands by its scope and dimensions the attention of every student of literature and art. I am speaking of the drama, or rather the sequence of four dramas, the tetralogy in which Wagner has grappled with those oldest and mightiest types of Teutonic lore which, in the Runic measures of the Icelandic sagas, strike us like the phantoms of a wild dream, gigantic at once in their beauty and boldness. The difficulties of handling such a subject need not be pointed out. These types, by their very essence, are removed from the sphere in which our modern thoughts and actions lie. Our customs, our morals, are unknown to them. The laws by which they act, or by the breaking of which they perish, are derived from an unwritten code of their own, being more intuitively felt than consciously known by themselves. They are led by their own free impulse where we anxiously regard the opinions of others. They represent, in short, the pure symbols of primeval forces, while we are the compounds of consecutive generations.