Because both Hegel and Wagner believed that epic relies on meaningfully recognizable representations of reality, they further believed that this creates serious problems for any modern trying to read, let alone revive, an ancient epic. Demonstrably, the references to Nordic mythology in one of Wagner's central epic sources, the Nibelungenlied, were not immediately relevant, understandable, and/or meaningful to many of his listeners. It was almost certainly the case that when Wagner first began writing the Ring, as far as his German audience was concerned, its characters and stories came from “a misty Nordic world about which it knew nothing and cared even less.” In his effort to influence German national identity through the use of this “misty Nordic” epic, Wagner therefore had to find a way to make it vital to his audience. Nineteenth-century Germany did not inhabit the same factual and spiritual reality described in the Norse sagas, myths, and epics. It neither worshiped the same gods nor upheld the same laws and customs. As Hegel caustically notes of the Nibelungenlied, any attempt to use its pagan Germanic myths, gods, and cultural references to depict reality for a nineteenth-century audience would have been an absurd and childish endeavor. The links between nineteenth-century Germans and their primeval Germanic myths had long been severed: