THE TWELVE PICTURES, by Edith Simon (367 pp.; Putnam; $3.95), is bathed in eerie, sth century Teutonic mists as British Novelist Simon (The Golden Hand) retells the dark, doom-laden Nibelungenlied. The events in it are drawn from somewhat different sources from the ones Wagner used in his familiar brooding operas. Siegfried, hero of the Rhine, jilts Brunhilde and marries a princess of Burgundy named Kriemhild. Brunhilde, a kind of earth-mother goddess, carries a torch for her lost love, but Hagen, the One-eyed, who believes the pagan gods have been flouted by this turn...
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