VI. THE BARBARIC DESTRUCTION OF THE EMPIRE[133]…

VI. THE BARBARIC DESTRUCTION OF THE EMPIRE[133]

The Latinizing of northern Italy, Spain, and Gaul was part of the expansion of Roman dominion. Throughout these lands, alien peoples submitted to the Roman order and acquired new traits from the training of its discipline. Voluntarily or under compulsion they exchanged their institutions and customs for those of Roman Italy, and their native tongues for Latin. The education and culture of the upper classes became identical with that gained in the schools about the Forum, and Roman literature was the literature which they studied and produced. In a greater or less degree their characters were Latinized, while their traditions were abandoned for those of Rome. Yet, although Romanized and Latinized, these peoples were not Roman. Their culture was acquired, their characters were changed, yet with old traits surviving. In character and faculties, as in geographical position, they were intermediate, and in rôle they were mediatorial. Much of what they had received, and what they had themselves become, they perforce transmitted to the ruder humanity which, as the Empire weakened, pressed in, serving, plundering, murdering, and finally amalgamating with these provincials. The surviving Latin culture passed to the mingled populations which were turning to inchoate Romance nations in Italy, Spain, and Gaul. Likewise Christianity, Romanized, paganized, barbarized, had been accepted through these countries. And now these mingled peoples, these inchoate Romance nations, were to accomplish a broader mediation in extending the rudiments of Latin culture, along with the great new Religion, to the barbarous peoples beyond the Romance pale.

The mediating rôles of the Roman provincials began with their first subjection to Roman order. For barbarians were continually brought into the provinces as slaves or prisoners of war. Next, they entered to serve as auxiliary troops, coming especially from the wavering Teutonic outskirts of the Empire. And during that time of misrule and military anarchy which came between the death of Commodus (A.D. 192) and the accession of Diocletian (A.D. 284), Teutonic inroads threatened the imperial fabric. But, apart from palpable invasions, there was a constant increase in the Teutonic inflow from the close of the second century. More and more the Teutons tilled the fields; more and more they filled the armies. They became officers of the army and officials of the Government. So long as the vigour of life and growth continued in the Latinized population of the Empire, and so long as the Roman law and order held, the assimilative power of Latin culture and Roman institutions was enormous; the barbarians became Romanized. But when self-conserving strength and coercive energy waned with Romans and provincials, when the law’s protection was no longer sure, and a dry rot infected civic institutions, then Roman civilization lost some of its transforming virtue. The barbarism of the Teutonic influx became more obstinate as the transmuting forces of civilization weakened. Evidently the decadent civilization of the Empire could no longer raise these barbarians to the level of its greater periods; it could at most impress them with such culture and such order as it still possessed. Moreover, reacting upon these disturbed and infirm conditions, barbarism put forth a positive transforming energy, tending to barbarize the Empire, its government, its army, its inhabitants. The decay of Roman institutions and the grafting of Teutonic institutions upon Roman survivals were as universal as the mingling of races, tempers, and traditions. The course of events may briefly be reviewed.

In the third century the Goths began, by land and sea, to raid the eastern provinces of the undivided Roman Empire; down the Danube they sailed, and out upon the Euxine; then their plundering fleets spread through the eastern Mediterranean. They were attacked, repulsed, overthrown, and slaughtered in hordes in the year 270. Some of the survivors remained in bondage, some retired north beyond the Danube. Aurelian gave up to them the province of Dacia: the latest conquest of the Empire, the first to be abandoned. These Dacian settlers thenceforth appear as Visigoths. For a century the Empire had no great trouble from them. Dacia was the scene of the career of Ulfilas (b. 311, d. 380), the Arian apostle of the Goths. They became Christian in part, and in part remained fiercely heathen. About 372, harassed by the Huns, they pressed south to escape over the Danube. Valens permitted them to cross; then Roman treachery followed, answered by desperate Gothic raids in Thrace, till at last Valens was defeated and slain at Hadrianople in 378.

It was sixteen years after this that Theodosius the Great marched from the East to Italy to suppress Arbogast, the overweening Frank, who had cast out his weak master Valentinian. The leader of the Visigothic auxiliaries was Alaric. When the great emperor died, Alaric was proclaimed King of the Visigoths, and soon proceeded to ravage and conquer Greece. Stilicho, son of a Vandal chief--one sees how all the high officers are Teutons--was the uncertain stay of Theodosius’s weakling sons, Honorius and Arcadius. In 400 Alaric attempted to invade Italy, but was foiled by Stilicho, who five years later circumvented and destroyed another horde of Goths, both men and women, who had penetrated Italy to the Apennines. In 408 Alaric made a second attempt to enter, and this time was successful, for Stilicho was dead. Thrice he besieged Rome, capturing it in 410. Then he died, his quick death to be a warning to Attila. The new Gothic king, Ataulf, conceived the plan of uniting Romans and Goths in a renewed and strengthened kingdom. But this task was not for him, and in two years he left Italy with his Visigoths to establish a kingdom in the south of Gaul.

Attila comes next upon the scene. The eastern Empire had endured the oppression of this terrible Turanian, and had paid him tribute for some years, before he decided to march westward by a route north of the Alps, and attack Gaul. He penetrated to Orleans, which he besieged in vain. Many nations were in the two armies that were now to meet in battle on the “Catalaunian Plains.” On Attila’s side, besides his Huns, were subject Franks, Bructeri, Thuringians, Burgundians, and the hosts of Gepidae and Ostrogoths. Opposed were the Roman forces, Bretons, Burgundians, Alans, Saxons, Salian Franks, and the army of the Visigoths. Defeated, but not overthrown, the lion Hun withdrew across the Rhine; but the next spring, in 452, he descended from the eastern Alps upon Aquileia and destroyed it, and next sacked the cities of Venetia and the Po Valley as far as Milan. Then he passed eastward to the river Mincio, where he was met by a Roman embassy, in which Pope Leo was the most imposing figure. Before this embassy the Scourge of God withdrew, awed or persuaded, or in superstitious fear. The following year, upon Attila’s death, his realm broke up; Gepidae and Goths beat the Huns in battle, and again Teutons held sway in Central Europe.

The fear of the Hun had hardly ceased when the Vandals came from Africa, and leisurely plundered Rome. They were Teutons, perhaps kin to the Goths. But theirs had been a far migration. At the opening of the fifth century they had entered Gaul and fought the Franks, then passed on to Spain, where they were broken by the Visigoths. So they crossed to Africa and founded a kingdom there, whence they invaded Italy. By this time, the middle of the fifth century, the fighting and ruling energy in the western Empire was barbarian. The stocks had become mixed through intermarriage and the confusion of wars and frequent change of sides. An illustrative figure is Count Ricimer, whose father was a noble Suevian, while his mother was a Visigothic princess. He directed the Roman State from 456 to 472, placing one after another of his Roman puppets on the imperial throne.

In the famous year 476 the Roman army was made up of barbarians, mainly drawn from lands now included in Bohemia, Austria, and Hungary. There were large contingents of Rugii and Heruli, who had flocked in bands to Italy as adventurers. Such troops had the status of foederati, that is, barbarian auxiliaries or allies. Suddenly they demanded one-third of the lands of Italy.[134] Upon refusal of their demand, they made a king from among themselves, the Herulian Odoacer, and Romulus Augustulus flitted from the shadowy imperial throne. By reason of his dramatic name, rather than by any marked circumstance of his deposition, he has come to typify with historians the close of the line of western emperors.

The Herulian soldier-king or “Patrician,” Odoacer, a nondescript transition personage, ruled twelve years. Then the nation of the Ostrogoths, which had learned much from the vicissitudes of fortune in the East, obtained the eastern emperor’s sanction, and made its perilous way to the gates of Italy under the king, Theodoric. This invading people numbered perhaps two hundred thousand souls; their fighting men were forty thousand. Odoacer was beaten on the river Isonzo; he retreated to the line of the Adige, and was again defeated at Verona. After standing a long siege in Ravenna, he made terms with Theodoric, and was murdered by him.

The Goths were among the best of the barbarians, and Theodoric was the greatest of the Goths. The eastern emperors probably regarded him as their representative in Italy; and he coined money only with the Emperor’s image. But in fact he was a sovereign; and, through his sovereignty over both Goths and Romans, from a Teutonic king he became an absolute monarch, even as his contemporary Clovis became, under analogous circumstances. He was a just despot, with his subjects’ welfare at heart. The Goths received one-third of the Italian lands, in return for which their duty was to defend the whole. This third may have been that previously possessed by Odoacer’s troops. Under Theodoric the relations between Goths and “Romans” were friendly. It was from the Code of Theodosius and other Roman sources that he drew the substance of his legislation, the Edictum which about the year 510 he promulgated for both Goths and Romans (barbari Romanique).[135] His aim--and here the influence of his minister Cassiodorus appears--was to harmonize the relations of the two peoples and assimilate the ways of the Goths to those of their more civilized neighbours. But if his rule brought prosperity to Italy, after his death came desolating wars between the Goths under their noble kings, and Justinian’s great generals, Belisarius and Narses. These wars ruined the Ostrogothic nation. Only some remnants were left to reascend the Alps in 553. Behind them Italy was a waste.

An imperial eastern Roman restoration followed. It was not to endure. For already the able and savage Lombard Alboin was making ready to lead down his army of Lombards, Saxons, Gepidae and unassorted Teutons, and perhaps Slavs. No strength was left to oppose him in plague-stricken Italy. So the Lombard conquered easily, and set up a kingdom which, united or divided under kings and dukes, endured for two hundred years. Then Charlemagne--his father Pippin had been before him--at the entreaty of the Pope, invaded Italy with a host of mingled Teuton tribes, and put an end to the Lombard kingdom, but not to Lombard blood and Lombard traits.

The result of all these invasions was a progressive barbarization of Italy, which was not altogether unfortunate, because fraught with some renewal of strength. The Teutons brought their customs; and at least one Teuton people, the Lombards, maintained them masterfully. The Ostrogoth, Theodoric, had preserved the Italian municipal organization, and had drawn his code for all from Roman sources. But the first Lombard Code, that of King Rothari, promulgated about 643, ignored Roman law, and apparently the very existence of Romans. Though written in barbarous Latin, it is Lombard through and through. So, to a scarcely less degree, is the Code of King Liutprand, promulgated about 725.[136] Even then the Lombards looked upon themselves as distinct from the “Romans.” Their laws were still those of the Lombards, yet of Lombards settling down to urban life. Within Lombard territories the “Romans” were subjects. In Liutprand’s Code they seem to be referred to under the name of aldii and aldiae, male and female persons, who were not slaves and yet not free. Instead of surrendering one-third of the land, the Romans were obliged to furnish one-third of its produce. Hence their Lombard masters were interested in keeping them fixed to the soil, perhaps in a state of serfdom. Little is known as to the intermarriage of the stocks, or when the Lombards adopted a Latin speech.[137]

It is difficult, either in Italy or elsewhere, to follow the changes and reciprocal working of Roman and Teutonic institutions through these obscure centuries. They wrought upon each other universally, and became what neither had been before. The Roman State was there no longer; where the names of its officials survived they stood for altered functions. The Roman law prevailed within the dominions of the eastern Empire and the popes. Everywhere the crass barbarian law and the pure Roman institution was passing away, or changing into something new. In Italy another pregnant change was taking place, the passing of the functions of government to the bishops of Rome. Its stages are marked by the names of great men upon whose shoulders fell the authority no longer held by a remote ruler. Leo the Great heads the embassy which turns back the Hun; a century and a half afterwards Gregory the Great leads the opposition to the Lombards, still somewhat unkempt savages. Thereafter each succeeding pope, in fact the papacy by necessity of its position and its aspirations, opposes the Lombards when they have ceased to be either savage or Arian. It is an absent supporter that the papacy desires, and not a rival close at hand: Charlemagne, not Desiderius.

When the Visigoths under Ataulf left Italy they passed into southern Gaul, and there established themselves with Toulouse as the centre of the Visigothic kingdom. They soon extended their rule to Spain, with the connivance of sundry Roman rulers. Some time before them Vandals, Suevi and Alans, having crossed the Rhine into Gaul, had been drawn across the Pyrenees by half-traitorous invitations of rival Roman governors. The Visigoths now attacked these peoples, with the result that the Suevi retreated to the north-west of the peninsula, and at length the restless Vandals accepted the invitation of the traitor Count Boniface, and crossed to Africa. Visigothic fortunes varied under an irregular succession of non-hereditary and occasionally murdered kings. Their kingdom reached its farthest limit in the reign of Euric (466-486), who extended its boundaries northward to the Loire and southward over nearly all of Spain.[138]

Under the Visigoths the lot of the Latinized provincials, who with their ancestors had long been Roman citizens, was not a hard one. The Roman system of quartering soldiers upon provincials, with a right to one-third of the house, afforded precedent for the manner of settlement of the Visigoths and other Teuton invaders after them. The Visigoths received two-thirds not only of the houses but also of the lands, which indeed were bare of cultivators. The municipal organization of the towns was left intact, and in general the nomenclature and structure of Roman officialdom were preserved. As the Romans were the more numerous and the cleverer, they regained their wealth and social consideration. In 506, Alaric II. promulgated his famous code, the Lex Romana Visigothorum, usually called the “Breviarium,” for his Roman subjects. Although the next year Clovis broke down the Visigothic kingdom in Gaul, and confined it to narrow limits around Narbonne, this code remained in force, a lasting source of Roman law for the inhabitants of the south and west of Gaul.[139]

Throughout Visigothic Spain there existed, in conflict if not in force, a complex mass of diverse laws and customs, written and unwritten, Roman, Gothic, ecclesiastical. Soon after the middle of the seventh century a general code was compiled for both Goths and Roman provincials, between whom marriages were formally sanctioned. This codification was the legal expression of a national unity, which however had no great political vigour. For what with its inheritance of intolerable taxation, of dwindling agriculture, of enfeebled institutions and social degeneracy, the Visigothic state fell an easy victim before the Arabs in 711. It had been subject to all manner of administrative abuse. In name the government was secular. But in fact the bishops of the great sees were all-powerful to clog, if not to administer, justice and the affairs of State within their domains; the nobles abetted them in their misgovernment. So it came that instead of a united Government supported by a strong military power, there was divided misrule, and an army without discipline or valour. This misrule was also cruelly intolerant. The bitter persecution of the Jews, and the law that none but a Catholic should live in Spain, if not causes, were at least symptoms, of a fatal impotence, and prophetic of like measures taken by later rulers in that chosen land of religious persecution.[140]

In Gaul, contact between Latinized provincials and Teutonic invaders produced interesting results. Mingled peoples came into being, whose polity and institutions were neither Roman nor Teutonic, and whose literature and intellectual achievement were to unite the racial qualities of both. The hybrid political and social phenomena of the Frankish period were engendered by a series of events which may be outlined as follows. The Franks, Salic and Ripuarian, were clustered in the region of the lower and middle Rhine. Like other Teutonic groups dwelling near the boundaries of the weakening Empire, they were alternately plunderers of Roman territory and auxiliaries in the imperial army, or its independent allies against Huns or Saxons or Alans. One Childeric, whose career opens in saga and ends in history, was king or hereditary leader of a part of the Salian Franks. This active man appears in frequent relations with Aegidius, the half-independent Roman ruler of that north-western portion of Gaul which was not held by Visigoths or Burgundians. If Childeric’s forefathers had oftener been enemies than allies of the Empire, he was its ally, and perhaps commander of the forces which helped to preserve this outlying portion of its territory.

Aegidius died in 463, and the territories ruled by him passed to his son Syagrius practically as an independent kingdom. Childeric in the next eighteen years increased his power among the Salian Franks, and extended his territories through victories over other Teutonic groups. Upon his death in 481 his kingdom passed to his son Chlodoweg, or, as it is easier to call him, Clovis, then in his sixteenth year. The next five years were employed by this precocious genius of barbarian craft in strengthening his kingship among the Salians. At the age of twenty he attacked Syagrius, and overthrew his power at Soissons. The last Roman ruler of a part of Gaul fled to the Visigoths for refuge: their king delivered him to Clovis, who had him killed. So Clovis’s realm was extended first to the Seine and then to the Loire. The Gallo-Romans were not driven out or dispossessed, but received a new master, who on his part treated them forbearingly and accepted them as subjects. The royal domains of Syagrius perhaps were large enough to satisfy the cupidity of the victors.

Clovis was now king of Gallo-Romans as well as Salian Franks. Thus strengthened he could fight other Franks with success, and carry on a great war against the Alemanni to the south-east. At the “battle of Tolbiac,” in which he finally overthrew these people, the heathen Frank invoked the Christian God (so tells Gregory of Tours), and vowed to accept the Faith if Christ gave him the victory. This is like the legend of Constantine at the battle of the Malvern Bridge, nor is the probability of its essential truth lessened because of this resemblance. Both Roman emperor and Frankish king turned from heathenism to Christianity as to the stronger supernatural support. And if ever man received tenfold reward in this world from his faith it was this treacherous and bloody Frank.

Hitherto the Teuton tribes, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals, Burgundians who had accepted Christianity, were Arians by reason of the circumstances of their “conversion.” On the other hand, the Romanized inhabitants of Italy, Spain, and Gaul were Catholics, and the influence of their Arian-hating clergy was enormous. Evidently when Clovis, under the influence of Catholic bishops and a Catholic wife, became a Catholic, the power of the Church and the sympathy of the laity would make his power irresistible. For the Catholic population was greatly in the majority, even in the countries held by Burgundian or Visigothic kings. The Burgundian rulers had half turned to Catholicism, and the Visigothic monarchy treated it with respect. Yet the Burgundian kings did not win the Church’s confidence, nor did the Visigoths disarm its active hostility. With such ability as Clovis and his sons possessed, their conversion to Catholicism ensured victory over their rivals, and made a bond of friendship between them and their Gallo-Roman subjects.[141]

The extension of Clovis’s kingdom, his overthrow of the Visigothic power, his partial conquest of the Burgundians, would have been even more rapid and decisive but for the opposing diplomacy of the great Arian ruler, Theodoric the Ostrogoth, whose prestige and power even the bold Frank dared not defy. Moreover, the Burgundians stood well with their Roman subjects, whom they treated generously, and permitted to live under a code of Roman law. When it came to war between them and Clovis, the advantage rested with the latter; but possibly the fear of Theodoric, or the pressure of war with the Alemanni, deferred the final conquest of the Burgundian kingdom for another generation.

In 507 Clovis attacked the Visigothic kingdom, and incorporated it with his dominions in the course of the next year. Whether or not he had cried out, in the words of Gregory of Tours, “it is a shame that these Arians should hold a part of Gaul; let us attack them with God’s help and take their land,” at all events the war had a religious sanction, and its successful issue was facilitated by the Catholic clergy within the Visigothic territory. Clovis’s career was now nearing its end. In his last years, by treachery, murder, and open war when needed, he made himself king of all the Franks, Ripuarian and Salian. The intense partisan sympathy of the Church for this its eldest royal Teuton son speaks in the words of Gregory of Tours, concluding his recital of these deeds of incomparable villainy: “Thus day by day God cast down his (Clovis’s) enemies before him, because he did what was right in His eyes”!

The unresting sons and grandsons of Clovis not only conquered Burgundy, but extended their rule far to the east, into the heart of Germany, and Merovingians became masters of Thuringia and Bavaria. That such a realm should hold together was impossible. From Clovis to Charlemagne it was the regular practice to divide the realm at death among the ruler’s sons, and for the ablest among them to pursue and slay the others, and so unite the realm again. Besides this principle of internecine conflict, differences of race and language and degrees of Latinization ensured eventual disruption.

Nothing passes away, and very little quite begins, but all things change; and so the verity of social and political phenomena lies in the becoming, rather than in any temporary phase--as one may perceive in the Merovingian, later Carolingian, regnum Francorum. Therein Roman institutions survived either as decayed actualities or as names or effigies; therein were conditions and even institutions which arose and were developed through the decay of previous institutions, through the weakening of the imperial peace and justice, the growth of abuses, and the need of the weak to put themselves under the protection of the nearest strong. This huge conglomerate of a government also held sturdy Teuton elements. There was the kingship and the strong body of personal followers, the latter an outgrowth of the comitatus, or rather of the needs of any barbaric chieftaincy. There was wergeld, not so much exclusively a Teutonic institution, as belonging to a rough society which sees the need of checking feuds, and finds the means in a system of compensation to the injured person or his kin, who would otherwise make reprisals; there was also Sippe, the rights and duties of kin among themselves, and of the kinship as a corporate unit toward the world without; and therein, in general, was continuance of the warrior spirit of the Franks and other Teutons, of their social ways and mode of dress, of their methods of warfare and their thoughts of barbaric hardihood.

These elements, and much more besides, were in process of mutual interplay and amalgamation. Childeric had been king of some of the Salian Franks, and had allied himself with the last fragment of the Roman Empire in Gaul. Clovis, his son, is greater: he makes himself king of more Franks, and becomes the head of the Roman-Frankish combination by overthrowing Syagrius and taking his place as lord of the Gallo-Romans. As towards them he becomes even as Syagrius and the emperors before him, absolute ruler, princeps. This authority enhanced the dignity of Clovis’s kingship over his own Franks and the Alemanni, and his personal power increased with each new conquest. He became a novel sort of monarch, combining heterogeneous prerogatives. Hence his sovereignty and that of his successors was not a simple development of Teutonic kingship, nor was it a continuation of Roman imperial or proconsular rule, but rather a new composite evolution. Some of its contradictions and anomalies were symbolized by Clovis’s acceptance of the title of Consul and stamping the effigies of the eastern emperors upon his coins--as if they held any power in the regnum Francorum! As between Gallo-Romans and Franks, the headship had gone over to the latter; yet there was neither hatred on the one side nor oppression from the other. A common catholicism and many similarities of condition promoted mutual sympathy and union. For example, through the decay of the imperial power, oppression had increased, and the common Gallo-Roman people were compelled to place themselves under the patronage of powerful personages who could give them the protection which they could no longer look for from the Government. So relationships of personal dependence developed, not essentially dissimilar from those subsisting between the Franks and their kings, when the kings were mere leaders of small tribes or war bands. But the vastness of the Salian realm impaired the personal relationship between king and subjects, and again the latter, Frankish or Gallo-Roman, needed nearer protectors, and found them in neighbouring great proprietors and functionaries, Frankish or Gallo-Roman as the case might be.[142]

Through all the turmoil of the Merovingian period, there was doubtless individual injustice and hardship everywhere, but no racial tyranny. The Gallo-Roman kept his language and property, and continued to live under the Roman law. He was not inferior to the Frank, except that the latter was entitled to a higher wergeld for personal injury, which, however, soon was equalized. The Frank also lived under his own law, Salic or Ripuarian. But the general mingling of peoples in the end made it impossible to distinguish the law personally applicable; and thereupon, both as to Franks and Gallo-Romans, the territorial law superseded the law of race.[143] And when, after two centuries, the Merovingian kingdom, through change of dynasty, became the Carolingian, political discrepancies between Frank and Gallo-Roman had passed away. Yet this huge colossus of a realm with its shoulders of iron and its feet of clay, still included enough disparities of race and land, language and institution, to ensure its dissolution.

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VII. THE CELTIC STRAIN IN GAUL AND IRELAND

The northern races who were to form part of the currents of mediaeval life are grouped under the names of Celts and Teutons.[144] The chief sections of the former, dwelling in northern Italy and Gaul and Spain, were Latinized and then Christianized long before the mediaeval period, and themselves helped to create the patristic and even the antique side of the mediaeval patrimony. Their rôle was largely mediatorial, and geographically, as well as in their time of receiving Latin culture, they were intermediaries between the classic sources and the Teutons, who also were to drink of these magic draughts, but not so deeply as to be transformed to Latin peoples. The rôle of the Teutons in the mediaeval evolution was to accept Christianity and learn something of the pagan antique, and then to react upon what they had received and change it in their natures.

Central Europe seems to have been the early home alike of Celts and Teutons. Thence successive migratory groups appear to have passed westwardly and southerly. Both races spoke Aryan tongues, and according to the earliest notices of classic writers resembled each other physically--large, blue-eyed, with yellow or tawny hair. The more penetrating accounts of Caesar and Tacitus disclose their distinctive racial traits, which contrast still more clearly in the remains of the early Celtic (Irish) and Teutonic literatures. Whatever were the ethnological affinities between Celt and Teuton, and however imperceptibly these races may have shaded into each other, for example, in northern France and Belgium, their characters were different, and their opposing racial traits have never ceased to display themselves in the literature as well as in the political and social history of western Europe.

The time and manner of the Celtic occupation of Gaul and Spain remain obscure.[145] It took place long before the turmoils of the second century B.C., when the Teutonic tribes began to assert themselves, probably in the north of the present Germany, and to press south-westwardly upon Celtic neighbours on both sides of the Rhine. Some of them pushed on towards lands held by the Belgae, and then passed southward toward Aquitania, drawing Belgic and Celtic peoples with them. Afterwards turning eastwardly they invaded the Roman Provincia in southern Gaul, and through their victories threatened the great Republic. This was the peril of the Cimbri and Teutones, which Marius quelled by the waters of the Durance and then among the hills of Piedmont. The invasion did not change the ethnology of Gaul, which, however, was not altogether Celtic in Caesar’s time. The opening sentences of his Commentaries indicate anything but racial unity. The Roman province was mainly Ligurian in blood. West of the province, between the Pyrenees and the Garonne, were the “Aquitani,” chiefly of Iberian stock. The Celtae, whose western boundary was the ocean, reached from the Garonne as far north as the Seine, and eastwardly across the centre of Gaul to the head waters of the Rhine. North of them were the Belgae, extending from the Seine and the British Channel to the lower Rhine. These Belgae also apparently were Celts, and yet, as their lands touched those of the Germans on the Rhine, they naturally show Teutonic affinities, and some of their tribes contained strains of Teuton blood. But it is not blood alone that makes the race; and Gaul, with its dominant Celtic element, was making Gauls out of all these peoples. At all events a common likeness may be discerned in the picture of Gallic traits which Caesar gives.[146]

Gallic civilization had then advanced as far as the native political incapacity of the Gauls would permit. Quick-witted and intelligent, they were to gain from Rome the discipline they needed. Once accustomed to the enforcement of a stable order, their finer qualities responded by a ready acceptance of the benefits of civilization and a rapid appropriation of Latin culture. Not a sentence of the Gallic literature survives. But that this people were endowed with eloquence and possessed of a sense of form, was to be shown by works in their adopted tongue.[147] Romanized and Latinized, they were converted to Christianity and then renewed with fresh Teutonic blood. So they enter upon the mediaeval period; and when, after the millennial year, the voices of the Middle Ages cease simply to utter the barbaric or echo the antique, it becomes clear that nowhere is there a happier balance of intellectual faculty and emotional capacity than in these peoples of mingled stock who long had dwelt in the country which we know as France.

Since the Celts of Gaul have left no witness of themselves in Gallic institutions or literature, it is necessary to turn to Ireland for clearer evidence of Celtic qualities. There one may see what might come of a predominantly Celtic people who lacked the lesson of Roman conquest and the discipline of Roman order. The early history of the Irish, their presentation of themselves in imaginative literature, their attainment in learning and accomplishment in art, are not unlike what might have been expected from Caesar’s Gauls under similar conditions of comparative isolation. Irish history displays the social turmoil and barbarism resulting from the insular aggravation of the Celtic weaknesses noticeable in Caesar’s sketch; and the same are carried to burlesque excess in the old Irish literature. On the other hand, Irish qualities of temperament and mind bear such fair fruit in literature and art as might be imagined springing from the Gallic stem but for the Roman graft.[148]

No trustworthy story can be put together from the myth, tradition, and conscious fiction which record the unprogressive turbulence of pre-Christian Ireland. But the Irish character and capacities are clearly mirrored in this enormous Gaelic literature. Truculence and vanity pervade it, and a passion for hyperbole. A weak sense of fact and a lack of steady rational purpose are also conspicuous. It is as ferocious as may be. Yet, withal, it keeps the charm of the Irish temperament. Its pathos is moving, even lovely. Some of the poetry has a mystic sensuousness; the lines fall on the ear like the lapping of ripples on an unseen shore; the imagery has a fantastic and romantic beauty, and the reader is wafted along on waves of temperament and feeling.[149]

Whatever themes sprang from the pagan age, probably nothing was written down before the Christian time, when Christian matter might be foisted into the pagan story. The Sagas belonging to the so-called Ulster Cycle afford the best illustration of early Irish traits.[150] They reflect a society apparently at the “Homeric” stage of development, though the Irish heroes suffer in comparison with the Greek by reason of the immeasurable inferiority of these Gaelic Sagas to the Iliad and Odyssey. There is the same custom of fighting from chariots, the same tried charioteer, the hero’s closest friend, and the same unstable relationship between the chieftains and the king.[151]

The Achilles of the Ulster Cycle is Cuchulain. The Tain Bo Cuailgne (Englished rather improperly as the “Cattle-raid of Cooley”) is the long and famous Saga that brings his glory to its height.[152] Other Sagas tell of his mysterious birth, his youthful deeds, his wooing, his various feats, and then the moving, fateful story of his death. Loved by many women, cherished by heroes, beautiful in face and form, possessed of strength, agility, and skill in arms beyond belief, uncontrolled, chivalric, his battle-ardour unquenchable, he is a brilliant epic hero. But his story is weakened by hyperbole. Even to-day we know how sword-strokes and spear-thrust kill. So do great narrators, who likewise realize the literary power of truth. Through the Iliad there is no combat between heroes where spear and sword do not pierce and kill as they do in fact. So in the Sagas of the Norse, the man falls before the mortal blow. But in the Ulster Cycle, day after day, two heroes may mangle each other in every impossible and fantastic way, beyond the bounds of the faintest shadow of verisimilitude.[153] In this weakness of hyperbole the Irish Sagas are outdone only by the monstrous doings of the epics of India.

Besides hyperbole, Irish tales display another weakness, which is not unpleasing, although an element of failure both in the people and their literature. This is the quality of non-arrival. Some old tales evince it in the unsteadfast purpose of the narrative, the hero quite forgetting the initial motive of his action. In the Voyage of Mældun, for instance, a son sets out upon the ocean to seek his father’s murderers, a motive which is lost sight of amid the marvels of the voyage.[154] As may be imagined, qualities of vanity, truculence, irrationality, hyperbole, and non-arrival or lack of sequence, frequently impart an air of bouffe to the Irish Sagas, making them humorous beyond the intention of their composers.[155]

Yet true heroic notes are to be heard.[156] And however rare the tales which have not the makings of a brawl on every page, these truculent Sagas sometimes speak with power and pathos, and sweetly present the loveliness of nature or the charms of women; all in a manner happily indicative of the impressionable Irish temperament. Examples are the moving tales of The Children of Usnach and the Pursuit of Diarmuid and Grainne.[157] They bring to mind the Tristram story, which grew up among a kindred people. The first of them only belongs to the Ulster Cycle. Both are stories of a beautiful and headstrong maiden betrothed to an old king. Each maid rebels against union with an old man; each falls in love with a young hero, and, unabashed, asks him to flee with her. In the former tale the heroine’s charms win the hero, while in the latter he is overcome by the violent insistence of a woman not to be gainsaid. In both stories love brings the hero to his death.

The Irish genius also showed an aptitude for lyric expression, and at an early period developed elaborate modes of rhymed and alliterative verse.[158] Peculiarly beautiful are the poems reflecting the Gaelic belief in a future life. A charming description of Elysium is offered by The Voyage of Bran, a Saga of the Otherworld, dating from the seventh century. Its verse portions preponderate, the prose serving as their frame.[159] But it opens in prose, telling how one day, walking near his stronghold, Bran heard sweet music behind him, and as often as he turned the music was still behind him. He fell asleep at last from the sweetness of the strains. When he awoke, he found by him a branch silvery with white blossoms. He took it to his home, where was seen a woman who sang:

“A branch of the apple-tree from Emain I bring; Twigs of white silver are on it, Crystal boughs with blossoms. There is a distant isle, Around which sea-horses (waves) glisten:”

And the woman sings on, picturing “Mag Mell of many flowers,” and of the host ever rowing thither from across the sea; till at last Bran and his people set forth in their boat and row on and on, till they are welcomed by sweet women with music and wine in island-fields of flowers and bird-song. There is no sad strain in the music from this Gaelic land beyond the grave.

Irish traits observed in poem and Saga are reflected in accounts of not improbable events, and exemplified in Christian saints; for the Irish did not change their spots upon conversion. How Christianity failed to affect the manners of the ancient Irish is illustrated in the story of the Cursing of Tara, where tradition says the high-kings of Ireland held sway. The account is scarcely historical; yet Tara existed, and fell to decay in the sixth century.[160] Its cursing was on this wise. King Dermot was high-king of Ireland. His laws were obeyed throughout the land, and over its length and breadth marched his spear-bearer asserting the royal authority, and holding the king’s spear across his body before him. Every town and castle must open wide enough to let this spear pass, carried crosswise. The spear-bearer comes to the strong house of Ædh. He finds the outer palisade breached to let the spear through, but not the inner house. The bearer demands that it be torn open. “Order it so as to please thyself,” quoth Ædh, as he smote off his head.

King Dermot sent his men to lay waste to Ædh’s land and seize his person. Ædh flees, and at last takes refuge with St. Ruadhan. The king again sends messengers, but they are foiled, till he comes himself, seizes the outlaw, and carries him off to hang him at Tara. Thereupon St. Ruadhan seeks St. Brendan of Birr and others. They proceed to Tara and demand the prisoner. The king answers that the Church cannot protect law-breakers. So all the clergy rang their bells and chanted psalms against the king before Tara, and fasted on him (in order that their imprecations might be more potent), and he fasted on them. King and clergy fasted on each other, till one night the clergy made a show of eating in sight of the town, but passed the meat and ale beneath their cowls. So the king was tricked into taking meat; and an evil dream came to him, by which he knew the clergy would succeed in destroying his kingdom.

In the morning the king went and said to the clergy: “Ill have ye done to undo my kingdom, because I maintained the righteous cause. Be thy diocese, Ruadhan, the first one ruined, and may thy monks desert thee.”

Said the saint: “May thy kingdom droop speedily.”

Said the king: “Thy see shall be empty, and swine shall root up thy churchyards.”

Said the saint: “Tara shall be desolate, and therein shall no dwelling be for ever.”

It was the custom of ancient bards to utter an imprecation or “satire” against those offending them.[161] The irate fasting and cursing by the Irish clergy was a thinly Christianized continuation of the same Irish habit, inspired by the same Irish temper. There was no chasm between the pagan bards and the Christian clergy, who loved the Sagas and preserved them. They had also their predecessors in the Druids, who had performed the functions of diviners, magicians, priests, and teachers, which were assumed by the clergy in the fifth and sixth centuries.[162] Doubtless many of the Druids became monks.

Christianity came to the Irish as a new ardour, effacing none of their characteristics. Irish monks and Irish saints were as irascible as Irish bards and Saga heroes. The Irish temper lived on in St. Columba of Iona and St. Columbanus of Luxeuil and Bobbio. Both of these men left Ireland to spread monastic Christianity, and also because, as Irishmen, they loved to rove, like their forefathers. Christianity furnished this Irish propensity with a definite aim in the mission-passion to convert the heathen. It likewise brought the ascetic hermit-passion, which drove these travel-loving islanders over the sea in search of solitude; and so a yearning came on Irish monks to sail forth to some distant isle and gain within the seclusion of the sea a hermitage beyond the reach of man. There are many stories of these explorers. They sailed along the Hebrides, they settled on the Shetland Islands, they reached the Faroes, and even brought back news of Iceland. But before the seventh century closed, their sea hermitages were harried by Norsemen who were sailing upon quite different ventures. From an opposite direction they too had reached the Shetlands and the Hebrides, and had pushed on farther south among the islands off the west coast of Scotland. So there come sorry tales of monks fleeing from one island to another. These harryings and flights had gone on for a century and more before the Vikings landed in Ireland, apparently for the first time, in 795.[163] There followed two centuries of fierce struggle with the invaders, during which much besides blows was exchanged. Vikings and Irish learned from each other; Norse strains passed into Irish literature, and conversely the Norse story-tellers probably obtained the Saga form of composition.

The rôle of the Irish in the diffusion of Christianity with its accompaniment of Latin culture will be noted hereafter, and a sketch of the unquestionably Irish saint Columbanus will be given in illustration. A few paragraphs on his almost namesake of Iona, whose career hardly extended beyond Celtic circles, may fitly close the present chapter on the Celtic genius. In him is seen the truculent Irishman and the clan-abbot of royal birth, violent, dominating by his impetuosity and the strident fervour of his voice; also the saint, devoted, loving, to his followers. Colum,[164] surnamed Cille, “of the church,” from his incessant devotions, and by his Latin name known as Columba, was born at Gartan, Donegal, in the extreme north-west of Ireland, about the year 520. His family was chief in that part of the country, and through both his parents he was descended from kings. He does not belong to those early Irish saints represented by Patrick and his storied coadjutors of both sexes, whose missionary activities were not constrained within any ascetic rule; but to the later generation who lived in those monastic communities which were so very typically Irish.[165]

Columba appears to have passed his youth wandering from one monastery to another, and his manhood in founding them. But so strong a nature could not hold aloof from the wars of his clan, which belonged to the northern branch of the Hy-neill race, then maintaining its independence against the southern branch. The head of the latter was that very King Dermot (usually called Diarmaid or Diarmuid) against whom St. Ruadhan[166] and the clergy fasted and rang their bells. Columba appears to have had no part in the cursing of Tara. But Dermot was the king against whom the wars of his family were waged, and all the traditions point to the saint as their instigator. The account given by Keating, the seventeenth century historian of Gaelic Ireland, is curious.[167]

“Diarmuid ... King of Ireland, made the Feast of Tara, and a nobleman was killed at that feast by Curran, son of Aodh; wherefore Diarmuid killed him in revenge for that, because he committed murder at the Feast of Tara, against the law and the sanctuary of the feast; and before Curran was put to death he fled to the protection of Colum-Cille, and notwithstanding the protection of Colum-Cille he was killed by Diarmuid. And from that it arose that Colum-Cille mustered the Clanna Neill of the North, because his own protection and the protection of the sons of Earc was violated. Whereupon the battle of Cul Dreimhne was gained over Diarmuid and over the Connaughtmen, so that they were defeated through the prayer of Colum-Cille.”

Keating adds that another book relates another cause of this battle, to wit:

“... the false judgment which Diarmuid gave against Colum-Cille when he wrote the gospel out of the book of Finnian without his knowledge.[168] Finnian said that it was to himself belonged the son-book which was written from his book, and they both selected Diarmuid as judge between them. This is the decision that Diarmuid made: that to every book belongs its son-book, as to every cow belongs her calf.”

Less consistent is the tradition that Columba left Ireland because of the sentence passed upon him by certain of his fellow-saints, as penance for the bloodshed which he had occasioned. Indeed, for his motives one need hardly look beyond the desire to spread the Gospel, and the passion of the Irish monk peregrinam ducere vitam. Reaching the west of Scotland, Columba was granted that rugged little island then called Hy, but Iova afterwards, and now Iona. This was in 563, and he continued abbot of Hy until his death in 597. Not that he stayed there all these years, for he moved about ceaselessly, founding churches among the Picts and Scots. Some thirty foundations are attributed to him, besides his thirty odd in Ireland.

Adamnan’s Vita largely consists of stories of the saint’s miracles and prophecies and the interpositions of Providence in his behalf. It nevertheless gives a consistent picture of this man of powerful frame and mighty voice, restless and unrestrained, ascetically tempered, working always for the spread of his religion. We see him compelling men to set sail with him despite the tempest, or again rushing into “the green glass water up to his knees” to curse a plunderer in the name of Christ. “He was not a gentle hero,” says an old Gaelic Eulogy. Yet if somewhat quick to curse, he was still readier to bless, and if he could be masterful, his life had its own humility. “Surely it was great lowliness in Colomb Cille that he himself used to take off his monks’ sandals and wash their feet for them. He often used to carry his portion of corn on his back to the mill, and grind it and bring it home to his house. He never used to put linen or wool against his skin. His side used to come against the bare mould.”[169]

So this impetuous life passes before our eyes filled with adventure, touched with romance, its colours heightened through tradition. As it draws to its close the love in it seems to exceed the wrath; and thus it ends: as the old man was resting himself the day before his death, seated by the barn of the monastery, the white work-horse came and laid its head against his breast. Late the same night, reclining on his stone bed he spoke his last words, enjoining peace and charity among the monks. Rising before dawn, he entered the church alone, knelt beside the altar, and there he died.[170]--His memory still hangs the peace of God and man over the Island of Iona.

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VIII. TEUTON QUALITIES: ANGLO-SAXON, GERMAN, NORSE

There were intellectual as well as emotional differences between the Celts and Teutons. A certain hard rationality and grasp of fact mark the mentality of the latter. On land or sea they view the situation, realize its opportunities, their own strength, and the opposing odds: with definite and persistent purpose they move, they fight, they labour. The quality of purposefulness becomes clearer as they emerge from the forest obscurity of their origins into the open light of history. To a definite goal of conquest and settlement Theodoric led the Ostrogoths from Moesia westward, and fought his way into Italy. With persistent purposefulness Clovis and his Merovingian successors intrigued and fought. Among Anglo-Saxon pirates the aim of plunder quickly grew to that of conquest. And in times which were to follow, there was purpose in every voyage and battle of the Vikings. The Teutons disclose more strength and persistency of desire than the Celts. Their feelings were slower, less impulsive; also less quickly diverted, more unswerving, even fiercer in their strength. The general characteristic of Teutonic emotion is its close connection with some motive grounded in rational purpose.

Caesar’s short sketch of the Germans[171] gives the impression of barbarous peoples, numerous, brave, overweening. They had not reached the agricultural stage, but were devoted to war and hunting. There were no Druids among them. Their bodies were inured to hardship. They lived in robust independence, and were subject to their chiefs only in war. Their fiercest folk, the Suevi, from boyhood would submit neither to labour nor discipline, that their strength and spirit might be unchecked. It was deemed shameful for a youth to have to do with women before his twentieth year.

The Roman world knew more about these Germans by the year A.D. 99 when Tacitus composed his Germania. They had scarcely yet turned to agriculture. Respect for women appears clearly. These barbarians are most reluctant to give their maidens as hostages; they listen to their women’s voices and deem that there is something holy and prophetic in their nature. Upon marriage, oxen, a horse, and shield and lance make up the husband’s morgengabe to his bride: she is to have part in her husband’s valour. Fornication and adultery are rare, the adulteress is ruthlessly punished; men and maidens marry late. The men of the tribe decide important matters, which, however, the chiefs have previously discussed apart. The people sit down armed; the priests proclaim silence; the king or war-leader is listened to, and the assembly is swayed by his persuasion and repute. They dissent with murmurs, or assent brandishing their spears. There is thus participation by the tribe, and yet deference to reputation. This description discloses Teutonic freedom as different from Celtic political unrestraint. Tacitus also speaks of the Germanic Comitatus, consisting of a chief and a band of youths drawn together by his repute, who fight by his side and are disgraced if they survive him dead upon the field. In time of peace they may seek another leader from a tribe at war; for the Germans are impatient of peace and toil, and slothful except when fighting or hunting. They had further traits and customs which are barbaric rather than specifically Teutonic: cruelty and faithlessness toward enemies, feuds, wergeld, drinking bouts, gambling, slavery, absence of testaments.

Between the time of Tacitus and the fifth century many changes came over the Teuton tribes. Early tribal names vanished, while a regrouping into larger and apparently more mobile aggregates took place. The obscure revolutions occurring in Central Europe in the second, third, and fourth centuries do not indicate social progress, but rather retrogression from an almost agricultural state toward stages of migratory unrest.[172] We have already noted the fortunes of those tribes that helped to barbarize and disrupt the Roman Empire, and lost themselves among the Romance populations of Italy, Gaul, and Spain. We are here concerned with those that preserved their native speech and qualities, and as Teuton peoples became contributories to the currents of mediaeval evolution.

I

When the excellent Apollinaris Sidonius, writing in the middle of the fifth century to a young friend about to enter the Roman naval service off the coasts of Gaul, characterized the Saxon pirates as the fiercest and most treacherous of foes, whose way is to dash upon their prey amid the tempest, and for whom shipwreck is a school, he spoke truly, and also illustrated the difference that lies in point of view.[173] Fierce they were, and hardy seamen, likewise treacherous in Roman eyes, and insatiate plunderers. From the side of the sea they represented the barbarian disorder threatening the world. The Roman was scarcely interested in the fact that these men kept troth among themselves with energy and sacrifice of life. The Saxons, Angles, Jutes, whose homes ashore lay between the Weser and the Elbe and through Sleswig, Holstein, and Denmark, possessed interesting qualities before they landed in Britain, where under novel circumstances they were to develop their character and institutions with a rapidity that soon raised them above the condition of their kin who had stayed at home. Bands of them had touched Britain before the year 411, when the Roman legions were withdrawn. But it was only with the landing of Hengest and Horsa in 449 that they began to come in conquering force. The Anglo-Saxon conquest of the island went on for two centuries. Information regarding it is of the scantiest; but the Britons seem to have been submerged or driven westward. There is at least no evidence of any friendly mingling of the races. The invaders accepted neither Christianity nor Roman culture from the conquered, and Britain became a heathen England.

While these Teuton peoples were driving through their conquest and also fighting fiercely with each other, their characters and institutions were becoming distinctively Anglo-Saxon. Under stress of ceaseless war, military leaders became hereditary kings, whose powers, at least in intervals of peace, were controlled by the Witan or Council of the Wise, and limited by the jurisdiction of the Hundred Court. Likewise the temporary ties of the Teutonic Comitatus became permanent in the body of king’s companions (thegns, thanes), whose influence was destined to supplant that of the eorls, the older nobility of blood. The Comitatus principle pervades Anglo-Saxon history as well as literature; it runs through the Beowulf epic; Anglo-Saxon Biblical versifiers transfer it to the followers of Abraham and the disciples of Christ; and every child knows the story of Lilla, faithful thegn, who flung himself between his Northumbrian king, Edwin, and the sword of the assassin--the latter sent by a West Saxon king and doubtless one of his faithful thegns. Their law consisted mainly in the graded wergeld for homicide, in an elaborate tariff of compensation for personal injuries, and in penalties for cattle-raiding. Beyond the matter of theft, property law was still unwritten custom, and contract law did not exist. The rules of procedure, for instance in the Hundred Court, were elaborate, as is usual in a primitive society where the substantial rights are simple, and the important thing is to induce the parties to submit to an adjudication. Similar Teutonic customs obtained elsewhere. But the course of their development in Saxon England displays an ever clearer recognition of fundamental principles of English law: justice is public; the parties immediately concerned must bring the case to court and there conduct it according to rules of procedure; the court of freemen hear and determine, but do not extend the inquiry beyond the evidence adduced before them; to interpret and declare the law is the function of the court, not of the king and his officers.[174]

During these first centuries in England, the Anglo-Saxon endowment of character and faculty becomes clearly shown in events and expressed in literature. A battle-loving people whose joy in fight flashes from their “shield-play” and “sword-game” epithets, even as their fondness for seafaring is seen in such phrases as “wave-floater,” “foam-necked,” “like a swan” breasting the “swan-road” of the sea. But their sword-games and wave-floatings had purpose, a quality that became large and steady as generation after generation, unstopped by fortress, forest, or river, pushed on the conquest of England. When that conquest had been completed, and these Saxons were in turn hard pressed by their Danish kin more lately sailing from the north, their courage still could not be overborne. It is reflected in the overweening mood of Maldon, the poem which is also called The Death of Byrhtnoth. The cold grey scene lies in the north of England. The Viking invaders demand rings of gold; Byrhtnoth, the Alderman of the East Saxons, retorts scornfully. So the fight begins with arrows and spear throwings across the black water. The Saxons hold the ford. The Sea-wolves cannot force it. They call for leave to cross. In his overmood Byrhtnoth answers: “To you this is yielded: come straightway to us; God only wots who shall hold fast the place of battle.” In the bitter end when Byrhtnoth is killed, still speaks his thane: “Mind shall the harder be, heart the keener, mood the greater, as our might lessens. Here lies our Elder hewn to death. I am old; I will not go hence. I think to lay me down by the side of my lord.”

The spiritual gifts of the Anglo-Saxons are discernible in their language, which so adequately could render the Bible[175] and the phraseology of the Seven Liberal Arts. Its terms were somewhat more concrete and physical than the Latin, but readily lent themselves to figurative meanings. More palpably the poetry with its reflection upon life shows the endowment of the race. Marked is its elegiac mood. In an old poem is heard the voice of one who sails with hapless care the exile’s way, and must forego his dear lord’s gifts: in sleep he kisses him, and again lays hands and head upon those knees, as in times past. Then wakes the friendless man, and sees the ocean’s waves, the gulls spreading their wings, rime and snow falling. More impersonal is the heavy tone of a meditative fragment over the ruins, apparently, of a Roman city:

“Wondrous is this wall-stone, fates have broken it, have burst the stronghold, roofs are fallen, towers tottering, hoar gate-towers despoiled, shattered the battlements, riven, fallen.

* * * *

Earth’s grasp holdeth the mighty workmen worn away, done for, in the hard grip of the grave.”

But the noblest presentation of character in pagan Anglo-Saxon poetry is afforded by the epic poem of Beowulf, which tells the story of a Geatic hero who sets out for Denmark to slay a monster, accomplishes the feat, is nobly rewarded by the Danish king, and returns to rule his own people justly for fifty winters, when his valiant and beneficent life ends in a last victorious conflict with a hoard-guarding dragon. Here myth and tradition were not peculiarly Anglo-Saxon; but the finally recast and finished work, noble in diction, sentiment, and action, expresses the highest ethics of Anglo-Saxon heathendom. Beowulf does what he ought to do, heroically; and finds satisfaction and reward. He does not seek his pleasure, though that comes with gold and mead-drinking; consciousness of deeds done bravely and the assurance of fame sweeten death at last.[176]

A century or more after the composition of this poem, there lived an Anglo-Saxon whose aims were spiritualized through Christianity, whose vigorous mind was broadened by such knowledge and philosophy as his epoch had gathered from antique sources, and whose energies were trained in generalship and the office of a king. He presents a life intrinsically good and true, manifesting itself in warfare against heathen barbarism and in endeavour to rule his people righteously and enlarge their knowledge. Many of the qualities and activities of Alfred had no place in the life of Beowulf. Yet the heathen hero and the Christian king were hewn from the same rock of Saxon manhood. Alfred’s life was established upon principles of right conduct generically the same as those of the poem. But Christianity, experience, contact with learned men, and education through books, had informed him of man’s spiritual nature, and taught him that human welfare depended on knowledge and intent and will. Accordingly, his beneficence does not stop with the armed safe-guarding of his realm, but seeks to compass the instruction of those who should have knowledge in order the better to guide the faith and conduct of the people. “He seems to me a very foolish man and inexcusable, who will not increase his knowledge the while that he is in this world, and always wish and will that he may come to the everlasting life where nothing shall be dark or unknown.”[177]

II

In spite of the general Teutonic traits and customs which the Germans east and west of the Rhine possessed in common with the Anglo-Saxons, distinct qualities appear in the one and the other from the moment of our nearer acquaintance with their separate history and literature. So scanty, however, are the literary remains of German heathendom that recourse must be had to Christian productions to discover, for example, that with the Germans the sentiment of home and its dear relationships[178] is as marked as the Anglo-Saxon’s elegiac meditative mood. Language bears its witness to the spiritual endowment of both peoples. The German dialects along the Rhine were rich in abstract nouns ending in ung and keit and schaft and tum.[179]

There remains one piece of untouched German heathenism, the Hildebrandslied, which dates from the end of the eighth century, and may possibly be the sole survivor of a collection of German poems made at Charlemagne’s command.[180] It is a tale of single combat between a father and son, the counterpart of which is found in the Persian, Irish, and Norse literatures. Such an incident might be diversely rendered; armies might watch their champions engage, or the combat might occur unwitnessed in some mountain gorge; it might be described pathetically or in warrior mood, and the heroes might fight in ignorance, or one of them know well, who was the man confronting him. In German, this story is a part of that huge mass of legend which grew up around the memory of the terrible Hun Attila, and transformed him to the Atli of Norse literature, and to the worthy King Etzel of the Nibelungenlied, at whose Court the flower of Burgundian chivalry went down in that fierce feud in which Etzel had little part. Among his vassal kings appears the mighty exile Dietrich of Bern, who in the Nibelungen reluctantly overcomes the last of the Burgundian heroes. This Dietrich is none other than Theodoric the Ostrogoth, transformed in legend and represented as driven from his kingdom of Italy by Odoacer, and for the time forced to take refuge with Etzel; for the legend was not troubled by the fact that Attila was dead before Theodoric was born. Bern is the name given to Verona, and legend saw Theodoric’s castle in that most beautiful of Roman amphitheatres, where the traveller still may sit and meditate on many things. It is told also that Theodoric recovered his kingdom in the legendary Rabenschlacht fought by Ravenna’s walls. Old Hildebrand was his master-at-arms, who had fled with him. In the Nibelungen it is he that cuts down Kriemhild, Etzel’s queen, before the monarch’s eyes; for he could not endure that a woman’s hand had slain Gunther and Hagen, whom, exhausted at last, Dietrich’s strength had set before her helpless and bound. And now, after years of absence, he has recrossed the mountains with his king come to claim his kingdom, and before the armies he challenges the champion of the opposing host. Here the Old German poem, which is called the Hildebrandslied, takes up the story:

“Hildebrand spoke, the wiser man, and asked as to the other’s father--‘Or tell me of what race art thou; ’twill be enough; every one in the realm is known to me.’

“Hadubrand spoke, Hildebrand’s son: ‘Our people, the old and knowing of them, tell me Hildebrand was my father’s name; mine is Hadubrand. Aforetime he fled to the east, from Otacher’s hate, fled with Dietrich and his knights. He left wife to mourn, and ungrown child. Dietrich’s need called him. He was always in the front; fighting was dear to him. I do not believe he is alive.’

“‘God forbid, from heaven above, that thou shouldst wage fight with so near kin.’ He took from his arm the ring given by the king, lord of the Huns. ‘Lo! I give it thee graciously.’

“Hadubrand spoke: ‘With spear alone a man receives gift, point against point. Too cunning art thou, old Hun. Beguiling me with words thou wouldst thrust me with thy spear. Thou art so old--thou hast a trick in store. Seafaring men have told me Hildebrand is dead.’

“Hildebrand spoke: ‘O mighty God, a drear fate happens. Sixty summers and winters, ever placed by men among the spearmen, I have so borne myself that bane got I never. Now shall my own child smite me with the sword, or I be his death.’”

There is a break here in the poem; but the uncontrolled son evidently taunted the father with cowardice. The old warrior cries:

“‘Be he the vilest of all the East people who now would refuse thee the fight thou hankerest after. Happen it and show which of us must give up his armour.’”

The end fails, but probably the son was slain.

Stubborn and grim appears the Old German character. Point to point shall foes exchange gifts. Such also was the way when a lord made reward; on the spear’s point presenting the arm-ring to him who had served, he accepting it in like fashion, each on his guard perhaps. The Hildebrandslied exhibits other qualities of the German spirit, as its bluntness and lack of tact; even its clumsiness is evinced in the seventy lines of the poem, which although broken is not a fragment, but a short poem--a ballad graceless and shapeless because of its stiff unvarying lines.

In a later poem, which gives the story of Walter of Aquitaine, the same set and stubborn mood appears, although lightened by rough banter. This legend existed in Old German as well as Anglo-Saxon. In the tenth century, Ekkehart, a monk of St. Gall, freely altering and adding to the tale, made of it the small Latin epic which is extant.[181] Monk as he was, he tells a spirited story in his rugged hexameters. He had studied classic authors to good purpose; and his poem of Walter fleeing with his love Hildegund from the Hunnish Court (for the all-pervasive Attila is here also) is vivid, diversified, well-constructed--qualities which may not have been in the story till he remodelled it. Its leading incidents still present German traits. Walter and Hildegund carry off a treasure in their flight; and it is to get this treasure that Gunther urges Hagen (for they are here too) to attack the fugitive. This is Teutonic. It was for plunder that Teuton tribes fought their bravest fights from the time of Alaric and Genseric to the Viking age, and the hoard has a great part in Teutonic story. In the Waltarius Gunther’s driving avarice, Walter’s stubborn defence of his gold are Teutonic. The humour and the banter are more distinctly German, and nobly German is the relationship of trust and honour between Walter and the maiden who is fleeing with him. Yet the story does not revolve around the woman in it, but rather around the shrewdly got and bravely guarded treasure.

German traits obvious in the Hildebrandslied, and strong through the Latin of the Waltarius, evince themselves in the epic of the Nibelungenlied and in the Kudrun, often called its companion piece. The former holds the strength of German manhood and the power of German hate, with the edged energy of speech accompanying it. In the latter, German womanhood is at its best. Both poems, in their extant form, belong to the middle or latter part of the twelfth century, and are not unaffected by influences which were not native German.

The Nibelungenlied is but dimly reminiscent of any bygone love between Siegfried and Brunhilde, and carries within its own narrative a sufficient explanation of Brunhilde’s jealous anger and Siegfried’s death. Kriemhild is left to nurse the wrath which shall never cease to devise vengeance for her husband’s murderers. Years afterwards, Hagen warns Gunther, about to accept Etzel’s invitation, that Kriemhild is lancraeche (long vengeful). The course of that vengeance is told with power; for the constructive soul of a race contributed to this Volksepos. The actors in the tragedy are strikingly drawn and contrasted, and are lifted in true epic fashion above the common stature by intensity of feeling and the power of will to realize through unswerving action the prompting of their natures. The fatefulness of the tale is true to tragic reality, in which the far results of an ill deed involve the innocent with the guilty.

A comparison of the poem with the Hildebrandslied shows that the sense of the pathetic had deepened in the intervening centuries. There is scarcely any pathos in the earlier composition, although its subject is the fatal combat between father and son. But the Nibelungen, with a fiercer hate, can set forth the heroic pathos of the lot of one, who, struggling between fealties, is driven on to dishonour and to death. This is the pathos of the death of Rüdiger, who had received the Burgundians in his castle on their way to Etzel’s Court, had exchanged gifts with them, and betrothed his daughter to the youngest of the three kings. He was as unsuspecting as Etzel of Kriemhild’s plot. But in the end Kriemhild forces him, on his fealty as liegeman, to outrage his heart and honour, and attack those whom he had sheltered and guided onward--to their death.

Not much love in this tale, only hate insatiable. But the greatness of hate may show the passional power of the hating soul. The centuries have raised to high relief the elemental Teutonic qualities of hate, greed, courage and devotion, and human personality has enlarged with the heightened power of will. The reader is affected with admiration and sympathy. First he is drawn to Siegfried’s bright morning courage, his noble masterfulness--his character appears touched with the ideals of chivalry.[182] After his death the interest turns to Kriemhild planning for revenge. It may be that sympathy is repelled as her hate draws within its tide so much of guiltlessness and honour; and as the doomed Nibelungen heroes show themselves haughty, strong-handed, and stout-hearted to the end, he cheers them on, and most heartily that grim, consistent Hagen in whom the old German troth and treachery for troth’s sake are incarnate.

The Kudrun[183] is a happier story, ending in weddings instead of death. There was no licentiousness or infidelity between man and wife in the Nibelungen, and through all its hate and horror no outrage is done to woman’s honour. That may be taken as the leading theme of the Kudrun. An ardent wooer, to be sure, may seize and carry off the heroine, and his father drag her by the hair on her refusal to wed his son; but her honour, and the honour of all women in the poem, is respected and maintained. The ideal of womanhood is noble throughout: an old king thus bids farewell to his daughter on setting forth to be married: “You shall so wear your crown that I and your mother may never hear that any one hates you. Rich as you are, it would mar your fame to give any occasion for blame.”[184]

A mediaeval epic may tell of the fortunes of several generations, and the Kudrun devotes a number of books to the heroine’s ancestors, making a half-savage narrative, in which one feels a conflict between ancient barbarities and a newer and more courtly order. When the venturesome wooing and wedded fortune of Kudrun’s mother have been told, the poem turns to its chief heroine, who grows to stately maidenhood, and becomes betrothed to a young king, Herwig. A rejected wooer, the “Norman” Prince Hartmuth, by a sudden descent upon the land in the absence of its defenders, carries off Kudrun and her women by force of arms, and the king, her father, is killed in an abortive attempt to recapture her. In Hartmuth’s castle by the sea Kudrun spends bitter years waiting for deliverance. His sister, Ortrun, is kind to her, but his mother, Gerlint, treats her shamefully. The maiden is steadfast. Between her and Hartmuth stands a double barrier: his father had killed hers; she was betrothed to Herwig. Hartmuth repels his wicked mother’s advice to force her to his will. In his absence on a foray Gerlint compels Kudrun to do unfitting tasks. Hartmuth, returning, asks her: “Kudrun, fair lady, how has it been with you while I and my knights were away?”

“Here I have been forced to serve, to your sin and my shame,”[185] answers Kudrun--a great answer, in its truth and self-control.

After an interval of kind treatment the old “she-wolf” Gerlint sets Kudrun with her faithful Hildeburg to washing clothes in the sea. It is winter; their garments are mean, their feet are naked. They see a boat approaching, in which are Kudrun’s brother Ortwin, and Herwig her betrothed, who had come before their host as spies. A recognition follows. Herwig is for carrying them off; Ortwin forbids it. “With open force they were taken; my hand shall not steal them back”; dear as Kudrun is, he can take her only nâch êren (as becomes his honour). When they have gone, Kudrun throws the clothes to be washed into the sea. “No more will I wash for Gerlint; two kings have kissed me and held me in their arms.”

Kudrun returns to the castle, which soon is stormed. She saves Hartmuth and his sister from the slaughter, and all sail home, where the thought is now of wedding festivals.

Kudrun is married to Herwig; at her advice Ortwin weds Ortrun, and then she thinks of Hartmuth’s plight, and asks her friend Hildeburg whether she will have him for a husband. Hildeburg consents. Kudrun commands that Hartmuth be brought, and bids him be seated by the side of her dear friend “who had washed clothes along with her!”

“Queen, you would reproach me with that. I grieved at the shame they put on you. It was kept from me.”

“I cannot let it pass. I must speak with you alone, Hartmuth.”

“God grant she means well with me,” thought he. She took him aside and spoke: “If you will do as I bid, you will part with your troubles.”

Hartmuth answered: “I know you are so noble that your behest can be only honourable and good. I can find nothing in my heart to keep me from doing your bidding gladly, Queen.”[186] The high quality of speech between these two will rarely be outdone.

There is directness and troth in all these German poems. Troth is an ideal which must carry truth within it. The more thoughtful and reflecting German spirit will evince loyalty to truth itself as an ideal. Wolfram’s poem of Parzival has this; and by virtue of this same ideal, Walter von der Vogelweide’s judgments upon life and emperors and popes are whole and steady, unveiling the sham, condemning the lie and defying the liar.[187] In them dawns the spirit of Luther and the German Reformation, with its love of truth stronger than its love of art.

III

Chronologically these last illustrations of German traits belong to the mediaeval time; and in fact the Nibelungenlied and Kudrun, and much more Wolfram’s Parzival and Walter’s poems, are mediaeval, because to some extent affected by that interplay of influences which made the mediaeval genius.[188] On the other hand, the almost contemporaneous Norse Sagas and the somewhat older Eddic poems exhibit Teutonic traits in their northern integrity. For the Norse period of free and independent growth continued long after the distinctive barbarism of other Teutons had become mediaevalized. There resulted under the strenuous conditions of Norse life that unique heightening of energy which is manifested in the deeds of the Viking age and reflected in Norse literature.[189]

This time of extreme activity opens in the eighth century, toward the end of which Viking ravagers began to harry the British Isles. St. Cuthbert’s holy island of Lindisfarne was sacked in 793, and similar raids multiplied with portentous rapidity. The coasts of Ireland and Great Britain, and the islands lying about them, were well plundered while the ninth century was young. In Ireland permanent conquests were made near Dublin, at Waterford, and Limerick. The second half of this century witnesses the great Danish Viking invasion of England. On the Continent the Vikings worried the skirts of the Carolingian colossus, and the Lowlands suffered before Charlemagne was in his grave. After his death the trouble began in earnest. Not only the coasts were ravaged, but the river towns trembled, on the Elbe, the Rhine, the Somme, the Seine, the Loire. Paris foiled or succumbed to more than one fierce siege. About the middle of the ninth century the Vikings began to winter where they had plundered in the summer.

The north was ruled by chiefs and petty kings until Harold Fairhair overcame the chiefs of Norway and made himself supreme about the year 870. But he established his power only after great sea-fights, and many of the conquered choosing exile rather than submission, took refuge in the Orkneys, the Faroes, and other islands. Harold pursued with his fleets, and forced them to further flight. It was this exodus from the islands and from Norway in the last years of the ninth century that gave Iceland the greater part of its population. Thither also came other bold spirits from the Norse holdings in Ireland.

While these events were happening in the west, the Scandinavians had not failed to push easterly. Some settled in Russia, by the Gulf of Finland, others along the south shore of the Baltic between the Vistula and Oder. So their holdings in the tenth century encircled the north of Europe; for besides Sleswig, Denmark, and Scandinavia, they held the coast of Holland, also Normandy, where Rollo came in 912. Of insular domain, they held Iceland, parts of Scotland, and the islands north and west of it, some bits of Ireland, and much of England. Moreover, Scandinavians filled the Varangian corps of the Byzantine emperors, and old Runic inscriptions are found on marbles at Athens. Their narrow barks traversed the eastern Mediterranean[190] long before Norman Roger and Norman Robert conquered Sicily and southern Italy. Such reach of conquest shows them to have been moved by no passion for adventure. Their fierce valour was part of their great capacity for the strategy of war. As pirates, as invaders, as settlers, they dared and fought and fended for a purpose--to get what they wanted, and to hold it fast. When they had mastered the foe and conquered his land, they settled down, in England and Normandy and Sicily.

Such genius for fighting was in accord with shrewdness and industry in peace. The Vikings laboured, whether in Norway or in Iceland. In the Edda the freeman learns to break oxen, till the ground, timber houses, build barns, make carts and ploughs.[191] So a tenth-century Viking king may be found in the field directing the cutting and stacking of his corn and the gathering of it into barns. They were also traders and even money-lenders. The Icelanders, whom we know so intimately from the Sagas, went regularly upon voyages of trade or piracy before settling down to farm and wife. Sharp of speech, efficient in affairs, and often adepts in the law, they eagerly took part in the meetings of the Althing and its settlement of suits. If such settlement was rejected, private war or the holmgang (an appointed single combat on a small island) was the regular recourse. But it was murder to kill in the night or without previous notice. Nothing should be said behind an enemy’s back that the speaker would not make good; and every man must keep his plighted word.

Much of the Norse wisdom consists in a shrewd wariness. Contempt for the chattering fool runs through the Edda.[192] Let a man be chary of speech and in action unflinching. Eddic poetry is full of action; even its didactic pieces are dramatic. The Edda is as hard as steel. In the mythological pieces the action has the ruthlessness of the elements, while the stories of conduct show elemental passions working in elemental strength. The men and women are not rounded and complete; but certain disengaged motives are raised to the Titanic and thrown out with power. Neither present anguish, nor death surely foreseen, checks the course of vengeance for broken faith in those famous Eddic lays of Atli, of Sigurd and Sigrifa, Helgi and Sigrun, Brynhild and Gudrun, out of which the Volsunga Saga was subsequently put together, and to which the Nibelungenlied is kin. They seem to carry the same story, with change of names and incidents. Always the hero’s fate is netted by woman’s vengeance and the curse of the Hoard. But still the women feel most; the men strike, or are struck. Hard and cold grey, with hidden fire, was the temper of these people. Their love was not over-tender, and yet stronger than death: cries Brynhild’s ghost riding hellward, “Men and women will always be born to live in woe. We two, Sigurd and I, shall never part again.” And the power of such love speaks in the deed and word of Sigrun, who answers the ghostly call of slain Helgi from his barrow, and enters it to cast her arms about him there: “I am as glad to meet thee as are the greedy hawks of Odin when they scent the slain. I will kiss thee, my dead king, ere thou cast off thy bloody coat. Thy hair, my Helgi, is thick with rime, thy body is drenched with gory dew, dead-cold are thy hands.”

The characters which appear in large grey traits in the Edda, come nearer to us in the Icelandic Sagas. The Edda has something of a far, unearthly gloom; the Saga the light of day. Saga-folk are extraordinarily individual; men and women are portrayed, body and soul, with homely, telling realism. Nevertheless, within a fuller round of human trait, Eddic qualities endure. There is the same clear purpose and the strong resolve, and still the deed keeps pace with the intent.[193]

The period which the Sagas would delineate commences when the Norse chiefs sail to Iceland with kith and kin and following to be rid of Harold Fairhair, and lasts for a century or more on through the time of King Olaf Tryggvason who, shield over head, sprang into the sea in the year 1000, and the life of that other Olaf, none too rightly called the Saint, who in 1030 perished in battle fighting against overwhelming odds. Following hard upon this heroic time comes the age of telling of it, telling of it at the mid-summer Althing, telling of it at Yuletide feasts, and otherwise through the long winter nights in Iceland. These tellings are the Sagas in process of creation; for a Saga is essentially a tale told by word of mouth to listeners. Thus pass another hundred years of careful telling, memorizing, and retelling of these tales, kept close to the old incidents and deeds, yet ever with a higher truth intruding. They are becoming true to reality itself, in concrete types, and not simply narratives of facts actually occurring--if indeed facts ever occur in any such unequivocal singleness of actuality and with such compelling singleness of meaning, that one man shall not read them in one way and another otherwise. And the more imaginative reading may be the truer.

This century of Saga-growth in memory and word of mouth came to an end, and men began to write them down. For still another hundred years (beginning about 1140) this process lasted. In its nature it was something of a remodelling. As oral tales to be listened to, the Sagas had come to these scribe-authors, and as such the latter wrote them down, yet with such modification as would be involved in writing out for mind and eye and ear that which the ear had heard and the memory retained. In some instances the scribe-author set himself the more ambitious task of casting certain tales together in a single, yet composite story. Such is the Njála, greatest of all Sagas; it may have been written about the year 1220.[194]

As representative of the Norse personality, the Sagas, like all national literature, bear a twofold testimony: that of their own literary qualities, and that of the characters which they portray. In the first place, a Saga is absolute narrative: it relates deeds, incidents, and sayings, in the manner and order in which they would strike the eye and ear of the listener, did the matter pass before him. The narrator offers no analysis of motives; he inserts no reflections upon characters and situations. He does not even relate the incidents from the vantage-ground of a full knowledge of them, but from the point of view of each instant’s impression upon the participants or onlookers. The result is an objective and vivid presentation of the story. Next, the Sagas are economical of incident as well as language. That incident is told which the story needs for the presentation of the hero’s career; those circumstances are given which the incident needs in order that its significance may be perceived; such sayings of the actors are related as reveal most in fewest words. There is nothing more extraordinary in these stories than the significance of the small incident, and the extent of revelation carried by a terse remark.

For example, in the Gisli Saga, Gisli has gone out in the winter night to the house of his brother Thorkel, with whom he is on good terms, and there has slain Thorkel’s wife’s brother in his bed. In the darkness and confusion he escapes unrecognized, gets back to his own house and into bed, where he lies as if asleep. At daybreak the dead man’s friends come packing to Gisli’s farm:

“Now they come to the farm, Thorkel and Eyjolf, and go up to the shut-bed where Gisli and his wife slept; but Thorkel, Gisli’s brother, stepped up first on to the floor, and stands at the side of the bed, and sees Gisli’s shoes lying all frozen and snowy. He kicked them under the foot-board, so that no other man should see them.”[195]

This little incident of the shoes not only shows how near was Gisli to detection and death, but also discloses the way in which Thorkel meant to act and did act toward his brother: to wit, shield him so long as it might be done without exposing himself.

Another illustration. The Njáls Saga opens with a sketch of the girl Hallgerda, so drawn that it presages most of the trouble in the story. There were two well-to-do brothers, Hauskuld and Hrut:

“It happened once that Hauskuld bade his friends to a feast, and his brother Hrut was there, and sat next to him. Hauskuld had a daughter named Hallgerda, who was playing on the floor with some other girls. She was fair of face and tall of growth, and her hair was as soft as silk; it was so long, too, that it came down to her waist. Hauskuld called out to her, ‘Come hither to me, daughter.’ So she went up to him, and he took her by the chin and kissed her; after that she went away. Then Hauskuld said to Hrut, ‘What dost thou think of this maiden? Is she not fair?’ Hrut held his peace. Hauskuld said the same thing to him a second time, and then Hrut answered, ‘Fair enough is this maid, and many will smart for it; but this I know not, whence thief’s eyes have come into our race.’ Then Hauskuld was wroth, and for a time the brothers saw little of each other.”[196]

The picture of Hallgerda will never leave the reader’s mind throughout the story, of which she is the evil genius. It is after she has caused the death of her first husband and is sought by a second, that she is sent for by her father to ask what her mind may be:

“Then they sent for Hallgerda, and she came thither, and two women with her. She had on a cloak of rich blue woof, and under it a scarlet kirtle, and a silver girdle round her waist; but her hair came down on both sides of her bosom, and she had turned the locks up under her girdle. She sat down between Hrut and her father, and she greeted them all with kind words, and spoke well and boldly, and asked what was the news. After that she ceased speaking.”

This is the woman that the girl has grown to be; and she is still at the beginning of her mischief. Such narrative art discloses both in the tale-teller and the audience an intelligence which sees the essential fact and is impatient of encumbrance. It is the same intelligence that made these Vikings so efficient in war, and in peace quick to seize cogent means.

Truthfulness is another quality of the Sagas. Indeed their respect for historical or biographical fact sometimes hindered the evolution of a perfect story. They hesitated to omit or alter well-remembered incidents. Nevertheless a certain remodelling came, as generation after generation of narrators made the incidents more striking and the characters more marked, and, under the exigencies of storytelling, omitted details which, although actual, were irrelevant to the current of the story. The disadvantages from truthfulness were slight, compared with the admirable artistic qualities preserved by it. It kept the stories true to reality, excluding unreality, exaggeration, absurdity. Hence these Sagas are convincing: no reader can withhold belief. They contain no incredible incidents. On occasions they tell of portents, prescience, and second sight, but not so as to raise a smile. They relate a very few encounters with trolls--the hideous, unlaid, still embodied dead. But those accounts conform to the hard-wrung superstitions of a people not given to credulity. So they are real. The reality of Grettir’s night-wrestling with Glam, the troll, is hardly to be matched.[197] Truthfulness likewise characterizes their heroes: no man lies about his deeds, and no man’s word is doubted.

While the Saga-folk include no cowards or men of petty manners, there is still great diversity of character among them. Some are lazy and some industrious, some quarrelsome and some good-natured, some dangerous, some forbearing, gloomy or cheerful, open-minded or biassed, shrewd or stupid, generous or avaricious. Such contrasts of character abound both in the Sagas of Icelandic life and those which handle the broader matter of history. One may note in the Heimskringla[198] of the Kings of Norway the contrasted characters of the kings Olaf Tryggvason and St. Olaf. The latter appears as a hard-working, canny ruler, a lover of order, a legislator and enforcer of the laws; in person, short, thick-set, carrying his head a little bent. A Viking had he been, and was a fighter, till he fell in his last great battle undaunted by odds.

But the other Olaf, Norway’s darling hero, is epic: tall, golden-haired, peerless from his boyhood, beloved and hated. His marvellous physical masteries are told, his cliff-climbing, his walking on the sweeping oars keeping three war-axes tossing in the air. He smote well with either hand and cast two spears at once. He was the gladdest and gamesomest of men, kind and lowly-hearted, eager in all matters, bountiful of gifts, glorious of attire, before all men for high heart in battle, and grimmest of all men in his wrath; marvellous great pains he laid upon his foes. “No man durst gainsay him, and all the land was christened wheresoever he came.” Five short years made up his reign. At the end, neither he was broken nor his power. But a plot, moved by the hatred of a spurned heathen queen, delivered him to unequal combat with his enemies, the Kings of Denmark and Sweden, and Eric the great Viking Earl.

Olaf is sailing home from Wendland. The hostile fleet crouches behind an island. Sundry of Olaf’s ships pass by. Then the kings spy a great ship sailing--that will be Olaf’s Long Worm they say; Eric says no. Anon come four ships, and a great dragon amid them--the Long Worm? not yet. At last she comes, greatest and bravest of all, and Olaf in her, standing on the poop, with gilded shield and golden helm and a red kirtle over his mail coat. His men bade to sail on, and not fight so great a host; but Olaf said, “Never have I fled from battle.” So Olaf’s ships are lashed in line, at the centre the Long Worm, its prow forward of the others because of her greater length. Olaf would have it thus in spite of the “windy weather in the bows” predicted by her captain. The enemies’ ships close around them. Olaf’s grapplings are too much for the Danes; they draw back. Their places are taken by the ships of Sweden. They fare no better. At last Earl Eric lays fast his iron-beaks to Olaf’s ships; Danes and Swedes take courage and return. It is hand to hand now, the ships laid aboard of each other.

At last all of Olaf’s ships are cleared of men and cut adrift, save the Long Worm. There fight Olaf’s chosen, mad with battle. Einar, Olaf’s strong bowman, from the Worm aft in the main hold, shot at Earl Eric; one arrow pierced the tiller by his head, the second flew beneath his arm. Says the Earl to Finn, his bowman, “Shoot me yonder big man.” Finn shot, and the arrow struck full upon Einar’s bow as he was drawing it the third time, and it broke in the middle.

“What broke there so loud?” said Olaf.

“Norway, king, from thine hands,” answered Einar.

“No such crash as that,” said the king; “take my bow and shoot.”

But the foeman’s strength was overpowering. Olaf’s men were cut down amidships. They hardly held the poop and bow. Earl Eric leads the boarders. The ship is full of foes. Olaf will not be taken. He leaps overboard. About the ship swarm boats to seize him; but he threw his shield over his head and sank quickly in the sea.

The private Sagas construct in powerful lines the characters of the heroes from the stories of their lives. A great example is the Saga of Egil,[199] whose father was a Norse chief who had sailed to Iceland, where Egil was born. As a child he was moody, intractible, and dangerous, and once killed an older lad who had got the better of him at ball playing. There was no great love between him and his father. When he was twelve years old his father used him roughly. He entered the great hall and walked up to his father’s steward and slew him. Then he went to his seat. After that, father and son said little to each other. The boy was bent on going cruising with his older brother, Thorolf. The father yields, and Egil goes a-harrying. Fierce is his course in Norway, where they come. On the sea his vessel bears him from deed to deed of blood and daring. His strength won him booty and reward; he won a friend too, Arinbjorn, and there was always troth between them.

Thorolf and Egil took service with King Athelstane, who was threatened with attack from the King of the Scots. The brothers led the Vikings in Athelstane’s force. In the battle Thorolf loses his life; but Egil hears the shout when Thorolf falls. His furious valour wins the day for Athelstane. After the fight he buries his brother and sings staves over his grave.

“Then went Egil and those about him to seek King Athelstan, and at once went before the king, where he sat at the drinking. There was much noise of merriment. And when the king saw that Egil was come in, he bade the lower bench be cleared for them, and that Egil should sit in the high-seat facing the king. Egil sat down there, and cast his shield before his feet. He had his helm on his head, and laid his sword across his knees; and now and again he half drew it, and then clashed it back into the sheath. He sat upright, but with head bent forward. Egil was large-featured, broad of forehead, with large eye-brows, a nose not long but very thick, lips wide and long, chin exceeding broad, as was all about the jaws; thick-necked was he, and big-shouldered beyond other men, hard-featured, and grim when angry. He would not drink now, though the horn was borne to him, but alternately twitched his brows up and down. King Athelstan sat in the upper high-seat. He too laid his sword across his knees. When they had sat there for a time, then the king drew his sword from the sheath, and took from his arm a gold ring large and good, and placing it upon the sword-point he stood up, and went across the floor, and reached it over the fire to Egil. Egil stood up and drew his sword, and went across the floor. He stuck the sword-point within the round of the ring, and drew it to him; then he went back to his place. The king sate him again in his high-seat. But when Egil was set down, he drew the ring on his arm, and then his brows went back to their place. He now laid down sword and helm, took the horn that they bare to him, and drank it off. Then sang he:

‘Mailed monarch, god of battle, Maketh the tinkling circlet Hang, his own arm forsaking, On hawk-trod wrist of mine. I bear on arm brand-wielding Bracelet of red gold gladly. War-falcon’s feeder meetly Findeth such meed of praise.’

“Thereafter Egil drank his share, and talked with others. Presently the king caused to be borne in two chests; two men bare each. Both were full of silver. The king said: ‘These chests, Egil, thou shalt have, and, if thou comest to Iceland, shalt carry this money to thy father; as payment for a son I send it to him: but some of the money thou shalt divide among such kinsmen of thyself and Thorolf as thou thinkest most honourable. But thou shalt take here payment for a brother with me, land or chattels, which thou wilt. And if thou wilt abide with me long, then will I give thee honour and dignity such as thyself mayst name.’

“Egil took the money, and thanked the king for his gifts and friendly words. Thenceforward Egil began to be cheerful; and then he sang:

‘In sorrow sadly drooping Sank my brows close-knitted; Then found I one who furrows Of forehead could smooth. Fierce-frowning cliffs that shaded My face a king hath lifted With gleam of golden armlet: Gloom leaveth my eyes.’”

Like many of his kind in Iceland and Norway, this fierce man was a poet. Once he saved his life by a poem, and poems he had made as gifts. It was when the old Viking’s life was drawing to its close at his home in Iceland that he composed his most moving lay. His beautiful beloved son was drowned. After the burial Egil rode home, went to his bed-closet, lay down and shut himself in, none daring to speak to him. There he lay, silent, for a day and night. At last his daughter knocks and speaks; he opens. She enters and beguiles him with her devotion. After a while the old man takes food. And at last she prevails on him to make a poem on his son’s death, and assuage his grief. So the song begins, and at length rises clear and strong--perhaps the most heart-breaking of all old Norse poems.[200]

In the portrayal of contrasted characters no other Saga can equal the great Njála, a Saga large and complex, and doubtless composite; for it seems put together out of three stories, in all of which figured the just Njal, although he is the chief personage in only one of them. The story, with its multitude of personages and threefold subject-matter, lacks unity perhaps. Yet the different parts of the Saga successively hold the attention. In the first part, the incomparable Gunnar is the hero; in the second, Njal and his sons engage our interest in their varied characters and common fate. These are great narratives. The third part is perhaps epigonic, excellent and yet an aftermath. Only a reading of this Saga can bring any realization of its power of narrative and character delineation. Its chief personages are as clear as the day. One can almost see the sunlight of Gunnar’s open brow, and certainly can feel his manly heart. The foil against which he is set off is his friend Njal, equally good, utterly different: unwarlike, wise in counsel, a great lawyer, truthful, just, shrewd and foreseeing. Hallgerda, of the long silken hair, is Gunnar’s wife; she has caused the deaths of two husbands already, and will yet prove Gunnar’s bane. Little time passes before she is the enemy of Njal’s high-minded spouse, Bergthora. Then Hallgerda beginning, Bergthora following quick, the two push on their quarrel, instigating in counter-vengeance alternate manslayings, each one a little nearer to the heart and honour of Gunnar and Njal. Yet their friendship is unshaken. For every killing the one atones with the other; and the same blood-money passes to and fro between them.

Gunnar’s friendship with the pacific Njal and his warlike sons endured till Gunnar’s death. That came from enmities first stirred by the thieving of Hallgerda’s thieving thrall. She had ordered it, and in shame Gunnar gave her a slap in the face, the sole act of irritation recorded of this generous, forbearing, peerless Viking, who once remarked: “I would like to know whether I am by so much the less brisk and bold than other men, because I think more of killing men than they?” At a meeting of the Althing he was badgered by his ill-wishers into entering his stallion for a horse-fight, a kind of contest usually ending in a man-fight. Skarphedinn, the most masterful of Njal’s sons, offered to handle Gunnar’s horse for him:

“Wilt thou that I drive thy horse, kinsman Gunnar?”

“I will not have that,” says Gunnar.

“It wouldn’t be amiss, though,” says Skarphedinn; “we are hot-headed on both sides.”

“Ye would say or do little,” says Gunnar, “before a quarrel would spring up; but with me it will take longer, though it will be all the same in the end.”

Naturally the contest ends in trouble. Gunnar’s beaten and enraged opponent seizes his weapons, but is stopped by bystanders. “This crowd wearies me,” said Skarphedinn; “it is far more manly that men should fight it out with weapons.” Gunnar remained quiet, the best swordsman and bowman of them all. But his enemies fatuously pushed on the quarrel; once they rode over him working in the field. So at last he fought, and killed many of them. Then came the suits for slaying, at the Althing. Njal is Gunnar’s counsellor, and atonements are made: Gunnar is to go abroad for three winters, and unless he go, he may be slain by the kinsmen of those he has killed. Gunnar said nothing. Njal adjured him solemnly to go on that journey: “Thou wilt come back with great glory, and live to be an old man, and no man here will then tread on thy heel; but if thou dost not fare away, and so breakest thy atonement, then thou wilt be slain here in the land, and that is ill knowing for those who are thy friends.”

Gunnar said he had no mind to break the atonement, and rode home. A ship is made ready, and Gunnar’s gear is brought down. He rides around and bids farewell to his friends, thanking them for the help they had given him, and returns to his house. The next day he embraces the members of his household, leaps into the saddle, and rides away. But as he is riding down to the sea, his horse trips and throws him. He springs from the ground, and says with his face to the Lithe, his home: “Fair is the Lithe; so fair that it has never seemed to me so fair; the cornfields are white to harvest, and the home mead is mown; and now I will ride back home, and not fare abroad at all.”

So he turns back--to his fate. The following summer at the Althing, his enemies give notice of his outlawry. Njal rides to Gunnar’s home, tells him of it, and offers his sons’ aid, to come and dwell with him: “they will lay down their lives for thy life.”

“I will not,” says Gunnar, “that thy sons should be slain for my sake, and thou hast a right to look for other things from me.”

Njal rode to his home, while Gunnar’s enemies gathered and moved secretly to his house. His hound, struck down with an axe, gives a great howl and expires. Gunnar awoke in his hall, and said: “Thou hast been sorely treated, Sam, my fosterling, and this warning is so meant that our two deaths will not be far apart.” Single-handed, the beset chieftain maintains himself within, killing two of his enemies and wounding eight. At last, wounded, and with his bowstring cut, he turns to his wife Hallgerda: “Give me two locks of thy hair, and do thou and my mother twist them into a bowstring for me.”

“Does aught lie on it?” she says.

“My life lies on it,” he said; “for they will never come to close quarters with me if I can keep them off with my bow.”

“Well,” she says, “now I will call to thy mind that slap on the face which thou gavest me; and I care never a whit whether thou holdest out a long while or a short.”

Then Gunnar sang a stave, and said, “Every one has something to boast of, and I will ask thee no more for this.” He fought on till spent with wounds, and at last they killed him.

Here the Njála may be left with its good men and true and its evil plotters, all so differently shown. It has still to tell the story and fate of Njal’s unbending sons, of Njal himself and his high-tempered dame, who will abide with her spouse in their burning house, which enemies have surrounded and set on fire to destroy those sons. Njal himself was offered safety if he would come out, but he would not.

Perhaps we have been beguiled by their unique literary qualities into dwelling overlong upon the Sagas. These Norse compositions belong to the Middle Ages only in time; for they were uninfluenced either by Christianity or the antique culture, the formative elements of mediaeval development. They are interesting in their aloofness, and also important for our mediaeval theme, because they were the ultimate as well as the most admirable expression of the native Teutonic genius as yet integral, but destined to have mighty part in the composite course of mediaeval growth. More specifically they are the voice of that falcon race which came from the Norseland to stock England with fresh strains of Danish blood, to conquer Normandy, and give new courage to the Celtic-German-Frenchmen, and thence went on to bring its hardihood, war cunning, and keen statecraft to southern Italy and Sicily. In all these countries the Norse nature, supple and pliant, accepted the gifts of new experience, and in return imparted strength of purpose to peoples with whom the Norsemen mingled in marriage as well as war.

This chapter has shown Teutonic faculties still integral and unmodified by Latin Christian influence. Their participation in the processes of mediaeval development will be seen as Anglo-Saxons and Germans become converted to Latin Christianity, and apply themselves to the study of the profane Latinity, to which it opened the way.

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Chapter IX

THE BRINGING OF CHRISTIANITY AND ANTIQUE KNOWLEDGE TO THE NORTHERN PEOPLES

I. IRISH ACTIVITIES; COLUMBANUS OF LUXEUIL.

II. CONVERSION OF THE ENGLISH; THE LEARNING OF BEDE AND ALFRED.

III. GAUL AND GERMANY; FROM CLOVIS TO ST. WINIFRIED-BONIFACE.

The northern peoples, Celts and Teutons for the most part as they are called, came into contact with Roman civilization as the great Republic brought Gaul and Britain under its rule. Since Rome was still pagan when these lands were made provinces, an unchristianized Latinity was grafted upon their predominantly Celtic populations. The second stage, as it were, of this contact between Rome and the north, is represented by that influx of barbarians, mostly Teutonic, which, in both senses of the word, quickened the disruption of the Empire in the fourth and following centuries. The religion called after the name of Christ had then been accepted; and invading Goths, Franks, Burgundians, Lombards, and the rest, were introduced to a somewhat Christianized Latindom. Indeed, in the Latin-Christian combination, the latter was becoming dominant, and was soon to be the active influence in extending even the antique culture. For Christianity, with Latinity in its train, was to project itself outward to subjugate heathen Anglo-Saxons in England, Frisians in the Low Countries, and the unkempt Teutondom which roved east of the Rhine, and was ever pressing southward over the boundaries of former provinces, now reverting to unrest. In past times the assimilating energy of Roman civilization had united western Europe in a common social order. Henceforth Christianity was to be the prime amalgamator, while the survivals of Roman institutions and the remnants of antique culture were to assist in secondary rôles. With Charles Martell, with Pippin, and with Charlemagne, Latin Christianity is the symbol of civilized order, while heathendom and savagery are identical.

I

The conversion of the northern peoples, and their incidental introduction to profane knowledge, wrought upon them deeply; while their own qualities and the conditions of their lives affected their understanding of what they received and their attitude toward the new religion. Obviously the dissemination of Christianity among rude peoples would be unlike that first spreading of the Gospel through the Empire, in the course of which it had been transformed to Greek and Latin Christianity. Italy, Spain, and Gaul made the western region of this primary diffusion of the Faith. Of a distinctly missionary character were the further labours which resulted in the conversion of the fresh masses of Teutons who were breaking into the Roman pale, or were still moving restlessly beyond it. Moreover, between the time of the first diffusion of Christianity within the Empire and that of its missionary extension beyond those now decayed and fallen boundaries, it had been formulated dogmatically, and given ecclesiastical embodiment in a Catholic church into which had passed the conquering and organizing genius of Rome. This finished system was presented to simple peoples, sanctioned by the authority and dowered with the surviving culture of the civilized world. It offered them mightier supernatural aid, nobler knowledge, and a better ordering of life than they had known. The manner and authority of its presentation hastened its acceptance, and also determined the attitude toward it of the new converts and their children for generations. Theirs was to be the attitude of ignorance before recognized wisdom, and that of a docility which revered the manner and form as well as the substance of its lesson. The development of mediaeval Europe was affected by the mode and circumstances of this secondary propagation of Christianity. For centuries the northern peoples were to be held in tutelage to the form and constitution of that which they had received: they continued to revere the patristic sources of Christian doctrines, and to look with awe upon the profane culture accompanying them.

Thus, as under authority, Christianity came to the Teutonic peoples, even to those who, like the Goths, were converted to the Arian creed. Likewise the orthodox belief was brought to the Celtic Britons and Irish as a superior religion associated with superior culture. But the qualities or circumstances of these western Celts reacted more freely upon their form of faith, because Ireland and Britain were the fringe of the world, and Christianity was hardly fixed in dogma and ritual when the conversion at least of Britain began.

Certain phrases of Tertullian indicate that Christianity had made some progress among the Britons by the beginning of the third century. For the next hundred years nothing is known of the British Church, save that it did not suffer from the persecution under Diocletian in 304, and ten years afterwards was represented by three bishops at the Council of Arles. It was orthodox, accepting the creed of Nicaea (A.D. 325) and the date of Easter there fixed. The fourth century seems to have been the period of its prosperity. It was affiliated with the Church of Gaul; nor did these relations cease at once when the Roman legions were withdrawn from Britain in 410. But not many decades later the Saxon invasion began to cut off Britain from the Christian world. After a while certain divergences appear in rite and custom, though not in doctrine. They seem not to have been serious when Gildas wrote in 550. Yet when Augustine came, fifty years later, the Britons celebrated Easter at a different date from that observed by the Roman Catholic Church; for they followed the old computation which Rome had used before adopting the better method of Alexandria. Also the mode of baptism and the tonsure differed from the Roman.

At the close of the sixth century the British Church existed chiefly in Wales, whither the Britons had retreated before the Saxons. Formerly there had been no unwillingness to follow the Church of Rome. But now a long period had elapsed, during which Britain had been left to its misfortunes. The Britons had been raided and harassed; their country invaded; and at last they had been driven from the greater portion of their land. How they hated those Saxon conquerors! And forsooth a Roman mission appears to convert those damned and hateful heathen, and a somewhat haughty summons issues to the expelled or downtrodden people to abandon their own Christian usages for those of the Roman communion, and then join this Roman mission in its saving work among those Saxons whom the Britons had met only at the spear’s point. Love of ancient and familiar customs soured to obstinacy in the face of such demands; a sweeping rejection was returned. Yet to conform to Roman usages and join with Augustine in his mission to the Saxons, was the only way in which the dwindling British Church could link itself to the Christian world, and save its people from exterminating wars. By refusing, it committed suicide.

A refusal to conform, although no refusal to undertake missions to the Saxons, came from the Irish-Scottish Church. As Ireland had never been drawn within the Roman world, its conversion was later than that of Britain. Yet there would seem to have been Christians in Ireland before 431; for in that year, according to an older record quoted by Bede, Palladius, the first bishop (primus episcopus), was sent by Celestine the Roman pontiff “ad Scottos in Christum credentes.”[201] The mission of Palladius does not appear to have been acceptable to the Irish. Some accounts have confused his story with that of Patrick, the “Apostle of Ireland,” whose apostolic glory has not been overthrown by criticism. The more authentic accounts, and above all his own Confession, go far to explain Patrick’s success. His early manhood, passed as a slave in Antrim, gave him understanding of the Irish; and doubtless his was a great missionary capacity and zeal. The natural approach to such a people was through their tribal kings, and Patrick appears to have made his prime onslaught upon Druidical heathendom at Tara, the abode of the high king of Ireland. The earliest accounts do not refer to any authority from Rome. Patrick seems to have acted from spontaneous inspiration; and a like independence characterizes the monastic Christianity which sprang up in Ireland and overleapt the water to Iona, to Christianize Scotland as well as northern Anglo-Saxon heathendom.

Irish monasticism was an ascetically ordered continuance of Irish society. If, like other early western monasticism, it derived suggestions from Syria or Egypt, it was far more the product of Irish temperament, customs, and conditions. One may also find a potent source in the monastic communities alleged to have existed in Ireland in the days of the Druids. Doubtless many members of that caste became Christian monks.

The noblest passion of Irish monastic Christianity was to peregrinare for the sake of Christ, and spread the Faith among the heathen; the most interesting episodes of its history are the wanderings and missionary labours and foundations of its leaders. The careers of Columba and Columbanus afford grandiose examples. Something has been said of the former. The monastery which he founded on the Island of Iona was the Faith’s fountainhead for Scotland and the Saxon north of England in the sixth and seventh centuries. About the time of Columba’s birth, men from Dalriada on the north coast of Ireland crossed the water to found another Dalriada in the present Argyleshire, and transfer the name of Scotia (Ireland) to Scotland. When Columba landed at Iona, these settlers were hard pressed by the heathen Picts under King Brude or Bridius. Accompanied by two Pictish Christians, he penetrated to Brude’s dwelling, near the modern Inverness, converted that monarch in 565, and averted the overthrow of Dalriada. For the next thirty years Columba and his monks did not cease from their labours; numbers of monasteries were founded, daughters of Iona; and great parts of Scotland became Christian at least in name. The supreme authority was the Abbot of Iona with his council of monks; “bishops” performed their functions under him. Early in the seventh century, St. Aidan was ordained bishop in Iona and sent to convert the Anglo-Saxons of Northumberland. The story of the Irish Church in the north is one of effective mission work, but unsuccessful organization, wherein it was inferior to the Roman Church. Its representatives suffered defeat at the Synod of Whitby in 664. Fifty years afterward Iona gave up its separate usages and accepted the Roman Easter.[202]

The missionary labours of the Irish were not confined to Great Britain, but extended far and wide through the west of Europe. In the sixth and seventh centuries, Irish monasteries were founded in Austrasia and Burgundy, Italy, Switzerland, Bavaria; they were established among Frisians, Saxons, Alemanni. And as centres of Latin education as well as Christianity, the names of Bobbio and St. Gall will occur to every one. Of these, the first directly and the second through a disciple were due to Columbanus. With him we enter the larger avenues of Irish missions to the heathen, the semi-heathen, and the lax, and upon the question of their efficacy in the preservation of Latin education throughout the rent and driven fragments of the western Roman Empire. The story of Columban’s life is illuminating and amusing.[203]

He was born in Leinster. While yet a boy he felt the conflict between fleshly lusts and that counter-ascetic passion which throughout the Christian world was drawing thousands into monasteries. Asceticism, with desire for knowledge, won the victory, and the youth entered the monastery of Bangor, in the extreme north-east of Ireland. There he passed years of labour, study, and self-mortification. At length the pilgrim mission-passion came upon him (coepit peregrinationem desiderare) and his importunity overcame the abbot’s reluctance to let him depart. Twelve disciples are said to have followed him across the water to the shores of Britain. There they hesitated in anxious doubt, till it was decided to cross to Gaul.

This was about the year 590. Columban’s austere and commanding form, his fearlessness, his quick and fiery tongue, impressed the people among whom he came. Reports of his holiness spread; multitudes sought his blessing. He traversed the country, preaching and setting his own stern example, until he reached the land of the Burgundians, where Gontran, a grandson of Clovis, reigned. Well received by this ruler, Columban established himself in an old castle. His disciples grew in numbers, and after a while Gontran granted him an extensive Roman structure called Luxovium (Luxeuil) situated at the confines of the Burgundian and Austrasian kingdoms. Columban converted this into a monastery, and it soon included many noble Franks and Burgundians among its monks. For them he composed a monastic regula, stern and cruel in its penalties of many stripes imposed for trivial faults. “Whoever may wish to know his strenuousness (strenuitatem) will find it in his precepts,” writes the monk Jonas, who had lived under him.

The strenuousness of this masterful and overbearing man was displayed in his controversy with the Gallican clergy, upon whom he tried to impose the Easter day observed by the Celtic Church in the British Isles. In his letter to the Gallican synod, he points out their errors, and lectures them on their Christian duties, asking pardon at the end for his loquacity and presumption. Years afterwards, entering upon another controversy, he wrote an extraordinary letter to Pope Boniface IV. The superscription is Hibernian: “To the most beautiful head of all the churches of entire Europe, the most sweet pope, the most high president, the most reverent investigator: O marvellous! mirum dictu! nova res! rara avis!--that the lowest to the loftiest, the clown to the polite, the stammerer to the prince of eloquence, the stranger to the son of the house, the last to the first, that the Wood-pigeon (Palumbus) should dare to write to Father Boniface!” Whereupon this Wood-pigeon writes a long letter in which belligerent expostulation alternates with self-debasement. He dubs himself “garrulus, presumptuosus, homunculus vilissimae qualitatis,” who caps his impudence by writing unrequested. He implores pardon for his harsh and too biting speech, while he deplores--to him who sat thereon--the infamia of Peter’s Seat, and shrills to the Pope to watch: “Vigila itaque, quaeso, papa, vigila; et iterum dico: vigila”; and he marvels at the Pope’s lethal sleep.

One who thus berated pope and clergy might be censorious of princes. Gontran died. After various dynastic troubles, the Burgundian land came under the rule nominally of young Theuderic, but actually of his imperious grandmother, the famous Brunhilde. In order that no queen-wife’s power should supplant her own, she encouraged her grandson to content himself with mistresses. The youth stood in awe of the stern old figure ruling at Luxeuil, who more than once reproved him for not wedding a lawful queen. It happened one day when Columban was at Brunhilde’s residence that she brought out Theuderic’s various sons for him to bless. “Never shall sceptre be held by this brothel-brood,” said he.

Henceforth it was war between these two: Theuderic was the pivot of the storm; the one worked upon his fears, the other played upon his lusts. Brunhilde prevailed. She incited the king to insist that Luxeuil be made open to all, and with his retinue to push his way into the monastery. The saint withstood him fiercely, and prophesied his ruin. The king drew back; the saint followed, heaping reproaches on him, till the young king said with some self-restraint: “You hope to win the crown of martyrdom through me. But I am not a lunatic, to commit such a crime. I have a better plan: since you won’t fall in with the ways of men of the world, you shall go back by the road you came.”

So the king sent his retainers to seize the stubborn saint. They took him as a prisoner to Besançon. He escaped, and hurried back to Luxeuil. Again the king sent, this time a count with soldiers, to drive him from the land. They feared the sacrilege of laying hands on the old man. In the church, surrounded by his monks praying and singing psalms, he awaited them. “O man of God,” cried the count, “we beseech thee to obey the royal command, and take thy way to the place from which thou earnest.” “Nay, I will rather please my Creator, by abiding here,” returned the saint. The count retired, leaving a few rough soldiers to carry out the king’s will. These, still fearing to use violence, begged the saint to take pity on them, unjustly burdened with this evil task--to disobey their orders meant their death. The saint reiterates his determination to abide, till they fall on their knees, cling to his robe, and with groans implore his pardon for the crime they must execute.

From pity the saint yields at last, and a company of the king’s men make ready and escort him from the kingdom westward toward Brittany. Many miracles mark the journey. They reach the Loire, and embark on it. Proceeding down the river they come to Tours, where the saint asks to be allowed to land and worship at St. Martin’s shrine. The leader bids the rowers keep the middle of the stream and row on. But the boat resistlessly made its way to the landing-place. Columban passed the night at the shrine, and the next day was hospitably entertained by the bishop, who inquired why he was returning to his native land. “The dog Theuderic has driven me from my brethren,” answered the saint. At last Nantes was reached near the mouth of the Loire, where the vessel was waiting to carry the exile back to Ireland. Columban wrote a letter to his monks, in which he poured forth his love to them with much advice as to their future conduct. The letter is filled with grief--suppressed lest it unman his beloved children. “While I write, the messenger comes to say that the ship is ready to bear me, unwilling, to my country. But there is no guard to prevent my escape, and these people even seem to wish it.”

The letter ends, but not the story. Columban did not sail for Ireland. Jonas says that the vessel was miraculously impeded, and that then Columban was permitted to go whither he would. So the dauntless old man travelled back from the sea, and went to the Neustrian Court, the people along the way bringing him their children to bless. He did not rest in Neustria, for the desire was upon him to preach to the heathen. Making his way to the Rhine, he embarked near Mainz, ascended the river, and at last established himself, with his disciples, upon the lake of Constance. There they preached to the heathen, and threw their idols into the lake. He had the thought to preach to the Wends, but this was not to be.

The time soon came when all Austrasia fell into the hands of Brunhilde and Theuderic, and Columbanus decided to cross over into northern Italy, breaking out in anger at his disciple Gall, who was too sick to go with him. With other disciples he made the arduous journey, and reached the land of the Lombards. King Agilulf made him a gift of Bobbio, lying in a gorge of the Apennines near Genoa, and there he founded the monastery which long was to be a stronghold of letters. For himself, his career was well-nigh run; he retired to a solitary spot on the banks of the river Trebbia, where he passed away, being, apparently, some seventy years of age.

It may seem surprising that this strenuous ascetic should occasionally have occupied a leisure hour writing Latin poems in imitation of the antique. There still exists such an effusion to a friend:

“Accipe, quaeso, Nunc bipedali Condita versu Carminulorum Munera parva.”

The verses consist mainly of classic allusions and advice of an antique rather than a Christian flavour: the wise will cease to add coin to coin, and will despise wealth, but not the pastime of such verse as the

“Inclyta Vates Nomine Sappho”

was wont to make. “Now, dear Fedolius, quit learned numbers and accept our squibs--frivola nostra. I have dictated them oppressed with pain and old age: ‘Vive, vale, laetus, tristisque memento senectae.’” The last is a pagan reminiscence, which the saint’s Christian soul may not have deeply felt. But the poem shows the saint’s classic training, which probably was exceptional. For there is no evidence of like knowledge in any Irishman before him; and after his time, in the seventh century, or the eighth, Latin education in Ireland was confined to a few monastic centres. A small minority studied the profanities, sometimes because they liked them, but oftener as the means of proficiency in sacred learning.

The Irish had cleverness, facility, ardour, and energy. They did much for the dissemination of Christianity and letters. Their deficiency was lack of organization; and they had but little capacity for ordered discipline humbly and obediently accepted from others. Consequently, when the period of evangelization was past in western Europe, and organization was needed, with united and persistent effort for order, the Irish ceased to lead or even to keep pace with those to whom once they had brought the Gospel. In Anglo-Saxon England and on the Carolingian continent they became strains of influence handed on. This was the fortune which overtook them as illuminators of manuscripts and preservers of knowledge. Their emotional traits, moreover, entered the larger currents of mediaeval feeling and imagination. Strains of the Irish, or of a kindred Celtic temperament passed on into such “Breton” matters as the Tristan story, wherein love is passion unrestrained, and is more distinctly out of relationship with ethical considerations than, for example, the equally adulterous tale of Lancelot and Guinevere.[204]

II

The Saxon invasions of the fifth and sixth centuries drove Christianity and letters from the land where the semi-Romanized Britons and their church had flourished. To reconvert and instruct anew a relapsed heathen country was the task which Gregory the Great laid on the willing Augustine. The story of that famous mission (A.D. 597) need not be told;[205] but we may note the manner of the presentation of Christianity to the heathen Saxons, and the temper of its reception. Most impressive was this bringing of the Faith. Augustine and his band of monks came as a stately embassy from Rome, the traditionary centre of imperial and spiritual power. Their coming was a solemn call to the English to associate themselves with all that was most august and authoritative in heaven and earth. According to Bede, Augustine sent a messenger to Ethelbert, the Kentish king, to announce that he had come from Rome bearing the best of messages, and would assure to such as hearkened, eternal joys in heaven and dominion without end with the living and true God. To Ethelbert, whose kingdom lay at the edge of the great world, the message came from this world’s sovereign pontiff, who in some awful way represented its almighty God, and had authority to admit to His kingdom. He was not ignorant of what lay within the hand of Rome to give. His wife was a Catholic Christian, daughter of a Frankish king, and had her own ministering bishop. Doubtless the queen had spoken with her lord. Still Ethelbert feared the spell-craft of this awe-inspiring embassy, and would meet Augustine only under the open sky. Augustine came to the meeting, a silver cross borne before him as a banner, and the pictured image of Christ, his monks singing litanies and loudly supplicating their Lord for the king’s and their own salvation. Knowledge, authority, supernatural power, were represented here. And how could the king fail to be struck by the nobility of Augustine’s Gospel message, by its clear assurance, its love and terror,[206] so overwhelming and convincing, so far outsoaring Ethelbert’s heathen religion? To be sure, in Christian love and forgiveness lay some reversal of Saxon morality, for instance of the duty of revenge. But this was not prominent in the Christianity of the day; and experience was to show that only in isolated instances did this teaching impede the acceptance of the Gospel.[207]

Ethelbert spoke these missionaries fair; accorded them a habitation in Canterbury with the privilege of celebrating their Christian rites and preaching to his people. There they abode, zealous in vigils and fastings, and preaching the word of life. Certain heathen men were converted, then the king, and then his folk in multitudes--the usual way. Under the direction of Gregory, Augustine proceeded with that combination of insistence, dignity, and tolerance, so well understood in the Roman Church. There was insistence upon the main doctrines and requirements of the Faith--upon the Roman Easter day and baptism, as against the practices of the British Church. Tolerance was shown respecting heathen fanes and sacrificial feastings; the fanes should be reconsecrated as Christian churches; the feasts should be continued in honour of the true God.[208]

Besides zeal and knowledge and authority, miracles advanced Augustine’s enterprise. To eliminate by any sweeping negation the miraculous element from the causes of success of such a mission is to close the eyes to the situation. All men expected miracles; Gregory who sent Augustine was infatuated with them. Augustine performed them, or believed he did, and others believed it too. Throughout these centuries, and indeed late into the mediaeval period, the power and habit of working miracles constituted sainthood in the hermit or the monk, thereby singled out as the special instrument of God’s will or the Virgin’s kindness. Of course miracles were ascribed to the great missionary apostles like Augustine or Boniface; and this conviction brought many conversions.

Among the heathen English about to be converted, there was diversity of view and mood as to the Faith. They stood in awe of these newcomers from Rome, fearing their spell-craft. From their old religion they had sought earthly victory and prosperity; and some had found it of uncertain aid. “See, king, how this matter stands,” says Coifi, at the Northumbrian Witenagemot held by Edwin to decide as to the new religion: “I have learned of a certainty that there is no virtue or utility whatever in that religion which we have been following. None of your thanes has slaved in the worship of our gods more zealously than I. Yet many have had greater rewards and dignities from you, and in every way have prospered more. Were the gods worth anything, they would wish rather to aid me, who have been so zealous in serving them. So if these new teachings are better and stronger, let us accept them at once.”[209] Coifi expressed the common motives of converts of all nations from the time of Constantine. No better thought of Christian expediency had inspired Gregory of Tours’s story of Clovis’s career; and Bede in no way condemns Coifi’s verba prudentiae, as he terms them. Naturally in times of adversity such converts were quick to abandon their new religion, proved ineffectual.[210]

Among these Angles of Northumberland, however, finer souls were looking for light and certitude. Such a one was that thane who followed Coifi with the wonderful illustration of man’s mortal need of enlightenment, the thane for whom life was as the swallow flying through the warmed and lighted hall, from the dark cold into the dark cold: “So this life of men comes into sight for a little; we are ignorant of what shall follow or what may have preceded. If this new doctrine offers anything more certain, I think we should follow it.” The heathen poetry had given varied voice to this contemplative melancholy so wont to dwell on life’s untoward changes; and there was ghostly evidence of the other world before the coming of the Roman monks. Now, as those monks came with authority from the traditionary home of ghostly lore, why question their knowledge of the life beyond the grave? Many Anglo-Saxons were prepared to fix their gaze upon a life to come and to let their fancies fill with visions of the great last severance unto heaven and hell. When once impressed by the monastic Christianity[211] of the Roman, or the Irish, mission, they were quick to throw themselves into the ascetic life which most surely opened heaven’s doors. So many a noble thane became an anchorite or a monk, many a noble dame became a nun; and Saxon kings forsook their kingdoms for the cloister: “Cenred, who for some time had reigned most nobly in Mercia, still more nobly abandoned his sceptre. For he came to Rome, and there was tonsured and made a monk at the church of the Apostles, and continued in prayers and fastings and almsgiving until his last day.”[212]

As might be expected, the re-expression of Christianity in Anglo-Saxon writings was martial and emotional. A martial tone pervades the epic paraphrases of Scripture, the Anglo-Saxon Genesis for example. On the other hand, adaptations of devotional Latin compositions[213] evince a realization of Christian feeling and prevalent ascetic sentiments. The “elegiac” Anglo-Saxon feeling seems to reach its height in a more original composition, the Christ of Cynewulf, while the emotional fervour coming with Christianity is disclosed in Bede’s account of the inspiration which fell upon the cowherd Cædmon, in St. Hilda’s monastery of Whitby, to sing the story of creation.[214] A pervasive monastic atmosphere also surrounds the visions of hell and purgatory, which were to continue so typically characteristic of monastic Christianity.[215]

What knowledge, sacred and profane, came to the Anglo-Saxons with Christianity? Quite properly learned were Augustine and the other organizers of the English Church. Two generations after him, the Greek monk Theodore was sent by the Pope to become Archbishop of Canterbury, complete Augustine’s work, and instruct the English monks and clergy. Theodore was accompanied by his friend Hadrian, as learned as himself. Their labours finally established Roman Christianity in England. The two drew about them a band of students, and formed at Canterbury a school of sacred learning, where liberal studies were conducted by these foreigners with a knowledge and intelligence novel in Great Britain. In the north, Benedict Biscop, a Northumbrian, promoted the ends of Roman Catholicism and learning by establishing the monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow under the monastic regula of St. Benedict of Nursia, as modified by the practices of continental monasteries in the seventh century. He had been in Italy, and brought thence many books. It was among these books that Bede grew up at Jarrow.

Thus strong currents of Roman ecclesiasticism and liberal knowledge reached England. On the other hand, Irish monastic Christianity had already made its entry in the south-western part of Great Britain, and with greater strength established itself in the north, converting multitudes to the Faith and instructing such as would learn. The Irish teaching had been eagerly received by those groups of Anglo-Saxons who henceforth were to prosecute their studies with the aid of the further knowledge and discipline brought from the Continent by Theodore. Some of them had even journeyed to Ireland to study.

From this dual source was drawn the education of Aldhelm. He was born in Wessex about the year 650, and was nephew of the powerful King Ini. He became abbot of Malmesbury in 675. An Irish monk was his first teacher; his second, the learned Hadrian. From the two he received a broader education than any Anglo-Saxon had possessed before him. Always holding in view the perfecting of his sacred knowledge, he studied grammar and kindred topics, produced treatises himself, and as a Catholic student and teacher was a true forerunner of the greatest scholar among his younger contemporaries, Bede.[216]

Bede the Venerable, and we may add the still beloved, was Aldhelm’s junior by some twenty-five years. He was born in 673 and died in 735. He passed his whole life reading, teaching, and writing in the Cloister of Jarrow near where he was born, and not far from where, beneath the “Galilee” of Durham Cathedral, his bones have long reposed. Back of him was the double tradition of learning, the Irish and the Graeco-Roman. Through a long life of pious study, Bede drew into his mind, and incorporated in his writings, practically the total sum of knowledge then accessible in western Europe. He stands between the great Latin transmitters (Boëthius, Cassiodorus, Gregory and Isidore) and the epoch known as the Carolingian. He was himself a transmitter of knowledge to that later time. If in spirit, race, epoch and circumstances, Aldhelm was Bede’s direct forerunner, Bede had also a notable predecessor in Isidore. The writings of the Spanish bishop contributed substance and suggestions of plan and method to the Anglo-Saxon monk, whose works embrace practically the same series of topics as Isidore’s, whose intellectual interests also, and attitude toward the Church Fathers, appear the same. But Bede was the more genial personality, and could not help imbuing his compositions with something from his own temperament. Even in his Commentaries upon the books of Scripture, which were made up principally of borrowed allegorical interpretations, there is common sense and some endeavour to present the actual meaning and situation.[217] But he disclaimed originality, as he says in the preface to his Commentary on the Hexaemeron, addressed to Bishop Acca of Hexham:

“Concerning the beginning of Genesis where the creation of the world is described, many have said much, and have left to posterity monuments of their talents. Among these, as far as our feebleness can learn, we may distinguish Basil of Caesarea (whom Eustathius translated from Greek to Latin), Ambrose of Milan, and Augustine, Bishop of Hippo. Of whom the first-named in nine books, the second following his footprints in six books, the third in twelve books and also in two others directed against the Manichaeans, shed floods of salutary doctrine for their readers; and in them the promise of the Truth was fulfilled: ‘Whoso believeth in me, as the Scripture saith, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water....’ But since these works are so great that only the rich may own them, and so profound that they may be fathomed only by the learned, your holiness has seen fit to lay on us the task of plucking from them all, as from the sweetest wide-flowering fields of paradise, what might seem to meet the needs of weaklings.”[218]

Bede was also a lovely story-teller. His literary charm and power appear in his Life of St. Cuthbert, and still more in his ever-famous Ecclesiastical History of the English People, so warm with love of mankind, and presenting so wonderful a series of dramatic stories animate with vital motive and the colour of incident and circumstance. Midway between the spontaneous genius of this work and the copied Scripture Commentary, stand Bede’s grammatical, metrical, and scientific compositions, compiled with studious zeal. They evince a broad interest in scholarship and in nature. Still, neither material nor method was original. For instance, his De rerum natura took its plan and much of its substance from Isidore’s work of the same name. Bede has, however, put in further matter and made his work less of a mere shell of words than Isidore’s. For he is interested in connecting natural occurrences with their causes, stating, for example, that the tides depend on the moon.[219] In this work as in his other opera didascalica, like the De temporum ratione and his learned De arte metrica,[220] he shows himself a more intelligent student than his Spanish predecessor. Yet he drew everything from some written source.

One need not wonder at the voluminousness of Bede’s literary productions.[221] Many of the writings emanating from monasteries are transcriptions rather than compositions. The circumstance that books, i.e. manuscripts, were rare and costly was an impelling motive. Isidore and Bede made systematic compilations for general use. They and their congeners would also make extracts from manuscripts, of which they might have but the loan, or from unique codices in order to preserve the contents. Such notes or excerpts might have the value of a treatise, and might be preserved and in turn transcribed as a distinct work. Yet whether made by a Bede or by a lesser man, they represent mainly the labour of a copyist.

Bede’s writings were all in Latin, and were intended for the instruction of monks. They played a most important rôle in the transmission of learning, sacred and profane, in Latin form. For its still more popular diffusion, translations into the vernacular might be demanded. Such at all events were made of Scripture; and perhaps a century and a half after Bede’s death, the translation of edifying Latin books was undertaken by the best of Saxon kings. King Alfred was born in 849 and closed his eyes in 901. In the midst of other royal labours he set himself the task of placing before his people, or at least his clergy, Anglo-Saxon versions of some of the then most highly regarded volumes of instruction. The wise Pastoral Care of Gregory the Great; his Dialogues, less wise according to our views; the Histories of Orosius[222] and Bede; and that philosophic vade-mecum of the Middle Ages, the De consolatione philosophiae of Boëthius. Of these, Alfred translated the Pastoral Care and the De consolatione, also Orosius; the other works appear to have been translated at his direction.[223] Alfred’s translations contain his own reflections and other matter not in the originals. In rendering Orosius, he rewrote the geographical introduction, inserted a description of Germany and accounts of northern Europe given by two of his Norse liegemen, Ohthere and Wulfstan. The alertness of his mind is shown by this insertion of the latest geographical knowledge. Other and more personal passages will disclose his purpose, and illustrate the manner in which his Christianized intelligence worked upon trains of thought suggested perhaps by the Latin writing before him.

Alfred’s often-quoted preface to Gregory’s Pastoral Care tells his reasons for undertaking its translation, and sets forth the condition of England. He speaks of the “wise men there formerly were throughout England, both of sacred and secular orders,” and of their zeal in learning and teaching and serving God; and how foreigners came to the land in search of wisdom and instruction. But “when I came to the throne,” so general was the decay of learning in England “that there were very few on this side of the Humber who could understand their rituals in English, or translate a letter from Latin into English; and I believe there were not many beyond the Humber.... Thanks be to God Almighty that we have any teachers among us now.” Alfred therefore commands the bishop, to whom he is now sending the copy, to disengage himself as often as possible from worldly matters, and apply the Christian wisdom God has given him. “I remembered also how I saw, before it had been all ravaged and burnt, how the churches throughout the whole of England stood filled with treasures and books, and there was also a great multitude of God’s servants, but they had very little knowledge of books, for they could not understand anything of them because they were not written in their own language.” It therefore seemed wise to me “to translate some books which are most needful for all men to know, into the language which we can all understand, and ... that all the youth now in England of free men, who are rich enough to be able to devote themselves to it, be set to learn so long as they are not fit for any other occupation, until that they are well able to read English writing: and let those be afterwards taught more in the Latin language who are to continue learning and be promoted to a higher rank.”

In the De consolatione of Boëthius, the antique pagan thought, softened with human sympathy, and in need of such comfort and assurance as was offered by the Faith, is found occupied with questions (like that of free-will) prominent in Christianity. The book presented meditations which were so consonant with Christian views that its Christian readers from Alfred to Dante mistook them for Christian sentiments, and added further meanings naturally occurring to the Christian soul. Alfred’s reflections in his version of the De consolatione are very personal to Saxon Alfred and show how he took his life and kingly office:

“O Philosophy, thou knowest that I never greatly delighted in covetousness and the possession of earthly power, nor longed for this authority”--so far Boëthius,[224] and now Alfred himself: “but I desired instruments and materials to carry out the work I was set to do, which was that I should virtuously and fittingly administer the authority committed unto me. Now no man, as thou knowest, can get full play for his natural gifts, nor conduct and administer government, unless he hath fit tools, and the raw material to work upon. By material I mean that which is necessary to the exercise of natural powers; thus a king’s raw material and instruments of rule are a well-peopled land, and he must have men of prayer, men of war, and men of work. As thou knowest, without these tools no king may display his special talent. Further, for his materials he must have means of support for the three classes above spoken of, which are his instruments; and these means are land to dwell in, gifts, weapons, meat, ale, clothing, and what else soever the three classes need. Without these means he cannot keep his tools in order, and without these tools he cannot perform any of the tasks entrusted to him. [I have desired material for the exercise of government that my talents and my power might not be forgotten and hidden away[225]] for every good gift and every power soon groweth old and is no more heard of, if Wisdom be not in them. Without Wisdom no faculty can be fully brought out, for whatsoever is done unwisely can never be accounted as skill. To be brief, I may say that it has ever been my desire to live honourably while I was alive, and after my death to leave to them that should come after me my memory in good works.”

The last sentence needs no comment. But those preceding it will be illuminated by another passage inserted by Alfred:

“Therefore it is that a man never by his authority attains to virtue and excellence, but by reason of his virtue and excellence he attains to authority and power. No man is better for his power, but for his skill he is good, if he is good, and for his skill he is worthy of power, if he is worthy of it. Study Wisdom then, and, when ye have learned it, contemn it not, for I tell you that by its means ye may without fail attain to power, yea, even though not desiring it.”

Perhaps from the teaching of his own life Alfred knew, as well as Boëthius, the toil and sadness of power: “Though their false hope and imagination lead fools to believe that power and wealth are the highest good, yet it is quite otherwise.” And again, speaking of friendship, he says that Nature unites friends in love, “but by means of these worldly goods and the wealth of this life we oftener make foes than friends,” which doubtless Alfred had discovered, as well as Marcus Aurelius. Perhaps the Saxon king knew wherein lay peace, as he makes Wisdom say: “When I rise aloft with these my servants, we look down upon the storms of this world, even as the eagle does when he soars in stormy weather above the clouds, where no storm can harm him.” The king was thinking of man’s peace with God.[226]

III

Christianity came to the cities of Provincia and the chief Roman colonies of Gaul (Lyons, Trèves, Cologne) in the course of the original dissemination of the Faith. There were Roman, Greek, or Syrian Christians in these towns before the end of the second century. Early Gallic Christianity spoke Greek and Latin, and its rather slow advance was due partly to the tenacity of Celtic speech even in the cities; while outside of them heathen speech and practices were scarcely touched. Through Gaul and along the Rhine, the country in the main continued heathen in religion and Celtic or Germanic in speech during the fifth century.[227] The complete Latinizing of Gaul and the conversion of its rural population proceeded from the urban churches, and from the labours and miracles of anchorites and monks. In contrast with the decay of the municipal governments, the urban churches continued living institutions. Their bishops usually were men of energy. The episcopal office was elective, yet likely to remain in the same influential family, and the bishop, the leading man in the town, might be its virtual ruler. He represented Christianity and Latin culture, and when Roman officials yielded to Teutonic conquerors, the bishop was left as the spokesman of the Gallo-Roman population. Thus the Gallic churches, far from succumbing before the barbarian invasions, rescued and appropriated the derelict functions of government, and emerged aggrandized from the political and racial revolution. In the year 400 the city of Trèves was Latin in speech and Roman in government; in the year 500 the Roman government had been overthrown, and a German-speaking population predominated in what was left of the city, but the church went on unchanged in constitution and in language.

There was constant intercourse between Teutons and Romans along the northern boundaries of the Empire. In the Danube regions many of the former were converted. The Goths, through the labours of Ulfilas and others in the fourth century, became Arian Christians; their conversion was of moment to themselves and others, but destiny severed the continuity of its import for history. In the provinces of Rhaetia, Vindelicia, and Noricum there were Christians, some of them Teutons, as early as the time of Constantine. For the next century, when disruption of the Empire was in full progress, the Life of St. Severinus by Eugippius, his disciple, gives the picture.[228] Bits and fragments of Roman government endured; letters were not quite quenched; but Alemanni and Rugii moved as they would, marauding, besieging, and destroying. Everywhere there was uncertainty and confusion, and yet civilized Roman provincials still clung to a driven life. Through this mountain land, the monk Severinus went here and there, barefoot even in ice and snow, austere, commanding. He encouraged the townspeople to maintain decency and courage; he turned the barbarians from ruthlessness. Clear-seeing, capable, his energies shielded the land. He was an ascetic who took nothing for himself, and won men to the Faith by this guarantee of disinterestedness. So he shepherded his harrowed flocks, and more than once averted their destruction. But his arm was too feeble; after his death even his cell was plundered, while the confusion swept on.

Such were fifth-century conditions on the northern boundary of what had been the Empire, conditions amid which the culture and doctrine germane to Christianity went down, although the Faith still glimmered here and there. Farther to the west, the Burgundians had gained a domicile in a land sparsely tenanted by Roman and Catholic provincials. Here on the left bank of the Rhine, in the neighbourhood of Worms, this people accepted the Christianity which they found. Afterwards, in the year 430, their heathen kin on the right bank were baptized as a people; for they hoped, through aid from fellow-Christians, to ward off the destruction threatening from the Huns. Yet five years later they were overthrown by those savage riders--an overthrow out of which was to rise the Nibelungenlied. The Burgundian remnants found a new home by the Rhone.

The Christianity of Burgundians and Goths was subject to the vicissitudes of their fortunes. The permanent conversion to Catholicism of the great masses of the Germans commenced somewhat later, when the turmoil of fifth-century migration was settling into contests for homes destined to prove more lasting. Its beginning may be dated from the baptism of Clovis as a Catholic on Christmas Day in the year 496. His retainers followed him into the consecrated water. By reason of the king’s genius for war and politics, this event was the beginning of the final triumph of Catholicism.[229]

The baptism of Clovis and his followers was typical of early Teutonic conversions. King and tribal following acted as a unit. Christ gave victory; He was the mightier God: such was the crude form of the motive. Its larger scope was grasped by the far-seeing king. Believing in supernatural aid, he desired it from the mightiest source, which, he was persuaded, was the Christian God. It was to be obtained by such homage to Christ as heretofore the king had paid to Wuotan. Any doubt as to the sincerity of his belief presupposes a point of view impossible for a fifth-century barbarian. But to this sincere expectation of Christ’s aid, to be gained through baptism, Clovis joined careful consideration of the political situation. Catholic Christianity was the religion of the Gallo-Roman population forming the greater part of the Frankish king’s subjects. He knew of Arian peoples; probably attempts had been made to draw him to their side. They constituted the great Teutonic powers at the time; for Theodoric was the monarch of Italy, and Arian Teutons ruled in southern France, in Spain, and Africa. Nevertheless, it was of paramount importance for the establishment of his kingdom that there should be no schism between the Franks and the Gallo-Roman people who exceeded them in number and in wealth and culture. Catholic influences surrounded Clovis; Catholic interests represented the wealth and prosperity of his dominions, and when he decided to be baptized he did not waver between the Catholic and the Arian belief. Thus the king attached to himself the civilized population of his realm. A common Catholic faith quickly obliterated racial antagonism within its boundaries and gained him the support of Catholic church and people in the kingdoms of his Arian rivals.

So under Clovis and his successors the Gallic Church became the Frankish Church, and flourished exceedingly. Tithes were paid it, and gifts were made by princes and nobles. Its lands increased, carrying their dependent population, until the Church became the largest landholder in the Merovingian realm. It was governed by Roman law, but the clergy were subject to the penal jurisdiction of the king.[230] It was he that summoned councils, although he did not vote, and left ecclesiastical matters to the bishops, who were his liegemen and appointees.[231] They recognized the king’s virtually unlimited authority, which they patterned on the absolute power of the Roman Emperors and the prerogatives of David and Solomon. In fine, the Merovingian Church was a national church, subject to the king. Until the seventh century it was quite independent of the Bishop of Rome.[232]

It is common knowledge--especially vivid with readers of the famous Historia Francorum of Gregory of Tours--that ethically viewed, the conduct of the Merovingian house was cruel, treacherous, and abominable; and likewise the conduct of their vassals. Frankish kings and nobles appear as men no longer bound by the ethics of the heathenism which they had foresworn, and as yet untouched by the moral precepts of the Christian code. Not Christianity, however, but contact with decadent civilization, and rapid increase of power and wealth, had loosened their heathen standards. Merovingian history leaves a unique impression of a line of rulers and dependents among whom mercy and truth and chastity were unknown. The elements of sixth-century Christianity which the Franks made their own were its rites, its magic, and its miracles, and its expectation of the aid of a God and His saints duly solicited. Here the customs of heathenism were a preparation, or themselves passed into Frankish Christianity. Nevertheless, the general character of Christian observances--baptism, the mass, prayer, the sign of the cross, the rites at marriage, sickness, and death--could not fail to impress a certain tone and demeanour upon the people, and impart some sense of human sinfulness. The general conviction that patent and outrageous crime would bring divine vengeance gained point and power from the terrific doctrine of the Day of Wrath, and the system of penances imposed by the clergy proved an excellent discipline with these rough Christians. Many bishops and priests were little better than the nobles, yet the Church preserved Christian belief and did something to improve morality. Everywhere the monk was the most striking object-lesson, with his austerities, his terror-stricken sense of sinfulness, and conviction of the peril of the world. No martial, grasping bishop, no dissolute and treacherous priest denied that the monk’s was the ideal Christian life; and the laity stood in awe, or expectation, of the wonder-working power of his asceticism. Indeed monasticism was becoming popular, and the Merovingian period witnessed the foundation of numberless cloisters.

In the fifth and through part of the sixth century the Gallic monastery of Lerins, on an island in the Mediterranean, near Fréjus, was a chief source of ascetic and Christian influence for Gaul. Its monks took their precepts from Syria and Egypt, and some of the zeal of St. Martin of Tours had fallen on their shoulders. As the energy of this community declined, Columban’s monastery at Luxeuil succeeded to the work. The example of Columbanus, his precepts and severe monastic discipline, proved a source of ascetic and missionary zeal. With him or following in his steps came other Irishmen; and heathen German lands soon looked upon the walls of many an Irish monastery. But Columbanus failed, and all the Irish failed, in obedience, order, and effective organization. His own monastic regula, with all its rigour, contained no provisions for the government of the monasteries. Without due ordering, bands of monks dwelling in heathen communities would waver in their practices and even show a lack of doctrinal stability. Sooner or later they were certain to become confused in habit and contaminated with the manners of the surrounding people. These Irish monasteries omitted to educate a native priesthood to perpetuate their Christian teaching. The best of them, St. Gall (founded by Columbanus’s disciple Gallus), might be a citadel of culture, and convert the people about it, through the talents and character of its founder and his successors. But other monasteries, farther to the east, were tainted with heathen practices. In fine, it was not for the Irish to convert the great heathen German land, or effect a lasting reform of existing churches there or in Gaul.

The labours of Anglo-Saxons were fraught with more enduring results. Through their abilities and zeal, their faculty of organization and capacity of submitting to authority, through their consequent harmony with Rome and the support given them by the Frankish monarchy, these Anglo-Saxons converted many German tribes, established permanent churches among them, reorganized the heterogeneous Christianity which they found in certain German lands, and were a moving factor in the reform of the Frankish Church. The most striking features of their work on the Continent were diocesan organization, the training of a native clergy, the establishment of monasteries under the Benedictine constitution, union with Rome, obedience to her commands, strenuous conformity to her law, and insistence on like conformity in others. Their presentation of Christianity was orthodox, regular, and authoritative.

Some of these features appear in the work of the Saxon Willibrord among the Frisians, but are more largely illustrated in the career of St. Boniface-Winfried. Willibrord moved under the authority of Rome; the varying fortunes of his labours were connected with the enterprises of Pippin of Heristal, the father of Charles Martel. They advanced with the power of that Frankish potentate. But after his death, during the strife between Neustria and Austrasia, the heathen Frisian king Radbod drove back Christianity as he enlarged his dominion at the expense of the divided Franks. Later, Charles Martel conquered him, and the Frankish power reached (718) to the Zuyder Zee. Under its protection Willibrord at last founded the bishopric of Utrecht (734). He succeeded in educating a native clergy; and his labours had lasting result among the Frisians who were subject to the Franks, but not among the free Frisians and the Danes.

Evidently there was no sharp geographical boundary between Christianity and heathendom. Throughout broad territories, Christian and heathen practices mingled. This was true of the Frisian land. It was true in greater range and complexity of the still wider fields of Boniface’s career. This able man surrendered his high station in his native Wessex in order to serve Christ more perfectly as a missionary monk among the heathen. He went first to Frisia and worked with Willibrord, yet refused to be his bishop-coadjutor and successor, because planning to carry Christianity into Germany.

Strikingly his life exemplifies Anglo-Saxon faculties working under the directing power of Rome among heathen and partly Christian peoples. On his first visit to Rome he became imbued with the principles, and learned the ritual, of the Roman Church. He returned to enter into relations with Charles Martell, and to labour in Hesse and Thuringia, and again with Willibrord in Frisia. Not long afterwards, at his own solicitation, Gregory II. called him back to Rome (722), where he fed his passion for punctilious conformity by binding himself formally to obey the Pope, follow the practices of the Roman Church, and have no fellowship with bishops whose ways conflicted with them. Gregory made him bishop over Thuringia and Hesse, and sent him back there to reform Christian and heathen communities. Thus Gregory created a bishop within the bounds of the Frankish kingdom--an unprecedented act. Nevertheless, Charles, to whom Boniface came with a letter from Gregory, received him favourably and furnished him with a safe conduct, only exacting a recognition of his own authority.

Boniface set forth upon his mission. In Hesse he cut down the ancient heathen oak, and made a chapel of its timber; he preached and he organized--the land was not altogether heathen. Then he proceeded to Thuringia. That also was a partly Christian land; many Irish-Scottish preachers were labouring or dwelling there. Boniface set his face against their irregularities as firmly as against heathenism. Again he dominated and reorganized, yet continued unfailing in energetic preaching to the heathen. Gregory watched closely and zealously co-operated.

On the death of the second Gregory in 731, the third Gregory succeeded to the papacy and continued his predecessor’s support of the Anglo-Saxon apostle, making him archbishop with authority to ordain bishops. Many Anglo-Saxons, both men and holy women, came to aid their countryman, and brought their education and their nobler views of life to form centres of Christian culture in the German lands. Cloisters for nuns, cloisters for monks were founded. The year 744 witnessed the foundation of Fulda by Sturm under the direction of Boniface, and destined to be the very apple of his eye and the monastic model for Germany. It was placed under the authority of Rome, with the consent of Pippin, who then ruled. The reorganization rather than the conversion of Bavaria was Boniface’s next achievement. The land long before had been partially Romanized, and now was nominally Christian. Here again Boniface acted as representative of the Pope, and not of Charles, although Bavaria was part of the Frankish empire.

The year 738 brought Boniface to Rome for the third time. He was now yearning to leave the fields already tilled, and go as missionary to the heathen Saxons. But Gregory sent him back to complete the reorganization of the Bavarian Church, and to this large field of action he added also Alemannia with its diocesan centre at Speyer. Here he came in conflict with Frankish bishops, firm in their secular irregularities. Yet again he prevailed, reorganized the churches, and placed them under the authority of Rome. Evidently the two Gregories had in large measure turned the energies of Boniface from the mission-field to the labours of reform.

On the death of Charles in 741 (and in the same year died Gregory, to be succeeded by the lukewarm Zacharias) his sons Carloman and Pippin succeeded to his power. The following year Carloman in German-speaking Austrasia called a council of his church (Concilium Germanicum primum) under the primacy of Boniface. Its decrees confirmed the reforms for which the latter had struggled:

“We Carloman, Duke and Prince of the Franks, in the year 742 of the Incarnation, on the 21st of April, upon the advice of the servants of God, the bishops and priests of our realm, have assembled them to take counsel how God’s law and the Church’s discipline (fallen to ruin under former princes) may be restored, and the Christian folk led to salvation, instead of perishing deceived by false priests. We have set up bishops in the cities, and have set over them as archbishop Bonifatius, the legate of St. Peter.”

The council decreed that yearly synods should be held, that the possessions taken from the Church should be restored, and the false priests deprived of their emoluments and forced to do penance. The clergy were forbidden to bear arms, go to war, or hunt. Every priest should give yearly account of his stewardship to his bishop. Bishops, supported by the count in the diocese, should suppress heathen practices. Punishments were set for the fleshly sins of monks and nuns and clergy, and for the priestly offences of wearing secular garb or harbouring women. The Benedictine rule was appointed for monasteries. It was easier to make these decrees than carry them out against the opposition of such martial bishops as those of Mainz and Trèves, whose support was necessary to Carloman’s government; and military conditions rendered the restoration of Church lands impracticable. Yet the word was spoken, and something was done.

The next year in Neustria Pippin instituted like reforms. He was aided by Boniface, although the latter held no ecclesiastical office there. In 747 Carloman abdicated and retired to a monastery;[233] and Pippin became sole ruler, and at last formally king, anointed by Boniface under the direction of the Pope in 752. After this, Boniface, withdrawing from the direction of the Church, turned once more to satisfy his heart’s desire by going on a mission among the heathen Frisians, where he crowned a great life with a martyr’s death.

Thus authoritatively, supported by Rome and the Frankish monarchy, Christianity was presented to the Germans. It carried suggestions of a better order and some knowledge of Latin letters. The extension of Roman Catholic Christianity was the aim of Boniface first and last and always. But a Latin education was needed by the clergy to enable them to understand and set forth this some-what elaborated and learned scheme of salvation. Boniface and his coadjutors had no aversion to the literary means by which a serviceable Latin knowledge was to be obtained, and their missionary and reorganizing labours necessarily worked some diffusion of Latinity.

The Frankish secular power which had supported Boniface, advanced to violent action when Charlemagne’s sword bloodily constrained the Saxons to accept his rule and Christianity, the two inseverable objects which he tirelessly pursued. Nor could this ruler stay his mighty hand from the government of the Church within his realm. With his power to appoint bishops, he might, if he chose, control its councils. But apparently he chose to rule the Church directly; and his, and his predecessors’ and successors’ Capitularies (rather than Conciliar decrees) contain the chief ecclesiastical legislation for the Frankish realm.

In its temporalities and secular action the Church was the greatest and richest of all subjects; it possessed the rights of lay vassals and was affected with like duties.[234] But in ritual, doctrine, language and affiliation, the Frankish Church made part of the Roman Catholic Church. It used the Roman liturgy and the Latin tongue. The ordering of the clergy was Roman, and the regulation of the monasteries was Romanized by the adoption of the Benedictine regula. Within the Church Rome had triumphed. Prelates were vassals of the king who had now become Emperor; and the great corporate Church was subject to him. Nevertheless, this great corporate institution was Roman rather than Gallic or Frankish or German. It was Teuton only in those elements which represented ecclesiastical abuses, for example, the remaining irregularities of various kinds, the lay and martial habits of prelates, and even their appointment by the monarch. These were the elements which the Church in its logical Roman evolution was to eliminate. Charlemagne himself, as well as his lesser successors, strove just as zealously to bring the people into obedience to the Church as into obedience to the lay rulers. While the Carolingian rule was strong, its power was exerted on behalf of ecclesiastical authority and discipline; and when the royal administration weakened after Charlemagne’s death, the Church was not slow to revolt against its temporal subjection to the royal power.

But the Church, in spite of Latin and Roman affinities, strove also to come near the German peoples and speak to them in their own tongues. This is borne witness to by the many translations from Latin into Frankish, Saxon, or Alemannish dialects, made by the clergy. Christianity deeply affected the German language. Many of its words received German form, and the new thoughts forced old terms to take on novel and more spiritual meanings. To be sure these German dialects were there before Christianity came, and the capacities of the Germans acquired in heathen times are attested by the sufficiency of their language to express Christian thought. Likewise the German character was there, and proved its range and quality by the very transformation of which it showed itself capable under Christianity. And just as Christianity was given expression in the German language, which retained many of its former qualities, so many fundamental traits of German character remained in the converted people. Yet so earnestly did the Germans turn to Christianity, and such draughts of its spirit did they draw into their nature, that the early Germanic re-expression of it is sincere, heartfelt, and moving, and illumined with understanding of the Faith.

These qualities may be observed in the series of Christian documents in the German tongues commencing in the first years of Charlemagne’s reign. They consist of baptismal confessions of belief, the first of which (cir. 769) was composed for heathen Saxons just converted by the sword, and of catechisms presenting the elements of Christian precept and dogma. The earliest of the latter (cir. 789), coming from the monastery at Weissenburg in Alsace, contains the Lord’s Prayer, with explanations, an enumeration of the deadly sins according to the fifth chapter of the Epistle to the Galatians, the Apostles’ Creed and the Athanasian. Further, one finds among these documents a translation of the De fide Catholica of Isidore of Seville, and of the Benedictine regula; also Charlemagne’s Exhortatio ad plebem Christianam, which was an admonition to the people to learn the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. There are likewise general confessions of sins. Less dependent on a Latin original is the so-called Muspilli, a spirited description in alliterative verse of the last times and the Day of Judgment.

German qualities, however, express themselves more fully in two Gospel versions, the first the famous Saxon Heliand (cir. 835), (which follows Tatian’s “Harmony”); the second the somewhat later Evangelienbuch of Otfrid the Frank. They were both composed in alliterative verse, though Otfrid also made use of rhyme.[235] The martial, Teutonic ring of the former is well known. Christ is the king, the disciples are His thanes whose duty is to stand by their lord to the death; He rewards them with the promised riches of heaven, excelling the earthly goods bestowed by other kings. In the “betrayal” they close around their Lord, saying: “Were it thy will, mighty Lord of ours, that we should set upon them with the spear, gladly would we strike and die for our Lord.” Out broke the wrath of the “ready swordsman” (snel suerdthegan)[236] Simon Peter; he could not speak for anguish to think that his lord should be bound. Angrily strode the bold knight before his lord, drew his weapon, the sword by his side, and smote the nearest foe with might of hands. Before his fury and the spurting blood the people fled fearing the sword’s bite.

The Heliand has also gentler qualities, as when it calls the infant Christ the fridubarn (peace-child), and pictures Mary watching over her “little man.” But German love of wife and child and home speak more clearly in Otfrid’s book. Although a learned monk, his pride of Frankish race rings in his oft-quoted reasons for writing theotisce, i.e. in German: Why shall not the Franks sing God’s praise in Frankish tongue? Forcible and logical it is, although not bound by grammar’s rules. Yes, why should the Franks be incapable? they are brave as Romans or Greeks; they are as good in field and wood; wide power is theirs, and ready are they with the sword. They are rich, and possess a good land, with honour. They can guard their own; what people is their equal in battle? Diligent are they also in the Word of God. Otfrid is quite moving in his sympathetic sense of the sorrow of the Last Judgment, when the mother from child shall be parted, the father from son, the lord from his faithful thane, friend from friend--all human kind. Deep is the mystic love and yearning with which he realizes Heaven as one’s own land: there is life without death, light without darkness, the angels and eternal bliss. We have left it--that must we bewail always, banished to a strange land, poor misled orphans. The antithesis between the fremidemo lant (fremdes land) of earth, and the heimat, the eigan lant of Heaven, which is home, real home, is the keynote strongly felt and movingly expressed.

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