For all early peoples, even the least civilized, possess the germs of literature. They have their hymns to their Divine Father above the sky, and to gods and spirits; they have magic songs, to win the love of women, or to cause the deaths of men; they have love-songs, and songs of feats of war. They possess fairy-tales, and legends in prose concerning gods and fabulous heroes; they have tales of talking birds and beasts; and they have dances in which the legends of old heroes are acted and sung. These dances are the germ of the drama: the songs are the germs of lyric poetry; the beast-stories are the sources of books like Æsop's Fables and Ovid's "Metamorphoses"; and the fairy-tales are the earliest kind of novels.
The Anglo-Saxon invaders were, of course, on a very much higher level than that of savages. They were living in the age of iron; they did not use bronze for their swords, spears, and axes; much more remote were they from the period of stone axes, stone, knives, and stone arrow-heads. They could write, not in the Roman alphabet, but in "Runes," adapted at some unknown time by the Germanic peoples, probably from the Greek characters; and there is no reason why they should not have used this writing to preserve their poetry, though it is not certain that they did so at this early, period.
One early Anglo-Saxon poem, indeed, "The Husband's Message," professes to be written in runic characters on a staff or tablet of wood. Even more ancient poems may have been written and preserved in this way, but the wood, the bóc (book) as it was called, has perished, while brief runic inscriptions on metal and on stone remain.
The Anglo-Saxon Way of Living.
The society of the Anglo-Saxons, as described in the oldest surviving poems, was like that of the early Irish about a.d. 200 as depicted in their oldest romances, and like that of the early Icelanders as painted in the sagas, or stories of 1100, and later. Each free man had his house, with its large hall, and a fire in the centre. In the hall, usually built of timber, the people ate and passed their time when not out of doors, and also slept at night, while there were other rooms (probably each was a small separately roofed house) for other purposes. The women had their "bower," the married people had their little bedclosets off the hall, and there were store-rooms. The house stood in a wide yard or court, where geese and other fowls were kept; it was fenced about with a palisade, or a bank and hedge. Tilling the soil, keeping cattle, hunting, and war and raiding, by sea and land, were the occupations of the men; the women sewed and span, and kept house.
A group of such homesteads, each house well apart from its neighbours, made the village or settlement: there were no towns with streets, such as the Romans left in Britain.
A number of such villages were united in the tribe, each tribe had its king, while the other chief men, the richest and best born, constituted a class of gentry. Later, tribes were gathered into small kingdoms, with a "Bretwalda" or "Over-Lord," the most powerful of the kings, at the head of all.
This kind of society is almost exactly the same as that which Homer describes among the Greeks, more than a thousand years before Christ. As in Homer, each Anglo-Saxon king had his Gleeman (scop) or minstrel, who sang to his household and to the guests in hall. The songs might be new, of his own making, or lays handed down from of old.
We shall see that the longer Anglo-Saxon poems, before Christianity came in, were stories about fabulous heroes; or real kings of times past, concerning whom many fables were told. Most of these tales, or "myths," were not true; they were mere ancient "fairy stories," in which sometimes real but half-forgotten warriors and princes play their parts. The traditions, however, were looked on as being true, and the listeners to the gleemen thought that they were learning history as well as being amused. Meanwhile any man might make and sing verses for his own pleasure, about his own deeds and his own fancies, sorrows, and loves.
There was no lack of old legends of times before the English invasion of Britain, or of legends quite fabulous about gods and heroes. We know from Roman and early Christian authors, that the other Germanic peoples, on the Continent, had abundance of this material for poetry: thus the Germans sang of Arminius, the Lombards sang of Alboin, or Ælfwine (died a.d. 573), and the Scandinavians and Germans had legends of Attila, the great Hun conqueror, in the fifth century, and of Sigurd, who slew Fafnir, the Snake-Man; of the vengeance of Brynhild, and all the other adventures of the Volsungs and Niblungs; in Germany fashioned, much later, into the famous "Nibelungenlied".[1]