Went forth before the armed train
Singing of Roland and Charlemain,
Of Olivere, and the brave vassals
Who died at the Pass of Roncesvals.
The northern skalds accompanied the armies to the wars and were present at all the battles. "Ye shall be here that ye may see with your own eyes what is achieved this day," said King Olaf to his skalds on the eve of the Battle of Stiklastad (1030), "and have no occasion, when ye shall afterwards celebrate these actions in song, to depend on the reports of others." In the same fight, a skald named Jhormod died an honourable death, shot with an arrow while in the act of singing. The early Keltic poets were forbidden to bear arms: a reminiscence of their sacerdotal status, but they, too, looked on while others fought, and encouraged the combatants with their songs. All these bards served a higher purpose than the commemoration of individual leaders: they became the historians of their epoch. The profession was one of recognised eminence, and numbered kings among its adepts. Then it declined with the rise of written chronicles, till the last bard disappeared and only the ballad-singer remained.
II.
This personage, though shorn of bardic dignity, yet contrived to hold his own with considerable success. In Provence and Germany, itinerant minstrels who sang for pay brought up the rank and file of the troubadours and minnesingers; in England and Italy and Northern France they formed a class apart, which, as times went, was neither ill-esteemed nor ill-paid. When the minstrel found no better audience he mounted a barrel in the nearest tavern, or
At country wakes sung ballads from a cart.
But his favourite sphere was the baronial hall; and to understand how welcome he was there made, it is only needful to picture country life in days when books were few and newspapers did not exist. He sang before noble knights and gracious dames, who, to us—could we be suddenly brought into their presence—would seem rough in their manner, their speech, their modes of life; but who were far from being dead or insensible to intellectual pleasure when they could get it. He sang the choicest songs that had come down to him from an earlier age; songs of the Round Table and of the great Charles; and then, as he sat at meat, perhaps below the salt, but with his plate well heaped up with the best that there was, he heard strange Eastern tales from the newly-arrived pilgrim at his right hand, and many a wild story of noble love or hate from the white-haired retainer at his left.
I have always thought that the old ballad-singer's world—the world in which he moved, and again the ideal world of his songs—is nowhere to be so vividly realised as in the Hofkirche at Innsbruck, among that colossal company who watch the tomb of Kaiser Max; huge men and women in richly wrought bronze array, ugly indeed, most of them, but with two of their number seeming to embody every beautiful quality that was possessed or dreamt of through well nigh a millennium: the pensive, graceful form of Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths, and the erect figure whose very attitude suggests all manly worth, all gentle valour, under which is read the quaint device, "Arthur von England."