Ep. 126.
To Arno.
“A love which neither the cold of the Alps nor the heat of Italy can overthrow.”
Ep. 101.
To Arno.
“I long to hear when the eagle, flying high, transcends the summits of the Alps, and, wearied with flight, composes its wings in the parts of Rhetia.”
It will have been noticed that most of these are addressed to the Tyrol. It may be remarked that there are traditions of the presence of Karl in the far east of the Alps, especially in a valley about twenty miles due west of the city of Trent. Mr. D. W. Freshfield has printed[247] the long Latin inscription which gives an explanation of frescoes in the Church of San Stefano in Val Rendena, showing Karl and a Pope baptizing heathen. The inscription credits the district with having been full, in Karl’s time, of castles held by pagan lords or by Jews, who were converted or slain.
We have an interesting evidence of the sufferings endured in crossing the Alps in the later Anglo-Saxon times. It is well known that persons who granted charters of lands, under conditions, invoked desperate penalties on the heads of any who should attempt to alienate the lands or trifle with the conditions. In the reigns of Athelstane and Eadmund, under dates ranging from A.D. 938 to 946, a West Saxon scribe produced and employed frequently a new form and idea of curse. He made the royal and archiepiscopal signatories indulge in the pious and fervent wish that any one who endeavoured to violate the gift set forth in the charter might suffer from the cold blasts of the ice-fields and the pennine host of malignant spirits[248].
William of Malmesbury relates[249] the death of an Archbishop of Canterbury from cold in the passage of the Alps. When Odo died in 959, Aelfsin, the Bishop of Winchester, bought the archbishopric and behaved with mad violence. He stamped on the grave of Odo, addressing him as “worst of old men”, taunting him that he had got his desire (which Odo had always opposed), namely, the succession to the archbishopric. That night the departed Odo appeared to him in a dream and warned him of a speedy end. Aelfsin disregarded the warning, and set off to Rome for the pallium. On the way across the Alps he was overcome with cold. His feet were frost-bitten, and there was no remedy but to put them into the warm carcasses of disembowelled horses, these feet with which he had done violence to the grave of Odo. Even so he could not get warm, and he was frozen to death. His death made way for Dunstan, and he is not reckoned among the archbishops.
The misery of extreme cold was a familiar fact to the Northumbrians after the experiences of Benedict Biscop and others in crossing the Alps. It is brought out in a very graphic way in the description which Bede gives of the trance of one Drithelme[250], who had appeared to be dead for six hours. Among other remarkable visions of the other world, he came in his trance to a valley, on one side of which was piercing cold, and on the other unquenchable fire. The unhappy souls, tortured in the biting cold, leaped madly across for warmth into the flames. Then, scorched in the fearful heat, they sprang back again for coolness into the torturing cold. In that continual alternation of tortures their time was spent. Drithelme was wont ever after, in beating down his animal passions, to stand up to his neck in the river, even in winter with broken masses of ice dashing against him. And when one called to him from the bank, “I wonder, brother Drithelme, that you endure such cold,” he would reply, “I, at least, have seen worse cold than this.”