[175] Compare, mutatis mutandis, Agam., 410 sq., and Kormak's "Stray verses," ll. 41-44, in the Corpus, ii. 65.
[176] Heimskringla does not say "edgeways," but this is the clear meaning. Kolbiorn held his shield flat and below him, so that it acted as a float, and he was taken. Olaf sank.
[177] Of course this is only in comparison. For instance, in Dr Suchier's Denkmäler (Halle, 1883), which contains nearly 500 large pages of Provençal anecdota, about four-fifths is devotional matter of various kinds and in various forms, prose and verse. But such matter, which is common to all mediæval languages, is hardly literature at all, being usually translated, with scarcely any expense of literary originality, from the Latin, or each other.
[178] Alberic's Alexander (v. [chap. iv.]) is of course Provençal in a way, and there was probably a Provençal intermediary between the Chanson d'Antioche and the Spanish Gran Conquesta de Ultramar. But we have only a few lines of the first and nothing of the second.
[179] The Grundriss zur Geschichte der Provenzalischen Literatur (Elberfeld, 1872) and the Chrestomathie Provençale (3d ed., Elberfeld, 1875) of this excellent scholar will not soon be obsolete, and may, in the peculiar conditions of the case, suffice all but special students in a degree hardly possible in any other literature. Mahn's Troubadours and the older works of Raynouard and Fauriel are the chief storehouses of wider information, and separate editions of the works of the chief poets are being accumulated by modern, chiefly German, scholars. An interesting and valuable addition to the English literature of the subject has been made, since the text was written, by Miss Ida Farnell's Lives of the Troubadours, a translation with added specimens of the poets and other editorial matter.
[180] Ed. Hercher, Erotici Scriptores Græci (2 vols., Leipzig, 1858), ii. 161-286.
[181] Ed. Reifferscheid. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1884.
[182] Following Eustathius in Hercher, op. cit.
[183] These political verses are fifteen-syllabled, with a cæsura at the eighth, and in a rhythm ostensibly accentual.
[184] Erotici Scriptores, ii. 555.