[Literature]
[CHAPTER XII.]
Literature.
During that period when the Danes were making their conquests and settlements in the North of England, art and literature did not hold any high position in Europe. The fall of the Roman Empire gave a shock to the pursuits of learning which had not recovered when Christian art was in its infancy. The Northmen early distinguished themselves in the art of shipbuilding, and also in the manufacture of ornaments, domestic utensils, and weapons. This taste had arisen from the imitation of the Roman and Arabesque articles of commerce which they brought up into the North. Some Scandinavian antiquities have been discovered belonging to the period called "the age of bronze," and also the later heathen times, known as "the iron age." The Sagas record that the carving of images was skilfully practised in the north, and the English Chronicles provide records of richly carved figures on the bows of Danish and Norse vessels. The Normans from Denmark who settled in Normandy were first converted to Christianity, and early displayed the desire to erect splendid buildings, especially churches and monasteries.
Long before the Norman Conquest, the Danes devoted themselves to peaceful occupations. Several of the many churches and convents were erected by Danish princes and chiefs, in the northern parts of England, which have now been re-built, or disappeared; but their names survive to distinguish their origin. It has been said that these early buildings were composed of wood. This is proved from the work recently issued by Mr. J. Francis Bumpus, in his "Cathedrals of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark." The touching life story of the martyred Saint Olaf is there told. A wooden chapel was built over his grave about the year 1047. This became the centre of the national religion, and the sanctuary of the national freedom and independence. Trondhjem, says Mr. Bumpus, is the eloquent expression in stone of Norway's devotion to the beloved St. Olaf. Despoiled of much of its ornamentation by Protestant zeal, it retains in the octagon of its noble choir a true architectural gem, equal in delicate beauty to the Angel Choir of Lincoln.
Example of Danish Carved Wood-work, with Runes, from Thorpe Church, Hallingdal, Denmark.
The phrase "skryke of day" is common to South Lancashire, and is the same as the old English "at day pype," or "peep of day." "There is a great intimacy," says Dr. Grimm, "between our ideas of light and sound, of colour and music, and hence we are able to comprehend that rustling, and that noise, which is ascribed to the rising and setting Sun." Thomas Kingo, a Danish poet of the seventeenth century, and probably others of his countrymen, make the rising of the Sun to pipe (pfeifen), that is to utter a piercing sound.
Tacitus had long before recorded the Swedish superstition, that the rising Sun made a noise. The form in which our skryke of day has come down to us is Scandinavian. Grimm says, "Still more express are the passages which connect the break of day, and blush of the morning, with ideas of commotion and rustling." Goethe has in "Faust" borrowed from the Pythagorean and Platonic doctrine of the harmony of the spheres, and illustrated Grimm's proposition of the union of our ideas of light and sound by describing the course of the Sun in its effulgence as a march of thunder. Jonson regarded noise as an essential quality of the heavenly bodies—
"Come, with our voices let us war,
And challenge all the spheres,
Till each of us be made a star,
And all the world turned ears."