CHAPTER III
THE ICELANDIC SAGAS
I
ICELAND AND THE HEROIC AGE
The epic poetry of the Germans came to an end in different ways and at different seasons among the several nations of that stock. In England and the Continent it had to compete with the new romantic subjects and new forms of verse. In Germany the rhyming measures prevailed very early, but the themes of German tradition were not surrendered at the same time. The rhyming verse of Germany, foreign in its origin, continued to be applied for centuries in the rendering of German myths and heroic stories, sometimes in a style with more or less pretence to courtliness, as in the Nibelungenlied and Kudrun; sometimes in open parade of the travelling minstrel's "public manners" and simple appetites. England had exactly the opposite fortune in regard to verse and subject-matter. In England the alliterative verse survived the changes of inflexion and pronunciation for more than five hundred years after Maldon, and uttered its last words in a poem written like the Song of Byrhtnoth on a contemporary battle,—the poem of Scottish Field.[46]
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There was girding forth of guns, with many great stones; Archers uttered out their arrows and eagerly they shotten; They proched us with spears and put many over; That the blood outbrast at their broken harness. There was swinging out of swords, and swapping of heads, We blanked them with bills through all their bright armour, That all the dale dinned of the derf strokes. |
But while this poem of Flodden corresponds in its subject to the poem of Maldon, there is no such likeness between any other late alliterative poem and the older poems of the older language. The alliterative verse is applied in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to every kind of subject except those of Germanic tradition. England, however, has the advantage over Germany, that while Germany lost the old verse, England did not lose the English heroic subjects, though, as it happens, the story of King Horn and the story of Havelock the Dane are not told in the verse that was used for King Arthur and Gawain, for the tale of Troy and the wars of Alexander. The recent discovery of a fragment of the Song of Wade is an admonition to be cautious in making the extant works of Middle English literature into a standard for all that has ceased to exist. But no new discovery, even of a Middle English alliterative poem of Beowulf or of Walter of Aquitaine, would alter the fact that the alliterative measure of English poetry in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, like the ancient themes of the German rhyming poems, is a survival in an age when the chief honours go to other kinds of poetry. The author of Piers Plowman is a notable writer, and so are the poets of Gawain, and of the Mort Arthure, and of the Destruction of Troy; but Chaucer and not Langland is the poetical master of that age. The poems of the Nibelungen and of Kudrun are rightly honoured, but it was to the author of Parzival, and to the courtly lyrics of Walther von der Vogelweide, that the higher rank was given in the age of the Hohenstaufen, and the common fame is justified by history, so often as history chooses to have any concern with such things.