Nothing in mediæval literature is more important than the revival of imagination through the influence of barbaric myths and legends; and in this the Celtic and Germanic tongues had a chief share between the ninth and the fourteenth century, to take no wider limits than these. But while the genius of each race may claim its due honour, the one for Tristram, the other for Sigfred, they have also a common merit, transcending that of their separate contributions to the life of the world. They brought literature back into relation with something which is neither German nor Celtic in any special sense; the common heritage of fancy, found, as the mythologists have proved, all over the world. The barbarian invasion in literature is in its own way a renaissance

-a revival of old common tastes in story-telling, a rediscovery of the world of Homer, or indeed of something more ancient still.

The new sources of terror and wonder revealed in the Celtic and German legends are not their exclusive property. Ulysses had sailed to the West before Maelduin or St Brandan. Those who would give the Celtic genius an especial right to this kind of adventure seem to be unjust to the genius of Babylon, which knew of a hero voyaging to find his friend among the dead and to hear his story. Before the Hellride of Brynhild, before the Death of Balder, before the chant of Hervor at her father's grave, the same motives of awe had been known to the Babylonian in the Descent of Ishtar. But although the mystery of the twilight regions of mythology and

the charm of strange adventures are not exclusively Celtic or Teutonic, that does not take away the place of Celtic and Teutonic mythology in the history of the Middle Ages. It merely affects the summing up as to what is to be called especially Celtic or Teutonic in the qualities of medieval literature. There may be such national or tribal elements to be discriminated; certain differential qualities in the manner in which the commonplaces of myth are presented in Dutch or Welsh, in Norse or Gaelic.

The progress of poetical mythology is on the whole a simple one. It is the victory of imagination over religion in matters where both are concerned; the substitution of imaginative theory for religious belief. Imagination and the pure delight in stories drive out

fear.

This process was carried out to the fullest extent in the Teutonic world, partly through the circumstances of Teutonic history, and mainly through the genius of one branch of the race, the Scandinavian. In the Celtic lands the clarifying of myth was interfered with, because the Celtic religion was not left to itself; it had to compete at a disadvantage with the official religions of the Empire, first pagan, then Christian. The Germans were under the same oppression, and in the same way, after conversion, allowed their ancient fancies to be confused and obliterated—all but the more Northern tribes. The families that were last to come under Latin influence retained their mythology longest; the English longer than the Goths or the Lombards; the Danes longer

than the English; Norway, Iceland, and Sweden longer than Denmark. Partly through the flourishing in Norway and Iceland of an order of poetry that required a conventional sort of mythological ornament, the myths were preserved in memory, even while the gods were rejected, and even with an accession of intellectual freedom on account of the religious rejection of the gods. The chief memorial of this remarkable emancipation of literature from religious prejudices is the Edda of Snorri Sturluson, written about 1222, in prose, with verse quotations from old heathen poems.

In Ireland and Wales the old mythology was preserved in stories where the ancient gods retained their marvellous nature to a large extent, though losing largely in the special characteristics of divinity. The gods became heroes. For imagination and for literature the change did not matter much. Cuchulinn is not less interesting because he is possibly less divine than Hercules, and Odin and Thor are heroes, with the dignity of gods—a kind of peerage which scarcely affects their value in a story.

Grimm in his Teutonic Mythology has tracked the myths in their disguises through the poems, chronicles, and popular stories of the German countries not Scandinavian, the regions of Germania which had lost their gods long before the Icelandic scholar wrote his account of them in the thirteenth century. Celtic students have done similar work in the other province, with this great disadvantage, that there is no Celtic Edda, no clear statement of the old mythology by

one who had command of pure heathen sources. The ironical and impartial genius of Snorri Sturluson is something exceptional in history; his rationalist clearness and his imaginative sympathy with myths are qualities that will scarcely be found repeated in that degree in any age, except perhaps in some that have no myths of their own to boast of.

But whether in the Teutonic countries, which in one of their corners preserved a record of old mythology, or in the Celtic, which allowed mythology, though never forgotten, to fall into a kind of neglect and to lose its original meaning, the value of mythology is equally recognisable, and it is equally clear that mythology is nothing more nor less than Romance.

Everything in the poets that is most enthralling through the mere charm of wonder, from the land of the Golden Fleece to that of the Holy Grail, is more or less nearly related to mythology.

The "natural magic" of which Mr Arnold spoke in his lectures on Celtic literature, he connected no less truly than persuasively with Celtic mythology. The end of mythology is in that way; it passes into poetry, and the barbarous terror of a world not realised becomes the wonder of La Belle Dame Sans Mercy or of Hyperion.

The Edda.

The Northern mythology as recorded in the Edda cannot be taken any longer as it used to be by enthusiastic antiquaries and made into the common original property of all the Teutonic. tribes. The tribes had stories of their own about Woden and Frea, like the Lombard one preserved by Paulus

Diaconus; the Norwegian stories, which may be possibly better, are not exactly the same. Not only may we suppose that the Norwegians, who are our chief authorities, had their own selection of stories about the gods, not the same as the Gothic, Vandal, Saxon, Lombard, or any other group of stories; but the Norwegians had time to find out new things about the gods in the additional centuries of their heathendom, when the other tribes had gone over to the Christian Church. The Edda is not a document for the whole of Germany, except in so far as it gives in the finest form the mythology of the purest and the least subdued of the German races. What is Scandinavian is also Teutonic, in one sense, but it is a very special and peculiar development of the original Teutonic type. Yet the mythology of the Edda, refined and modern as it is, contains elements that are older than Germany, monstrous fragments of the primeval world, as Carlyle has divined and explained in words that serve for other mythologies as well :—

"All this of the old Norse Belief which is flung out for us at one level of distance in the Edda, like a picture painted on the same canvas, does not at all stand so in reality. It stands rather at all manner of distances and depths, of successive generations since the Belief first began. All Scandinavian thinkers, since the first of them, contributed to that Scandinavian system of thought; in ever-new elaboration and addition, it is the combined work of them all."

Perhaps the Northern mythology would be best surveyed in the following way. First come the