importance for the minds of their people, and find their record in different forms of poetry, to all of which the name heroic is appropriate. In the Teutonic and also in the Romance tongues a kind of narrative poem is gradually brought to completion, for which the title of Epic has been found acceptable. The old Teutonic epic poetry, the old French epic, Beowulf, and Roland, these are works of the Dark Ages, which might more honourably be called, and not less correctly, the Heroic Age of the North.

Beowulf and Roland are epic poems, more or less complete and orderly; but these are not the only shapes in which heroic themes were represented. They came at the end of a long process of elaboration, the history of which is not easy to make out.

There are many references in Latin historians to songs in which Teutonic kings are praised. The "Saxon Poet" who turned into Latin verse the life of Charles the Great says that there were many songs in the vulgar tongue in honour of the Carlovingian house, the ancestors of Lewis the Pious:

“Est quoque jam notum : vulgaria carmina magnis
Laudibus ejus avos et proavos celebrant :
Pippinos Carolos Hludovicos et Theodricos

Et Carlomannos Hlothariosque canunt.”

But there are different ways of singing about a king and hero, and some of these are easily enough distinguished in the history of the Middle Ages. proper epic-the noble and dignified narrative poemis too complicated a thing, and requires too much

The

preparation, to flourish everywhere. There are simpler kinds of verse, ballads sung in country choruses, like the song of Clothair II. referred to in the Life of St Faro. Clothair died in 628; the saint's Life was written in the ninth century. There it is told how Clothair's victory over the Saxons passed into popular songs among the common people, and how choruses of women kept time to the song,—

"Ex qua victoria carmen publicum juxta rusticitatem per omnium pene volitabat ora ita canentium, feminæque choros inde plaudendo componebant:

De Chlothario est canere rege Francorum
Qui ivit pugnare in gentem Saxonum

Quam graviter provenisset missis Saxonum

Si non fuisset inclytus Faro de gente Burgundionum.

Et in fine hujus carminis :

Quando veniunt missi Saxonum in terram Francorum
Faro ubi erat princeps

Instinctu Dei transeunt per urbem Meldorum

Ne interficiantur a rege Francorum.

Hoc enim rustico carmine placuit ostendere quantum ab omnibus celeberrimus habebatur (sc. Faro)."

In the same sort of words will later historians tell how the heart of the people is touched by momentous heroic or tragic occurrences in their own day, and how they turn their news into ballads. So Barbour of the strife in Eskdale :

"I will nocht rehers all the maner
For quha sa likis thai mai heir
Young women quhen thai will play
Syng it emang thame ilke day."

So Mr James Melville of the death of the Earl of Moray "the horrour of the deid of Dinnibirsall, quhilk the unburied corps lyand in the Kirk of Leithe maid to be nocht onlie unburied amangs the peiple, but be comoun rymes and sangs keipit in recent detestation." Common rhymes and songs amongst the people (juxta rusticitatem), ballads sung by girls in a ring, may have much of the heroic spirit, even much of the epic manner, but the epic poem does not belong to those singers or their audiences. Heroic poetry requires a court, like that of Alcinous in the Odyssey or that of Hrothgar the Dane in Beowulf; and it is not in every house, even of great men with a taste for such things, that the epic narrative is to be found. Much heroic poetry of the Middle Ages is not narrative but lyric. As the girls' dancing song is one of the oldest, at least one of the commonest, types of popular poetry in different countries, so the lyric eulogy of a chieftain (alive or dead) is the established form of courtly entertainment offered by a literary artist to his patron, essentially unvarying in motive in different parts of the world. The courtly lyric of praise is specially cultivated by Celtic and Scandinavian poets, and it may be that their attention to this branch of the art may have hindered the progress of epic in Ireland and Norway. However that may be, the lyric of praise is something different from the epic of adventure, though the two kinds may have much in common. The lyric may have much historical matter in it. The Icelandic court poems were used, scientifically, as sources for the lives of the Kings of Norway.

"There were scalds at the Court of Harald Fairhair, and their poems are known, and likewise poems about all the kings that have been in Norway since. And we have taken evidence chiefly from those poems that were recited before the great lords themselves or their sons: we hold it all for truth that is found in these poems about their expeditions and battles. It is indeed the custom of poets to praise him most before whom they stand; but no one would dare to tell the king of exploits which every one who heard, and the king himself, would know to be vanity and lies; that were scorn and no praise." This is Icelandic historical criticism, in the preface to the history commonly called Heimskringla. But the historical matter of the Court poems is not expressed in an epic way. The Oxford editors have given a convenient diagram of the regular Court method, which shows the difference clearly.1 "The type and plan of the Court poem might be represented in six lines::

And every subject and object throughout every poem is put into a more or less dark and rigid dressing of metaphor." Here the adventures themselves are not the main thing: what the poet wishes to bring out is

1 C. P. B., ii. 449.

their value as proof of the king's excellence in war. Epic matter goes into the lyric of praise, as in the song of Deborah or in Pindar, but the narrative interest is not the chief motive, and does not determine the form of the poem.

While it is convenient and necessary to distinguish between popular and courtly poetry, the distinction need not be carried too far. It does not mean that there was no relation between the two. On the contrary, the history of the most polite and artificial of the medieval forms of verse-e.g., of the lyrics of Provence and Germany-proves a close connection between the wild stock and the cultivated varieties, while the Celtic and the Icelandic types of elaborate poetry are found spreading wide among the common people. To begin with, in the great houses of an heroic age there is no very marked difference between the tastes and occupations of the king and his followers, even the meaner sort. What the earl likes the churl can admire in his own way. The epic that requires the society of a court, and something of pride and warlike honour to inspire it and give it substance, is not retained at court and obliged to be exclusively noble. The epic soon finds its way to the same sort of gatherings as listen to the rustic ballads. The minstrel publishes the epic, and is welcomed in simple houses, drawing children from their play and old men from the chimney-corner, like Bernlef, the blind Frisian harper, "who was loved by his neighbours because he was of an open and free nature, and would repeat the actions of the men of