Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/452

More coherent evidence concerning the differentiation of the poet from the priest is hardly to be expected where, instead of a continuous evolution of one society, we have an agglomeration of societies, in which the conquering society from the beginning incorporated other ideas and usages with its own.

 

When, from Southern Europe of early days, we turn to Northern Europe, we meet, in Scandinavia, with evidence of a connection between the primitive poet and the medicine-man. Speaking of the "diviners, both male and female, honored with the name of prophets," who were believed to have power to force the ghosts of the "dead to tell them what would happen," Mallet says that "poetry was often employed for the like absurd purposes:" these same skalds or bards were supposed to achieve this end "by force of certain songs which they knew how to compose." At the same time that these poets and musicians of the ancient northern nations invoked the spirits of the departed in verses which most likely lauded them, they "were considered as necessary appendages to royalty, and even the inferior chieftains had their poets." The Celts had kindred functionaries, whose actions were evidently similar to those of the Greek priest-poets. Says Pelloutier, basing his statement on Strabo, Lucan, and others:—

"Les Bardes, qui faisoient [des] Hymnes, etoient Poëtes et Musiciens; ils composoient les paroles, et l'air sur lequel on les chantoit."

The use of the word "hymnes" apparently implying that their songs had something of a sacred character. That the connection between poet and priest survived, or was re-established, after paganism had been replaced by Christianity, there is good evidence. In the words of Mills—

"Every page of early European history attests the sacred consideration of the minstrel;" his peculiar dress "was fashioned like a sacerdotal robe."

And Fauriel asserts that—

"Almost all the most celebrated troubadours died in the cloister and under the monk's habit."

But it seems a probable inference that after Christianity had subjugated paganism, the priest-poet of the pagans, who originally lauded now the living chief and now the deified chief, gradually ceased to have the latter function and became eventually the ruler's laureate. We read that—

"A joculator, or bard, was an officer belonging to the court of William the Conqueror."

"A poet seems to have been a stated officer in the royal retinue when the king went to war."

And among ourselves such official laureateship still survives, or is but just dying.

While the eulogizer of the visible ruler thus became a court-functionary, the eulogizers of the invisible ruler no—longer an