classic store of myth and legend, men, not wholly Romanised, who could interpret to them in words which they could understand the new culture which they otherwise would simply have ignored. It was contact with the Christian classic world, but contact through the comparatively friendly medium of Anglo-Saxons and Celts, that was the determining impulse to the supreme expression by men of Teutonic races of their heathen beliefs and fancies, and it was in these islands that this contact took place, and that much of the resulting literature assumed form.
Such is the theory, the details of which have been pushed to such extravagant lengths as would reduce the magnificent poetry of the Scandinavians to a mere cento of misunderstood borrowings from Englishmen and Irishmen.[1] Discarding as we must arbitrary and uncritical methods which would deprive the Eddas of all value as exponents of archaic belief and fancy, we may yet recognise that it was Britain which supplied the historical and social conditions, thanks to which Teutonic heathendom was able to realise and manifest itself in its grandest and most characteristic aspect. The Viking shock upon the Empires of the West and the East resulted in political changes the effects of which have lasted until to-day, but otherwise influenced but little the culture of the south and south-west of Europe. The Viking shock upon England and Ireland, less momentous in its political consequences, had for an outcome that superb body of mythical and heroic sagas which preserve not alone the formal legends and traditions of our forefathers, but a conception, a vision of life, alien to the Christian, alien to the latter classic ideals, whose loss would have left mankind infinitely weaker and poorer.
Thus when the older barbarism manifests itself for the first time in its awful strength and beauty our land and our
- ↑ E.g. by Professor Sophus Bugge, whose methods and results will shortly be accessible to the English reader in vol. xi. of the Grimm Library (The Home of the Eddie Poems, with special reference to the Helgi lays).
