meetings of the Frankish race with the Northern pirates; while on the other hand there were not wanting the rare successes, and the single heroes, to be thrown up into brilliant relief by the general blackness. And the great epic birth-time was dawning at the very time when the Norse inroads were orbing into a completed roundness of past terror, and must have been to the popular memory in the exact twilight stage between real remembrance and legendary illumination which is the most fertile for the production of epics.
That there were some such epics is plain. The production of the Ludwigslied as an ancestor of the Chanson de Geste has been objected to. But it is at least more likely to have been the legitimate parent of such virile offspring than the virginal St. Eulalia. And I may quite well adduce it to prove my present point, since even if itself unsuited for knocking about in those rough days of camp and court, it shows that such songs were sung and called for. Many barrack songs have been written, which have not won a place in the barrack-room; but they would not have been written had not others before them been popular.
But there is stronger evidence than this, as to the existence of hero-songs dealing with the Norse Invasions. Hariulf, whose history goes down to 1088, gives as his reason for only relating a few facts connected with the Norse invasions, "that the events were not only recorded in histories, but also gathered and sung daily in the memory of the people."[1] And he immediately proceeds to relate the account of Isambard and Gormund, the legendary story of that same victory of Saucourt celebrated in the Ludwigslied. We have fortunately preserved to us a fragment in early French of this very lay, one of the most interesting remains of the early Chansons de Geste. To this I hope possibly to ask leave some day to call the attention of the Folk-Lore Society.
- ↑ Quod quomodo sit factum non modo Historiis sed etiam patriensium memoria quotidie recolitur et cantatur. Har. Chron. Cent. (St. Requier), lib. iii., c. 20.
