the entire contents of existing and progressive Christian and antique culture were contained in the mediaeval Latin literature, the literature of religion and of law and government, of education and of all serious knowledge. It was to be the primary literature of mediaeval thought; from which passed over the chief part of whatever thought and knowledge the vernacular literatures were to receive. For scholars who follow, as we have tried to, the intellectual and the deeper emotional life of the Middle Ages, the Latin literature yields the incomparably greater part of the material of our study. It has been our home country, from which we have made casual excursions into the vernacular literatures.
These existed, however, from the earliest mediaeval periods, beginning, if one may say so, in oral rather than written documents. We read that Charlemagne caused a book to be made of Germanic poems, which till then presumably had been carried in men's memories. The Hildebrandslied is supposed to have been one of them.[1] In the Norse lands, the Eddas and the matter of the Sagas were repeated from generation to generation, long before they were written down. The habit, if not the art, of writing came with Christianity and the Latin education accompanying it. Gradually a written literature in the Teutonic languages was accumulated. Of this there was the heathen side, well represented in Anglo-Saxon and the Norse; while in Old High German the Hildebrandslied remains, heathen and savage. Thereafter, a popular and even national or rather racial poetry continued, developed, and grew large, notwithstanding the spread of Latin Christianity through Teutonic lands. Of this the Niebelungenlied and the Gudrun are great examples. But individual still famous poets, who felt and thought as Germans, were also composing sturdily in their vernacular a lack of education possibly causing them to dictate (dictieren, dichteri) rather than to write. Of these the greatest were Wolfram von Eschenbach and Walther von der Vogelweide. With them and after them, or following upon the Niebelungenlied, came a mass of secular poetry,
- ↑ Ante, Vol. I., p. 145.
