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causes.

To be affronted at a tournament, or to be omitted in the invitation to a feast, kindles a war. Women are carried off, and the whole tribe, as in the Homeric times, rise to avenge the wrong. In their battles it is evident the drum, trumpet, or bagpipe were not known or used. They had no expedient for giving the military alarm but striking on a shield or raising a loud cry.

"Their armies seem not to have been numerous. They appear to have been destitute of military discipline and skill. The battles were disorderly, and terminated for the most part by a personal combat or wrestling between the two chiefs, after which the bards sang the song of triumph, and the battle ceased along the hills.' Their ideas were all particular. They had not words to express general conceptions; these were the consequence of more profound reflection and larger acquaintance with the arts of thought and speech.

"A public, a community, the universe, were conceptions beyond their sphere, as also was personification as a poetical figure. Inanimate objects, such as trees, woods, and flowers, they are supposed to have personified; but those of later poets - Time, Terror, Fame, Virtue were modes of expression too abstract for the age."

The poetry of the Scalds, containing not only the praises of their heroes but their popular traditions and religious rites, was filled with those superstitions which would naturally pervade the fictions of a wild, imaginative Asiatic people. Some of the superstitions handed down from the old Goths and Scandinavians are retained to this day in the English language. Mara, from whom our "nightmare" is derived, was in the Runic theology a spirit or spectre of the night, which seized men in their sleep and suddenly deprived them of speech and motion. Among those boar-feasting, mead-guzzling Goths we can easily imagine Mara as a resident household fiend. In the days of fable, poetry, without fear of contradiction, could give what character she pleased to her heroes. Men loved to record their

connection with chiefs so renowned. Bards were employed to perpetuate their deeds in song; and thus in process of time every chief had a bard in his own family, and the office at last became hereditary. By the succession of these bards the poems concerning the ancestors of the family were handed down from generation to generation, and always alluded to in the new compositions of the bards. This custom came down to a period not altogether remote from our own time; for after the bards were discontinued a great number in a clan retained by memory or committed to writing their compositions, and founded the antiquity of their families on the authority of their poems.

The descendants of the Celts who inhabited Britain and its Isles were, it is averred, not singular in this method of preserving the most precious monuments of their nation. We are told that the Spartans through long habit became so fond of this custom of oral tradition that they would never allow their laws to be committed to writing. All the historical monuments of the old Germans were comprehended in their ancient songs and orally handed down. Garcillan is said to have composed his account of the Incas of Peru from poetical traditions, the Peruvians having lost all other monument of their history. "When we consider," says Dr. Blair, "a college of men like the Scalds, who, thus cultivating poetry through a long series of years, had their imaginations continually employed upon ideas of heroism, who had all the poems and panegyrics which were composed by their ancestors handed down to them with care, is it not natural to think they would contribute not a little to exalt the public manners?"

Warton, who had, it is affirmed, distinctly considered the peculiarities, habits, and manners belonging to the early Gothic tribes, places the origin of chivalry in Europe

in these early times, and "finds the seeds of elegance among men only distinguished for their ignorance and barbarity. To this people," he says, "we must refer the origin of gallantry in Europe." Even amid the confusion of savage war and among the most incredible cruelties committed by the Goths at their invasion of Europe, they forbore to offer any violence to the women. The Gothic nations dreaded captivity more on account of their women than their own; and the Romans, availing themselves of this apprehension, often demanded their noblest virgins as hostages.

They believed some divine and prophetic quality to be inherent in their women. It is related of Valeda, a German prophetess, who held frequent conferences with the Roman generals, that on some occasions, on account of the sacredness of her person, she was placed at a great distance on a high tower, from whence like an oracular divinity she conveyed her answers by some chosen messenger. Exaggerated ideas of female chastity prevailed among the Northern nations, and the passion of love, controlled by the principles of honor and integrity, acquired a degree of delicacy.

It is related of Regner Lodbrok that, imprisoned in a loathsome dungeon and condemned to be destroyed by venomous serpents, he solaced himself by recollecting and reciting the glorious achievements of his past life. The first which his Ode commemorates is an achievement of chivalry. It was the delivery of a beautiful Swedish princess, whom he afterward married, from an impregnable fortress in which she was forcibly detained.

Boh, a Danish champion, having lost his chin and one of his cheeks by a single stroke from his adversary, only reflected how he should be received, when thus maimed and disfigured, by the Danish girls. He is said to have

instantly exclaimed, "The Danish girls will not now willingly or easily give me kisses if I should perhaps return home." Harold, one of the most eminent adventurers of his age, complains in his Ode that the reputation he had acquired by so many hazardous exploits, by his skill in single combat, riding, swimming, gliding along the ice, darting, rowing, and guiding a ship through the rocks, had not been able to make any impression upon Elisiff, the beautiful daughter of Janillas, King of Russia. Chivalry, it must be remembered, existed but in its rudiments at this early era; later, after the Norman Conquest, it became a formal institution.

A skill in poetry is said to have become in some measure a national science among the Scandinavians, and familiar with almost every order and degree. Their kings and warriors partook of the epidemic enthusiasm, breaking forth on frequent occasions into spontaneous songs and

verses.

Asbiorn Pruda, a Danish champion, who lived at the close of the tenth century, described his past life in nine strophes while his enemy, Bruce, a giant, was tearing out his bowels.

"Tell my mother, Suanita of Denmark," he says, "that she will not this summer comb the hair of her son; I had promised her to return, but now my side shall feel the edge of the sword." Longfellow gives a rhymed translation of this song, each stanza beginning with this line,

"Not such those days of yore."

One could almost fancy the regretful burden of Asbiorn's death-song floating down the centuries to be re-echoed at last by that peerless bard who sings from the depth of "the same divine despair" in strains tender and sad as the complaining song of his own nightingale, "The days that are no more."

In the latter half of the tenth century, at the court of Hakon the Good, flourished the Scald Eyvynd, who for his skill in poetry was called "The Cross of Poets." Eyvynd was the most celebrated of all the Scalds. His noble ode, called in the Northern Chronicles "The Eulogium of Hakon, King of Norway," was composed in a battle in which the king with eight of his brothers fell; Eyvynd fought himself in the battle which he celebrated. This death-song, of which there is a translation in Longfellow's collection, contains these lofty sentiments,

"Hallowed be the day,

Praised the year,

When a king is born

Whom the gods love!

By him his time

And his land shall be known.

"Wealth is wasted,

Kinsmen are mortal,

Kingdoms are parted;
But Hakon remains
High among the gods,

Till the trumpet shall sound."

"These Northern chiefs appear frequently," observes Warton, "to have hazarded their lives merely in expectation of meeting a panegyric from their bards. Olave, King of Norway, when his army was prepared for the onset, placed three Scalds about him and exclaimed aloud, 'You shall not only record what you have heard but what you have seen.' We are told that thus incited they each obligingly delivered an ode on the spot.

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It is related in Canute's History that he ordered the Scald Loftunga to be put to death for daring to comprehend his achievements in too concise a poem. The bard, however, extorted a speedy pardon by producing the next

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