Page:Bury J B The Cambridge Medieval History Vol 2 1913.djvu/508

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GERMANIC HEATHENISM

Attempts to reconstruct the great edifice of ancient Teutonic religion base themselves on two main sources of information: the Continental and the Scandinavian. English evidence stands midway between the two. With the exception of Tacitus, the Continental writers seldom do more than let fall some chance remark on religious practices, their chief concern being with other matters — in Classical and post-Classical times with the wars of these "barbaric" races, and later, with their conversion to Christianity. We also possess some early laws, and the histories of those tribes fortunate enough to have inspired a medieval chronicler, but the laws date in their present shape from Christian times, and the histories are hardly more sympathetic towards heathen ideas than are the Lives of martyred saints or the edicts of Church Councils. The chief sources from Denmark, Norway and Sweden comprise a great wealth of archaeological information, their early laws, and Saxo's history of the legendary kings of Denmark, written about 1208. It is Iceland which furnishes us with almost all the literary evidence, beginning with the mythological poems of the Older Edda, which can in one sense be termed Icelandic with impunity, in the midst of the conflict as to their origin, since they only reach us from that country. With them may be classed the earlier skaldic poems from the Norwegian court. Then come the Sagas, prose histories of Icelandic families and Norwegian kings, often dealing with events which occurred before the conversion to Christianity about A.D. 1000, but not committed to writing till the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Neither source of evidence is perfectly satisfactory. The Scandinavian Sagas, though originating among a people with an extraordinarily keen instinct for historic truth, are far from contemporary with the events they relate. The Continental references to the subject are indeed often contemporary, but they are the observations of alien eyes, and some of them are open to the further objection that the superstitions mentioned may occasionally be mere survivals of the religious legacy of Rome. Fortunately there is more agreement between these two sources than we could have dared to expect, and this common factor in both is the more valuable since, though one channel of information begins where the other leaves off, they are yet practically independent of one another. While fully admitting that there were extremely wide local divergences in the practices and belief of the various tribes, the following survey of the