Page:Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation (tr. Jane).djvu/16

Rh In Saxo's time—four centuries after Bede—the old gods can still be seen by looking through the elbow of a witch held akimbo, and their power is vital in the land. A shudder runs through all the treatment of the supernatural world. Nowhere is there a more gruesome tale than that of the man who, with sad Germanic loyalty, had himself buried alive in the barrow of his dead blood-brother. Passers-by, who, lured by hope of treasure, lowered one of their number into the barrow with a basket, listened terror-stricken to the sounds of horrid conflict within the mound. And when the basket rose again it held the ghastly form of the buried comrade, who had won desperate escape from that underworld, where the ghost of his brother, turned vampire, had viciously torn off his ear. If Bede has no such horrors as this to chronicle—though similar tales attend everywhere the progress of the old Northern peoples—we can see even from the stories he himself tells such as that of the sons of Penda, how violent and fierce was the temper of the heathen world. The light of conflagration, which shines down the ages in such old poems as The Fight at Finnsburgh, is not absent from his pages. The England he shows us is a bleak country, in which rare cultivated oases break the expanse of forest and morass. An eye-witness told him of the small altar to Odin erected by King Redwald in a Christian Church: He, the ruler of North-folk and South-folk, a man open-browed as the skies, Held the eyes of the eager Italians with his blue, bold, Englishman's eyes;

To the priests, to the eager Italians, thus fearless he poured his swift speech: 'O my honey-tongued fathers, I turn not away from the faith that you preach: Not the less, hath a man many moods, and may ask a religion for each. Grant that all things are well with the realm on a delicate day of the spring,— Easter-month, time of hopes and of swallows—. The praises, the psalms that ye sing, As in pleasant accord they float heavenward, are good in the ears of the King.