Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/108

 82 German, half Roman States. And, as I have already insisted, what was vital in Teutonic institutions has been preserved for the modern world by England, by the island colony, not by the mainland home of the Germans. In one thing our Saxon ancestors seem at first blush sadly deficient from the folklorist's point of view: the rich store of myth and romance preserved alike by the Continental and the Scandinavian Germans would seem to have dwindled away in their hands, influencing but slightly our later literature or our mass of popular fancy. But we must not forget that the most archaic German hero-legend of any length, Beowulf, was composed in these islands, nor that, if Continental German literature had had its development violently arrested in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as was the case with our Anglo-Saxon literature, Germany would have had nought to tell us of Siegfried or Dietrich, of the wooing of Brunhild or the vengeance of Kriemhild. If, however, this plea be admitted m striking the balance between the claims of Low and High Germany to the preservation of the racial sagas, it cannot, will it be said, be urged against the far superior claims of Scandinavia. Anglo-Saxondom must yield to Norway and Denmark the honour of preserving the crown of Teutonic myth and romance. Anglo-Saxondom, Yes! but Britain? This query is allowable in view of the large share which has been claimed of late for men of these islands in the elaboration of that great fabric of mythico-heroic saga which we owe to Iceland, Norway, and Denmark. In the North and North-west the Teutons found their limit as had the Celts in the West, but after ages of comparative quiescence they broke forth, hurling themselves upon communities partly subjected to the double influence of Christian and Roman civilisation. In the stress of conflict with the alien ideals they encountered, they expressed and magnified and developed their own; but to do this they had to come in contact with men who still sympathised with the pre-Christian conception of life, and still retained much of the