Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/36

 22 vast body of romance grew up round oral legends attached to persons who, if they existed, must, some of them, have lived and died in the sixth century. In both these cases the foundation of the new literature was certainly oral. For the Britannic Book, like the British History, can but have contained the substance of oral traditions. It is true^ as Carlyle said, that beyond a limited time (no greater perhaps than three centuries) all the past tends to be viewed as on one plane. These are the old times

as the parody has it; but even then a certain order is remembered. The two Cromwells may be confused, but they are known to be later than the Danes, and the Danes themselves younger than the "old Romans." In the far-off landscape only a few peaks catch the sun, only a few names survive, but we must remember that with us in England, since the Conversion which began in the late sixth century, there has been no systematic tradition, no organisation that secured the handing down of that great mass of heathen history and knowledge which the Teutonic settlers must have brought across the North Sea in the fifth century. Kings (like Alfred and his exemplar, Charles) may have busied themselves with the collection of the old songs, but the change in religion, in language and in culture, and the long disgrace under which all that had affinity to the Old Faith had so long lain, must have prevented their collections (of which so little now remains) from being at all adequately representative of the vast mass of traditions that belonged to the past. Spells have survived in out-of-the-way places, and a few curious penmen (to whom we owe great gratitude) took the trouble to write down some few compositions in which they were personally interested. It is to such a stray Scandinavian collector that the preservation of the two chief collections of the Eddie poems is due. But the mass of old lore in Britain has