Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/374

318 printed, edited, furnished with copious exegesis and commentary. They have been studied as literature. Now their value as literature is surely taken on trust. The pieces were written down to the rude pagan mind, and their value lies in that circumstance. They were devised to captivate the eye, to arrest attention, to impress on unwilling or indifferent minds, innocent of all cultivation, the personalities and the stories of the Christian cult. If we may not deny them a place as literature, we may regard them as they are, exotics, foreign to the people in their origin. Their position in relation to literature corresponds, perhaps, to that of chap-books; rude versions of literary subjects prepared for unlettered people. The Bible is literature, and Homer, and the Sagas: but these plays, devised by ecclesiastics for didactic purposes, have a very different origin and development. In relation to the mediæval history of England they are extremely important; and when they are so studied, the obvious direction of inquiry will be into the condition of things amid which they were introduced, into those pagan performances of a dramatic character which they were devised to supplant.

For the sake of clearness it is perhaps not superfluous to set down the fact that the Saxon invasion of England preceded the introduction of Christianity. From this source, and from the later Danish immigrations, are derived the original elements, Teutonic and Scandinavian, of English folk-lore. Of these elements, those of which it may be predicated most clearly that they belong to the Northern mythology, are song and dance, and combined or concerted imitative action of any kind. Why these elements never intermarried, and so never produced a Northern literary drama, is due probably to political causes; because in the poetry of the Eddas, in the religious rites of the warlike worship of Odin, in the power of expression as shown by the scalds, and the musical capacity as shown