Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/68

 44 down to us from a later period, but much of a similar character which has perished, and it implies the closest familiarity of the community with their contents. Again, the Scandinavian attitude towards the new faith seems to have differed alike from that of Gael and Anglo-Saxon. The Skald did not, like the former, accept the new, but continue to tell the old with a minimum of change; nor, like the latter, practically abandon the old for the new. He clung with increased fervour to his own faith, but he re-shaped and enriched it in competition and conflict with the alien creed. In the world of European literature as of European polity, the Viking of the ninth-tenth centuries acts as a potent ferment. Cycles of tradition crystallise around the famous leaders, as duchies and kingdoms take shape under their mighty hands; older, outworn cycles have new blood infused into them, suffer transformation, and acquire a fresh lease of life, as did so many political organisations when the Norman with his combination of strong practical sense and daring imagination mastered them for his use.

As far as Britain is concerned, we can substantiate the hypothesis of Scandinavian influence on romance by the testimony of figured monuments. The men who carved on stone the legends of Sigurd and Völundr most certainly retold them in verse and prose. It may also, I think, be taken for certain that the Conquest of the eleventh century affected Danish Britain less than it did Anglo-Saxon Britain; there was less wrench of social life, more chance for tradition to flow in unbroken line.

On the other hand, there is in the Teutonic-Scandinavian contribution to our folklore a disturbing factor lacking in the Teutonic Anglo-Saxon. The latter, whether scanty or rich, whether brilliant or monotonous, is Teutonic alike in form and content; it is an open question whether the former did not borrow much of its form and still more of its tone and spirit from the Celts. By the time the Danish