Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/86

68 ong time well-nigh monopolized the oral tradition, began to decline, the telling of folk-lore tales, which never had been entirely interrupted, revived, became for some time and to a certain extent united with the mythic and legendary products of antiquity, and — though less extensively— with foreign elements, and still continues to flourish among the com- mon people.

In regard to literature, the propagation of which on northern soil contributed so much to the decline of genuine historical and poetical taste, and thus to the undermining of the peculiarly Norse literary development, we may be very brief. It consisted of romances and romantic poems full of strange adventures and sentimental love-stories, which were imported from Germany, France and England, and were written partly in Latin, partly in the vernaculars of those countries. The bulk of them were French, and either originally written in this language or translated from the Breton, which was spoken by the aboriginal Celtic population of France and England, and which long continued to flourish in popular literature among the inhabitants of Wales and Bretagne, whither the Celts gradually were forced to retire. From the thirteenth century translations and adaptations of such romances were zealously read in the higher circles in the North, and they became more and more popular until they at last displaced all other light reading. Of many of these books it is known with certainty that Norwegian kings or princes secured their translation, and to what extent this work of translation was carried may be inferred from the fact that an Icelandic scholar, who wrote a history of literature about the end of the last century, was able to give the