Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 07.djvu/166

* EPIC POETRY. 142 EPIC POETRY. twelfth century this story, common I the Teutonic 'stock, finally takes place in South German} as an epic poem, not only is the tale itself different at times in detail and incident, but the entire atmosphere and set- ting i- ■■ History has taken the place of myth. Brunhild is "no longer a Valkyr, nor is Siegfried able to change his shape. Be- lief ami manners are Catholic and mediseval in- stead of heathen and primitive. Early French epic poetry shows, perhaps, even more clearly the continuous change and growth of popular song. I'he Chansons tit Geste, as the name implies, deal with historical facts; bui it is history trans- anal glorified by passion and imagination The new and stirring sense of nationality, due to the successes of Charles Martel, reached its in the reign of Charlemagne, under whom aspirations for national greatness were at last almost entirely satisfied. In particular, the war in Spain (778) and the memorable dis- aster at Roncesvalles which terminated it called forth an extraordinary outburst of epic song. Later, when an age of royal had been succeeded by an age of feudal magnificence, there is another great period of epic productivity, which gives ex- pression to the feudal ideal. If one examines the Chansons, whether, like the Roland, the /'. /< to the royal period, or. like Rcnaud de Montau- iuni and Qirard de Roussillon, to the feudal, one discovers at once the same conditions that appear among the Teutons and the Finns — a mass of fluc- tuating poetic thought in a perpetual state of composition, decomposition, and recomposition. This poetry developed among the warrior class and those attached to its service, and there is no doubt that the songs contemporary with the events were often composed and chanted by the knights themselves Hut they were especially composed and made familiar to all by the min- strels, the jongleurs (q.v.), who took service with the great lords, or else more frequently made the round of the chateaux, or sang their lays in places of public resort. Through their wandering liie they bee acquainted with one another's songs. In the endeavor to please by giv- t. ni.li nf novelty to a favorite old I in. they would combine two or three songs, modify them to remove discrepancies, and am- plify for (he sake of poetical embellishment or more stirring description of incident. In this way there came into existence an im- mense body of epic material contained in short snugs, which toward the middle of the ele enlh century began I" lake the form of long epic poems. Finally, tl omposition of the Chansons te comes in hi end iii a period (from the end of the twelfth century to the middle ,,f the Fourteenth) which i> in ;i|] respects anil u to that o the cyclic poets in (.'recce. The legends tin rel lied and I nd together by intro- duction [meeting link- and continuations, anil the intend ih.gies nf the heroes oul i'I h. The vicii, i ,,r these '•pic-. I'l.hmtl. inu-l l.c dated, in i "i, full three centuries after • he di i,l in this version mil id c| names and even! - of .-, | Richard of Nor Ml-iilcin ; the I I loll, > uggg led, is Wenelori, Archbishop of Sens, accused of treason against Charles the Bald in 859. The Basques who surprised Charlemagne's rear-guard have be- come Saracens; and the King himself, who was then thirty-six years old, appears in the form in which, after the close of his reign, tradition conse- crated his memory — unviellard « /•/ barbt fleurie. Over a hundred years later a redaction in rhyme instead of assonance appears, with a new ending of some 2000 lilies; and of this version we have again a large number of remaniements or rehand- lings. The conclusions as to the genesis of epic poetry to which we are thus far led are strengthened by a study of the Sanskrit Mahabharata. There was a like warrior class, the Kshatriyas, proud of its valorous deeds and delighting in their celebra- tion in song; and there is no reason to doubt that, in India as in Greece, Iceland, Germany, and France, popular poetry flourished in the form of short epic lays. The Mahabharata, which con- sists of about 107,000 ilokas, or couplets, nearly eight times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssi y together, shows internal evidence, confirmed by statements in the poem, of an early nucleus of perhaps one-fifth of that amount. This is the portion which relates the feud of the two great Bharata houses whose rivalry forms the main plot of the poem. But this in its turn has grown out of shorter handlings of different parts of the story. The Puranas, or collections of ancient tra- ditions, especially ethical and theosophic, agree m much of their matter with the Mahabharata, and seem to show that the compilers of both drew upon a common body of popular verse tales. That the poems which are sometimes called the epics of growth were formed out of earlier Urine Licdcr is now doubted by no one. What is still a warmly disputed point is the mode in which the combination was finally effected. Was the epos a mere compilation of these shorter lays, more or less ingeniously fitted together, with the help, perhaps, of some new connecting links, but still with such preservation of the original masses that the modern scholar with his criti- cal acumen can discern the junctures? Or, was the entire material so fused in the mind of some one great poet as to come forth a homogeneous and organically related whole? In 1795 F. A. Wolf published his famous Prolegomena to Ho- mer, in which he argued at length for the view that "Pisistratus was the first who had the Homeric poems committed to writing and brought into that order in which we now read them." Karl l.achmann. in two papers read to the Berlin Acad- emy in 1S37 and 1841, maintained that the Iliad was made of sixteen independent lays, with vari- ous enlargements and interpolations, all finally reduced to order by Pisistratus. Lachmann had already investigated the structure of the yibelungenMed, and had reached tin' conclusion that it consisted nf twenty ancient ballads which had been put together about 1210; that the col- lector or editor had connected them by stanzas nf hi> own composition, and that in the ancient bal- lads themselves be had inserted unauthentic Since that time the Homeric question has been much discussed, and widely divergent 1 1 rics. differing both in principle and in detail, have been put forth by scholars who deny Ihe unity of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Mr. Walter I'll i"i instance, one of the latest, in his Com- panion I" the lliatl ( 1802), holds thai, to an orig-
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