Page:The Normans in European History.djvu/61

Rh for knowledge of this epoch once remarked, its delightful obscurity makes it all the more interesting, but there are limits to the delights of obscurity, and a French scholar who has tried to reconstruct the history of this period in Spain finds that all surviving documentary sources of information are fabrications! Matters are not so bad as that for Normandy, for the forgers there chose other periods in which to place their products, but there are for the tenth century practically no contemporary documents or contemporary Norman chronicles. The earliest Norman historian, Dudo, dean of Saint-Quentin, wrote after the year 1000 and had no personal knowledge of the beginnings of the Norman state. Diffuse, rhetorical, credulous, and ready to distort events in order to glorify the ancestors of the Norman dukes who were his patrons, Dudo is anything but a trustworthy writer, and only the most circumspect criticism can glean a few facts from his confused and turgid rhetoric. Yet he was copied by his Norman successors, in prose and in verse, and has found his defenders among patriotic Normans of a more modern time. Not until quite recent years has his fundamental untrustworthiness been fully established, and with it has vanished all hope of any detailed knowledge of early Norman history. Only with the eleventh century do we reach a solid foundation of annals and charters in the reigns of the princes whom Dudo seeks to glorify in the person of their predecessors. And when we reach