Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/451

 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE 401 though not written down until about 1200, makes use of an old story of the hero Siegfried to which there are references both in Beowulf and in Icelandic literature. But in the German version the old heathen gods and the primitive Northern setting have been displaced by medieval Chris- tianity and by scenes and heroes drawn from early medieval history, such as Attila the Hun and Brunhilda the Frankish queen, while the local color is largely that of feudal society. But the old heroes have lost none of their giant strength, nor of their colossal passions. In Iceland in the thirteenth century numerous prose sagas were composed dealing with family histories, viking adventures, and a wild, mysterious world of nature. Somewhat similar are the Celtic tales penned in Ireland at about the same period. The chief literary movements of the Middle Ages, how- ever, originated in the Romance languages, and France was the heart and center of the literary activity of France the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, medieval i France, where feudalism was at its height, whose literature knighthood overflowed into the British Isles, the Spanish
 * and Italian peninsulas, Sicily and Syria, the Levant and

! the Orient ; France, where we shall find the cradle of Gothic j architecture, that supreme artistic creation of the Middle
 * Ages; France, where we shall also see develop the most

i powerful medieval monarchy, — France also took the lead j both in poetry and in prose, and the surrounding countries 1 learned from her to a great extent both what they should write about and how they should write about it. And within France both the regions north and south of the Loire en- gaged simultaneously in the creation of new literatures. It is possible that this medieval French literature had its pre- cursors and was the outcome of a gradual development, but we cannot trace such a process, and the writings appear before us as the spontaneous expression of a new age and unlike in form and substance to any previous literature of which we know. Although by no means entirely modern in character, it is more like the writing of modern times than it is like that of the immediately preceding ninth and tenth