ABSTRACT

It is, however, in the end to be admitted, that many Anglo-Saxon clerics, without doing any violence to their Christianity, far outstripped the Germans in the eighth and ninth centuries, partly in their popular inclination, partly in a free and all-round education. Many were familiar even with the Greek language and literature, but for all that did not let themselves be led in any way into contempt for their own language, but strove all the more to preserve faithfully for the latter the value in poetry and speech which it deserved. So it came about that already in the eighth century in England the extensive heroic poem, the epic, could develop out of the mythic and epic folk-lay, which never took place in Scandinavia, and in central Germany not before the twelfth century, and that the poetry as a whole here maintained itself in the old spirit and in its original, pure, common-Germanic form, while among us it was overwhelmed by the foreign rhyme-form, and the old spirit itself was, partly just through the acceptance of the foreign form, more or less remodelled.