ABSTRACT
It seems improbable that the early Germanic peoples had no tradition of masking at all. But they were an oral, not a literate, culture, and our evidence is about as sparse as it can be. What there is belongs to the warrior elite, and suggests inevitably that masking was solely connected with the practice and (possibly) rituals of warfare. If the Anglo-Saxons had a tradition of folk masking, they have left no evidence of it.
