Andrew Lang

History Of English Literature From "Beowulf" To Swinburne Andrew Lang

For all early peoples, even the least civilized, possess the germs of literature. They have their hymns to their Divine Father above the sky, and to gods and spirits; they have magic songs, to win the love of women, or to cause the deaths of men; they have love-songs, and songs of feats of war. They possess fairy-tales, and legends in prose concerning gods and fabulous heroes; they have tales of talking birds and beasts; and they have dances in which the legends of old heroes are acted and sung. These dances are the germ of the drama: the songs are the germs of lyric poetry; the beast-stories are the sources of books like Æsop's Fables and Ovid's "Metamorphoses"; and the fairy-tales are the earliest kind of novels. The Anglo-Saxon invaders were, of course, on a very much higher level than that of savages. They were living in the age of iron; they did not use bronze for their swords, spears, and axes; much more remote were they from the period of stone axes, stone, knives, and stone arrow-heads. They could write, not in the Roman alphabet, but in "Runes," adapted at some unknown time by the Germanic peoples, probably from the Greek characters; and there is no reason why they should not have used this writing to preserve their poetry, though it is not certain that they did so at this early, period.