Considering the great length at which every the mi nutest item of the present subject has been discussed in separate treatises by authors °Idle greatest research, in genuity and taste, we should certainly involve ourselves in an attempt alike useless as presumptuous, if we pre tended to exhaust any part of it here ; or indeed, if we pretended to any thing beyond sketching, for the use of those who have not as yet entered on this wide field of study, some of the main topics to which they ought to di rect their attention. We shall endeavour to do the little we pretend to with as much brevity as is possible.
All critical antiquaries, then, arc at one as to the opi nion of which we have been speaking above, viz. that the romantic literature was in its origin historical, and we believe they all concur in lamenting the facility with which those into whose hands it fell, soon suffered its original character and purpose to escape them. While this, however, is admitted on every hand, a world of con troversies have sprung up both as to the question whence the historical materials, and as to that whence the mytho logical ornaments of the earliest romance-makers, with whose own works we have any acquaintance, were deri ved. One contends, that the legends of European ro mance were derived from the scalds of the north. Another maintains as unrivalled and alone the pretensions of the British bards. A third is of opinion, that although our ancestors might have possessed from a much earlier pe riod a few rude strains and bloody stories of their own, yet for the whole array of fancy, the whole ornaments of pleasing wonder, the whole soul and spirit, in short, of what we now talk of as the old Gothic romance—for eve ry thing that long made that popular, and still entitles it to be remembered—our Gothic forefathers were entirely indebted to that collision with the arts of the east, which attended their collision with eastern arms at the period of the Crusades. A fourth party, finally attribute a simi lar exclusive influence to the knowledge of the works of the ancients, which was spread abroad among the Gothic nations about the same time, and in part at least in con sequence of the sante causes.
It appears to us, and we believe most impartial judges are now of the same way of thinking, that there is a great portion of truth in the essays by which each of these hy potheses has been asserted and enforced, and that the fault of each of the theories lies in its being too narrow and exclusive. We well know that there were bards among the Celtic, scalds among the Gothic, and story tellers by profession among the Oriental people, as far back as any history reaches them. We know that in con sequence, first of Teutonic, then of Roman, and then again of a long series of Teutonic invasions, the popula tion of the western countries of Europe had early acqui red a very mixed character. We know that, in every instance, the conquerors and the conquered people must to a certain extent have mingled ; and in the names of places, in the assumption of customs, and in the whole composition of language, we have perfect evidence that this mixture took place, in most instances, to an extent totally irreconcilable with the reveries in which some writers indulge, as to the purity of any of the races of man now existing in western Europe. We, therefore, cannot see any difficulty whatever in believing, that the descendants of the poets described by Tacitus in his work on Germany, and those of the poets found by Julius Cae sar in Britain and Celtic France, should have commenced an interchange of their respective legendary treasures soon, and carried it on until it might be a matter of no small difficulty fur themselves to decide, whether any one given fact or fable was in its origin the property of the one race of people or of the other. In like manner we know, that the romantic literature of western Europe had not certainly gained any thing like the shape under which alone we are acquainted with it, and therefore entitled to speak decidedly about it, until in or about the period of the Crusades; and therefore, recognising, as we cannot fail to do, the extraordinary resemblance between many of the most striking features of that literature, and many of the most striking features of the fiction of the " un changing east," we cannot hesitate about admitting the extreme probability, that the minstrels who accompanied the armies of the Frankish princes into the east borrow ed ornaments for their own use among the people with whom these journeyings carried them into immediate and intimate contact. We conceive, on the contrary, that
in the absence of all distinct and positive proof—which, from the character of these uncritical times is of course the case here—it would be the extreme of imbecility to regret the views which, supported by all reason and like lihood, are, to say the least of it, uncontradicted by any authority worthy of being opposed for a single moment to these. And we take exactly the same view of the matter in regard to the fourth or classical hypothesis above stated. Our ancestors were descended from the same original stock with the Greeks. In their mytho logy, and in the more elaborate mythology of the Greeks, there were a thousand essential points of radical resem blance. What more natural, than that the ruder people should be glad to engraft upon their own fables the beau tiful ornaments of fancy, which they found interwoven with fables originally not of an incongruous character ? What more natural, than that they who unquestionably had witches and charms, and giants enough of their own, should borrow eagerly from those storehouses of classi cal fiction, in which all the arts of poetry had been la vished on the spells of Circe, the incantations of Medea, the impenetrable armour of Vulcan's forge, and the ex ploits of Polyphemus and his brethren ? Formed out of the mixture of these several kinds of materials, we have, in dur European literature, three dis tinct bodies of romantic writing ; and the most ancient of these appears from internal evidence to be that of the Germans. We say from internal evidence, and by this we mean not so much the internal evidence of style and language as that of thought and conception. In early times, compositions of this class were handed down orally from one generation to another, and of course the mere language of them was perpetually undergoing altera tions. But one strong circumstance cannot be over looked, and indeed appears to us to be conclusive. In all the existing romances of Arthur and of Charlemagne, we have the clearest traces of that peculiar spirit of re ligious chivalry which was first excited in western Eu rope in the period of the Crusades. In the Nibelungenlied we have nothing whatever of this. The poem may, as it now stands, have been the work of an age pos terior to the first Crusades; in all probability it was so by at least a hundred years ; but the person or persons who gave to these legends their present form and dress, must have carefully followed more ancient editions of them, otherwise it seems impossible that we should be able to discover in them nothing of the anti-Saracen ardour, no thing of the idea of a chivalry formed and preserved for purposes not political and military only, but religious; nothing, in short, of that peculiar spirit which animates the far greater portion of the Norman romances, connect ed with the traditions of Charlemagne and Arthur. Be sides, the superior antiquity of the Nibelungenlied le gends is equally attested by the far less formal manner in which the institution itself of chivalry is brought for ward. We have no trace of the solemn institutions and brotherhoods by which chivalry was distinguished in its perfect state ; and we know enough of all the romance writers to be quite certain, that they, under whatever colouring of distance, aimed at, or at least indulged in, nothing so much as the delineation of the actual manners of their own period.