Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/450

400 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE Saxon, however, although it is often spoken of as Old Eng- lish, is very different from the English language of later times. It is much easier for a Frenchman to understand a French poem of the twelfth century than for an English- man to attempt to read Anglo-Saxon, in which many words and expressions are still a puzzle even to scholars. After the Norman conquest in the eleventh century learned men and the court and nobility all spoke and wrote ,. ,. , for some time either in Latin or in Norman Medieval English French, and Anglo-Saxon went out of use as a literary language except for the continuation of the Chronicle to 1154. Indeed, even before the Norman conquest Anglo-Saxon literature, like the Anglo-Saxon mon- archy, had already shown signs of decline. Anglo-Saxon now became simply the spoken tongue of the uneducated classes and the common people, and it was only after a long period of transformation of sounds, endings, and inflections, and of great alteration and enrichment of the vocabulary by words adopted from the French or Latin, that the lan- guage of the people again came to serve as a literary medium. Hence the first works of any importance in Middle English were not written until the thirteenth century, and not until the second half of the fourteenth do we reach, in Langland and Chaucer, the great period of English medieval literature. The epic Beowulf is thought to have existed in oral reci- tative form for some time before it was set down in writing. Medieval It is a tale of fighting and seafaring, of heroic th™rimi- 0f con ^ ct w * tn weird forces of nature, of slaying tive Teutonic dragons in their watery caverns, and of draining folk epic flagons of ale in the halls of thegns. It is written in the alliterative verse usual in Anglo-Saxon poetry, where the important and accented words in a line begin with the same sound. The Eddas of Iceland, too, written in the most primitive style of Icelandic verse, with stories of the gods Woden and Thor, of prophetesses and magic, of thralls and giants, seem to be a collection made in the thirteenth cen- tury from the mass of myth and legend handed down from earlier heathen times. The German Nibelungenlied also,