all were astonished at his strange garb and bearing. He enquired for Charlemagne, who had been long since dead; the generation below Oger had grown to be old men, yet he still had the habit of a man of thirty. We need not wonder that his talk excited suspicion. But at length he made himself known to the King of France, joined his army, and put the paynim to flight. He had now forgotten his life in Fairie, he was beloved by the Queen of France (the King having been killed) and was about to marry her, when Morgue again appeared and carried him off to Avalon.

It need not be said that this story of the return of the hero to earth is an essential in the legend of the Earthly Paradise. In this way among others found expression that favourite myth of the Middle Age of the sleeping hero who, though withdrawn for awhile from the world and its combats, was yet to come back again some day, and at the hour of his country's supreme need stand in irresistible might at the side of her warriors, ready to strike a final blow for her deliverance. This myth, I say, was universal and fondly cherished. Probably the sleeping hero was at first the old national god, still dear to peasants' hearts. That old god might serve for a symbol of the time when these peasants themselves were freer and more warlike than they had become. For gradually arms were taken from the hands of the freemen and the bonders, and they sank to the condition of serfs. They were buried, like Thorr and Wuotan, beneath a mountain of new laws which they could not shake off.

When the national god was forgotten a national hero. became the symbol of the sleeping past. Where Wuotan had once slumbered there now lay Charlemagne or Frederick Redbeard; and on his heart weighed the mass of an immense mountain, which yet moved with his breathing. Or otherwise it was said that the hero had gone, like Oger, to the far-off Earthly Paradise, and would return again when most needed, as Oger did.

THE PARADISE KNIGHT.

459

From the legends of this class are to be derived some of those bright but misty figures the Paradise Knights, who move across the field of popular lore, coming no one knows from whence and when their work is done going away no one knows whither. But there is another order of these half-celestial beings-the knights who are born in Paradise. Of Oger himself it is recorded that he became by Morgue the father of Mervain, and that this Mervain was a valiant knight in the days of Hugh Capet.

Indeed, as human beings, knights and dames, may be transported to the deathless land without undergoing death or changing their earthly nature, taking their soulas and all the enjoyments of our world, children, it is clear, may be born in that place; and these Paradise children, though they have powers above the range of common mortality, yet are in no way separated in interests from their fellow men. They may long to come to the common earth and perform here deeds of knight-errantry, and then to go back again if their work is over or they themselves unthankfully treated, as such celestial messengers often are. Hence we have that beautiful and universal German myth of the child who comes earthward from the immortal land. As the hero goes away to Avalon in a boat, so this child comes wafted in a boat to some shore, or down some river. The child is sleeping; no one knows whence it has fared.'

In the introduction to Beowulf it is said that his father, Seyld, was after his death borne to a ship and placed in it with no less gifts provided than they gave him who at the beginning sent him forth over the wave, being a child.' The legend here alluded to is that this child had been borne in a boat without sail or oar to the

In certain legends of saints a ship floats against stream, bearing their remains to a fit resting-place. The remains of St. Marternus were in this way carried up the Rhine in a rudderless boat and deposited at Rodenkirchen. The remains of St. Emmeranus were carried from the Iser to the Danube, and thence up stream to Ratisbon. See Simrock, Handbuch der D. M., 285.

shore of Scandinavia,' and that he was afterwards chosen to be king of that land. There is a mistake made by the author of Beowulf when he attributes this history to Scyld, for the name should be Sceaf, the father of Scyld; but this is of no consequence. The outlines of the legend stand clear; and this legend gives the normal form of the myth. The child born in Paradise is wafted by an unknown bark from that unknown shore; he becomes king of the people of his adoption. After death (or before it, when his work is done) he is again carried away in a boat to Paradise. Among the many medieval forms of this myth one is the legend of the Swan Knight, of which one special form is the story of Lohengrin of Brabant:2

Lohengrin was son of Sir Percival, who, having been while in the world long in search for the Holy Grail, had been snatched up to a Fellowship of the Holy Grail in another world. In this Paradise Lohengrin was born. Then, at the prayer of Else of Brabant, he was sent into the world to be her champion and to prove her innocence. He married her and became Duke of Brabant. But the condition of his staying by her side was that she should never ask his name, and this condition she disregarded. So once again the mystic boat came sailing down the Rhine; and Lohengrin entered it once more, and was then lost for ever to the world of men. But there is no need to retell this tale to-day. Since this swan knight left the world of popular lore he had slept in men's remembrance till yesterday, when the wand of the magician again called him back from the Paradise or Limbo of forgotten legends. And now he has been reborn for us with no less gifts provided,' surrounded with a no less splendid halo of poetry and beauty than they gave him who first sent him to wander through the seas of human thought.

Insula oceani quæ dicitur Scania.'- Chron. Ethilw. iii. 3.

In quamdam insulam Scanzam, de qua Jornandes historiographus Gothorum loquitur.'- Wm. of Malmesbury.

2 See Grimm's Deutsche Sagen, ii. 256 sqq., for this legend, and several others of the same kind.

SURVIVAL OF HEATHENISM.

461

CHAPTER X.

HEATHENISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES.

THE heathenism of Northern Europe cannot fully be studied if we confine ourselves to heathen literature and to heathen times alone; for its beliefs are to be detected lurking in many secret places of the Catholicism of the Middle Ages; nay, for that matter, they are to be discovered in contemporary creeds. We have already seen this in part, for while tracing out some special phases of belief those, namely, which were concerned with the future state-we found ourselves insensibly being carried on from the mythology of the ancient Germans and Celts and of the Norsemen to similar myths which were current during the Middle Ages. We found ourselves passing, almost without intermission, from Helheim to the mediæval purgatory, and from the heathen notions touching the Earthly Paradise to the notions concerning the same place which were in vogue in the tenth and twelfth centuries.

What we have thus done in part and for particular elements of belief we ought to try and do for the whole. In a rough way we ought to try and discover what strain of heathenism still lingered in the Christianity of the Middle Ages, and how far the life and thought of the men of those days was a legacy from the past life and thought of the heathen days which had been before them. But this subject is an immense one, and cannot possibly be duly dealt with in one chapter. It can, at the very best, only be sketched in merest outline, and presented in a most fragmentary form. Wherefore what is set down in

the concluding pages of this volume is meant as a help to the reader to recover for himself the threads of heathen beliefs which run through mediæval Catholicism rather than an attempt to draw out these threads in due order or to trace their various interlacings. Be it remembered, too, that it is not into the ethical parts of Catholicism that we are going to make enquiry. It were far too great a task to attempt to decide what elements in the moral creed of the Middle Ages can be traced back to heathenism, and truly affiliated to the beliefs of heathen Europe, and what elements are really Christian. Moreover, though our space were unlimited, that enquiry would always lie beyond the sphere of this work. At the very outset of this volume all intention was disclaimed of wandering into the domain of morals. The kind of belief which has throughout been our study is that which is in its essentials independent of the moral code. If ethics have entered here and there, they have come in, as we said they would do, only by the way.

But another thing which was laid down at the outset of the volume was this: that very early phases of belief may subsist side by side with phases of much higher development; and that we are quite at liberty, if we choose, to stray into these later fields in search of the early formations' and nothing more. Much, no doubt, of mediæval Catholicism-nay, by far the greater part of it-shows an advanced stage of religious growth. As a whole the creed lies far beyond that initial phase of monotheism which elsewhere we posed as the limits of our special field of enquiry; but there is yet something left in Catholicism as a legacy from early days. It is in quest of these elements only that we turn to the study of it

now.

To say that we abandon the ethical parts of the creed is the same thing as to say that we turn to search in mediæval Christianity for those parts of it which spring most directly from the contact of man with outward