According to these writers, the Douazdeh Rokh, or twelve champions of Kai Khosrou, would be the archetypes of the peers of Charlemagne the moris cos, of our ballads and the fiestas de las canas, of our tournaments. Warburton (Final note to Love's Labor Lost ) and Warton (First Dissertation prefixed to the History of English Poetry ) favour more or less this hypothesis, which makes Spain the birth-place of modern civilization, and successively the school-mistress of the Provenzal and Italian, of the Norman and English, poets.
That scheme of opinion which aims at deducing romance, rime, and knighthood, from the Arabs, originates probably with Velasquez, who, in a history of the poetry of Spain, naturally ascribes to the Moorish conquest many peculiarities of Spanish culture. Two systems especially, which may be characterized as the Arabic and the Gothic, have attracted the toils of microscopic erudition, and divide the votes of literary speculators. The pedigree is still to seek of circumstances, which have given to the manners of our heroic ages, and to the compositions of our European poets, their most peculiar tinge.ĭifferent theories have indeed been offered of their probable origin. Had the Constantinopolitans borrowed it from their Persian neighbours, adopted it in their popular novels, handed it through Ravenna to the Italians and Lombards, and thus naturalized it in the north? In this case it ought first to have made its appearance in Italy, and next in the metrical romances of Lombardy, which is not apparent so that the nest of romantic fiction, the origin of chivalry, and the establishment of rime, are of uncertain locality. Gangolf,-of which, indeed, the German original exists no longer, but of which a latin metrical version remains, written by Roswitha, a nun at Gandersheim, in Lower Saxony who, under the first and second Otho, distinguished herself by latin poetry, and wrote spiritual plays in a language resembling that of Terence.īut in general a dead pause seemed to have checked the fertility, or paralyzed the industry, of the studious Germans and when they next awoke to recommence their practical exertions, a new mythology appeared to have grown up in the country, a sort of oriental fairyism, wholly distinct from the stern simplicity of the original paganism, and from the imported hagiolatry of the Romish priesthood. Some legendary ballads were produced under the Saxon emperors, analogous to the lyrical history of St. This fable retained a long popularity it was repeatedly modernized during the middle ages, Notgér, at Liege, translated psalms, and set them to music.Ī long and complex fable, known by the title of Renard the Fox,-resembling in structure the apologues of Pilpay,-is supposed to have originated at this period' as history mentions an Austrian (Count Isengrim,) and a Lorrain (Duke Reinhard,) who flourished before the twelfth century,-after whom the wolf and the fox of the story are thought to have been named. He was a vain overbearing man, another St.Dunstan but likely to have given such a colouring to his own conduct as it here receives : and the intimate knowledge displayed of all his connexions favours the suspicion that he is himself the versifier of this rimed chronicle. Poem seems to record the death of Anno, yet,- as he provided his own mausoleum in the minster of Siegeberg, was familiar with the thought of death, and might have strong reason to expect it,-there is no impossibility in his having written the entire poem. a pious civility, commonly shown, in those times, to a predecessor. The entire poem consists of 880 lines, separated into forty-nine irregular strophes, or paragraphs: it makes mention of the Emperor Henry IV blames the concurrence of Anno in a plan to carry off this young prince treats the bishop's illness as a judgment for that crime but flatters him with the hope of celestial pardon, and that his body should work miracles,
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