by Will Durant
As the Church used architecture, sculpture, painting, and music to impress upon the faithful the central scenes and ideas of the Christian epic, so she appealed to the imagination, and intensified the piety, of the people by developing in increasing splendor and detail the dramatic implications of the greater feasts. The “tropes,” or amplifying texts added for musical elaboration to the liturgy, were sometimes turned into little plays. So an “Easter trope” in a tenth-century manuscript at St. Gall assigns this dialogue to parts of a choir divided to represent angels and the three Marys:
Angels: Whom seek ye in the tomb, O servants of Christ?
Marys: We seek Christ that was crucified, O heavenly host.
Angels: He is not here; He is risen, as He foretold. Go, and announce that He is risen.
United chorus: Alleluia, the Lord has risen.17
Gradually, from the twelfth century onward, the religious spectacles grew too complex for representation within doors. A platform was set up outside the church, and the ludus or play was performed by actors chosen from the people and trained to memorize an extended script. The oldest extant example of this form is a twelfth-century Representation of Adam, written in French with Latin “rubrics” in red ink as directions to the players.
Adam and Eve, dressed in white tunics, are shown playing in an Eden represented by shrubs and flowers in front of the church. Devils appear, in those red tights that have clung to them ever since in the theater; they run through the audience, twisting their bodies and making horrible grimaces. They offer the forbidden fruit to Adam, who refuses it, then to Eve, who takes it; and Eve persuades Adam. So convicted of a desire for knowledge, Adam and Eve are fettered with irons and are dragged off by the devils to hell—a hole in the ground, from which comes an infernal noise of rejoicing. In a second act Cain prepares to murder Abel. “Abel,” he announces, “you are a dead man.” Abel: “Why am I a dead man?” Cain: “Do you wish to hear why I want to kill you? … I will tell you. Because you ingratiate yourself too much with God.” Cain flings himself upon Abel, and beats him to death. But the author is merciful: “Abel,” reads the rubric, “shall have a saucepan beneath his clothes.”18
Such Biblical ludi were later called “mysteries,” from the Latin ministerium in the sense of an action; this was also the meaning of drama. When the story was post-Biblical it was called a miraculum or miracle play, and usually turned on some marvelous deed of the Virgin or the saints. Hilarius, a pupil of Abélard, composed several such short plays (c. 1125), in a mixture of Latin and French. By the middle of the thirteenth century the vernacular languages were the regular medium of such “miracles”; humor, increasingly broad, played a rising role in them; and their subjects became more and more secular.
Meanwhile the farce had made its own development toward drama. The evolution is exemplified in two short plays that have come down to us from the pen of an Arras hunchback, Adam de la Halle (c. 1260). One of them, Li jus Adam—the Play of Adam—is about the author himself. He had planned to be a priest, but fell in love with sweet Marie. “It was a beautiful and clear summer day, mild and green, with delightful song of birds. In the high woods near the brook … I caught sight of her who is now my wife, and who now seems pale and yellow to me…. My hunger for her is satisfied.” He tells her so with peasant directness, and plans to go to Paris and the university. Into this marital scene, with more rhyme than reason, the author introduces a physician, a madman, a monk begging alms and promising miracles, and a troop of fairies singing songs, like a ballet projected by main force into a modern opera. Adam offends one of the fairies, who lays upon him the curse of never leaving his wife. From such nonsense there is a line of continuous development to Bernard Shaw.
As secularization proceeded, the performances moved from the church grounds to the market place or some other square in the town. There were no theaters. For the few performances to be given—usually on some summer festival—a temporary stage was erected, with benches for the people and gaily decorated booths for nobilities. Surrounding houses might be used as background and “properties.” In religious plays the actors were young clerics; in secular plays they were town “mummers” or wandering jongleurs; women rarely took part. As the plays strayed farther from the church in scene and theme, they tended toward buffoonery and obscenity, and the Church, which had given birth to the serious drama, found herself forced to condemn the village ludi as immoral. So Bishop Grosseteste of Lincoln classed the plays, even the “miracles,” along with drinking bouts and the Feast of Fools, as performances that no Christian should attend; and by such edicts as his (1236–44) the actors who took part were automatically excommunicated. St. Thomas was more lenient, and ruled that the profession of histrio had been ordained for the solace of humanity, and that an actor who practiced it becomingly might, by God’s mercy, escape hell.19
IV. EPICS AND SAGAS
The secularization of literature went hand in hand with the rise of the national languages. By and large, by the twelfth century, only clerics could understand Latin, and writers who wished to reach a lay audience were compelled to use the vernacular tongues. As social order grew, the reading audience widened, and national literatures rose to meet its demand. French literature began in the eleventh century, German in the twelfth, English, Spanish, and Italian in the thirteenth.
The natural early form of these indigenous literatures was the popular song. The song was drawn out into the ballad; and the ballad, by proliferation or agglutination, swelled into such minor epics as Beowulf, the Chanson de Roland, the Nibelungenlied, and the Cid. The Chanson was probably put together about 1130 from ballads of the ninth or tenth century. In 4000 simple, flowing iambic lines it tells the story of Roland’s death at Roncesvalles. Charlemagne, having “conquered” Moorish Spain, turns back with his army toward France; the traitorous Ganelon reveals their route to the enemy; and Roland volunteers to lead the dangerous rear guard. In a narrow winding gorge of the Pyrenees a horde of Basques pours down from the cliffs upon Roland’s little force. His friend Olivier begs him to sound his great horn as a call to Charlemagne for aid, but Roland proudly refuses to ask for help. He and Olivier and Archbishop Turpin lead their troops in a desperate resistance, and they fight till nearly all are dead. Olivier, blinded by blood flowing from mortal wounds in his head, mistakes Roland for an enemy, and strikes him. Roland’s helmet is split from crown to nosepiece, but saves him.
At this blow Roland looks at him,
Asks him gently and softly:
“Sir comrade, do you this in earnest?
I am that Roland who loves you so well.
In no wise have you sent me defiance.”
Says Olivier: “Now I hear you speak;
I do not see you. God see and save you!
Struck you have I. Forgive it to me!”
Roland replies: “I have no injury.
I forgive you here and before God.”
At this word one to the other bows;
And with such love they part.20
Roland at last blows his oliphant, blows till the blood bursts from his temples. Charlemagne hears, and turns back to the rescue, “his white beard flying in the wind.” But the way is long; “high are the mountains, vast and dark; deep are the valleys, swift the streams.” Meanwhile Roland mourns over the corpse of Olivier, and says to it: “Sir comrade, we have been together through many days and many years. You never did me evil, nor I to you. Life is all pain if you are dead.” The Archbishop, also dying, begs Roland to save himself by flight; Roland refuses, and continues to fight till the attackers flee; but he too is mortally wounded. With his last strength he breaks his jeweled sword Durendal against a stone, lest it fall into heathen hands. Now “Count Roland lay under a pine tree, his face turned toward Spain…. Many memories came upon him then; he thought of the lands he had conquered, of sweet France, and his family, and Charles, who had brought him up, and he wept.” He held up his glove to God as a sign of loyal vassalage. Charles, arriving, finds
him dead. No translation can catch the simple but knightly dignity of the original, and none but one reared to love France and honor her can feel to the full the power and sentiment of this, the national epic that every French child learns, almost with its prayers.
About 1160 an unknown poet, romantically idealizing the character and exploits of Ruy or Rodrigo Diaz (d. 1099), gave a national epic to Spain in the Poema del Cid. Here too the theme is the struggle of Christian knights against the Spanish Moors, the exaltation of feudal courage, honor, and magnanimity, the glory of war rather than the servitude of love. So Rodrigo, banished by an ungrateful king, leaves his wife and children in a nunnery, and vows never to live with them again until he has won five battles. He goes to fight the Moors, and the first half of the poem resounds with Homeric victories. Between battles the Cid robs Jews, scatters alms among the poor, feeds a leper, eats from the same dish with him, sleeps in the same bed, and discovers him to be Lazarus, whom Christ raised from the dead. This, of course, is not the Cid of history, but it does no greater injury to fact than the Chanson with its idealization of Charlemagne. The Cid became a heady stimulant to Spanish thought and pride; hundreds of ballads were composed about its hero, and a hundred histories more or less historical. There are few things in the world so unpopular as truth, and the backbone of men and states is a concatenation of romance.
No one has yet explained why little Iceland, harassed by the elements and isolated by the sea, should have produced in this period a literature of scope and brilliance quite out of proportion to its place and size. Two circumstances helped: a rich store of orally transmitted historical traditions, dear to any segregated group; and a habit of reading—or being read to—which was favored by long winter nights. Already in the twelfth century there were many private libraries in the island, in addition to those in the monasteries. When writing became a familiar accomplishment, laymen as well as priests put this racial lore, once the property of scalds, into literary form.
By a rare anomaly the leading writer of thirteenth-century Iceland was also its richest man, and twice the president of the republic—the “speaker of the law.” Snorri Sturluson (1178–1241) loved life more than letters; he traveled widely, engaged vigorously in politics and feuds, and was murdered by his son-in-law at sixty-two. His Heimskringla—The Round World—told Norse history and legend with a spare and brief simplicity natural to a man of action. His Edda Snorra Sturlusonar, or Prose Edda, gave a summary of Biblical history, a synopsis of Norse mythology, an essay on poetic meters, a treatise on the art of poetry, and a unique explanation of the art’s urological origin. Two warring groups of gods made peace by spitting into a jar; from this spittle was formed a demigod, Kvasir, who taught men wisdom like Prometheus. Kvasir was slain by dwarfs, who mixed his blood with wine and produced a nectar that conferred the gift of song on all who drank of it. The great god Odin found his way to where the dwarfs had stored this poetic wine, drank it all up, and flew to heaven. But some of the pent-up liquid escaped from him by a means rarely used in public fountains; this divine stream fell in an inspiring spray upon the earth; and those who were bedewed by it imbibed the gift of poesy.21 It was a learned man’s nonsense, quite as rational as history.
The literature of Iceland in this period is astonishingly rich, and still alive with interest, vivacity, humor, and a poetic charm that pervades its prose. Hundreds of sagas were written, some brief, some as long as a novel, some historical, most of them mingling history and myth. In general they were civilized memories of a barbarous age, compact of honor and violence, complicated with litigation, and mitigated with love. The Ynglinga sagas of Snorri repeatedly tell of Norse knights who burned one another, or themselves, in their halls or cups. The most fertile of these legends was the Volsungasaga. Its stories had an early form in the Elder or Poetic Edda; they have their latest form in Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungs.
A Volsung was any descendant of Waels, a Norse king, who was great-grandson of Odin and grandfather to Sigurd (Siegfried). In the Nibelungenlied the Nibelungs are Burgundian kings; in the Volsungasaga they are a race of dwarfs guarding in the Rhine a gold treasure and ring which are infinitely precious but bring a curse and misfortune to all who possess them. Sigurd slays Fafnir the dragon guardian of the hoard, and captures it. On his wanderings he comes to a fire-encircled hill, on which the Valkyrie (an Odin-descended demigoddess) Brunhild sleeps; this is one form of the Sleeping Beauty tale. Sigurd is ravished by her beauty, and she is ravished; they plight their troth; and then—as is the way of men in many medieval romances—he leaves her and resumes his travels. At the court of Giuki, a Rhine king, he finds the princess Gudrun. Her mother gives him an enchanted drink, which enables him to forget Brunhild and marry Gudrun. Gunnar, son of Giuki, marries Brunhild, and brings her to the court. Resenting Sigurd’s amnesia, she has him killed; then in remorse she mounts his funeral pyre, slays herself with his sword, and is consumed with him.
The most modern in form of these Icelandic sagas is The Story of Burnt Njal (c. 1220). The characters are sharply defined by their deeds and words rather than by description; the tale is well constructed, and moves with inherent fatality through stirring events to the central catastrophe—the burning of Njal’s house, with himself and his wife Bergthora and his sons, by an armed band of enemies led by one Flosi, and bent on blood vengeance against Njal’s sons.
Then Flosi… called out to Njal, and said,
“I will offer thee, master Njal, leave to go out, for it is unworthy that thou shouldst burn indoors.”
“I will not go out,” said Njal, “for I am an old man, and little fitted to avenge my sons, but I will not live in shame.”
Then Flosi said to Bergthora, “Come thou out, housewife, for I will for no sake burn thee indoors.”
“I was given away to Njal young,” said Bergthora, “and I have promised him this, that we would both share the same fate.”
After that they both went back into the house.
“What counsel shall we now take?” said Bergthora.
“We will go to our bed,” said Njal, “and lay us down; I have long been eager for rest.”
Then she said to the boy Thord, Kari’s son, “Thee will I take out, and thou shalt not burn in here.”
“Thou hast promised me this, grandmother,” said the boy, “that we should never part so long as I wished to be with thee; but methinks it is much better to die with thee and Njal than to live after you.”
Then she bore the boy to her bed, and … put him between herself and Njal. Then they signed themselves and the boy with the cross, and gave over their souls into God’s hand; and that was the last word men heard them utter.22
The age of the migrations (300–600) had deposited in the confused memory of peoples and minstrels a thousand stories of social chaos, barbaric courage, and murderous love. Some of these tales were carried to Norway and Iceland, and produced the V olsungasaga; many, with kindred names and themes, lived and multiplied in Germany in the form of legends, ballads, and sagas. At an unknown time in the twelfth century an unknown German, uniting and transforming such materials, composed the Nibelungenlied, or Song of the Nibelungs. Its form is a concatenation of rhyming couplets in Middle High German; its narrative is a brew of primitive passions and pagan moods.
Sometime in the fourth century King Gunther and his two brothers ruled Burgundy from their castle at Worms on the Rhine; and with them dwelt their young sister Kriemhild—“in no land was any fairer.” In those days King Siegmund governed the Lowlands, and enfeoffed his son Siegfried (Sigurd) with a rich estate near Xanten, also on the Rhine. Hearing of Kriemhild’s loveliness, Siegfried invited himself to Gunther’s court, made himself welcome there, lived there for a year, but never saw Kriemhild, though she, looking from her high window upon the youths tilting in the courtyard, loved him from the first. Siegfried surpassed all in jousts, and fought bravely for the Burgundians in their wars. When Gunther celebrated a victorious peace he bade the ladies join the feast.
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Many a noble maiden adorned herself with care, and the youths longed exceedingly to find favor in their eyes, and had not taken a rich King’s land in lieu thereof…. And lo, Kriemhild appeared, like the dawn from out the dark clouds; and he that had borne her so long in his heart was no more aweary…. And Siegfried joyed and sorrowed, for he said in his heart, “How should I woo such as thee? Surely it was a vain dream; yet I were liefer dead than a stranger to thee”.… Her color was kindled when she saw before her the high-minded man, and she said, “Welcome, Sir Siegfried, noble knight and good.” His courage rose at her words; and graceful as beseemed a knight he bowed himself before her and thanked her. And love that is mighty constrained them, and they yearned with their eyes in secret.