rs
That knew not of night nor of morrow,
Of hopes or of fears.
The wars and the woes and the glories
That quicken, and lighten, and rain
From the clouds of its chronicled stories
The passion, the pride, and the pain."[2]

Such a golden clue to guide the modern seeker through the labyrinths
of the mediaeval mind is that which I have tried to suggest in the
title "_Hero_-Myths and Legends of the British Race"--the pursuit and
representation of the ideal hero as the mind of Britain and of early
and mediaeval England imagined him, together with the study of the
characteristics which made this or that particular person, mythical or
legendary, a hero to the century which sang or wrote about him. The
interest goes deeper when we study, not merely

"Old heroes who could grandly do
As they could greatly dare,"[3]

but

"Heroes of our island breed
And men and women of our British birth."[4]

"Hero-worship endures for ever while man endures," wrote Thomas
Carlyle, and this fidelity of men to their admiration for great heroes
is one of the surest tokens by which we can judge of their own
character. Such as the hero is, such will his worshippers be; and the
men who idolised Robin Hood will be found to have been men who were
themselves in revolt against oppressive law, or who, finding law
powerless to prevent tyranny, glorified the lawless punishment of
wrongs and the bold denunciation of perverted justice. The warriors
who listened to the saga of Beowulf looked on physical prowess as the
best of all heroic qualities, and the Normans who admired Roland saw
in him the ideal of feudal loyalty. To every age, and to every nation,
there is a peculiar ideal of heroism, and in the popular legends of
each age this ideal may be found.

Again, these legends give not only the hero as he seemed to his age;
they also show the social life, the virtues and vices, the
superstitions and beliefs, of earlier ages embedded in the tradition,
as fossils are found in the uplifted strata of some ancient ocean-bed.
They have ceased to live; but they remain, tokens of a life long past.
So in the hero-legends of our nation we may find traces of the
thoughts and religions of our ancestors many centuries ago; traces
which lie close to one another in these romances, telling of the
nations who came to these Islands of the West, settled, were conquered
and driven away to make room for other races whose supremacy ha