Rynerwulf we have 'night falls like a helmet, dark
brown covers the mountains.' 'The sky is the fortress of the storm,
the sun the torch of the world, the jewel of splendour.' 'Fire is
eager, wild, blind, and raging; the sea is the gray sea, and the
sparkling splendid sea; waves are graves of the dead,' etc.

Vivid feeling for Nature is not among the characteristic features of
either Scandinavian or old German poetry.

It is naive and objective throughout, and seldom weighty or forcible.

The Waltharius shews the influence of Virgil's language, in
highly-coloured and sympathetic descriptions like those of the Latin
poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance.

Animal saga probably first arose just before the twelfth century, and
their home was probably Franconia.

Like the genial notices of plant life in the Latin poems of the
Carlovingian period, the animal poems shewed interest in the animal
world--the interest of a child who ponders individual differences and
peculiarities, the virtues and failings so closely allied to its own.
It was a naive 'hand-and-glove' footing between man and the
creatures, which attributed all his wishes and weaknesses to them,
wiped out all differences between them with perfect impartiality, and
gave the characteristics of each animal with exactness and poetry.

The soil for the cultivation of poetry about animals was prepared by
the symbolic and allegorical way of looking at Nature which held sway
all through the Middle Ages.

The material was used as a symbolic language for the immaterial, the
world of sense conceived of as a great picture-book of the truths of
salvation, in whose pages God, the devil, and, between them man,
figured: thus plant life suggested the flower of the root of Jesse,
foretold by Isaiah, red flowers the Saviour's wounds, and so forth.
In the earliest Christian times, a remarkable letter existed in
Alexandria, the so-called 'Physiologus,' which has affected the
proverbial turns of speech in the world's literature up to the
present day to an almost unequalled degree.

It gave the symbolic meanings of the different animals. The lamb and
unicorn were symbols of Christ; sheep, fish, and deer, of his
followers; dragons, serpents, and bears, of the devil; swine, hares,
hyenas, of gluttony; the disorderly luxuriance of snow meant death,
the phoenix the resurrection, and so forth, indeed, whole categories
of animals were turned into allegories of the truths of
salvation