is fantastic, prodigious, colossal; and this tendency appears even in
the writings where they wish to amuse; it is still more marked there
than in the ancient Celtic tales. Thor and the giant go a-fishing, the
giant puts two hooks on his line and catches two whales at once. Thor
baits his hook with an ox's head and draws out the great serpent which
encircles the earth.[50]

Their violence and energy spend their force, and then the man, quite
another man it would seem, veers round; the once dauntless hero is now
daunted by shadows, by thoughts, by nothing. Those strong beings, who
laugh when their hearts are cut out alive, are the prey of vague
thoughts. Already in that far-off time their world, which appears to us
so young, seemed old to them. They were acquainted with causeless
regrets, vain sorrows, and disgust of life. No literature has produced a
greater number of disconsolate poems. Mournful songs abound in the
"Corpus Poeticum" of the North.

II.

With beliefs, traditions, and ideas of the same sort, the Anglo-Saxons
had landed in Britain and settled there.[51] Established in their
"isolated dwellings," if they leave them it is for action; if they
re-enter them it is for solitary reverie, or sometimes for orgies. The
main part of their original literature, like that of their brothers and
cousins on the Continent, consists of triumphal songs and heartrending
laments. It is contemplative and warlike.[52]

They have to fight against their neighbours, or against their kin from
over the sea, who in their turn wish to seize upon the island. The
war-song remains persistently in favour with them, and preserves, almost
intact, its characteristics of haughty pride and ferocity. Its cruel
accents recur even in the pious poems written after the conversion, and
in the middle of the monotonous tale told by the national annalist. The
Anglo-Saxon monk who draws up in his cell the chronicle of the events of
the year, feels his heart beat at the thought of a great victory, and in
the midst of the placid prose which serves to register eclipses of the
moon and murders of kings, he suddenly inserts the bounding verse of an
enthusiastic war-song:

"This year, King AEthelstan, lord of earls, ring-giver of warriors, and
his brother eke Edmund AEtheling, life-long glory in battle won at
Brunanburh.... The foes lay low, the Scots people and the shipman
death-doomed fell. The field streamed with warriors' blood what time the
sun up