Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race
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 has been
as brief, till all these superimposed races have blended into one, to
form the British nation, the most widespread race of modern times. For
"Britain's might and Britain's right
And the brunt of British spears"[5]
are not the boast of the English race alone. No man in England now can
boast of unmixed descent, but must perforce trace his family back
through many a marriage of Frank, and Norman, and Saxon, and Dane, and
Roman, and Celt, and even Iberian, back to prehistoric man--
"Scot and Celt and Norman and Dane,
With the Northman's sinew and heart and brain,
And the Northman's courage for blessing or bane,
Are England's heroes too."[6]
When Tennyson sang his greeting at the coming of Alexandra,
"Saxon or Dane or Norman we,
Teuton or Celt or whatever we be,"
he was only recognising a truth which no boast of pure birth can
cover--the truth that the modern Englishman is a compound of many
races, with many characteristics; and if we would understand him, we
must seek the clue to the riddle in early England and Scotland and
Ireland and Wales, while even France adds her share of enlightenment
towards the solution of the riddle.
"The Saxon force, the Celtic fire,
These are thy manhood's heritage."[7]
Britain, as far as we can trace men in our island, was first inhabited
by cave-men, who have left no history at all. In the course of ages
they passed away before the Iberians or Ivernians, who came from the
east, and bore a striking resemblance to the Basques. It may be that
some Mongolian tribe, wandering west, drawn by the instinct which has
driven most race-migrations westward, sent offshoots north and
south--one to brave the dangers of the sea and inhabit Britain and
Ireland, one to cross the Pyrenees and remain sheltered in their deep
ravines; or it may be that Basques from the Pyrenees, daring the
storms of the Bay of Biscay in their frail coracles, ventured to the
shores of Britain. Short and dark were these sturdy voyagers,
harsh-featured and long-headed, worshipping the powers of Nature with
mysterious and cruel rites of human sacrifice, holding beliefs in
totems and ancestor-worship and in the superiority of high descent
claimed through the mother to that claimed through the father. When
the stronger and more civilised Celt came he drove before him these
little dark men, he enslaved their survivors or wedded their women,
and in his turn fell into slavery to the cruel Druidic religion of his
subjects. To these Iberians, and to the Celtic dread of them, we
probably owe all the stories of dwarfs, goblins, elves, and
earth-gnomes which fill our fairy-tale books; and if we examine
carefully the descriptions of the abodes of these beings we shall find
them not inconsistent with the earth-dwellings, caves, circle huts, or
even with the burial mounds, of the Iberian race.
The race that followed the Iberians, and drove them out or subdued
them, so that they served as slaves where they had once ruled as
lords, was the proud Aryan Celtic race. Of different tribes, Gaels,
Brythons, and Belgae, they were all one in spirit, and one in physical
feature.
Tall, blue-eyed, with fair or red hair, they overpowered in every way
the diminutive Iberians, and their tattooing, while it gave them a
name which has often been mistaken for a national designation (Picts,
or painted men), made them dreadful to their enemies in battle, and
ferocious-looking even in time of peace. Their civilisation was of a
much higher type than that of the Iberians; their weapons, their
war-chariots, their mode of life and their treatment of women, are all
so closely similar to that of the Greeks of Homer that a theory has
been advanced and ably defended, that the Homeric Greeks were really
invading Celts--Gaelic or Gaulish tribes from the north of Europe. If
it indeed be so, we owe to the Celts a debt of imperishable culture
and civilisation. To them belongs more especially, in our national
amalgam, the passion for the past, the ardent patriotism, the longing
for spiritual beauty, which raises and relieves the Saxon materialism.
"Though fallen the state of Erin and changed the Scottish land,
Though small the power of Mona, though unwaked Llewellyn's band,
Though Ambrose Merlin's prophecies are held as idle tales,
Though Iona's ruined cloisters are swept by northern gales,
One in name and in fame
Are the sea-divided Gaels.
"In Northern Spain and Italy our brethren also dwell,
And brave are the traditions of their fathers that they tell;
The Eagle or the Crescent in the dawn of history pales
Before the advancing banners of the great Rome-conquering Gaels:
One in name and in fame
Are the sea-divided Gaels."[8]
It is almost impossible to overestimate the value of the Celtic
contribution to our national literature and character: the race that
gave us Ossian, and Finn, and Cuchulain, that sang of the sorrowful
love and doom of Deirdre, that told of the pursuit of Diarmit and
Grania, till every dolmen and cromlech in Ireland was associated with
these lovers; the race that preserved for us
"That grey king whose name, a ghost,
Streams like a cloud, man-shaped, from mountain-peak
And cleaves to cairn and cromlech still,"[9]
the King Arthur whose Arthur's Seat overhangs Edinburgh, whose
presence haunts the Lakes, and Wales, and Cornwall, and the forests of
Brittany; the race that held up for us the image of the Holy
Grail--that race can claim no small share in the moulding of the
modern Briton.
The Celt, however, had his day of supremacy and passed: the Roman
crushed his power of initiative and made him helpless and dependent,
and the Teuton, whether as Saxon, Angle, Frisian, or Jute, dwelt in
his homes and ruled as slaves the former owners of the land. These
new-comers were not physically unlike the Celts whom they
dispossessed. Tall and fair, grey-eyed and sinewy, the Teuton was a
hardier, more sturdy warrior than the Celt: he had not spent centuries
of quiet settlement and imitative civilisation under the aegis of
Imperial Rome: he had not learnt to love the arts of peace and he
cultivated none but those of war; he was by choice a warrior and a
sailor, a wanderer to other lands, a plougher of the desolate places
of the "vasty deep," yet withal a lover of home, who trod at times,
with bitter longing for his native land, the thorny paths of exile. To
him physical cowardice was the unforgivable sin, next to treachery to
his lord; for the loyalty of thane to his chieftain was a very deep
and abiding reality to the Anglo-Saxon warrior, and in the early poems
of our English race, love for "his dear lord, his chieftain-friend,"
takes the place of that love of woman which other races felt and
expressed. A quiet death bed was the worst end to a man's life, in the
Anglo-Saxon's creed; it was "a cow's death," to be shunned by every
means in a man's power; while a death in fight, victor or vanquished,
was a worthy finish to a warrior's life. There was no fear of death
itself in the English hero's mind, nor of Fate; the former was the
inevitable,
"Seeing that Death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come,"[10]
and the latter a goddess whose decrees must needs be obeyed with proud
submission, but not with meek acceptance. Perhaps there was little of
spiritual insight in the minds of these Angles and Saxons, little love
of beauty, little care for the amenities of life; but they had a
sturdy loyalty, an uprightness, a brave disregard of death in the
cause of duty, which we can still recognise in modern Englishmen. To
the Saxon belong the tales where
"The warrior kings,
In height and prowess more than human, strive
Again for glory, while the golden lyre
Is ever sounding in heroic ears
Heroic hymns."[11]
When the English (Anglo-Saxons, as we generally call them) had settled
down in England, had united their warring tribes, and developed a
somewhat centralised government, their whole national existence was
imperilled by the incursions of the Danes. Kindred folk to the
Anglo-Saxons were these Danes, these Vikings from Christiania Wik,
these Northmen from Norway or Iceland, whose fame went before them,
and the dread of whom inspired the petition in the old Litany of the
Church, "From the fury of the Northmen, good Lord, deliver us!" Their
fair hair and blue or grey eyes, their tall and muscular frames, bore
testimony to their kinship with the races they harried and plundered,
but their spirit was different from that of the conquered Teutonic
tribes. The Viking _loved_ the sea; it was his summer home, his field
of war and profit. To go "a-summer-harrying" was the usual employment
of the true Viking, and in the winter only could he enjoy domestic
life and the pleasures of the family circle. The rapturous fight with
the elements, in which the Northman lived and moved and had his being,
gave him a strain of ruthless cruelty unlike anything in the more
peaceful Anglo-Saxon character: his disregard of death for himself led
to a certain callousness with regard to human life, and to a certain
enjoyment in inflicting physical anguish. There was an element of Red
Indian ruthlessness in the Viking, which looms large in the story of
the years of Norse ascendancy over Western Europe. Yet there was also