| AH | Dreves and Blume, Analecta hymnica medii ævi, Leipzig, vol. 1, 1886; vol. 53, 1911. |
| ARP | Baldwin (C. S.), Ancient rhetoric and poetic, New York, 1924. |
| Clark | Clark (J. M.), The abbey of St. Gall ..., Cambridge University Press, 1926. |
| Ermini | Ermini (F.), Poeti epici latini del secolo X, Rome, 1920. |
| Halm | Halm (K.), Rhetores latini minores, Leipzig, 1863. |
| Keil | Keil (H.), Grammatici latini, Leipzig, 1870-1880, 7 vols. |
| Manitius | Manitius (M.), Geschichte der lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters, Munich, 1911, 2 vols. (in Von Mueller’s Handbuch der klassischen Alterthums-Wissenschaft, IX. ii). |
| MGH | Monumenta Germaniæ historica (cited by page of the appropriate volume). |
| PL | Migne, Patrologia latina (cited by volume and column). |
Hibernia, Northumbria, Francia were successively the seats of learning in the period of readjustment after the invasions. Men born to Celtic speech, to English, to Frankish learned the Latin culture and transmitted it to the middle age. In the circumstances the writers of the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries were primarily teachers; and their chief field was grammatica. The language of learning was no longer for any of them common speech; it had to be acquired even by Italians and Gauls as a second language and a superior. In compensation it was universal, halted by no frontiers. The whole western world of culture was a quartier Latin. Scoti, as the Irish Celts were commonly called, wrote and taught in it by Humber, Rhine, or Loire; Bede wrote in it his Church History of the English People; Alcuin was brought from the school of York to apply it to the education of the Frankish empire, and his companion and successor was the Bishop of Orléans, Theodulf, a Goth from Spain.
Grammatica became thus more important than ever. It opened not only learning in general, not only literature, but especially the interpretation of the liturgy, the offices, the creeds, and the Scriptures. Charlemagne’s care was to secure a clergy that should be first educated and then educating. The mission of the Church to teach through the universal language of western Christianity was exercised partly through the cathedrals, mainly through the monasteries. In these centuries rose such great monastic schools as Fulda, St. Gall, and Tours. As the physical preservation and circulation of texts depended on the scriptoria, so on the masters of the monasteries depended not only specific training for the religious life, but much of the more general training in divinity and most of the seven liberal arts.
The monastic slant suggests a narrowing of culture. But the restriction of the seven arts must have been due quite as much to those other conditions which gave the preponderance to grammatica. The achievement of the age was preparatory. That the age of preparation was also an age of revival is witnessed best by the outstanding teachers. The Scoti who fled from the Danes to the Continent were remarkable no more for their preservation of the last vestiges of Greek than for their intellectual eagerness. They were a stirring leaven. The greater schools founded during this period, such as that at Wearmouth to which English Benedict had brought store of books from Rome and Vienne, show an impressive succession of teachers: Bede, Alcuin, Rabanus, Loup, Remi, Gerbert.[1] The former three are sufficient assurance that culture was safe; the latter, that it was advancing.
A work on the Elements of Philosophy, ascribed to Bede, closes with the following list:
The order of learning is as follows. Since eloquentia is the instrument of all teaching, they are instructed in it first. Its three parts are correct writing and correct delivery of what is written; proof of what is to be proved, which dialectica teaches; figures of words and sentences, which rhetorica hands down. Therefore we are to be initiated in grammatica, then in dialectica, afterward in rhetorica. Equipped with these arms, we should approach the study of philosophy. Here the order is first the quadrivium, and in this first arithmetica, second musica, third geometria, fourth astronomia, then holy writ, so that through knowledge of what is created we arrive at knowledge of the Creator.[2]
Toward the close of the tenth century the same order of studies, except for the transposition of geometria and musica, appears in the school at Speier. Though the details of the reminiscences prefixed by Walter of Speier to his Passion of St. Christopher[3] are obscured by figurative language, allusions, and other devices of style, he shows unmistakably, after his first lessons in psalmody, a full course of grammatica, including much metric. His references seem also to indicate both the elementary exercises beginning with fabula, and prælectiones on Vergil, Ovid, Horace’s Ars poetica, and the metra of Boethius. Dialectica, which he entered by the door of Porphyry, he recalls less distinctly. Rhetorica, though remembered in her usual garb of flowers, evidently included declamatio. By the end of the tenth century, then, a typical monastic school, though still spending most time on grammatica, seems to have offered an ample trivium.
Donatus and Priscian, with the other grammarians of the declining Empire,[4] kept their authority. They were successively adapted to changing needs in manuals by Bede, Boniface, Paulus Diaconus, Alcuin, Loup, Remi, Gerbert, Abbo, Ælfric. That grammatica thus engaged the best teachers of the time is evidence of its cardinal importance. At Chartres, by the tenth century, grammaticus was the usual name for headmaster.[5]
The study of figures, both those usually included in grammatica and those assigned to rhetorica, was applied to the interpretation of holy writ. Augustine[6] had pointed out that the Scriptures not only use figures, but explicitly mention allegory and parable. Bede’s brief summary De schematibus et tropis sacræ scripturæ[7] is thus typical both of elementary teaching and of medieval habit of reading.
That neither Bede nor Alcuin specifically defines grammatica in the traditional terms as including the study of Latin poetry may mean no more than that neither wrote comprehensively on the whole subject. The prælectio can hardly have been neglected by the Scoti, or by Bede himself. The definition of Rabanus in the ninth century[8] not only resumes the whole ancient scope, but puts the interpretation of the poets first. That Boethius was added to the list of classics[9] is significant of the influence of his metra even on the hymns.
When Bede tells his boys to look at all the first syllables[10] of a manuscript page of hexameters, because these syllables must be long, he is not precluding either nicer points of metric or wiser consideration of poetry; he is very practically teaching Latin quantities. His book offers much more; and though its subject is only metric, it takes pains to distinguish rhythmic,[11] and closes with that classification of poetry by Diomedes which was to be often repeated.
Since we have discussed at length poems and meters, it is to be observed finally that the kinds of poetry are three. For it is active, or imitative, what the Greeks entitle dramaticon or mimeticon; or narrative, what the Greeks style exegematicon or apangelticon; or common, i.e. mixed, what the Greeks call cœnon or micton. That is dramaticon, or active, in which the personæ are presented as speaking without the intervention of the poet, as in tragedies and fables, for drama is called in Latin fabula. In this kind is written “Quo te Moeri pedes? an quo via ducit, in urbem?” as also among ourselves the Song of Songs, where the voice of Christ and of the Church are clearly found to alternate without the writer’s intervention. That is exegematicon, or narrative, in which the poet himself speaks without the intervention of any persona, as three books of the Georgics and the first part of the fourth, as well as the poems of Lucretius and others like them. In this kind our literature shows Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, which are composed metrically in their own language. Cœnon or mixed, is the kind in which the poet himself speaks and also the personæ are presented as speaking. So are written the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer, the Æneid of Vergil, and with us the story of blessed Job, though this in its own language is written not entirely as poetry, but partly as prose, partly in metra or in rhythmi.[12]
Far as this is not only from Aristotle, but from Vergil, the shift of emphasis from composition to style remained for centuries characteristic of medieval Latin poetic, and opened the way for the confusion of poetic with rhetoric.
The best known hymn of this period is by Rabanus (ninth century).
This keeps generally the quantities of the metrical dimeter.[13] Rime is insistent in ruder hymns. The two following, Irish of the eighth century, though substantially correct as metra in some stanzas, seem to be rhythmi. The first is alphabetical; the second, a lorica. As rhythmi they are relieved by shift of stress in the places indicated, and probably intend it elsewhere; i.e., they are most satisfactorily read by word-accent.
Rhythmical use of the Corde natus measure[14] is suggested by frequent disregard of the distinction in the original meter between trochee and spondee within the line, and of the dactyl at the end.[15] The popular swing of this rhythmus is felt in a well known hymn of the eighth century:
Freer use, with both end-rime and occasional internal rime,[17] as in lines 3 and 5 above, appears in an Irish hymn ascribed to St. Cuchuimne.
A Septuagesima hymn in a tenth-century manuscript is so united by the iteration of Alleluia that the poet felt no need of rime.
A much simpler trochaic measure is heard in one of the most popular of medieval hymns. Found in a manuscript of the ninth century, it may well be earlier.
Sapphics, which of course exercised the skill of the learned,[18] are occasionally convincing in a hymn.
One Sapphic, doubtfully ascribed to Paulus Diaconus, had currency enough to furnish later a memory stanza for the notes of the scale.
The striking measure of Sancti venite[19] is not forgotten.
The second measure of Boethius, exhibited by Bede in two poems,[20] is echoed in the Tanquam præcipitans turbo regentes of Sedulius Scotus[21] and appears in a fine Assumption hymn of the ninth century.
In a few hymns of this period the measure seems to be derived from one used twice by Prudentius.[22]
A rhythmus of uncertain date is most plausibly assigned to tenth-century Verona.[23]
To read this as a rhythmical senarius disregards not only many quantities, as might be expected, but also many word-accents. The measure of the hymn just above is suggested by the doubly dactylic close and the generally long and stressed opening. But so to render it is again to violate many word-accents, including almost all those of the characteristic second foot. The word-accent is generally kept by rendering:
It is hard not to think that at least the final rhythmical dactyls were in the composer’s mind. If so, we have rhythmical dactyls not only as occasional substitutions, but as constituent; and the easiest rendering makes them constitute the whole measure.
Carolingian hymn-writers ranged in art all the way from the expert and fluent metrist Sedulius Scotus to the undisciplined Gottschalk,[25] who would write twelve stanzas on a single rime such as Christe, mearum | Lux tenebrarum,[26] or Spes mea, Christe, | Rex benedicte.[27] Thus he rimes even Sapphics. With much diffuseness and jingle he has sometimes a lyric appeal that forecasts the more sentimental hymns of later centuries, and is as far from the gravity of the elder habit.
Hymnody is typically communal and popular. Such poetic opportunities inspired and authorized in the Carolingian period some verse more valid as devotion than as poetry. Here and there manuscripts have preserved local commemorations which make little pretense beyond grateful mnemonic. But hymns of higher achievement show that the new Latin verse given by the Church to the last days of the Empire was appreciated and carried forward as poetry; and the rhythmical adaptations of measures not used before evince an active, and often an expert, poetic.
But the characteristic verse of the period is hexameter or elegiac. Thus Theodulf composed even the familiar Palm Sunday hymn.
Alcuin devotes fifty-five hexameters to a conflictus between spring and winter, and celebrates York in over sixteen hundred.[28] The elegiacs may seek Ovidian recurrences.[29]
Of the many narrative poems employing these measures the commonest were the passiones, or saints’ legends, usually with at least a rhythmic bent, and by the tenth century habitually rhythmi with internal rime. The tenth-century Vita et passio sancti Christophori of Walter of Speier, though it abundantly exemplifies both the metrical training and the study of Latin poets that he mentions in his introduction, shows also the trend of the time.
Some, at least, of these longer poems were cumulative school exercises. A promising theme in the imitative verse that was commonly part of the study of the Latin poets would be commented by the grammaticus, revised according to his criticism, and kept by him for later rehandling or extension.[31] Thus the verse, even with the rhythmical habit established, attended to Latin quantities. Thus also classical reminiscences, especially Vergilian, are frequent; and Walter shows the continued vogue of Prudentius. For the hexameters most typical of the period are literary exercises.
Logic followed the Boethian tradition handed down by Isidore.[32] Alcuin, though his manual is meager, repeats in his tract on the Trinity St. Augustine’s view of the importance of this study[33] for the defense of the faith. Rabanus makes it theoretically central.
Dialectica is the training of the reason to investigate, define, and express, and to be able to distinguish the true from the false. This, then, is the training of trainings; it teaches how to learn. This exhibits and unfolds the nature, aim, and scope of reason itself. It knows; its aims and virtue are both to know and to make knowers. De clericorum institutione III. xx; PL 107: 397 C.
But the turn of dialectica to dominate the Trivium was not yet.
Alcuin’s adaptation of the De inventione of Cicero, Walafrid Strabo’s enumeration of the five ancient parts of rhetoric, do not prove the use of the whole ancient program. Even the ancient texts would not of themselves carry on the ancient method. The “quæstiones civiles” often quoted from Cicero’s opening definition could hardly carry their ancient content either in a society disturbed by the invasions or in a society reorganizing under feudalism. Moreover the teaching of rhetorica, even when it kept touch with Roman method, was likely to lean on the declamatio handed down by the schools of Gaul.[34] For all these reasons the ancient lore naturally most sought and most used was elocutio, the counsels of style. The function of rhetorica is usually described by some such verb as ornare.
Little beyond this is suggested by the summary of Rabanus. Repeating once more that the field of rhetoric is quæstiones civiles, he adds:
Nevertheless [rhetoric] is not outside the scope of training for the Church. For whatever an orator or preacher of the divine law sets out capably and fitly in teaching, whatever he expresses aptly and elegantly in letters, conforms to this art. De clericorum institutione III. xix; PL 107: 396 C.
The passage is reminiscent of St. Augustine’s De doctrina christiana;[35] and eight later chapters (xxix-xxxvi) follow this closely, sometimes continuously and word for word. But Rabanus is at once less specific and narrower as to style. As to composition in the large he says hardly anything; and he seems to miss the cogency of Augustine’s own order.
The larger and more vital conception of rhetoric, which was at least before the eyes of Rabanus, seems more to beckon Loup de Ferrières. Man of letters in his intellectual eagerness[36] as well as in his style, and teacher as well, he makes requisitions on the libraries of his friends. The Quintilian that he needs is not the volume of selections, but all twelve books;[37] the Cicero, not only the common De inventione, but also the book whose recovery by Poggio in the fifteenth century was one of the literary events of the Renaissance, the De oratore.[38] If these two cardinal works of the better ancient tradition were not much sought, at least they were available.
The “three styles” seem already to have been transferred in school from rhetoric to poetic, and exemplified from Vergil.[39] Mature practise was already attentive to prose rhythm. Abbo of Fleury, much preoccupied with this, was also fond of alliteration, and sometimes marked his balances with rime.
Qua peracta pœnitentia, populos suæ dioceseos mandat, mandando convocat, convocando suppliciter persuadet, ut triduano jejunio a se divinæ indignationis iracundiam removeant, removendo avertant, quatenus sacrificio spiritus contribulati placatus Dominus illi suam gratiam concederet, qua corpus beati martyris tangere et lavare auderet; qui licet tantis virtutibus floreret in mundo, vili tamen et sibi incongruo continebatur mausoleo. Abbonis Floriacensis Passio Sancti Edmundi.[40]
Though the extremes of this passage go beyond Abbo’s normal practise, they appear also in tenth-century ceremonious letters.[41]
This is the period also of Germanic epic: the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf (probably eighth century), Waldere, Finnsburgh, and Maldon, the Hildebrand (early ninth century) of the continental Germans, the Scandinavian “Elder Edda.”[42] Though little connection is apparent between these verse narratives and the Latin poetic with which they are contemporary, there may have been some.[43] Anglo-Saxon epic is of the time of Bede. The Walter legends are known largely through the Latin hexameters of Ekkehard;[44] and other learned clerks found native epic worth while not only as history, but as literature.
What has been preserved shows the primary epic appeal of legend not exotic and imported, but handed down in folklore still orally active. This is not at all to say that they are history as opposed to fiction. Their historical value, however great, is accidental. Their facts, already centuries old, have been shaped by tradition. Their Sigurd or Hildebrand is seen through a magnifying mist. Epic is never, in our modern sense, history. It is the glorification in song of a hero; and primary epic has its own authentic appeal from singing a hero that still belongs to the poet and to his hearers and still beckons their communal dreams.
Thus Germanic epic, taking us farther back through legend into myth, gives a more immediate sense of oral tradition. There is even an eery likeness, as of the most ancient poetic repeating itself, between the minstrel in the Beowulf and the minstrel in the Odyssey.
But after they had put from them the desire of meat and drink, the muse stirred the minstrel to sing the songs of famous men, even that lay whereof the fame had then reached the wide heaven, namely the quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles, son of Peleus.... Then Odysseus of many counsels spake to Demodocus, saying: “Demodocus, I praise thee far above all mortal men, whether it be the Muse, the daughter of Zeus, that taught thee, or even Apollo; for right duly dost thou chant the faring of the Achæans, even all that they wrought and suffered, and all their travail, as if, methinks, thou hadst been present, or heard the tale from another. Come now, change thy strain, and sing of the fashioning of the horse of wood, ... even the guileful thing that goodly Odysseus led up into the citadel, when he had it laden with the men who wasted Ilios!”... So spake he, and the minstrel, being stirred by the god, began and showed forth his minstrelsy. He took up the tale where it tells how the Argives of the one part set fire to their huts, and went aboard their decked ships and sailed away, while those others, the fellowship of renowned Odysseus, were now seated in the assembly-place of the Trojans, all hidden in the horse, for the Trojans themselves had dragged him to the citadel. Odyssey viii. 72-75, 484-504 (Butcher and Lang’s prose translation).
So Hrothgar’s minstrel is represented as singing songs of former heroes to awaken joy in hall along the mead-bench. Among those thus inserted in the Beowulf is the lay of King Finn, which has come down also in another form. As the Greek minstrel turns old songs to the praise of the hero present before him, so the warriors celebrating in hall Beowulf’s killing of Grendel turn the legend of Sigmund.
At times one of the king’s thanes, whose memory was full of songs, laden with vaunting rhymes, who knew old tales without number, invented a new story, closely bound up with fact. The man deftly narrated the adventures of Beowulf, and cunningly composed other skilful lays with interwoven words. Beowulf, 867-874 (Tinker’s prose translation).
In such passages we seem to be near the roots of verse narrative.
The verse narratives of the Germanic peoples during this period are poetically homogeneous. Hildebrand, indeed, is more stinted than Beowulf, and the north inclines more than the west toward lyric; but they all have essentially the same poetic.[45] Their epic conception is typically not of a progressive story, but of a situation. The hero is imagined in a crisis. Sometimes abrupt or stinted, they nevertheless prevail by unity. This mainspring of their poetic is their habitual means toward tragic intensity.[46] Even more constant is their movement in detail. The verse consists of two staves separated by a marked cæsura, but corresponding by alliteration. The alliteration is not, as in Latin verse, an added suggestion; it is constituent; it makes the verse.
No less essential is the two-stave movement, so strong in Germanic habit that it may well have been influential in handling even Latin hexameters with cæsura reinforced by rime.[47] In Anglo-Saxon the staves show distinct recurrent types; and the verses generally tend, as above, to “run on,” whereas the Old Norse are oftener composed in the fashion of the “closed couplet.” But these differences are unimportant beside the constant binary movement. The verses are not equal in number of syllables; their stress rhythm is patterned in alliterated pairs.