The Ethnology of the British Islands Part 12

Yet nowhere can we find a definite tract of country upon which we can lay our finger and say _this is the land of Saxons_, saving only the insignificant district to the north of the Elbe, mentioned by Ptolemy.

From the time of Honorius to that of Charlemagne, _Saxo_ is, like _Franc_, a general term applied, indeed, to the maritime Germans rather than those of the interior, and to those of the north rather than the south, yet nowhere specifically attached to any definite population with a local habitation and a name to match. Whenever we come to detail, the Saxons of the Roman writers become Chamavi, Bructeri, Cherusci, Chauci, or Frisii; while the Frank details are those of the Ostphali, Westphali, and Angrivarii.

But the Frank writers under the Merovingian and Carlovingian dynasties are neither the only nor the earliest authors who speak of the Hanoverians and Westphalians under the general name of _Saxon_. The Christianized Angles of England used the same denomination; and, as early as the middle of the eighth century, Beda mentions the Fresones, Rugini, Dani, Huni, _Antiqui Saxones_, Boructuarii.--_Hist. Eccles._ 5, 10. Again--the Boructuarii, descendants of the nearly exterminated Bructeri of Tacitus, and occupants of the country on the Lower Lippe, are said to have been reduced by the nation of the _Old Saxons_ (_a gente Antiquorum Saxonum_). In other records we find the epithet _Antiqui_ translated by the native word _eald_ (=_old_) and the formation of the compound _Altsaxones_--Gregorius Papa universo populo provinciae _Altsaxonum_ (vita St. Boniface). Lastly, the Anglo-Saxon writers of England use the term _Eald-Seaxan_ (=_Old-Saxon_). And this form is current amongst the scholars of the present time; who call the language of the _Heliand_, of the so-called _Carolinian Psalms_ and of _Hildebrant and Hathubrant_, the _Old_-Saxon, in contradistinction to the _Anglo_-Saxon of Alfred, Caedmon, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The authority of the Anglo-Saxons themselves justifies this compound; yet it is by no means unexceptionable. Many a writer has acquiesced in the notion that the Old-Saxon was neither more nor less than the Anglo-Saxon in a continental locality, and the Anglo-Saxon but the Old-Saxon transplanted into England. Again--the Old-Saxons have been considered as men who struck, as with a two-edged sword, at Britain on the one side, and at Upper Saxony on the other, so that the Saxons of Leipsic and the Saxons of London are common daughters of one parent--the Saxons of Westphalia.

The exact relations, however, to the Old-Saxons and the Anglo-Saxons seem to have been as follows:--

The so-called Old-Saxon is the old _Westphalian_--

The so-called Anglo-Saxon the old _Hanoverian_ population.

Their languages were sufficient alike to be mutually intelligible, and after the conversion of the Angles of England, who became Christianized about A.D. 600, the extension of their own creed to the still Pagan Saxons of the Continent became one of the great duties to the bishops and missionaries of Britain; who, although themselves of Hanoverian rather than Westphalian extraction, looked upon the whole stock at large as their parentage, and called their cousins (so to say) in Westphalia, and their brothers in Hanover, by the collective term _Old-Saxon_.

All the Angles, then, of the _Saxonia_ of the Frank and British writers of the eighth century were Saxon, though all the Saxons were not Angle.

Eastphalia, the division which must have been the most _Angle_, reached as far as the Elbe.

But there was, also, a Saxony beyond Eastphalia, a Saxony beyond the Elbe; the country of the _Saxones Transalbiani_; other names for its occupants being _Nord-albingi_ (=_men to the north of the Elbe_), and Nord-leudi (=_North people_). The poet already quoted, writes--

Saxonum populus quidam, quos claudit ab Austro Albis sejunctim positos Aquilonis ad axem.

Hos _Nordalbingos_ patrio sermone vocamus.

In this case as before, _Saxon_ is a generic rather than a particular name. The facts that prove this give us also the geographical position of the Nordalbingians. They fell into three divisions:

1. The _Thiedmarsi_, _Thiatmarsgi_, or _Ditmarshers_, whose capital was Meldorp--_primi ad Oceanum Thiatmarsgi_, et eorum _ecclesia Mildindorp_--

2. The _Holsati_, _Holtzati_, or _Holtsaetan_, from whom the present Duchy of Holstein takes its name--_dicti a sylvis, quas incolunt_.[20]

The river Sturia separated the Holsatians from--

3. The _Stormarii_, or people of _Stormar_; of whom Hamburg was the capital--_Adam Bremens_: _Hist. Eccles._ c. 61.

These are the Nordalbingians of the eighth century. Before we consider their relations to the Westphalian and Hanoverian Saxons the details of the present ethnology of the Cimbric Peninsula are necessary. At the present moment Holstein, Stormar, and Ditmarsh are Low German, or Platt-Deutsch, districts; the High German being taught in the schools much as English is taught in the Scotch Highlands. Eydersted also is Low German, and so are the southern and eastern parts of Sleswick. Not so, however, the western. Facing the Atlantic, we find an interesting population, isolated in locality, and definitely stamped with old and original characteristics. They are as different from the Low Germans on the one side as the Dutch are from the English; and they are as little like the Danes on the other. They are somewhat bigger and stronger than either; at least both Danes and Germans may be found who own to their being _bigger if not better_. They shew, too, a greater proportion of blue eyes and flaxen locks; though these are common enough on all sides.

That breadth of frame out of which has arisen the epithet _Dutch-built_, is here seen in its full development; with a sevenfold s.h.i.+eld of thick woollen petticoats to set it of. So that there are characteristics, both of dress and figure, which sufficiently distinguish the _North-Frisian_ of Sleswick from the Dane on one side and the German on the other.

It is only, however, in the more inaccessible parts of their country that the _differentiae_ of dress rise to the dignity of a separate and independent _costume_. They do so, however, in some of those small islands which lie off the coast of Sleswick; three of which are supposed to have been the _three islands of the Saxons_, in the second and third centuries. A party, which the writer fell in with, from _Fohr_, were all dressed alike, all in black, all in woollen, with capes over the heads instead of bonnets. "Those," says the driver, who was himself half Dane and half German, "are from Fohr. They have been to Flensburg to see one of their relations. He is a sailor. They are all sailors in Fohr. Some of them, perhaps, smugglers--they all dress so--I can't speak to them--my brother can--he has been in England, and an Englishman can talk to them--they talk half Danish and half Platt-Deutsch, and half English--more than half. They were Englishmen once--a good sort of people--took no part in the war--did not much care for the Danes, though the Danes took pains to persuade them--so did the Germans, but they did not much care for the Germans either--strong men--good soldiers--good sailors--Englishmen, but not like the Englishmen I've seen myself. My brother's been in London and America, and can talk with them."

What is thus said about their English-hood is commonly believed by the Danes and Germans of the Frisian localities. They are English in some way or other, though how no one knows exactly. And many learned men hold the same view. It is a half-truth. They are more English, and, at the same time, more Dutch, than any of their neighbours; more so than either Dane or German, but for all that they are something that is neither English nor Dutch. They are _Frisians_ of the same stock as the Frisians of Friesland, whom they resemble in form, and dress, and manners, and speech, and temper, and history. But from the Frisians of the south they have been cut off for many centuries, partly by the hand of man, partly by the powers of Nature, partly by invasions from Germans, and partly by overwhelming inbreaks of the Ocean. There is a Frisian country in the south (the present Province of Friesland), and there is a Frisian country in the north (the tract which we are speaking of); and these are parts of the _terra firma_. But the Friesland that lay between the two is lost--lost, though we know where it is. It is at the bottom of the sea: forfeited, like the lava-stricken plains of Sicily, of Campania, and of Iceland, in the great game of Man against Nature--for it is not everywhere that Man has been the winner. The war of the Frisians against the sea has been the war not of the t.i.tans against Jove, but of the Amphibii against Neptune.

Every Frisian--_Friese_ as he calls himself--is an agriculturist, and it is only in the villages that the Frisian tongue is spoken. In the towns of Ripe, Bredsted, and Husum, small as they are, there is nothing but Danish and German. But in all the little hamlets between, the well-built old-fas.h.i.+oned farm-houses, with gable-ends of vast breadth, and ma.s.sive thatched roofs that make two-thirds of the height of the house, and a stork's nest on the chimney, and a cow-house at the end, are Frisian; and, if you can overhear what they say amongst themselves, you find that, without being English it is somewhat like it. _Woman_ is the word which sounds strangest to both the German and the Dane, and, it is generally the first instance given of the peculiarity of the Frisian language. "Why can't they speak properly, and say _Kone_?" says the Dane. "_Weib_ is the right word," says the German. "Who ever says _woman_?" cry both. The language has not been reduced to writing; indeed, the little that has been done with it is highly discreditable to the Sleswick-Holstein Church Establishment. It is spoken by upwards of thirty thousand individuals; and when we remember that the whole population of Denmark is less than that of London and the suburbs, we see at once that a large proportion of it has been less heeded in respect to its spiritualities than the Gaels and Welsh of Great Britain.

You may distinguish a Frisian parish as the Eton grammar distinguishes nouns of the neuter gender. It is _omne quod exit in -um_; for so end nine out of ten of the Frisian villages. Now, throughout the whole length and breadth of the Brekkel_ums_, and Stad_ums_, &c., that lie along the coast, from Ripe north to Hus_um_ south, there is not one church service that is performed in Frisian, or half-a-dozen priests who could perform it. No fraction of the Liturgy is native; nor has it ever been so. Danish there is, and German there is; German, too, of two kinds--High and Low. The High German is taught in the schools, and that well; so well, that nowhere are the answers of the little children more easily understood by such travellers as are not over strong in their language than in the _Friese_ country. Nevertheless, it is but a well-taught lesson; and by no means excuses the neglect of the native idiom.

As things are at present, this is, perhaps, all for the best. The complaint lies against the original neglect of the Frisian; and its _gravamen_ is the sad tale it so silently tells of previous centralization--by which is meant arbitrary and unjustifiable oppression; for at no distant time back, the Frisians must have formed a very considerable proportion of the Sleswickers, and, at the beginning of the Historical period, the majority. And yet it was not thought of Christianizing them through their own tongue; a tongue which, because it has never been systematically reduced to writing, conscientious clergymen say is incapable of being written. As if the Frisian of Friesland, the Frisian of the south, had not been the language of law and poetry for more than eight hundred years, and, as if it were a bit harder to write, or print, the northern dialect of the same, than it was for Scotland to have a literature. For the tongue is no growth of yesterday. It may, possibly, be as much older as any other tongue of the Peninsula as the Welsh is older than the English. That it is older than some of them is certain. Amateur investigators of it there are, of course. Outzen, the pastor of Brekkelum, was the father of them; and honourable mention is due to the present clergyman in Hacksted. As a general rule, however, the religion of Sleswick has been centralized.

The literature, as far as it has been collected, consists of a wedding-song of the fifteenth century, to be found in Camerarius, with addition of, perhaps, a dozen such _morceaux_ as the following approaches to song, epigram, and ballad, respectively.

1

Laet foammen kom ins jordt to meh, Ik hev en blanken daaler to deh, Di vael ik deh vel zjonke, Dae sjaellt du beh meh tjonke, Laet foammen, &c.

2

Ik[21] vael for tusend daaler ej Dat ik het haad of vaas, Den lup ik med den rump ombej En vost ekj vaer ik var.

3

DER FREYER VOM HOLSTEIN.

Diar kam en skep bi Sudher Sioe Me tri jung Fruers on di Floot.

Hokken wiar di fordeorst?

Dit wiar Peter Rothgrun.

Hud saat hi sin spooren?

Fuar Hennerk Jerkens duur.

Hokken kam to Duur?

Marrike sallef, Me Kruk en Bekker on di jen hundh, En gulde Ring aur di udher hundh.

Ju noodhight hom en sin Hinghst in, Dod di Hingst Haaver und Peter wun.

Toonkh Gott fuar des gud dei.

Al di Brid end bridmaaner of wei, Butolter Marri en Peter alluning!

Ju look hom un to Kest En wildh hom nimmer muar mest.

_Translated._

1.

Little woman come in the yard to me, I have a white dollar for thee; I will give it you So that you think of me.

2.

I would not for a thousand dollars, That my head were off, Then should I run with my trunk, And know (wiss) not where I was.

3.

There came a s.h.i.+p by the South Sea, With three young wooers on the flood; Who was the first?

That was Peter Rothgrun.

Where set he his tracts?

For Hennerk Jerken's door.

Who came to door?

Mary-kin herself, With a pitcher (crock) and beaker in the one hand, A gold ring on the other hand.

She pressed him and his horse (to come) in, Gave the horse oats and Peter wine.

Thank G.o.d for this good day!

All the brides and bridesmen out of the way!

Except Mary and Peter alone.

She locked him up in her box, And never would miss him more.