The fate of epic poetry was the same as that of the primitive German forms of society. In both there was a progress towards independent perfection, an evolution of the possibilities inherent in them, independent of foreign influences. But both in Teutonic society, and in the poetry belonging to it and reflecting it, this independent course of life is thwarted and interfered with. Instead of independent strong Teutonic national powers, there are the more or less Romanised and blended nationalities possessing the lands that had been conquered by Goths and Burgundians, Lombards and Franks; instead of Germania, the Holy Roman Empire; instead of Epic, Romance; not the old-fashioned romance of native mythology, not the natural spontaneous romance of the Irish legends or the Icelandic stories of gods and giants, but the composite far-fetched romance of the age of chivalry, imported from all countries and literatures to satisfy the medieval appetite for novel and wonderful things. Nevertheless, the stronger kind of poetry had still something to show, before all things were overgrown with imported legend, and before the strong enunciation of the older manner was put out of fashion by the medieval clerks and rhetoricians. IV THE THREE SCHOOLS--TEUTONIC EPIC--FRENCH EPIC--THE ICELANDIC HISTORIES The Teutonic heroic poetry was menaced on all hands from the earliest times; it was turned aside from the national heroes by saints and missionaries, and charmed out of its sterner moods by the spell of wistful and regretful meditation. In continental Germany it appears to have been early vanquished. In England, where the epic poetry was further developed than on the Continent, it was not less exposed to the rivalry of the ideas and subjects that belonged to the Church. The Anglo-Saxon histories of St. Andrew and St. Helen are as full of romantic passages as those poems of the fourteenth century in which the old alliterative verse is revived to tell the tale of Troy or of the _Mort Arthur_. The national subjects themselves are not proof against the ideas of the Church; even in the fragments of _Waldere_ they are to be found; and the poem of _Beowulf_ has been filled, like so much of the old English poetry, with the melancholy of the preacher, and the sense of the vanity of earthly things. But the influence of fantasy and pathos could not dissolve the strength of epic beyond recovery, or not until it had done something to show what it was worth. Not all the subjects are treated in the romantic manner of Cynewulf and his imitators. The poem of _Maldon_, written at the very end of the tenth century, is firm and unaffected in its style, and of its style there can be no question that it is heroic.