[Illustration: Illustration from the _Roman der Fauvel_ (15th Cent.)] It was, then, of the highest importance that all knowledge that was to be preserved be cast in metrical form. A wandering minstrel was able to tell one country about the battles of another country by making a song about them. The nature of the Gods and the religious duties of men could be preserved for succeeding centuries because Homer made a poem out of them. And so poetry was a thing of incalculable value. In these practical matters, of course, the music was not of the same importance as the words. We do not know, in fact, to what extent music entered into the reciting of the old poems. But it has been conjectured that even the longest poems, like the Iliad, were usually intoned and rose into something like a set melody in the more impassioned parts. Certainly the shorter poems always tended to find a tune for themselves. It is even quite likely that the bards invented words and tune at the same time. The long Robin Hood poems of England were usually sung and not spoken and we possess some of the curious tunes with which they were traditionally associated. Among the earlier minstrels much of the music was improvised in the course of the recitation, though as the poems became old and widely spread it is likely that they were associated with precise melodies or melodic motives. On the whole, it seems that little of the metrical literature antedating the art of writing was without music of one sort or another. All early references, however, tend to regard the tune and the words as one and the same thing. It seems to some, therefore, since melody is not mentioned by itself, that music was of slight importance. But the truth seems rather to be that the melody was inseparable from the words and not to be thought of apart from them. And the music seems to have been of the highest importance in giving dignity and seriousness to the poem. What the music of the earliest poems was like we have no exact means of guessing. The writing of musical notes is of comparatively late invention and there was no way to preserve the old tunes through the changing centuries. When the traditional poems were committed to writing the sacred marriage of verse and music usually ended in a divorce. We have, however, a Finnish melody of great age, sung to an epic fragment, which might be taken as typical. It consists of few notes (which can safely be said of nearly all primitive tunes), but the stanza is long and the winding melodic line is highly expressive. But in general we cannot hope to know the earliest melodies of the European nations. We can fumble our way back about a thousand years and then we are met by the blackness of mystery.