The Carlovingian Coins; Or, The Daughters of Charlemagne: A Tale of the Ninth CenturySue, Eugène
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The Carlovingian Coins; Or, The Daughters of Charlemagne: A Tale of the Ninth Century
Sue, Eugène
Charlemagne, Emperor, 742-814 -- Fiction
"Then presently the cry runs through the ranks
That Morvan's head, the Breton chieftain's head,
Has been brought in unto the Frankish King:
To see it haste the Franks; they shout with joy
At prospect to behold the grisley sight.
From hand to hand the bloody head is passed,
Marred with the sword that hewed it from its trunk.
Witchaire the Abbot next is called upon
T' identify the member, if it be
The head of Morvan, that redoubted chief.
He pours some water on the matted front,
He laves it, wipes the hair from off its brow,
And cries ''Tis Morvan--'tis his Gallic lour!'"
Thus Brittany, once lost to the Franks, is placed anew under their
sway.
EPILOGUE
Vortigern, the grandson of Amael, wrote this account of the war of the
Franks against Brittany. Left for dead on the banks of the Scoer, he did
not recover his senses until a day and a night had passed after the
defeat of the Bretons. Some Christian druids, led to the spot by
Caswallan, who had escaped the massacre, came to the field of battle to
gather the wounded who might still be alive. Vortigern was of the
number. From them he learned that his sister Noblede, the wife of
Morvan, together with other women and young girls who took refuge in the
fortified enclosure, had stabbed themselves to death in order to escape
being outraged by the Franks and led into slavery. After Abbot Witchaire
left the house of Morvan on his return trip to announce to Louis the
Pious the refusal of the Armorican Gauls to pay the tribute demanded
from them, Vortigern returned with his wife and children to Karnak in
order to gather in the crops from his fields. The harvest being in, he
left his family at the house of his parents, and returned to Morvan in
order to join the latter's forces, and oppose the army of Louis the
Pious. Immediately after his wounds were healed, Vortigern returned to
Karnak, where he rejoined his wife and children. The Franks had not
dared push their invasion beyond the valley of Lokfern. They contented
themselves with leaving Armorica devastated and stripped of her bravest
defenders. Yet is she not subdued. She but waits the moment to revolt
anew.
Vortigern joined this narrative to the other narratives of his family,
and he accompanied his own account with the two Carlovingian coins, the
gift of Thetralde, one of the daughters of Charles the Great. These
relics of the family of Joel now consist of Hena's little gold sickle,
Guilhern's little brass bell, Sylvest's iron collar, Genevieve's silver
cross, Shanvoch's casque's lark, Ronan the Vagre's poniard's hilt and
his branding needle, Bonaik's abbatial crosier and Vortigern's
Carlovingian coins, together with the narratives that accompany them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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