Hartmuth answered: “I know you are so noble that your behest can be only honourable and good. I can find nothing in my heart to keep me from doing your bidding gladly, Queen.”[186] The high quality of speech between these two will rarely be outdone. There is directness and troth in all these German poems. Troth is an ideal which must carry truth within it. The more thoughtful and reflecting German spirit will evince loyalty to truth itself as an ideal. Wolfram’s poem of _Parzival_ has this; and by virtue of this same ideal, Walter von der Vogelweide’s judgments upon life and emperors and popes are whole and steady, unveiling the sham, condemning the lie and defying the liar.[187] In them dawns the spirit of Luther and the German Reformation, with its love of truth stronger than its love of art. III Chronologically these last illustrations of German traits belong to the mediaeval time; and in fact the _Nibelungenlied_ and _Kudrun_, and much more Wolfram’s _Parzival_ and Walter’s poems, are mediaeval, because to some extent affected by that interplay of influences which made the mediaeval genius.[188] On the other hand, the almost contemporaneous Norse Sagas and the somewhat older Eddic poems exhibit Teutonic traits in their northern integrity. For the Norse period of free and independent growth continued long after the distinctive barbarism of other Teutons had become mediaevalized. There resulted under the strenuous conditions of Norse life that unique heightening of energy which is manifested in the deeds of the Viking age and reflected in Norse literature.[189] This time of extreme activity opens in the eighth century, toward the end of which Viking ravagers began to harry the British Isles. St. Cuthbert’s holy island of Lindisfarne was sacked in 793, and similar raids multiplied with portentous rapidity. The coasts of Ireland and Great Britain, and the islands lying about them, were well plundered while the ninth century was young. In Ireland permanent conquests were made near Dublin, at Waterford, and Limerick. The second half of this century witnesses the great Danish Viking invasion of England. On the Continent the Vikings worried the skirts of the Carolingian colossus, and the Lowlands suffered before Charlemagne was in his grave. After his death the trouble began in earnest. Not only the coasts were ravaged, but the river towns trembled, on the Elbe, the Rhine, the Somme, the Seine, the Loire. Paris foiled or succumbed to more than one fierce siege. About the middle of the ninth century the Vikings began to winter where they had plundered in the summer.