The Anglosaxon Traveller’s Song contains a multitude of names which cannot be found elsewhere. Paulus Diaconus and Jornandes have evidently used ancient poems as the foundation of their histories. The lays of the various Germanic cycles still furnish details respecting Hermanaric, Otachar, Theodoric, Hiltibrant and other heroes of this troubled period. But the reader who would judge of the fragmentary and unsatisfactory result of _all_ that the ancient world has recorded of the new, had better consult that most remarkable work of Zeuss, Die Deutschen und die Nachbarstämme. Munich, 1837. He will there see how the profoundest science halts after the reality of ancient ages, and strives in vain to reduce their manifold falsehood to a truth. ----- Possessing no written annals, and trusting to the poet the task of the historian, our forefathers have left but scanty records of their early condition[8]. Nor did the supercilious or unsuspecting ignorance of Italy care to enquire into the mode of life and habits of the barbarians until their strong arms threatened the civilization and the very existence of the empire itself. Then first, dimly through the twilight in which the sun of Rome was to set for ever, loomed the Colossus of the German race, gigantic, terrible, inexplicable; and the vague attempt to define its awful features came too late to be fully successful. In Tacitus, the city possessed indeed a thinker worthy of the exalted theme; but his sketch, though vigorous beyond expectation, is incomplete in many of the most material points: yet this is the most detailed and fullest account which we possess, and nearly the only certain source of information till we arrive at the moment when the invading tribes in every portion of the empire entered upon their great task of reconstructing society from its foundations. Slowly, from point to point, and from time to time, traces are recognized of powerful struggles, of national movements, of destructive revolutions: but the definite facts which emerge from the darkness of the first three centuries are rare and fragmentary. Footnote 8: “Celebrant carminibus antiquis, quod unum apud illos memoriae et annalium genus est.” Tac. Mor. Germ. cap. ii. Let us confine our attention to that portion of the race which settled on our own shores.