PART I.

THE OLD HIGH GERMAN PERIOD

75"

CHAPTER I.

EARLY GERMANIC CULTURE; THE MIGRATIONS.

IN the growth of every national literature there is a period
corresponding to what the ethnologist describes as a pre-
historic age.
This age of unwritten literature may, as in
isolated civilisations, be synonymous with the age of unwritten
history, but it is not always or necessarily the case. The
modern nations of Europe, which grew up under the shadow
of the earlier civilisations of Greece and Rome, had long
emerged from prehistoric obscurity before they attained that
stage of culture which permitted of a written literature: when
the literary "prehistoric" period of modern Europe came to
a close, the individual nationalities could already look back
upon centuries of political history. Thus the first seven
centuries of the history of England, and the first eight cen-
turies, at least, of the history of Germany, are absolutely
without literary records. There is no literature in Germany

manic races.

before the age of Charles the Great. Of the successive waves of immigration on which the The GerAryans spread over Europe, that which bore the Germanic races was among the last. Whence the Aryans came is still a matter of uncertainty; when they came is a question we can never hope to answer. Of the earliest history of the Germanic peoples all that can be said with certainty is, that at the time Rome was beginning to assert herself in Southern Europe they were clustered round the shores of the North Sea and the Baltic: here, as early as the fourth century before Christ, an adventurous voyager of Marseilles, Pytheas by name, discovered them.1 In this dim prehistoric age the

1 Cp. K. Müllenhoff, Deutsche Altertumskunde, 1, 2nd ed., Berlin, 1890, 211 ff.; and W. Scherer, Vortrage und Aufsätze, Berlin, 1874, 21 ff.