by their praises they send down the ages the brave souls of those killed in
war; Aelian, that they take as the subject of their songs the men who have died
nobly in battle. The Goths ‘used to sing of their forefathers’ deeds with
melody and lyres’. The sixth-century Lombard king Alboin’s liberality,
bravery, and success in war were celebrated in song throughout Bavaria and
Saxony. In the late eighth century the blind Frisian bard Bernlêf ‘knew well
how to tell forth with music the deeds of the ancients and the battles of kings’.
An Irish Saint’s Life records that Aengus king of Munster had fine musicians
who would sing before him to the lyre ‘the deeds of heroes’.^107
Heroic narratives were recited to armies before battle to spur them to
valour. Tacitus says that the Germans, when going to fight, would sing of
‘Hercules’first of all brave warriors; the implication is that the bards recalled
a series of past heroes. They no doubt included the illustrious Arminius, who
died in 19 and according to another passage of the same historian ‘is still
sung of among the barbarians’. Of the Coralli too, a Thracian–Danubian
people, it is related that they roused their men to battle by singing of their
ancient leaders’ deeds, and we hear the same of the Visigoths before the battle
of Hadrianople in 378. There is evidence for the like practice among the
British.^108 In Ireland prose sagas took the place of verse narratives. Fergal, on
the eve of battle in 722, bade a musician entertain the company with harps
and pipes and poems and talk and royal stories of Ireland; he declined, but
another was called on and ‘set about telling the battles and combats of Leth
Cuinn and the Leinstermen, from the destruction of Dind Ríg, in which
Cobthach Cóel Breg was killed, up until that time’.^109
Such lays would be accurately described by the Homeric–Hesiodic phrase
κλα α, νδρω
ν or κλε4α προτρων α, νθρ.πων ‘renowns of (former) men’.
Achilles is found singing these in his cabin (Il. 9. 189, cf. 524), and Demo-
docus sings them to the Phaeacians (Od. 8. 73). In Vedic the cognate word
s ́ráva ̄m
̇
si‘renowns’ is similarly used meaning ‘deeds of renown’ (of Indra, RV
- 7; 8. 99. 2), while s ́ám
̇
- 7; 8. 99. 2), while s ́ám
sa- ‘appreciation’ is combined with nara ̄ ́m‘of(^107) Timagenes ap. Amm. Marc. 15. 9. 8 (FGrHist 88 F 2); Luc. 1. 447–9; Ael. Var. hist. 12. 23;
Jordanes, Getica 43; Paulus Diaconus, Hist. Langobard. 1. 27; Vita Liudgeri (MGH Scriptores ii.
412); Vita S. Ciarani de Saigir 14 (Charles Plummer, Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae (Oxford 1910),
i. 222).
(^108) Tac. Germ. 3. 1, Ann. 2. 88 (for German battle songs cf. also Tac. Ann. 4. 47, Hist. 2. 22,
- 18); Val. Flacc. 6. 93 f.; Amm. Marc. 31. 7. 11; A. O. H. Jarman, Y Gododdin (Landysul 1988),
lxxxi, xcv.
(^109) J. N. Radner, Fragmentary Annals of Ireland (Dublin 1978), 68/9 f. (§178); cf. J. de Vries,
Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 75 (1953), 246 f. In the Cath
Finntrága the poet Fergus Finnbel repeatedly raises a hero’s spirits during combat by praising
him and reminding him of his previous victories (351ff., 637ff., etc.).
- Poet and Poesy 67