A little later (about 870) Otfried, a Franconian, educated at Fulda and St. Gall, produced
another poetic harmony of the Gospels, which is one of the chief monuments of old high German
literature. It is a life of Christ from his birth to the ascension, and ends with a description of the
judgment. It consists of fifteen thousand rhymed lines in strophes of four lines.
Thus the victory of Christianity in Germany as well as it, England, was the beginning of
poetry and literature, and of true civilization,
The Christianization of North-Eastern Germany, among the Slavonic races, along the Baltic
shores in Prussia, Livonia, and Courland, went on in the next period, chiefly through Bishop Otto
of Bamberg, the apostle of Pomerania, and the Knights of the Teutonic order, and was completed
in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
III. THE CONVERSION 0F SCANDINAVIA.
General Literature.
I. Scandinavia before Christianity.
The Eddas, edit. Rask (Copenhagen, 1818); A. Munch (Christiania, 1847); Möbius (Leipzig, 1860).
N. M. Petersen: Danmarks Historie i Hedenold. Copenhagen, 1834–37, 3 vols.; Den Nordiske
Mythologie, Copenhagen, 1839.
N. F. S. Grundtvig: Nordens Mythologie. Copenhagen, 1839.
Thorpe: Northern Mythology. London, 1852, 3 vols.
Rasmus B. Anderson: Norse Mythology; Myths of the Eddas systematized and interpreted. Chicago,
1875.
II. The Christianization of Scandinavia.
Claudius Oernhjalm: Historia Sueonum Gothorumque Ecclesiae. Stockholm, 1689, 4 vols.
E. Pontoppidan: Annales Ecclesiae Danicae. Copenhagen, 1741.
F. Münter: Kirchengeschichte von Dänmark und Norwegen. Copenhagen and Leipzig, 1823–33,
3 vols.
R. Reuterdahl: Svenska kyrkans historia. Lund, 1833, 3 vols., first volume translated into German
by E. T. Mayerhof, under the title: Leben Ansgars.
Fred Helweg: Den Danske Kirkes Historie. Copenhagen, 1862.
A. Jorgensen: Den nordiske Kirkes Grundloeggelse. Copenhagen, 1874.
Neander: Geschichte der christlichen Kirche, Vol. IV., pp. 1–150
§ 28. Scandinavian Heathenism.
Wheaton: History of the Northmen. London 1831.
Depping: Histoire des expeditions maritimes des Normands. Paris, 1843. 2 vols.
F. Worsaae: Account of the Danes in England, Ireland, and Scotland. London, 1852; The Danish
Conquest of England and Normandy. London, 1863. These works are translated from the Danish.
Scandinavia was inhabited by one of the wildest and fiercest, but also one of the strongest and
most valiant branches of the Teutonic race, a people of robbers which grew into a people of
conquerors. Speaking the same language—that which is still spoken in Iceland—and worshipping
the same gods, they were split into a number of small kingdoms covering the present Denmark,
Sweden, and Norway. Every spring, when the ice broke in the fjords, they launched their boats or
skiffs, and swept, each swarm under the leadership of its own king, down upon the coasts of the