Читать книгу History of English Literature from "Beowulf" to Swinburne - Andrew Lang, Robert Kirk - Страница 25

Alcuin (735-804), a pupil of the school of York, lived at the worst period of the savage attacks made by the still heathen Danes on England. What the Anglo-Saxons had done to the Britons, the Danes after 780 did to the Anglo-Saxons, slaying, plundering, torturing, and burning, wherever they came. Happily for Alcuin he passed most of his life abroad, aiding the great Emperor Charlemagne in founding schools and fostering education. Charlemagne collected the old war-songs of his people, little dreaming that in three centuries he would become as fabulous a hero, in the French epic poems of the eleventh to the thirteenth century, as Beowulf or Alboin had been in Germanic lays. Alcuin had far more influence as a lecturer and as a writer of letters than as an author; in a poem he preserves the names of the books in the libraries of York and Wearmouth, beautiful manuscripts that would now be almost priceless, but the Danes burned them all. Other Latin writers there were, they mainly dealt with religious themes, and their works are of very little importance.