Early Lives of Charlemagne by Eginhard and the Monk of St Gall edited by Prof. A. J. Grant. Einhard

monastery in which he wrote has a special interest for our islands; for Saint Gall was an Irishman of noble family, and an inmate of a monastery in County Down, which was at that time governed by Saint Comgel. He was one of the twelve monks who in 585 followed Saint Columban into Frankland. Switzerland was the great scene of his evangelical labours. The Catholic Church celebrates his death on the 16th October; and tells in the Lectiones of that day how he destroyed the idols of the heathen; how he turned many to Christianity, and, even to the monastic life; how he founded the Monastery of Saint Gall in his eighty-fifth year, and died at the age of ninety-five, having previously been warned in a dream of the death of his master, Saint Columban; and how at once miracles declared that a saint had passed away. His monastery for a [pg xxi] century followed the rule of Saint Columban, and then, in common with most monastic institutions of Western Europe, adopted the rule of Saint Benedict.

      It was in the famous abbey, that owed its foundation to this Irish missionary, that this account of the deeds of Charlemagne—the Gesta Karoli—was written. The author is at more pains than we should expect to tell us from what sources he derived his information. The preface to the work is lost; but at the end of the first book he repeats some of the information that he had inserted in it. It was his intention, he informs us, to follow three authorities, and three authorities only; but of these three he seems to mention two only—Werinbert, a monk of Saint Gall, who died just as he was completing the first part; and Adalbert, the father of Werinbert, who followed Kerold, the brother of Queen Hildigard, in the wars that were fought, under Charlemagne’s banner, against the Huns and the Saxons and Slavs. It is an amusing picture that he gives us, at the end of the first book, of Adalbert’s anxiety to tell him of Charles’s exploits and his own unwillingness to hear. It is to be presumed that the stories were often repeated, for not only facts but words seem to have remained in the mind of the unwilling listener. The third authority does not seem to be [pg xxii] mentioned, unless he means to imply that Kerold himself (who was killed in an expedition against the Avars in 799) is one of his sources of information.

      The whole of what the Monk of Saint Gall wrote is not left to us. The preface, as we have seen, is missing, and also, perhaps, a third book; for in the sixteenth chapter of the second book it seems that our author promises us an account of the habits of Charles, his cotidiana conversatio, when the story of his military exploits has been finished. But this may easily be a misunderstanding of his meaning; or, rather, it may be giving too great a precision to it. The good Monk is so little able to follow out any line of thought, or to maintain any arrangement, that it may well be that the “daily conversation” of Charles never received any separate treatment.

      No attempt will be made here to estimate the historical value of the narrative, though it would be a matter of curious speculation to consider whether the critical historian can employ any method whereby a residuum of objective fact can be separated from the mass of legend, saga, invention, and reckless blundering of which the greater part of the book is made up. But, apart from any value which it may possess as a historical document, the Monk’s story [pg xxiii] is of great interest for the light which it throws on the methods and outlook of a monk of the early Middle Ages. Charles has been dead not much more than half-a-century; the author has talked familiarly with those who knew him and fought under him; and yet the Charlemagne legend has already begun. Charles is already, if not inspired, at least supernaturally wise; if he does not work miracles, miracles are wrought in his presence, and on his behalf; if he does not yet lead the armies of Christendom to Jerusalem, he is already the specially recognised protector of the Holy City. There are passages too, as, for instance, the account of the visit of the envoys of the Greek Emperor, and Charles’s “iron-march to Pavia,” where we seem to detect the existence of a popular saga—a poem—underlying the prose narrative. With the help of M. Gaston Paris’s “Histoire Poétique de Charlemagne,” we can trace the further development of the legend. By the eleventh century Charles was already a martyr for the faith, and the Crusaders believed themselves to be passing along his route to Jerusalem. “Turpin’s” chronicle, in the eleventh century, shows the vast extension of the legend, which now loses all but the vaguest relation to the actual events of history and the real characteristics of Charles. In the twelfth [pg xxiv] century (1165) Charles was solemnly canonised; and thenceforward the story spread into all lands, and received its last stroke in the time of the Renaissance, at the hands of Pulci, Boiardo, and Ariosto. These poets chiefly concern themselves, however, with the paladins of Charles; and the King himself forms the dimly-conceived centre, round whom the whole story revolves, deciding disputes, besieging the Turks in Paris, priest-like rather than royal in his main features, and by Ariosto treated with some irony and banter. These mediæval legends of Charlemagne may well be compared to those which deal with Virgil, whose transformation into a magician is not less remarkable than Charles’s development into a saint. If the Charlemagne legend ends with Ariosto, Dante may be said to have given the last shape to the many transformations of Virgil, when, more than two centuries before Ariosto’s “Orlando,” Virgil acted as guide to Dante through the “lost folk” of the Inferno, and the toilsome ascent of Purgatory, until he handed him over at last into the keeping of Beatrice at the gate of the earthly Paradise.

      Story and myth naturally attach themselves only to the greatest figures; and the Monk of Saint Gall’s narrative becomes then, even by virtue of its inventions and unrealities, a testimony to the effect [pg xxv] produced on the mind of his century by the career of Charles.

      Both the life of Eginhard and the Monk’s narrative have been translated from Jaffe’s “Bibliotheca Rerum Germanicarum”; which, both in its reading and arrangement, differs at times considerably from the text given in Pertz’s “Monumenta Germaniæ Historica.”

      [pg xxvii]