At the wedding banquet Horant, who, in spite of his advanced years, had lost none of his musical skill, played the wedding march with such success that the queens simultaneously flung their crowns at his feet,—­an offering which he smilingly refused, telling them that crowns were perishable, but that the poet’s song was immortal.

    “The aged minstrel drew his harp still closer to his breast,
    Gazed at the jeweled coronets as this thought he expressed: 
    ’Fair queens, I bid you wear them until your locks turn gray;
    Those crowns, alas! are fleeting, but song will live alway.’”
                                             NIENDORF (H.A.G.’s tr.).

CHAPTER III.

REYNARD THE FOX.

Among primitive races, as with children, animal stories are much enjoyed, and form one of the first stages in literature.  The oldest of these tales current in the middle ages is the epic of Reineke Fuchs, or Reynard the Fox.  This poem was carried by the ancient Franks across the Rhine, became fully acclimated in France, and then returned to Germany by way of Flanders, where it was localized.

After circulating from mouth to mouth almost all over Europe, during many centuries, it was first committed to writing in the Netherlands, where the earliest manuscript, dating from the eleventh or twelfth century, gives a Latin version of the tale.

[Sidenote:  Origin of animal epics.] “The root of this saga lies in the harmless natural simplicity of a primeval people.  We see described the delight which the rude child of nature takes in all animals,—­in their slim forms, their gleaming eyes, their fierceness, their nimbleness and cunning.  Such sagas would naturally have their origin in an age when the ideas of shepherd and hunter occupied a great portion of the intellectual horizon of the people; when the herdman saw in the ravenous bear one who was his equal, and more than his equal, in force and adroitness, the champion of the woods and wilds; when the hunter, in his lonely ramble through the depths of the forest, beheld in the hoary wolf and red fox, as they stole along,—­hunters like himself,—­mates, so to say, and companions, and whom he therefore addressed as such....  So that originally this kind of poetry was the exponent of a peculiar sort of feeling prevailing among the people, and had nothing whatever to do with the didactic or satiric, although at a later period satiric allusions began to be interwoven with it.”

The story has been rewritten by many poets and prose writers.  It has been translated into almost every European language, and was remodeled from one of the old mediaeval poems by Goethe, who has given it the form in which it will doubtless henceforth be known.  His poem “Reineke Fuchs” has been commented upon by Carlyle and translated by Rogers, from whose version all the following quotations have been extracted.