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OverviewPurchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: records, have agreed to allow them the credit of true history. After letters began to prevail, and history assumed a more stable form, by being committed to plain simple prose, these songs of the Scalds or Bards began to be more amusing than useful. And in proportion as it became their business chiefly to entertain and delight, they gave more and more into embellishment, and set off their recitals with such marvellous fictions as were calculated to captivate gross and ignorant minds. Thus began stories of adventures with giants and dragons, and witches and enchanters, and all the monstrous extravagances of wild imagination, unguided by judgment, and uncorrected by art. t This seems to be the true origin of that species of romance which so long celebrated feats of chivalry, and which at first in metre, and afterwards in prose, was the entertainment of our ancestors, in common with their contemporaries on the Continent; till the satire of Cervantes, or rather the increase of knowledge and classical literature, drove them off the stage, to make room for a more refined species of fiction, under the name of French Romances, copied from the Greek. J That our old romances of chivalry may be derived in a lineal descent from the ancient historical songs of the Gothic Bards and Scalds, will be shown below; and indeed appears the more evident, as many of those songs are still preserved in the North, which exhibit all the seeds of See Northern Antiquities, or a Description of the Manners, Customs, Full Product DetailsAuthor: Thomas PercyPublisher: General Books LLC Imprint: General Books LLC Dimensions: Width: 22.90cm , Height: 1.80cm , Length: 15.20cm Weight: 0.475kg ISBN: 9780217983365ISBN 10: 0217983367 Pages: 322 Publication Date: 02 September 2009 Audience: General/trade , General Format: Paperback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: In Print This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us. Table of ContentsReviewsAuthor InformationTab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |