on the warrior’s helmet, the intricate adornment of the warrior’s shield, tell like the honour in which the smith was held their tale of industrial art.  The curiously twisted glass goblets, so common in the early graves of Kent, are shewn by their form to be of English workmanship.  It is only in the English pottery, hand-made, and marked with coarse zigzag patterns, that we find traces of utter rudeness.

[Sidenote:  Religion]

The religion of these men was the same as that of the rest of the German peoples.  Christianity had by this time brought about the conversion of the Roman Empire, but it had not penetrated as yet among the forests of the north.  The common God of the English people was Woden, the war-god, the guardian of ways and boundaries, to whom his worshippers attributed the invention of letters, and whom every tribe held to be the first ancestor of its kings.  Our own names for the days of the week still recall to us the gods whom our fathers worshipped in their German homeland.  Wednesday is Woden’s-day, as Thursday is the day of Thunder, the god of air and storm and rain.  Friday is Frea’s-day, the deity of peace and joy and fruitfulness, whose emblems, borne aloft by dancing maidens, brought increase to every field and stall they visited.  Saturday may commemorate an obscure god Saetere; Tuesday the dark god, Tiw, to meet whom was death.  Eostre, the goddess of the dawn or of the spring, lends her name to the Christian festival of the Resurrection.  Behind these floated the dim shapes of an older mythology; “Wyrd,” the death-goddess, whose memory lingered long in the “Weird” of northern superstition; or the Shield-maidens, the “mighty women” who, an old rime tells us, “wrought on the battle-field their toil and hurled the thrilling javelins.”  Nearer to the popular fancy lay deities of wood and fell, or hero-gods of legend and song; Nicor, the water-sprite who survives in our nixies and “Old Nick”; Weland, the forger of weighty shields and sharp-biting swords, who found a later home in the “Weyland’s smithy” of Berkshire; AEgil, the hero-archer, whose legend is one with that of Cloudesly or Tell.  A nature-worship of this sort lent itself ill to the purposes of a priesthood; and though a priestly class existed it seems at no time to have had much weight among Englishmen.  As each freeman was his own judge and his own lawmaker, so he was his own house-priest; and English worship lay commonly in the sacrifice which the house-father offered to the gods of his hearth.

[Sidenote:  The English Temper]

It is not indeed in Woden-worship or in the worship of the older gods of flood and fell that we must look for the real religion of our fathers.  The song of Beowulf, though the earliest of English poems, is as we have it now a poem of the eighth century, the work it may be of some English missionary of the days of Baeda and Boniface who gathered in the very homeland of his race the legends of its earlier prime.