I. Sága, the Name of a Goddess. Jacob Grimm, in his Mythologie (ii, 759), interpreted the name Sága as a personification of the appellative saga ‘history, story.‘ This interpretation has now been rightly rejected because the long radical vowel a in the proper name Sága is attested by its occurrence in skaldic verse. I question, however, whether this difference in the quantity of the radical vowel in these two forms warrants the conclusion that they are not etymologically related.

To saints and their relics in the Middle Ages great men did great reverence. The mighty Charlemagne zealously collected and distributed relics of Christ and the saints; so, too, did the noble King Athelstan of England, who was, to his own contemporaries, something of “an English Charlemagne.” Certain tales relating to these two famous rulers and the holy relics acquired by them, are full of interest in themselves and in the relationship, at special stages, of the stories to each other. The Continental Carolingian narratives—the Pèlerinage de Charlemagne, the Descriptio qualiter Karolus Magnus clavum et coronam Domini a Constantino poli Aquis Grani detulerit, the Fierabras tell how Charlemagne, either on a fabulous journey to the East, or by warfare in Spain, got a hoard of precious relics which included some from the Crucifixion but never, in the oldest versions of these stories, any part of the Passion Lance. An ancient story, of English origin, tells how Athelstan received, as a gift from France, a hoard which likewise included some Passion relics. Among the gifts was the Passion Lance which was said to have belonged to Charlemagne; there was also the vexillum of St. Mauricius. For the Carolingian stories named above there is no extant text that antedates the latter half of the twelfth century, no conjectured source that antedates the latter half of the eleventh century. The Athelstan Gift Story, as we shall call it, was first set forth in an Anglo-Latin poem eulogizing the English king (d. 939). This panegyric was quoted and summarized by William of Malmesbury (1125) and is now accepted, though it was long ignored, as an authentic tenth century source. It may have been this almost unknown poem which inspired in the Chanson de Roland, in that earliest Anglo-Norman copy known as the Oxford Roland, four concepts connected with Charlemagne's reported possession of a bit of the Passion Lance. Our concern here, however, is not with the ancient Latin poem, but with the version of its Gift Story by William of Malmesbury. To it he gave new life, new currency; its influence can be traced in various chronicles and in certain English Carolingian romances. It throws new light on their development and relationships. Strangely enough, it was in these English Carolingian stories and not in their Continental sources and analogues that the idea that Charlemagne had once possessed the Passion Lance took root and flourished.

In Old English occur seven compound nouns (brimrád, hronrád, hwéolrád, seglrád, stréamrád, swanrád, wígrád) the second element of which is customarily interpreted in dictionaries, translations, handbooks, and critical writings as ‘road’ (via, Weg, Bahn); and this interpretation is the basis for the widespread dogma that the five of these compounds that refer to water are metaphors, or at least figures of speech, “poetic terms for the sea.” Unquestionably, this element is the word, occurring in OE in the simplex, which in Modern English means ‘road: an ordinary line of communication used by persons passing between different places, usually one wide enough to admit of the passage of vehicles as well as of horses or travellers on foot’ (OED). In no extant OE text, however, so far as the recorded instances indicate, does the simplex rád have this meaning; on the contrary, according to the OED the simplex first appears in this sense at the end of the sixteenth century—in 1596, in Shakespeare's I Henry IV II.I.16. Therefore, it is open to doubt that the bound element did actually in OE have the modern meaning in seven of the twelve extant nominal compounds in -rád. The presumption would be that in these seven, as in the other five (éorod, flocrád, setlrád, sweglrád, punorrád), it had a sense, or senses, not too remote from those of the simplex or of the related verb rídan, and that the construction of these compounds as well as the contexts in which they stand should form the basis of conclusions concerning their applications and uses, literal or figurative. The evidence afforded by extant OE texts supports the presumption.