Man, I should have joined this site a long time ago! I've missed so much, I feel like I'm playing catch up with all these fascinating threads. Not that I'm complaining--there's just nothing like a free exchange of ideas on all the topics I love at once! "g" This is more a reply to the earlier posts on this thread, but oh well: it's a chance to talk.

Thiu makes some good points about all the pagan learning going on through history in Christian Europe. I think it surprises a lot of people to learn that the Christian Church throughout history often did things that were for the benefit of humanity or culture or people's material needs, even if they didn't directly benefit the Church itself or cause any conversions or even have any real bearing on spiritual life.

This may take a wide range of forms: from the immediate nutritional needs of the people that Mother Teresa cared for (she didn't try to convert them), to the broad cultural needs of a society--a whole continent really--that thought they saw the end of the world in the fall of Rome. It was in fact the Christians at that time (at least the farseeing ones) who saw past that event and began to do what they could to preserve culture, even while adapting with it. It was this vision that enabled Augustine to write The City of God, where he makes this point (among others), while the Vandals, having swept through SW Europe and Northern Africa, were literally outside the city walls.

This idea also applies, I believe, in the case of literature dealing with the pagan Germanic north. For in fact, monks and priests did not study only what they needed to perform their duties; or if they did, at least in the case of monks (who had more time than priests with their pastoral concerns), they viewed the preservation of culture--whether religious or natural--as part of their jobs. Sure they copied the Bible, but honestly, I don't care how devoted you are to the Bible for a spiritual reasons; on a natural level, copying the same thing an hour a day for 30 years in a monastery would be crazy! In fact, they copied some of the very manuscripts we all know and love.

Historian Chrisopher Dawson, in Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, ends his chapter on "The Conversion of the North" by saying this:

"With the fall of Anglo-Saxon culture, the Scandinavian world became the great representative of vernacular culture in Northern Europe. And it was, above all, in Iceland that the scholars of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries took up the tradition of King Alfred and founded the great school of vernacular historiography and archaeology to which we owe so much of our knowledge of the past. We are apt to regard medieval culture as intolerant of everything that lay outside the tradition of Latin Christendom. But we must not forget that the Northern Sagas are as much the creation of medieval Christendom as the chansons de geste and that it is to the priests and the schools of Christian Iceland that we are indebted for the preservation of Northern mythology and poetry and saga."

In other words, the main reason we have as much interesting information about the literature and culture of our pagan remote ancestors is because the Christians who were those pagans immediate descendants thought it was worth passing on to us.