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 Sætere; 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