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850 DEATH.
bol of Death (p. 844) and the dead-man s steed (p. 841). As
the convent clergy set up human death s-heads in their cells for
a memento mori, may not they also have nailed up horse s skulls
inside their walls ? did an older heathen custom, here as in so
many instances, have a Christian thought breathed into it ? If
this holds good, we can see why the horse s head should have set
the Flemish poet thinking of Death ; it may even be, that fanatic
sculptors used to fashion Death as playing on it instead of a
fiddle or fife. 1
In any case dominus Blicero proves that in the middle of the
12th cent, it was the practice to represent Death as a skeleton.
I do not know of any earlier evidence, but think it very possible
that such may be hunted up. We know that to the ancient
Romans fleshless shrivelled-up masks or skeletons served to
indicate Death. 2 On tombs of the Mid. Ages, no doubt from an
early time, corpses were sculptured as whole or half skeletons (see
Suppl.). Poets of the 13th cent, paint the World (p. 792n.) as
a beautifully formed woman in front, whose back is covered with
snakes and adders :
3 the notion itself may be of much higher
antiquity ; it is closely related to the story
dead kings. 4
of three live and three
This mode of representing Death, which soon became universal,
stands in sharp contrast with the ancient portraitures and the
old heathen conceptions of him. The engaging form of the
genius, akin to Sleep, the childlike Angel of death, is now
supplanted by a ghastly figure copied from the grim reality of
corruption in the grave. Yet even here poetry steps in with her
all-embracing, all-mellowing influence. The older conceptions
of Death as leading away, as attacking, as dancing, applied to this
new and hideous figure, have called forth a host of truly popular,
naive and humorous art-productions; nay, their wealth is not
nearly exhausted by the artists yet. Without this bag of bones
1
Todenpfeife is a place in Lower Hesse, Eommel 5, 375. Eemigius demonol.
145 says, at witches gatherings they played on a dead horse s head instead of a
cithern: a coincidence almost decisive. Finland, von Sittew. (p.m. 174) has also
a Death with his lyre.
2 0. Miiller s Archaol. 696-7. Lessing 8, 251-2.
8 The poem was printed before the Wigalois.
4 Staphorst i. 4, 263. Bragur 1, 369. 0. Fr. les trois mors et les trois vis,
Roquefort 2, 780. Catal. de la Valliere p. 285-6 ; couf. Douce p. 31 seq. and Catal.
of MSS. in Brit. Mus. (1834) 1, 22 (Cod. Arund. no. 83 sec. xiv), also plate 7.