Beginnings英国起源(25)

At first, the warriors from north Germany and Denmark, sailing up-river in their wave horses, seemed a boon, not a curse. When one local despot, named Vortigern, naively imagined he could use the imported barbarians as his own personal military muscle but neglected to pay them as per the contract, he made one of the more spectacular blunders in British history. Furious at being stiffed, the Saxons turned on the local population they'd been hired to defend. And when they finished burning and pillaging, they took land in lieu of pay, settling down amidst the understandably dismayed native population. Dismayed, but not, I think, terrified. For although the earliest chroniclers of the coming of the Saxons thought of Vortigern's faux pas as heralding some sort of final apocalypse, was not, though, someone suddenly turned the lights out on Roman Britannia and declared the Dark Ages to have begun.

起初，扬鞭策马顺流而来的北方日耳曼与丹麦士兵似是佳音，而非噩耗。当地暴君沃蒂艮天真地妄想能雇佣蛮族之兵力为己所用，而忽视给付相应报酬的约定，便铸成了不列颠史上最愚不可及的大错。被欺骗的盛怒之下，撒克逊人对本该保护的当地居民倒戈相向，在烧杀劫掠一空后，他们以地抵资，在理所当然对其大失所望的当地居民中定居下来。失望是当然，但我想他们并不恐惧，尽管关于撒克逊入主的最早记录者，将沃蒂艮的愚蠢作为天启，预示时代的更迭，却没有谁终结了罗马不列颠尼亚，而后宣布黑暗时代的到来。