lived in Germany; the abode of the great Eormanric or Hermanric, King of the East Goths, was to be sought for 'eastan of Ongle;' it lay in and around 'Wistla-wudu,' the forest of the Vistula, where the Gothic warriors, with their hard swords, turned to bay in defence of their ancient seats against the hordes of Attila: 1 heardum sweordum Ymb Wistla-wudu wergan sceoldon Again, the nations under the sway of the empire are designated by the singular name of Rum-walas-strangers of Rome,-and part of the dominions of the 'Caser,' or emperor, is called Walaríce. Evidently we have here the Wälsch, Wälsch-land, Walloon, Welsh, of the Teutonic tribes; names by which they described the races, strange to themselves in blood and language, by which they were surrounded, and especially the inhabitants of Italy. But the Anglo-Saxon, after his conversion at the end of the seventh century, never again applied this name to the subjects of the Roman empire; Rome was then too near and dear a name to him to allow of his using any term importing estrangement with reference to her people. Here again, then, we have an evidence of the early date of the present poem. But it may be objected that the author speaks of heathens' (1. 73), and therefore may be presumed to have been a Christian; and if there were Angle Christians early in the fifth century, how came it that at the time of their transmigration to Britain, and for more than a century after, they are represented to us as purely Pagan? Many lines of thought and inquiry suggest themselves in reply, which cannot here be followed up. But it may be observed that Christianity admits of many degrees; that of the Peruvians, after the Spanish conquest, bore but a faint resemblance to that of the Jesuit converts in Paraguay; and the thin varnish of Arian Christianity thrown over the barbarism of Alaric and his Visigoths, shares the name, but not the influence or the durability, of the religious system which softened the manners and the hearts of Ethelbert and Edwin. Besides the East and West Goths, the Burgundians, and many other Teutonic 1 It seems a difficulty at first sight to understand how Hermanric (see Gibbon, Decline und Fall, chs. xxv. and xxvi.) and Attila could be brought in conjunction as contemporaries of the same poet. But this was perfectly. possible; Hermanric was assassinated in the year 375, and Attila, though not known in the Roman world till many years later, succeeded his uncle as ruler, jointly with his brother Blæda, of the Hunnish tribes, in 403. Now the whole tenor of the poem points to a long course of wanderings continued through many years, so that the Gleeman, at different parts of his career, may easily have known both Hermanric and Attila races, professed Christianity in the fifth century; and there is nothing improbable in the conjecture that the Angles may have derived from their neighbourhood to the Goths of East Prussia the same kind of nominal Christianity which the latter possessed. This loose profession they may easily have lost, after their colonizing enterprise had established them firmly in Britain; nor would the circumstance that the Britons were Christians have tended at all to attach them to Christianity, but rather the contrary. For, besides the proverbial 'odisse quem læseris,' no fact is more certain than that the Angles thoroughly despised the Celts whom they dislodged; and as the latter carefully refrained from imparting to their conquerors that faith, without which they believed them to be under the sentence of eternal perdition, so the former must have been disposed to involve the religion of the Britons in the same sweeping contempt which they entertained for themselves. 6. The essential charm of the Anglo-Saxon, as of the Icelandic poetry-though it appertains to the former in a lower degree-is in the glimpses which it gives us into the old Teutonic world, when Odin was still worshipped in the sacred wood, when the wolf, the eagle, and the raven were held in reverence as noble and fearless creatures, bringers of good luck, and specially dear to the gods; and when the battle and the banquet were the only forms of life in which the hero could or cared to shine. In this Gleeman's Song, though in the main a mere catalogue of the nations and persons visited by the writer, traces of this primitive state of things may be gathered. From the following lines it would seem that the Goths knew not as yet how to coin money: And ic was mid Eormanrice ealle þrage; pone ic Eadgilse on æht sealde Minum hleo-drihtne, þa ic to ham bicwom, Mines fæder edel, frea Myrginga.1 * And I was with Eormanric a whole season; There the King of the Goths endowed me with good things: For it were cut off six hundred shots [i.e. pieces] 1 The ring of metal, large or small, was a customary form of present among the Germans. Tacitus (Germ. xv.) mentions 'torques' among the gifts which they delighted to receive from neighbouring nations. 7. But the features of the antique world are more distinctly and variously exhibited to us in the poem of Beowulf. Unfortunately the single manuscript on which we are dependent for the text was injured in the fire at the Cotton Library in 1731, and a not inconsiderable number of lines remain from this cause more or less unintelligible. The MS. was first edited, in 1815, by Thorkelin, keeper of the Royal Archives at Copenhagen. In 1833 the text with annotations, and in 1837 a translation with a learne l introduction, were produced by J. M. Kemble, under the auspices of the English Historical Society. The poem has been stud.ed most attentively by German scholars, as Grimm, Ettmüller, Leo, and others, for the sake of the light which it throws upon the origins of the Teutonic race. Many different theories have been advanced respecting its age and import of which I have elsewhere given an account. After explaining what the poem is about, I shall briefly state my own view of its origin. 8. The main actions of the poem are three: first, the fight of the hero, Beowulf, with the fiendish monster, Grendel, who had long infested the approaches to Heorot, the palace of Hrothgar, king of Denmark, and killed many noble Danes; secondly, the fight of the same hero with Grendel's mother, whom he kills; thirdly, the deadly conflict between Beowulf, now an old man, and king both of Denmark and Gautland, and a huge dragon, keeper of a large treasure-hoard by the seashore. Beowulf, who was a prince of the Geatas (the people of Gautland or Gotland in the south of Sweden), came by sea to the aid of Hrothgar, attacked Grendel, and after a tremendous struggle, compelled him to flee, leaving one of his arms torn off in Beowulf's hands, to his home at the bottom of a pool, where he soon afterwards died. His mother, to revenge his defeat, visited Heorot by night, and carried off Eschere, Hrothgar's favourite thane. Beowulf goes in pursuit, traces the creature to her watery abode, goes down into the pool, and after a hard Of beaten gold, reckoning by shillings.* That ring I delivered into the possession of Eadgils My sheltering lord it. lee-led, when I came home, The native place of my father-he, Lord of the Myrgings, The 'sceat' (a word that still survives in the phrase sect and lot") seems to have been equivalent to the smaller penny, twelve of which went to the 'scilling. 600 sceatta then were equal to 30 sellingas. 1 See the Introduction to the author's, Beowulf, a Heroic Poem of the Eighth Century; Longmans, 1876. 2 The name of Hecrot is thought to be preserved in Hjortholm, a village of Zealand, not far from Copenhagen. fight despatches her. Returning to his own land, he succeeds after a while to the kingdom, and reigns for many years in all prosperity. In his old age, hearing of the ravages of a fiery dragon on the sea-board of his kingdom, he undertakes the perilous adventure, shunned by all but himself, of attacking and destroying him. He succeeds, but receives in the struggle a mortal wound. The plundering of the dragon-hoard, the burning of Beowulf's body on a funeral pile by the seashore, and the raising of a large beacon-mound over his ashes, 'easy to behold by the sailors over the waves,' are the concluding events of the poem. 9. The following view of the origin and relations of the poem is briefly summarized from the Introduction to the edition above cited. The date of composition was the early part of the eighth century. This conclusion arises from a number of converging considerations, such as, 1. the language, which in its general cast, and also in certain peculiar terms and expressions, closely resembles that of Guolac, Andreas, and Elene, poems which must be unquestionably referred to that century; 2. certain historical allusions contained in the work. The most important of these refers to the expedition, mentioned several times in Beowulf, of Hygelac king of the Geatas to Friesland, where he was slain by the Franks. This expedition has been satisfactorily identified with a marauding raid, described by the chronicler Gregory of Tours under the year 511, in which a king 'Chocilaicus' (Frankish-Latin for Hygelac) met his death in Friesland under precisely similar circumstances. The poem itself contains incidents which are supposed to happen some sixty years after this expedition, and has expressions which indicate that after the latest of those incidents the writer conceived of a long period of time intervening between it and his own day. These facts completely demolish a theory which has been often advanced, that Beowulf was written in Anglen or Holstein before the Angles and Saxons had migrated to Britain in the fifth century. The poem contains another allusion helping to determine its date, in the words of the Geat, who, after mentioning Hygelac's raid, adds (1. 2921), 'To us never after that was granted the favour of the Merovingians.' The Merovingian dynasty among the Franks became extinct in 752; and since the poem contains no mention whatever of the great family which succeeded it, the Carolingians or Karlings, it may be reasonably inferred that it was written before that date. Dr. Grein of Marburg, who by his Bibliothek der Angelsächsischen Poesie, and admirable Glossar, or Dictionary, accompanying it, has laid all students of old Teutonic literature under an in estimable obligation,—and also Ludwig Ettmüller of Zurich, agree with the general result embodied in the above view, namely that Beowulf must be placed in the eighth century. 10. With regard to the authorship, it must be premised that in the judgment of the best critics the poem-apart from two or three passages, not necessary to the connection of the story, which may be the interpolations of a later age-forms one whole, composed about the same time, and by one author. That author was undoubtedly a Christian. If the conclusion above given as to the date of the poem be sound, the reflection at once arises that the early part of the eighth century was a period of great literary activity for the West Saxons (in whose language the work is written), as is proved by the writings of St. Aldhelm, and the letters of St. Boniface and others. It was also an age in which West Saxon missionaries, led by SS. Wilfrid and Willibrord, were actively engaged in spreading the light of Christianity among the still Pagan nations of their own blood living to the eastward—the Frisians, Old Saxons, and Danes. Alcuin, in his Vita S. Willibrordi, mentions that thirty young Danes were placed in the missionary's hands, in 695, and sent to be educated in Friesland. By means of some communication of this kind, it is conjectured that the legends and traditions of Scandinavia may have become known to a West-Saxon priest or clerk of a poetic turn, and by him worked up into the poem before us. 11. Another theory-that of Mr. Thorpe-is to this effect : that we have here no original Anglo-Saxon poem in any sense, but only a metrical paraphrase of an old Swedish poem of uncertain date, composed in England under the Danish dynasty, between the years 1010 and 1050, by some one who was of Danish parentage, but a native of England. Yet why any one should take so much trouble to make a translation which would be unintelligible to his Danish, and uninteresting to his English countrymen, it is not easy to understand. 12. Cadmon's Paraphrase.-The unique MS. containing this poem belonged to Archbishop Usher, and is now in the Bodleian library. No author's name is to be found in the MS. itself; but Francis Junius, who published the first edition of the poem in 1655, observing the remarkable general agreement of its contents with the summary given by Beda 1 of the substance of the religious poetry written by Cadmon, the lay brother of Whitby, who flourished about 680 A.D., assumed the identity of the two works. Later critics have generally held 1 Hist. Eccl. vi. 24. |