the issue of the fight. In the Annals, we hear of the larger type of poetry, of the beginnings of the sagas. They have songs, Tacitus writes, in honour of their deliverer Arminius;' there are other pieces also which they sing in their bivouacs and at their feasts.

All this music and verse was, as we see, already old in the time of Tacitus, and belonged to religion and to war—a music of solemn ceremonies, sorrowful or festival. "Of all ceremonies, going into battle was the most religious," save perhaps that other great ceremony which was always attended by songs the burial of a king or hero, an instance of which we have in the closing lines of Beowulf.

For 1900 years, then, we know that the English race has been a singing folk, and though we are not alone in that characteristic, we are almost alone in this, that we possess in our own language products of that singing temper in poems like those of Widsith and The Fight at Finnsburg which may range from the fifth to the seventh century. Moreover, there are lays imbedded in the Beowulf which seem to go back to a still more remote antiquity.

If this be true, if we may venture to speak of any of our poetry as continental, the poems make us understand, better than any historical statement can do, that the first English were not in Britain, but in the Low Dutch lands and Denmark-that there was an England there before our England. The first emigration was to Britain, the second to America. And as the Pilgrims and I use a fine comparison of Freeman's—"took with them to America the Bible, an old Shakspere, their ballads, the Gesta of English soldiers and sailors, in the memory of nurses, children, and women, so the English brought to Britain, in that first pilgrimage, Widsith, Beowulf, The Fight at Finnsburg." Many other lays, no doubt, came with them, but their verse, Time, too greedy of the excellent, "devoured with privy paw, and nothing said."

2

1 Vigfusson has written a short essay in the supplement to the Corp. Poet. Boreale, in which he more than suggests that Arminius is identical with Siegfried. If this be true, and there is much probability in the argument, it adds another charm to the great story, and a new interest to the statement of Tacitus. The Roman soldiers may then have heard the earliest lays of the Volsung and Niblung saga. Arminius, "canitur adhuc barbaros apud gentes."

2 I cannot find the passage; I quote from memory. I may as well say in this note that the mention of Attila in Widsith, in our earliest English poem, written perhaps before the English left for Britain, adds an additional interest to Mr. Hodgkin's theory that it was the pressure of the Huns at the back of the north-German tribes which was the cause of the English migration. Two great sea-ruling peoples arose then from the fierce driving of the Huns - the Venetians and the English.

CHAPTER II

BEOWULF

Introduction

THE Beowulf MS. (Cotton Vitellius A. xv.) was one of those collected by Sir Robert Cotton. It was in Little Deans Yard, Westminster, when the fire which, in 1731, destroyed so many manuscripts took place, and was fortunately among those which were not fatally injured. In 1753, having spent some time in the old dormitory at Westminster, it was transferred to the British Museum.

In 1705 Wanley, employed by Hickes, the Anglo-Saxon scholar, to make a catalogue of the old northern books in the kingdom, discovered the poem of Beowulf in the Cottonian library and calls it a tractatus nobilissimus poeticè scriptus. It is a parchment codex, and the handwriting of the two copyists is of the beginning of the tenth century. Thorkelin, a Danish scholar, had two copies of it made in 1786, and published the whole of it for the first time in 1815. This edition made the poem known, and it was discussed in English and foreign reviews. Meantime, in 1805, Sharon Turner gave the first account of the poem in his history of the Anglo-Saxons. Turner again, in 1823, and Conybeare, in 1826, filled up that account and translated portions of Beowulf into English verse, and in 1833 and 1837 John M. Kemble edited, with historical prefaces, and translated the whole of the poem. This scholarly book increased the interest of foreign scholars in the poem; and, since then, a great number of editions and translations have been published, while the essays, dissertations, articles, and notices on the poem and the subjects contained in it, fill a long list, and are written by English, French, German, Dutch, Danish, and American scholars.

The poem, consisting of 3183 lines, is divided into two parts by an interval of fifty years, the first containing Beowulf's

great deeds against the monster Grendel and his dam, the second Beowulf's conquest of the Fire-drake and his death and burial. The first division may be again divided into twothe fight with Grendel, and the fight with Grendel's mother -and some suppose that they are due to different hands. Several episodes are introduced which are linked on, often very roughly, to the history of Beowulf, and two or three of these seem to be taken from other sagas of even an earlier date than the original lays of the legend.

The same kind of controversy which has raged over the composition of the Iliad and Odyssey has raged also over Beowulf. It is said that it is a single poem composed by one man; and, on the contrary, that it is a poem built up, in process of time, by various hands, and consisting of various lays of different ages; and this opinion, to take one instance, has been worked out by Müllenhof with a minuteness which makes the most severe demands upon our credulity. We are to conceive first of two old lays by different authors, then of a continuation of one of these, and then of an introduction to the whole by two other authors. The fifth-a reviser-added another portion and altered the previous work to suit his addition, and another reviser, the sixth in the series, increased the poem by episodes from other sagas and by Christian interpolations. Elaborate arrangements of this kind are as doubtful as they are interesting. The main point, however, seems clear. Beowulf was built up out of many legends which in time coalesced into something of a whole, or were, as I think, composed together into a poem by one poet. The legends were sung in the Old England across the seas, and brought to our England by the Angles, or by that band of Jutes or Saxons whom many suppose to have settled, at an early time, in northern Northumbria. They were then sung in Northumbria, added to by Northumbrian singers, and afterwards, when Christianity was still young, compressed and made into a poem by a Christian singer.

The first question we have to ask is with regard to the date of the story. Is it entirely mythical and legendary, or is there any actual history contained in it which will enable us to date its composition? Such a connection with known history has been suggested. The Hygelac of the poem, Beowulf's lord, has been identified with the King Chochilaicus, who is mentioned in the Historia Francorum of Gregory of Tours, and in another chronicle the Gesta Regum Francorum.

About 512-520, when the conquest of Britain had but begun, when the victory of the Britons at Mount Badon caused a long

pause in the advance of the English, we are told that Chochilaicus made an expedition from the modern Götaland to the Attuarii of the Frisian shore - the Hetware of the poem to plunder and to slay. When he was about to leave, having laden his ships with slaves and spoil, the Frankish king Theodoric sent his son to attack him with an army of Franks and Frisians. In the battle Chochilaicus fell and all the booty was recovered. This affair is four times mentioned in the poem of Beowulf, if we identify Hygelac with Chochilaicus. We are told that fate carried away Hygelac in feud against the Frisians. He fell under his shield. His life and the jewelled collar he had from Beowulf passed into the power of the Franks. Beowulf himself, before he goes down to fight with the dragon, tells of this fight; how Hygelac fell, how he avenged his lord's death. Two other allusions are made in the poem to the same expedition and battle. It is said, therefore, that it must have been after the date of 520 that the main story of the poem arose. Of that there can be no doubt, but we have also to remember that parts of the poem are drawn from lays older than 520; lays, some of which, as the preface about Scyld, may go back to a remote antiquity. But the poem itself carries us past the death of Hygelac in 520 to Beowulf's death in 570. Only after that date, then, could the last part-the fight with the Dragonbegin to be welded to the first part of the story, and this would take at least thirty years to accomplish. This would bring us to the year 600. If we take that date, and if we make the poem Northumbrian, this first interweaving of the lays would be made about the time of Æthelfrith, before Northumbria had become Christian.1

The second question to ask is, Where is the scene of the poem laid? It has been supposed by some, who hold that it was composed from end to end in England, that the scenery is English, and Mr. Haigh has ingeniously endeavoured to identify its descriptions with places on the coast of Yorkshire. But there is not one word about our England in the poem, not a single hint that the original singers knew of the existence of such a people as the English in Britain. The personages, the

1 This argument is based on the supposition that Beowulf was, at least partly, an historical personage. But the supposition is a doubtful one, and we can come to no certainty with regard to the date of the story. I have almost assumed that the poem arose into shape in Northumbria, but Professor Earle thinks that Mercia was the place of its birth, and Ten Brink endeavours to establish West Saxon connections for it. Professor Earle's interesting book, The Deeds of Beowulf, has just been published, and his theory of the origin of the poem is fully expounded in it.

tribes are all of the continent - North, South, East and West Danes, the Geats, the Sweons, and the Frisians. The Danes dwelt in Seeland, and their chief town was there; the Geats in Scandinavia, in Götaland, and their king's town was on the west coast near the mouth of the Götaelf. The name Wederas and Weder-Geatas suggested to Grein a connection with the Island Väderöe or Veiröe, and with the group of islands Väderöane. The scenery then is laid on the coast of the North Sea and the Kattegat, the first act of the poem among the Danes in Seeland, the second among the Geats in South Sweden.

It is held then that the earliest lays of the story arose among the Geats and the Danes, and it is chiefly with these tribes, their manners, and their customs, that we are here concerned. But their manners and their customs were the same as those of the Angles. Angle and Geat and Dane spoke the same language, and were all kinsmen and I am not sure whether we might not with propriety call Angle the tribes of South Sweden, or at least the Geats of the poem. At any rate Beowulf became English. The earliest lays of the poem were adopted by the older England on the mainland,' the scenery of the poem was scenery with which the elder English were well acquainted before they came to Britain. However we may hold that the poem was altered and edited, its foundation lays were sung by a people who lived in South Sweden, in Denmark, in the Isles, and about the Elbe. Having thus conjectured the date at which the story began to take shape, and the place in which it arose, we may ask what theory we may form concerning its upbuilding. A multitude of theories have been put forward, differing here and there in minor points from one another. But the main lines are almost the same in the greater number, and I have brought them together here into as compact a form as I

1 There is a theory of Ettmüller's which is interesting. In his view the story arose in the sixth or seventh century among the Geatas, inhabitants of South Scandinavia, who along with the Danes set up a Dano-Gautic kingdom which lasted till 720 or 730 A.D. But there were Danish and Geat settlers from this kingdom in Northumbria in the eighth century, and these brought the Song of Beowulf with them. Then some English poet, a layman, perhaps a pagan, put it into vernacular English. Afterwards, in the eighth or ninth century, this poem was redone by a clerical person in the West Saxon dialect.

Another suggestion may be made. If it should ever come to be clearly established-as some believe that a branch of the same Jutish folk who seized on Kent in 450, had, about the same time, settled on the coast of Scotland, south of the Forth, so that Eadwine when he came there found English already spoken in the country-why then, the mythical lays of Beowa (added afterwards to the Beowulf legend) may have been brought to this part of England and sung in English there as early as the fifth century-and by the very folk, the Jutes, among whom they originally rose. The Angles would then have found them there, heard them sung, and adapted these mythic lays to their Beowulf story.