CHAPTER III BEOWULF The Poem THE poem opens with an account of the forefathers of Hrothgar the Scylding, King of the Danes. He is the builder of Heorot, the hall where Beowulf contends with Grendel. Hrothgar is the second son of Healfdene, who is the son of another Beowulf than the hero of the poem; and this other Beowulf is the son of Scyld, from whom the dynasty of the Scyldings takes its name. In ancient days, so ran the legend, Scyld, when he was but a child, was drifted in an open boat to the shores of the Danes. When coming thus out of the secret of the sea the bark touched the land, the folk found the naked child lying asleep in the midst of arms and gems and golden treasure, and took him up and hailed him king. With as many treasures as he brought, with so many they sent him away when he died. As he came alone and mysteriously out of the sea, so he passes away alone and mysteriously into the sea, and the introduction to the poem describes his burial. It is the burial of a hero who had passed into a divine being, but it is also the burial of a great sea-king, the earliest record by some hundred years for the introduction is probably from an ancient song about Scyld- of many burials of the same kind among the Northern lords; but touched with so poetic a hand that it is first of all accounts in art as it is first in time. When the hour of fate had come, Scyld departed. Then his faithful comrades bore him down to the flowing of the sea, There at haven stood, hung with rings,1 the ship, 1 Hringed-stefna is sometimes translated "with curved prow," but it means, I think, that in the prow were fastened rings through which the cables were passed which tied it to the shore. Thus, into the silence of the sea the hero went alone, lying dead among his treasures, and the wind in his banner of battle. It is a later heathen belief that the souls pass over an unknown water to the realms beyond, and it may be that this belief was one of the reasons why the Northmen sometimes buried their dead in boats, so that when they came to this great sea they might have carriage. Odinn, in after-myth, receives those who are buried like Seyld. When Sigmund bears Sinfiötli to the seashore, he lays him in a skiff which a gray-mantled pilot brings to the beach. This is Odinn, and he sails away with the body. Balder himself, whose myth is later than this of Scyld, is buried in a great ship. The gods place his body on a pyre in the midst of the bark; it is set on fire, and pushed into the sea. Even a living man, in later times, buried himself in the way of Scyld. Flosi, in the Njal saga, weary of life, puts out to sea in a boat that all men call unseaworthy. ""Tis good enough," he said, "for a death-doomed man.' Of him, too, it might be said, "none of men could tell who took up that lading." As the poem begins with this burial, so it ends with the burial of Beowulf. His burial has nothing mythic, nothing mystic surrounding it. It might be that of an historical personage; and the contrast between the shore-burial and the 1 In the Ynglinga Saga, the burial of Haki is nearer to that of Scyld. Sore wounded, he had one of his ships loaded with dead men and weapons, and the sail hoisted. Then he let tarred wood be kindled, and a pyre made on the ship, while the wind blew seaward. Almost dead, he was laid on the pyre and the burning ship sailed out to sea. None of these, however, quite resemble the burial of Scyld, the most romantic, I think, of them all. sea-burial is worth making immediately. Beowulf, dead after his fight with the dragon, and his gray hair lying round his head, is borne to the top of the great cliff that overlooks the sea, to the very edge, where the wanderers on the sea may hereafter mark his lofty barrow. The cliff has its own name. Men saw from its height the whales tumbling in the waves, and called it Whale's Ness (Hrones-naes). There then the folk of the Geats made ready a funeral pyre, firm-fixed on the earth, and they hung it with helms and with shields of the war-host, with shining shirts of battle, as the hero had asked of them In the midst thereof Their beloved lord, the mighty-famous king, mourning, laid the warriors. Then the hugest of the Bale-fires 'gan the heroes waken High upon the hill, and the reek of wood arose Swart above the swimming fire,1 while the hissing sound of flame Was with weeping woven Hot upon his heart for the wail of wind was stillhouse of bone in twain, Heaven devoured the smoke. Beowulf, 1. 3143. This was the burning; after the burning the barrow is raised; and it shall be told at the end how the people of the Weders built up on the point of the Ness a mound, high and broad, to be seen from far by the sailors whom Beowulf loved. There is yet another burial told of in the poem. The bard at Hrothgar's table sings of the death of Hnaef, kinsman of Hildeburh (perhaps her brother), and of the burning of Hildeburh's son on the same pyre as Hnaef. "The bloodstained battle-sark, the golden helm, the boar crest, iron-hard, were piled on the wood; and, with the two chieftains, many another Ætheling who had fallen, writhing on the field of slaughter." Then beside the pyre of Hnaef Hildeburh bade Lay her well-beloved son all along the blazing flame, Wretched was the woman, on the bale to place him. 1 Swio dole is here, I think, the quivering clear space of vaporous flame between the burning body and the dark-rolling smoke above it; at least this is the way I here understand swadul or sweodol, which is taken to mean "vaporous flame," sometimes "smoky flame," but the word is obscure. 2 The other reading is Guðrine, which would mean "the hero of battle passed upwards in the flame." and the blaze devoured all, Beowulf, 1. 1114. From the foe's bite on the body; Greediest it of ghosts. This is an inland burial, but the other two are by the sea; and the sea-note struck thus at the beginning and close of the poem is heard constantly sounding through its verse. The men are sea-folk. Beowulf in his youth is a sea-rover, a fighter with sea-monsters, a mighty swimmer of the sea. All the action is laid on the sea-coast. The inland country, not the sea, is the unknown, the terrible. Grendel and his dam are more sea-demons than demons of the moor. Their cave is underneath the sea. Nor in the last part of the poem are we without the all-prevailing presence of the ocean. The dragon lives in a cavern on the edge of the sea. The king and the dragon fight in the hearing of the waves. Beowulf's barrow, heaped high on the edge of the sea-ness, is a beacon for "those who sail through the mists of the sea." The background of all the action is the great deep-the chorus, as it were, of this story of the fates of men. Thus the ocean life, the ocean mystery, the battle with the ocean and on the ocean begin the English poetry, and they are as vivid in it now as they were in the youth of our people. The Battle of the Baltic, the Fight of the Revenge, the Sailor Boy, Hervè Riel, Swinburne's sea-songs, a hundred ballads, taste of the same brine and foam which the winds drove in the faces of the men who wrote Beowulf, the Seafarer, and the Riddles which concern the sea. Nay, more, the very temper of mind which pervades modern poetry of the sea-a mingling of melancholy and exaltation-is to be found in English poetry before the Conquest, and strange to say it is not found again, except in scattered ballads, till we reach our own century. The action of the poem now begins with the voyage of Beowulf to the Danish coast. The hero has heard that Hrothgar, the chief of the Danes, is tormented by Grendel, a man-devouring monster. If Hrothgar's warriors sleep in Heorot-the great hall he has built they are seized, torn to pieces, and devoured. "I will deliver the king," thought Beowulf, when he heard the tale from roving seamen. "Over the swan-road I will seek Hrothgar; he has need of men." His comrades urged him to the adventure, and fifteen of them were willing to fight it out with him. Among the rest was a sea-crafty man who knew the ocean-paths. Their ship lay drawn up on the beach, under the high cliff. Stepped upon the stem, Then There the well-geared heroes while the stream of ocean Whirled the sea against the sand. To the ship, to its breast, On desired adventure, their tight ocean-wood. with a wind well-fitted, foam around its neck, Till about the same time, on the second day, Broad sea-nesses. So the Sailer of the Sea 1 Reached the sea-way's end. Beowulf, 1. 211. This was the voyage, ending in a fiord with two high seacapes at its entrance. The same kind of scenery belongs to the land whence they set out. When Beowulf returns over the sea the boat groans as it is pushed forth. It is heavily laden; the hollow, under the single mast with the single sail, holds eight horses, swords and treasure and rich armours. The sail is hoisted, the wind drives the foam-throated bark over the waves, until they see the Geats' cliffs - the well-known seanesses. The keel is pressed up by the wind on the sand, and the "harbour-guard, who had looked forth afar o'er the sea with longing for their return one of the many human touches of the poem "fastens the wide-bosomed ship with anchoring chains to the strand, lest the violence of the waves should sweep away the winsome boat." I have brought the two voyages together that we may see the customs of embarking and disembarking twice over, and realise the kind of sea and coast the shipmen of the poem sailed by-brief stretches of sea, between short bays protected on either side by capes rising from the mainland till they became cliffs above the open sea. At the end of the bay into which Beowulf sails is a low shore, on which he drives his ship, stem on. Planks are pushed out on either side of the prow; the Weder folk slipped down on the shore, tied up their sea-wood; their battle-sarks clanged on them as they moved. Then they thanked the gods that the wave-paths had been easy to them. The scene which follows is almost Homeric in its directness and simplicity, and in the clearness with which it is presented. On the ridge of the hill above the landing-place the ward of the coast of the Scyldings sat on his horse, and saw the strangers bear their bright shields over the bulwarks of the ship to the 1 I have taken sund-lida for the ship'; but sund liden, which is Wülker's reading, makes the line "then was the Sea sailed over, at the end of the sea-way." |