Canst thou not, my friend, know at sight this sword, into fighting bore, in his latest hour? where the Dane-folk murdered him! Theirs was then the war-field, when Withergyld lay low, Now of these same slaughterers Prideful of his spoils, here the son of one, paces through the hall, Yelps in triumph of the slaying, bears with him the treasured sword That thyself of right should'st alone possess. Beowulf, 1. 2047. Thus with bitter words he stirs up Ingeld, till the Lady's thegn, for that his father slew Froda, sleeps blood-stained after the biting of the bill, having paid the forfeit of his life; but the slayer escapes, knowing well the land. Then the swordoaths on either side will be broken, both by Danes and by Heathobeardnas. Deadly hate will boil in Ingeld—though he has caused the death of the boasting Dane - and the love he had for Freaware will become cooler through the waves of care. Therefore, ends Beowulf, put no trust in that alliance!1 It is a vivid picture, and, as we read it, a whole troop of similar motives come flying to its side out of the Icelandic tales. The other episodes are the death of Hygelac, the earlier events of Beowulf's life, the earlier wars of the Geats. Of these I have already given an account in the story of Beowulf's life. The manners of our forefathers, as the tale represents them, now remain to be noticed. Of the customs of the men and women from whom we have descended, and of their types of character much has been told in the poem and in the episodes. We have seen them as kings and queens, and there is a certain grave stateliness about their bearing and speech, and about the ceremony with which they are approached. They are respected by, and they respect, their followers. Rank is duly observed, and it is fitting that kings and nobles know the rank, the ancestry and the renown of other kings and nobles in other countries. The tie that 1 There is an allusion to this same story of Ingeld and Freaware and Hrothgar in the Widsith; and Beowulf's prediction (put, after the event, into his mouth to show his wisdom) was fulfilled. Ingeld did go to war with Hrothgar his father-in-law, to avenge his father's death. The warriors of the Heathobeardnas came sailing into the same fiord that Beowulf sailed into when he came to Heorot, landed, stormed over the hill, and attacked Hrothgar in his hall. But the king, though old, was still dreadful. Hrothulf, his nephew, whom we hear of in the poem. was faithful, and they stood bravely to their arms for the homestead. The Heathobeardnas were pushed back to the sea, and Ingel was slain. The lines from Widsith tell us the story. "Hrothwulf and Hrothgar hewed down at Heorot the host of the Heathobeardnas. There they bowed the point of the sword of Ingeld." knits the thegns-the comrades in war and feast king and to each other is kept unbroken, and is t the duties of life. The breaking of it through cov untruth is attended with mortal disgrace, with ou may be, and brings dishonour on the families of the Extreme courtesy is the rule, rudeness such as Hunf exception; and jealousy and drink, combined with a which is itself violent even to slaying of his kin carefully assigned as the causes of this rudeness. H and frank generosity, lavish gifts and their intercl also rigorous duties of life. If they drink hard, we that they also sing well. Poets are always at their f the playing of the harp; and singing and harp-playi only in the hands of professionals, if I may use Every warrior is supposed to be capable of these art the hard-drinking, it has been, if we look into the Saxon poems, much exaggerated. It does not seem drank as hard as the gentlemen of the eighteenth c the British Isles. Frequently we find passages, not in these early poems, but afterwards, where the man drunk is looked on with scorn and reproof. All th different from the traditional image of our English which is still painted of them by some of our ow and by our neighbours over the channel. In Taine of English Literature his sketch of the early Englis ridiculous. One would think that the ancestors of t were less greedy, less drunken, less brutal, less vic those of the English; that they were more dignif loyal, of better manners, and of better laws, than the folk. The contrary was the case; and as to litera forefathers of the French had none which time has c worthy to last. There is, in conclusion, a word to say upon the merit of Beowulf, and on the Christian elements in t The first of these Christian elements is the sense of softer world than that in which the Northern warri I shall draw attention to this change hereafter, but I instance of it. After the description of Heorot a desolate moors the Christian poet writes - "He said, v tell the tale of the creation of men from old,1 that the 1 It seems to me (and perhaps others have without my knowled the same) that this Christian piece may be from Caedmon. It r quotation, "He who could the creation of men from old relate, s the lines which I have translated above might be part of the three had wrought the earth, the glorious-glancing plain that water girts around: and in victorious power set the gleam of sun and moon to give light to dwellers in the land, and adorned the fields of earth with branched and leafy trees." The lines seem to have a softer movement than the other Beowulf verses, and above all, that sought-out pleasure in natural beauty which does not belong to the pagan, but does eminently belong to the Christian poetry of the English before the Conquest. Another Christian passage derives all the demons, eotens, elves, and dreadful sea-beasts from the race of Cain. The folly of sacrificing to the heathen gods is spoken of; but a kind of excuse is made for this, as if the writer were sorry for his forefathers. "They knew not the Lord God." In another passage, with curious forgetfulness of this previous statement, Hrothgar is made to give thanks to God for the death of Grendel, and Beowulf's work is done in the strength of God. "The King of Glory works wonder on wonder; let thanks to him be quickly given. Now hath a hero, through the might of God, done that which all our wisdom could not do. Lo, whatever woman brought forth this son may say that the eternal Creator was gracious to her child-bearing." As to the Wyrd, God has either made it, or He can avert it, or He is identified with it; all these ideas are expressed. Then there is the sermon of Hrothgar to Beowulf after the victory over Grendel. It is couched in the manner of the gnomic verses. God is director of the fates of men, and they are many. A few are sketched, and the fate of the man of mighty race who comes to a prosperous kingdom is chosen. He is happy, till a portion of pride enters into his soul - pride which in all early English poetry is the chief overthrower of the life of man and the passage where the slayer of the soul lodges the bitter arrow, the deadly sin of pride, in the heart of the man is a good example of homiletic English verse, and its metaphor constantly occurs in Anglo-Saxon poetry. The only other point is the belief in immortality, of which the early Teutonic pagans had but a dim vision, for the Valhalla seems to have been a post-Christian conception. The poet uses of the death of Hrethel and others common phrases like those we find in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: "He gave up human joy and chose the light of God" or "he chose the everlasting gain." Wherever these phrases occur, they spoil the ing in the MS. of the Genesis after the 168th line. Those missing pages would contain the account of the creation of the sun and moon, and of the clothing of the earth with grass and trees. The Beowulf lines are 92-97. natural impression of the poem, and we owe some tha poet that he was merciful, and thought too well of hi story to do much of this kind of work. When we think of the whole poem as it appeals to unity, and ask ourselves what poetic standard it re must confess that it is not one of the great poems of t If we think of the date at which it was composed, the have a right to be very proud of it, for it stands alon may have been others as good in the vernacular lang Europe, but time has not chosen to preserve them, which it has preserved has a certain distinction in the the story is unique, and the Grendel myth in it stand It has been called an epic, but it has no continu evolution. It has, rather, two narratives concern remarkable events in a hero's life, each of which considered apart. It is narrative, then, rather than it has an epic quality in this that the purificatio hero the development of his character' to perfection main motive of the tale. When he appears again a years of silence; he has the same moral dignity, the sa and heroic heart in age that he had in youth. But we in a nobler position. He is not now the isolated hero become the father of his people, the image of a great an king. And at the last he dies for the sake of his folk, an an immortal name. He knows, as he goes forth to the that Wyrd will now conquer his body, but she shall quer his soul. The moral triumph is attained, and Beowulf, is really conquered in the contest. This is fication of the hero, and it is the ever-recurring theme a splendid poem. The subject, standing thus at t of English literature, has silently handed down a gre tion of which our poets have not been unworthy. N they been unworthy of the character-drawing which is lent in this poem. The unity of Beowulf's character a broken-up poem some unity of design. There is also a clear outline, a distinctiveness of portraiture in th characters, which foretell that special excellence in poetry an excellence which has made its drama perl most varied in the world. It is another excellence of Beowulf that, when we le the repetitions which the oral condition of the poem and excuses, it gets along. It is rapid, and it is direc dialogue is short, and says forcibly what it has to say says it without much imagination, with scarcely one c touches which mingle earth and heaven, or which go home to the depths of the human heart. But in many places it is imaginative by its direct vision of the thing or the situation which is described, and by the short and clear presentation of it. A certain amount also of imagination collects round the monsters of the moor and sea, but that is rather in the myth itself and in our own imagination of these wastes of nature than in the poetry, though I do not deny it altogether to the verse. Then, again, the poem is lamentably destitute of form. Each of the lays used had no doubt its own natural form, which we should find good if we could isolate them one from another. But the poet did not understand how to shape them afresh or to interweave them well. The Grendel part is much better done than the Dragon part; indeed, there are portions of this last story in the poem which seem to have been broken on the wheel. But when all is said, we feel that we have scarcely a right to estimate the poem in this critical fashion unless we could have heard it delivered. To judge it in our study is like judging an altar-piece far away from the town and the associations for which it was originally painted. If we want to feel whether Beowulf is good poetry or not, let us place ourselves in the hall as evening draws on, when the benches are filled with warriors and seamen, and the chief sits in the high seat, and the fires flame in the midst, and the cup goes round-and then hear the Shaper strike the harp. With gesture, with the beat of his voice and of the hand upon his instrument at each alliterative word of the saga, he sings of the great fight with Grendel or the dragon, of Hrothgar's giving, of the sea-voyage, to men who had themselves fought against desperate odds, to sailors who knew the storms, to the fierce rovers of the deep, to great ealdormen who ruled their freemen, to thegns who followed their kings to battle and would die rather than break the bond of comradeship. Then as we image this, and read the accented verse, sharply falling and rising with the excitement of the thing recorded, we understand how good the work is, how fitted for its time and place, how national, how full of noble pleasure. |