Now that we have gone through the Beowulf and its we are in a better position to consider certain ele it which belong to literature, and to those myths whi mothers of poetry. The historical and geographical are apart from my subject, nor do they belong to our but the question of the cycles of song which we tra poem, of the myths of Beowulf and Grendel, of Scyl Dragon, belongs to literature and to English literatur

As to the cycles of song, we have in the Beowulf e heroic sagas which are contemporary with the suppos ical life of the hero, that is, with the sixth century dence also in it of still earlier cycles. The first s includes the songs sung concerning the earlier deeds wulf before he became king. I do not mean the Gren which was taken into the legend of Beowulf after t his death, but the lays to which the hero himself allu he is dying. Then it is also plain that there was a 1 concerned the deeds of Hygelac, and especially his the sixth century. If Hrothgar too was an historica age, and we may well believe it, his doings at Heorot, and battles were sung; and the mention of him and h with Ingeld in the poem of Widsith makes this very We also understand from the accounts of the fates of and his sons that there were a number of lays about feuds, and wars among the Swedes, Danes, Geats, Fris others, which have no record except in the pages of but to which allusions are made in later sagas. F heroes like Ecgtheow, Ongentheow, Froda, pass us phantoms, the likeness of a kingly crown upon them seen no more. The whole cycle of these lays is prob temporary with those songs sung among the Goths Jordanes tells-the barbara et antiquissima carmin

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Eginhard in the ninth century says were collected by command of Charles the Great, but which have unfortunately been lost. Beowulf suggests to us the existence of a still earlier cycle. The poets at the court of Hrothgar sing not only of heroes of their own time, but of men and women who have passed away, who have already become legendary. They chant the deeds of Finn and Hnaef and Hildeburh and Hengest, of Heremod and Healfdene, of Hoce; and the mention of these names, outside of Beowulf, in the poems of Widsith and the Fight of Finnsburg confirms the conjecture that there was a whole cycle of lays which preceded Beowulf and dealt with these partly mythical, partly historical personages. Another legendary hero whom we touch in the later part of Beowulf is Offa, and the stories. connected with him have already become lays. A yet older lay is that of Sigemund and Fitela, and we are told in Beowulf that the story was already ancient in the days of Hrothgar. If Sigemund be Siegfried, and Siegfried, as Vigfusson thinks, Arminius, we reach back, but only through the name, to the first century. But we seem to be able to go even farther back to a still earlier cycle, to personages who are not legendary, but mythic. We come on Ing, the first king of the East Danes, the divine root of the Ynglings as well as of the Scyldings, of the Angles as well as of the Danes, and Ing is, some say, the same as Sceaf. We hear of Weland, the semi-divine smith, whose name is mossed with gray antiquity. Most important of all, we have in the legend of Scyld with which the poem opens, and whose tale is the same as Sceaf's - the story of the divine founder of the Teutonic tribes north of the Elbe, the earliest ancestor-god our fathers worshipped. These tales, these allusions belong to a distant cycle of lays, and may have been sung in centuries long anterior to our poem. In this point of view then, that of age, and suggestions of a still greater age, the interest of Beowulf is extraordinarily great. Embedded in it we find lay after lay, like fossil after fossileach of which testifies to a different stratum of song.

The next question has regard to myths and mythical elements. There are commentators who seem to make the whole poem and all the personages in it mythical. This is to go too far in an easy path, and to forget the slow upbuilding, I do not say of the poem as we have it, but of the subject. A common

nature-myth no doubt runs through the whole of it. An historical myth of great antiquity, the myth of Scyld or Sceaf, appears in its introduction. Added to these mythical, there are legendary elements, which have had either a root in some

actual historical event, or have been connected with who actually fought and ruled, and whose deeds through legend, became part of the folklore of the and the half-mythic, half-real animals of the sea in belong, I think, to this folk-tale element. Added c to this, there are historical elements like the battle of with the Frisians. Thus myth, legend, the folk-ta little history are conglomerated in the poem. Thes elements do not exist separately, or at least it is ve that they do so. For the most part they interpen another. This is the case in the lay of the prince who death-song and hid his treasure; who died after all E had perished, and whose treasure the dragon fo guarded. A possible bit of history, a folk-tale, and myth mingle in that lay.

Again, to leave out many others, we come across which belong to commonly extended folk-tales in the Beowulf's youth. It is stated that he was not esteer he was young, and then appeared suddenly, to the su all, as a great warrior. This is also told of the Offa, son of Wermund, and stole afterwards into th Offa of Mercia. Now it is one of the well-known istics of the heroes of the folk-tales. -a characteristi down perhaps from some nature-myth-that their ea are obscure, and their person despised, that they are or have some bodily defect, and that all in a mome their brothers have failed, they suddenly shoot into p intelligence. The very nursery tales, the flotsam an of the folk-tales, are full of the dull boy who rises sun freeing itself from clouds, into the sudden adventurer.

We get nearer to myth in the nickers of the poem, is a mixture of natural fact in the description of them great sea-beasts who attend on Grendel's dam, and g the herds of Proteus, her sea-cave, may be partly my images of the monstrous fury of the waves, of t powers of the wintry sea. We are told that their afterwards mixed up with Hnikarr (who is Wode: relation to the sea), and with the Nix, the water dem various forms. But when we touch them in the poer

1 Hygelac became in after days a legendary person. He is iden Hugleik of the Heimskringla, and with a certain Huglacus Magnu an account it given in a MS. of the tenth century, where he has becom personage, and where the enormous strength of Beowulf seems to added to him.

with regard to them on the borderland between fact and myth, for at times they are scarcely to be distinguished from the tusked seals, and they are hunted by Hrothgar's men in much the same way as the Esquimaux to this day hunt the walrus. When they are also mentioned in the story of Beowulf's swimming match with Breca, they are half-mythical and halfactual sea-beasts, just like the story itself, which is myth, legend, and fact all rolled together.

These are not pure myths, but there are three things in the poem to which we may give that name - the story of Scyld, the contention of Beowulf with Grendel and the dragon, and the representation of Grendel and his dam.

The first of these is the story of Scyld. It is the introduction to the whole poem, and is followed by his burial, of which I have already written. Here is the passage

have in stories heard, in the far-off days; mighty deeds of war.

See now
of the Spear-Danes we
All the fame of our folk-kings
How the doughty nobles did
Oft has Scyld, the son of Scef,
From the multitude of tribes,
Awe-inspiring was that earl,
Found in his forlornness.

from the Scathers' host, taken their mead-benches! since when erst he was Comfort did he find for that! Beowulf, 11. 1-7.

How he was forlorn is explained later on in the account of his burial when his subjects recall how he came as a child to their shores. "They laid him," it is said, " in the ship's bosom, with no less of costly treasures on his breast than those had done, who at his beginning had sent him forth of old, alone, an infant, over the ocean waves." Who those were, none knew. He had come in a boat, drifting to the shores of Scania, and when he is launched by his people into the sea after his death, and the poem says "That none knew who took up that lading," it refers to the mysterious Those who had sent him forth. The next lines mark what the God-given child did for Scedeland

He up-waxed beneath the welkin, in his worthy glories grew,
Till that every one, of the folk abiding round

O'er the pathway of the whale, had to pay him tribute,
Had to give him service. That was a good king.

11. 8-11.

Of him was born Beowulf (that is the Beaw of the AngloSaxon genealogists, not our Beowulf, who was a Geat, not a Dane), "the son of Scyld in Scedeland." Then Scyld died at his appointed time, and was buried.

This is our ancestral myth, the story of the first c of the North, "the patriarch," as Rydberg calls hi royal families of Sweden, Denmark, Angeln, Saxland land. We might say that Sceaf (the Scyld of belongs especially to England, for it is only in En this myth has been preserved. It is told, not only i but by four English chroniclers, who add details no Beowulf Ethelweard, William of Malmesbury, of Durham, and Matthew of Westminster. The m then in the popular voice till the time of Henry II. berg says, with that certainty of a theorist which doubt, that "a close examination shows that these c with the Beowulf poem, have their information from ferent sources, which again have a common origin in myth." They describe the boat drawing near the Sca and a little boy asleep in it, with his head on a shea and around him treasures and tools, swords and coat The boat is richly adorned, and moves without sail or people draw it ashore, take up the boy with glad him their king, and call him Scef or Sceaf, because to them with a sheaf of grain. This Sceaf is the sa Scyld of Beowulf, or, as Scyld in the poem is the son (Earle translates Scyld Scefing, Scyld of the sheaf), of the father is there attributed to the son. Thoug exists only in these English sources, yet the name Sce is elsewhere found in Northern Saga, and according ments which may be traced to a Scef Saga, Denmar the north of Saxland, Götaland, and Svealand were him. "Legend derives from him," says Rydberg, "th of Upsala." Beowulf, as we have seen, brings all family of Denmark from Scyld, the son of Sceaf, w Formanna sögur is called the god of the Scanians. M Westminster says that he ruled in Angeln, and t Saxon Chronicle, in the complete genealogy of Wess back to Sceaf the origin of the West-Saxon kings. H if we may believe Rydberg,' the same as Skelfir, in landic Sagas, who is the progenitor of the Skjoldings Ynglings, and is further identified with Heimdal, the who, under the name of Rig, lived among men for a

1 Rydberg, Teutonic Mythology, pp. 87-95. When we have allowance for a certain fancifulness, and for the bias which a well-l creates, this book is a real contribution to Northern mythology, an of one original ancestor hero of the Danes, the English, the S others, is rendered extremely probable.