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 thanks to the poet that he was merciful, and thought too well of his original story to do much of this kind of work. When we think of the whole poem as it appeals to us in its unity, and ask ourselves what poetic standard it reaches, we must confess that it is not one of the great poems of the world. If we think of the date at which it was composed, the English have a right to be very proud of it, for it stands alone. There may have been others as good in the vernacular languages of Europe, but time has not chosen to preserve them, and this which it has preserved has a certain distinction in the fact that the story is unique, and the Grendel myth in it stands alone. It has been called an epic, but it has no continuous selfevolution. It has, rather, two narratives concerning two remarkable events in a hero's life, each of which might be considered apart. It is narrative, then, rather than epic, but it has an epic quality in this that the purification of the hero- the development of his character to perfection—is the main motive of the tale. When he appears again after fifty years of silence, he has the same moral dignity, the same equal and heroic heart in age that he had in youth. But we find him in a nobler position. He is not now the isolated hero; he has become the father of his people, the image of a great and worthy king. And at the last he dies for the sake of his folk, and leaves an immortal name. He knows, as he goes forth to the dragon, that Wyrd will now conquer his body, but she shall not conquer his soul. The moral triumph is attained, and fate, not Beowulf, is really conquered in the contest. This is the purification of the hero, and it is the ever-recurring theme of many a splendid poem. The subject, standing thus at the head of English literature, has silently handed down a great tradition of which our poets have not been unworthy. Nor have they been unworthy of the character-drawing which is so excellent in this poem. The unity of Beowulf's character gives to a broken-up poem some unity of design. There is also a force, a clear outline, a distinctiveness of portraiture in the other characters, which foretell that special excellence in English poetry an excellence which has made its drama perhaps the most varied in the world. -- It is another excellence of Beowulf that, when we leave out the repetitions which the oral condition of the poem created and excuses, it gets along. It is rapid, and it is direct. The dialogue is short, and says forcibly what it has to say; but it says it without much imagination, with scarcely one of those 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 judg ing 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. CHAPTER V THE MYTHICAL ELEMENTS IN "BEOWULF" Now that we have gone through the Beowulf and its episodes, we are in a better position to consider certain elements in it which belong to literature, and to those myths which are the mothers of poetry. The historical and geographical questions are apart from my subject, nor do they belong to our England; but the question of the cycles of song which we trace in the poem, of the myths of Beowulf and Grendel, of Scyld and the Dragon, belongs to literature and to English literature. As to the cycles of song, we have in the Beowulf evidence of heroic sagas which are contemporary with the supposed historical life of the hero, that is, with the sixth century; and evidence also in it of still earlier cycles. The first saga-cycle includes the songs sung concerning the earlier deeds of Beowulf before he became king. I do not mean the Grendel story, which was taken into the legend of Beowulf after the lay of his death, but the lays to which the hero himself alludes when he is dying. Then it is also plain that there was a lay which concerned the deeds of Hygelac, and especially his death in the sixth century. If Hrothgar too was an historical personage, and we may well believe it, his doings at Heorot, his feuds and battles were sung; and the mention of him and his quarrel with Ingeld in the poem of Widsith makes this very probable. We also understand from the accounts of the fates of Hrethel and his sons that there were a number of lays about treaties, feuds, and wars among the Swedes, Danes, Geats, Frisians, and others, which have no record except in the pages of Beowulf, but to which allusions are made in later sagas. Far-famed heroes like Ecgtheow, Ongentheow, Froda, pass us by, noble phantoms, the likeness of a kingly crown upon them, and are seen no more. The whole cycle of these lays is probably contemporary with those songs sung among the Goths of which Jordanes tells the barbara et antiquissima carmina which 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 Seyldings, 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 Seyld with which the poem and whose tale is the same as Sceaf's the story of the opens, 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 fossil each 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 |