This is the last word of the first act of English literature which we have followed for so long. The curtain falls on the scenes the action of which moved with Theodore and Ealdhelm in Canterbury and Wessex; on those which in a wilder land brought before our eyes the cliffs of Whitby, the island rock of Lindisfarne, the Wear where it opens towards the sea, the lonely moors of the border, the peopled vales of Yorkshire, the school beside the Minster. All has passed away, and with the scenery the great figures that went to and fro through it Eadwine and Oswald, Caedmon and Hild, Benedict and Baeda, Ecgberht, Æthelberht, and Alcuin, Cynewulf and his fellows; and behind them, in the mists of the distant ground, and in another England, the giant shapes of Beowulf and Hygelac, of Grendel and his dam, of Finn and Scyld. The first Act is played out; when the curtain rises again, it will rise on a different scene, and in a different land. Wessex will take the place of Northumbria. We shall then look on the royal figure of Elfred, his sword laid down for a time, his pen in his hand, sitting in his king's houses or in his town of Winchester, and grouped around him the scholars of a new time; and the fashion of their speech will have changed. As the characters of the first Act of English Literature spoke in poetry, so those of the second will speak in prose.

which many of the poor scholars, bearing manuscripts from York, took refuge, before they made their way to Ælfred. It was in western Mercia that Ælfred sought for help when he began his literary work. But the story of this belongs properly to the next volume of this book.

NOTES

A.-(CHAPTER I)

WIDSITH

THE introduction may have been written on the continent by a poet of the Angles, for "the poet clearly refers to the old country under the title of Ongle." The country of Eormanric was, he says, "east from Ongle." This is the view of Dr. Guest, and he thinks that this part of the poem belongs to the time after the Ostrogoths had left the Vistula, probably between the years 480 and 547, the date of Ida's occupation of Bamborough. This would put the original poem, which begins at line 10, back into an earlier part of the fifth century, between the years, as Guest conjectures, 433 and 440. If we take, with him, the poem as genuine, the poet was contemporary in his youth with Eormanric, and must have sung in his court before the year 375, when this King of the Goten died. But the poet also mentions Ætla (Attila) as king. But Attila was not king till 433. The poem then, to include these two dates, must have been written in Widsith's old age, and after 433. Moreover, Guest continus, "the Goths appear in the poem as the enemies, still independent, of Attila"; and he makes a criticism which, coming from so careful an historian, must not be omitted. "Eormanric and his generals are spoken of in the poem in a sober manner. We see none of the fable which afterwards enveloped their names; they are still the mere creatures of history."

But all this is subject to other explanations, and we can come to no certainty about it. The most that critics can dare to suggest is, first: "That the theory which maintains the genuineness of the poem is the theory which is beset with the fewest difficulties" (Guest); and secondly, that the kernel of the poem, from verse 10 to verse 75, and from verse 87 to the close (verses 131-134 being excepted) is very old, the oldest English poetry we possess.1 Originally written by a Myrging, it was adopted by the Angles, to whom the Myrgings, if we may conjecture this from a passage in the poem, were tributary in the days of Offa of Ongle.

The poet represents himself as contemporary with Hermanric, Attila, the Visigoth Wallia, the Burgundian Gibica, and these kings range from the year 375 to 435. He also speaks of Offa of Ongle, Ongentheow, Hrothgar, Finn and Hnaef as known of by him, and as historical rather than legendary personages.

1 This great age is agreed to by Leo, Müllenhof, Ten Brink, Möller, and Wülker, to speak of the Germans alone.

But this theory of the genuineness of the poem is not so easily settled. In the midst of the list, other kings are mentioned whose reigns extend beyond 440, and whose names, if we accept the visit to Eormanric as genuine, must have been afterwards interpolated. This is certainly the case if we are to take Ælfwine, whom Widsith says he met, as identical with Alboin, who was not king in Italy till the year 568. Guest avoids this difficulty by making the Elfwine of the poem one of the chiefs who followed Alaric in his inroad, 401 A.D.

The editors of the Corpus Poeticum Boreale assume at once, without expressing a shade of doubt on the matter, that the Traveller's Song was written after the death of Alboin, 572 A.D. They quote a passage concerning Elfwine's (Alboin's) fame from Paul the Deacon, and say, "This passage is strikingly confirmed by the fame of Elfwine having reached even the English author of the Traveller's Song." This opinion makes the poem to be written in our England, and probably not earlier than the seventh century, a view which is not without its critical supporters. Maurer, referring to the mention of the Cæsar in it, places it still later, after the time of Charles the Great, and suggests that the name Vikingas which occurs in the list of tribes, points to a time when the English had made acquaintance with the northern rovers.

On the other hand, it has been held, and by a number of commentators, that the insertion of names later than the fifth century is due to the work of an interpolator, who probably lived in England in the seventh century, and that the total absence of any mention of our England as England goes far to prove-independent altogether of the directness and simplicity of the personal portion — that the body of the poem was composed upon the continent. The English editor of the seventh century would then have used the ancient poem as a frame into which he inserted what men had come to know (a hundred years let us say after the death of Alboin), of other countries and their rulers, introducing also, from his own knowledge, the passage concerning the Picts and Scots and the Armoricans. We should then have a poem, the body of which was composed by a man who in his youth may have been a contemporary of Eormanric in the fourth century, but who did not write his verses till the fifth century, 435-440, and which, brought to Britain by the Angles, was taken up, added to, and produced in its present form in the seventh or eighth century.

The

A word remains to be said about some names interesting to us. poet stays his hand in the middle of his list to speak at some length of Offa who ruled Ongle, as if Offa's history were specially bound up with his own tribe. "Offa," he says, "set up, while yet a youth, the greatest of kingdoms. With his sword alone he widened his marches against the Myrgings, by Fifeldor. And as Offa fixed it, so Engle and Swaefe held their place." We only know Offa as a legendary hero, whose story gets mixed up afterwards with that of Offa of Mercia. But this sober mention of him has the air of history rather than of legend, and the fight at Fifeldor, which in after saga is clothed with imaginative details, is here wholly free from them. We seem to touch a piece of reality concerning a king who was in ancient days, one of ourselves, a great Englishman who fought the battles of the Angles in the lands about the Elbe. Whether this is really so will, I suppose, be discussed till every possible theory is exhausted. The reference to the Engle and Swaefe as neighbouring nations is also to the point. "It is clear from this," says Guest, "that the

latter had not as yet left the shores of the Baltic. This is one of the many circumstances which prove the great antiquity of the poem."

Another passage of interest is that in which the writer also interrupts his mere catalogue of names to tell a piece of history or of what seems history. It contains names well known to us from the poem of Beowulf. He speaks of Hrothgar, and of his famous Hall, Heorot, and he speaks of both without any allusion whatever to the legend of Beowulf and Grendel. It seems as if this poem had been written before the legend of Beowulf had been connected with Hrothgar and Heorot. So also he speaks of Finn and Hnaef, who occur in one of the episodes of Beowulf and in the fragment we have in English of the Fight at Finnsburg.

Still more curious is another coincidence which I have already noticed. In one of the episodes introduced into Beowulf there is an account of a feud which arose between Hrothgar and Froda, and of the way the feud was healed by the marriage of Hrothgar's daughter Freaware to Ingeld, the son of Froda. But the slayer of Froda comes as attendant on Freaware to the hall of Ingeld, and Ingeld slays his father's murderer. In the trouble that follows, his love for his wife grows cold. There the episode ends, but the hero Beowulf, who tells the story, prophesies that evil will flow from it, that war will arise between Hrothgar and Ingeld. We hear nothing of the result in the poem of Beowulf. But the result is given us in the Traveller's Song. Widsith tells us that Heorot was attacked by Ingeld, and that he was beaten back and slain. 19 They (Hrothgar, and Hrothulf his brother) "bowed down at Heorot the sword of Ingeld, hewed down at Heorot the host of the Heathobeards."

66

This is what Paley would have called an undesigned coincidence, and it seems to bring Hrothgar and Heorot and Ingeld, that is, some of the names in Beowulf, into the realm of history.

B.-(CHAPTER I)

THE LAMENT OF DEOR

Weyland, Egil, and Slagfin entrap three swan maidens who came flying through the mirkwood. Of these Lathgund clasped the white neck of Weyland. But when nine winters had gone she left him, and he stayed in Wolfdale hammering the red gold, for he was the first of smiths. Then Nidad, King of the Niars, came on him by stealth and bound him and bore him to the palace, and the queen, seeing him and his eyes like the flashing snake, was afraid, and said, "Sever the might of his sinews and set him down at Seastead;" and there Weyland, lame as the Greek smith, wrought many treasures, and thought of vengeance. And the sons of Nidad, young boys, came to Wolfmere in Seastead to see the red gold and jewels, and Weyland seized them and made cups for Nidad out of their skulls, and out of their eyeballs gems for the queen, and out of their teeth brooches for Bodwild (Beadohild). And Bodwild broke her ring and came to Weyland to get it mended, and he gave her a drink and took his will of her. And when he had so wrought his wrath he made himself wings and flew over the palace and mocked Nidad, and crying out all that he had done, rose laughing into the air, but Nidad and Bodwild sat behind with many sorrows.