I

arm as Grendel dies of the same loss. The tearing, rending and battering down of the house belongs to the idea of Grendel. When Grettir comes to the edge of the waterfall and plunges into the boiling wave and dives under the waterfall to reach the cave while the priest sits waiting above, we recall Beowulf coming to the edge of the Ness and diving into the welter of water and up into the cave, while the thegns sit waiting on the rocks above. When Grettir slays the giant and the waves of the force are stained with blood and the priest, believing Grettir dead, goes home, we remember the blood-stained sea and that the thegns of Hrothgar returned, thinking that Beowulf was dead. There is even a parallel in one of the words used. The giant fights with a glaive which cuts and thrusts, and the saga says that men called that weapon "heft-sax." Hrunting, the sword Hunferth lends to Beowulf, is called haeftmece, and the term occurs only this once in the whole of Anglo-Saxon literature. The question then arises, Did it slip from Beowulf into the Grettis Saga?

Here are the parts of the story necessary to quote. They are, as before, taken from Morris and Magnusson's translation.

Steinvor, the good wife of Sandheaps, has lost her good man and her house carle by a haunting. Blood was left in the house, about the outer door. Grettir heard the tale and says that he will abide the night in the house, and he lay down but did not take off his clothes. "When it drew towards midnight he heard great din without, and thereafter came into the hall a huge Troll-wife, with a trough in one hand and a chopper wondrous great in the other; she peered about when she came in and saw where Guest (this was Grettir's assumed name) lay, and ran at him, but he sprang up to meet her, and they fell a-wrestling terribly and struggled together for long in the hall. She was the stronger, but he gave back with craft, and all that was before them was broken, yea, the crosspanelling withal of the chamber. She dragged him through the door, and so into the outer doorway, and then he betook himself to struggling hard against her. She was fain to drag him from the house, but might not till they had broken away all the fittings of the outer door, and borne them out on their shoulders then she laboured away with him down to the river, right down to the deep gulf.

"By then was Guest exceeding weary, yet must he either gather his might together or be cast by her into the gulf. All night did they contend in such wise. . . . But now when they

came to the gulf of the river, he gives the hag a swing round and therewith got his right hand free, and swiftly seized the short-sword that he was girt withal, and smote the Troll therewith on the shoulder and struck off her arm, and therewithal was he free, but she fell into the gulf and was carried down the force."

So ends the first fight, but, as in Beowulf, there is another underneath the waterfall. Grettir is sure that there is more to be known of these monsters, and he passes to the cliff, fifty feet above the whirlpool, and girt with the short-sword leaped off the cliff into the force.

"And Grettir dived under the force, and hard work it was because the whirlpool was strong, and he had to dive down to the bottom before he might come up under the force. But thereby was a rock jutting out, and thereon he gat; a great cave was under the force, and the river fell over it from the sheer rocks. He went up into the cave, and there was a great fire flaming from amidst of brands; and there he saw a giant sitting withal, marvellously great and dreadful to look on. But when Grettir came anigh, the giant leapt up and caught up a glaive and smote at the newcomer, for with that glaive might a man both cut and thrust; a wooden shaft it had, and that fashion of weapon men called then, heft-sax.

"Grettir hewed back against him with the short-sword, and smote the shaft so that he struck it asunder; then was the giant fain to stretch aback for a sword that hung up there in the cave; but therewithal Grettir smote him afore into the breast, and smote off wellnigh all the breast-bone and the belly, so that the bowels tumbled out of him and fell into the river, and were driven down along the stream; and as the priest sat by the rope, he saw certain fibres all covered with blood swept down the swirls of the stream; then he grew unsteady in his place and thought for sure that Grettir was dead, so he ran from the holding of the rope and gat him home. Thither he came in the evening and said, as one who knew it well, that Grettir was dead, and that great scathe was it of such a man.

"Now, of Grettir must it be told that he let little space go betwixt his blows or ever the giant was dead. Then he went up the cave, and kindled a light and espied the cave. The story tells not how much he got therein, but men deem that it must have been something great. But there he abode on into the night; and he found there the bones of two men, and bore them together in a bag; then he made off from the cave and swam to the rope and shook it, and thought that the priest

would be there yet; but when he knew that the priest had gone home, then must he draw himself up by strength of hand, and thus he came up out on to the cliff."

The parallel is very close, and three suggestions may be made concerning it. Either the Beowulf Saga was known over Sweden and Norway, and its lays came from Norway or the Western Isles to Iceland with the first settlers; or some of the roving Icelanders had heard of the tale in England, and brought it back to Iceland in a broken fashion; or there was a tale older than Beowulf itself - a combination of a naturemyth and a folk-tale which was common property of the Northmen, and out of which the Grendel story in Beowulf, and the Glam and Troll story both grew independently of each other.

One more parallel suggested in the Corpus Poeticum Boreale (vol. ii. p. 503) remains to be noticed. "In the English poem of Eger and Grime in the Percy MS., there is the echo of the Beowulf story in the hand of Grey Steele, the monster knight of the moor; and that noble brand Egeking mentioned there, which King Fundus got from 'full far beyond the Greekes sea,' may be the last traditional descendant of the hefti-sax," Beowulf's haeft-mece. I do not see much in the sword-part of this parallel. The haeft-mece in Beowulf is not Beowulf's sword but Hunferth's, and though it is famous, it would scarcely become traditional, as it fails in the encounter with Grendel. The only really mythic sword in Beowulf is the ancient sword of the cave itself, and of that nothing is really left but the hilt. There are swords enough to get Egeking from without tracing it to a failure.

CHAPTER VI

WALDHERE

It is a curious question how it came to pass that the story of Beowulf and Grendel did not, like the other sagas of the North, become a part of the Norse-German cycle of romance. The story stops dead; we hear no more of it. The Goths or Jutes who dwelt in the north of Denmark and Southern Sweden possessed it. The Danes of the islands possessed it. It passed downwards to dwell among the Angles, and the story may have reached the sea-board Saxons who came to England. But it gets no farther. Why did it not pass into the hands of the old Saxons? Why did it not become a part of Northern German legend? It does not do so; there is no trace of it. There is no evidence for the conjecture that it was one of the ancient songs to which the Franks listened.

I have sometimes thought that the Angles alone threw the myths and tales of it into lays, and that when the whole body of them emigrated to our island, they left the Continent naked of the tale. It would not have had time then to become a part of German saga. If the Danes had put it into verse, I do not understand why it was not carried into Northern Germany. I conjecture then that something broke the literary connection on the Continent, or that the story was developed only when the Angles got into Britain.

Again, if the Jutes or Saxons had it, why are there only vague traces of it in place names in our Southern England? I conjecture again that the stories were not shaped into verse by the Jutes. Or it may be, since they were a small party of warriors and had so desperate a bit of fighting to do, that they would think, if they had the songs, more of slaughter and of

1 Unless, as I have before suggested, there were Jutish or Frisian settlers on the sea-board, south of the Forth, among whom the Angles, on their arrival, found the lays of Beowulf existing. Such a discovery, if we may with any probability imagine it would be likely to awaken in the Angles a fresh interest in their own form of the Beowulf lays, and to increase the vogue of the lays.

plunder than of preserving poetry. But the Angles went en masse, with all their women and all their bards, and they would take their literature with them. It was they, I hold, who in our England worked on the lays before the Christian poet wove them together.

Again, if the lays existed in Southern Sweden and in the north of Denmark, what became of them there? It seems as if there also they died out, or existed, not in verse, but only as a folk-tale. It was perhaps in that form that they got into Norway and thence to Iceland, if we may explain in this way the similarities between the Beowulf story and the tales of Glam and the Troll-wife in the legend of Grettir. But the more likely conjecture is that these similarities arose from Icelandic rovers bringing back the story from England or the Isles. Had the story really been established, even as a folk-tale, I think we should have had some further trace of it in the Norse tales.

I am inclined then to come to the conclusion that the Angles alone retained the Beowulf lays, or alone made them into a poem. If this have any truth in it, it isolates the poem with us. But if we may be proud of this, we may be humbled by another consideration. The Norse and Teutonic sagas were developed on the Continent and in Iceland into full romances, carefully worked and treated with art. There was enough of poetic power to do this work. But after the seventh or eighth century the story of Beowulf underwent no further development, and what we have of it is rudely wrought. Yet we must not blame the Northern Englishmen too much for this. There was not time to work further at the tale. The Danes destroyed the Northumbrian poetry, and when literature was revived in Wessex by Elfred, southern Englishmen seem to have had little care for poetry of this kind, and little power of imaginative invention. Beowulf stands alone then, when it is looked at along with the carefully wrought tales of Sigurd or Theodric, like some crag of Plutonic rock, rugged and weather-worn, which rises among the later strata of a gentler age; the sole remnant of an ancient cycle of stories which have entirely perished.

When that ancient cycle was dying a new cycle had begun, and its tales grew by accretion for centuries in Germany and among the Norse folk, and have continued working in literature to the present day. It was not till quite lately that we had some proof that any of them had an influence on English literature or touched at all our country. Now, however, since