CHAPTER VI

WALDHERE

The

Ir 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. 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 Alfred, 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

1860, we know that one at least of this new cycle of tales one which belonged to the Theodric cycle and was embodied in the Vilkina sagawas domesticated in England; and if one of them, and one of the least important, is found in a Southern English dialect, it is of the highest probability that others. were also written down from the songs of wandering bards. But, if they existed, they have all perished. No land was ever more ravaged by successive wars than the land of ancient English literature. Scarcely a shred of romantic manuscript survives; so thorough in destruction were pagan Dane and Christian monk, were the years of ignorance, of long neglect, of the tyranny of Latin, of the harrying of the monasteries by war and by reform, of modern fires and modern damps.

Pro

The discovery of almost every important extant AngloSaxon poem has been of special interest. And the discovery of the parchment leaves which tell us that the English had examples before them of the Norse-German cycle after the age of Beowulf does not want the element of sensation. fessor Werlauff, looking through a great mass of loose papers in the National Library at Copenhagen, turned up two vellum pages of a great age which had been used for the binding of a book, and saw that they were covered with Old English lines of verse, sixty-two lines in all. How they came to Denmark no one could tell, but it was conjectured that when Thorkelin searched England for Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and found Beowulf, he picked up also these two pieces of parchment and brought them with him to Copenhagen. Werlauff handed them on to Stephens to edit, and the literary exultation of this scholar at the discovery makes his little book upon them pleasant reading.

He found that the two sheets were not continuous but different portions of the poem, and conjectured that the whole of the story had been in manuscript. We had proof, he held, that a poem belonging to the Teutonic cycle and perhaps as long as Beowulf, existed in English, and Stephens thought that the handwriting was as old as the ninth century and the poem as old as the eighth. As the fragment refers to the Weland and the Theodric Sagas, it makes it probable that both these Sagas were known in England - a probability which is confirmed by the Deor poem. Those who have written on the fragment in Germany, and chiefly Müllenhof, agree on the whole with these dates. Each sheet contains thirty-one lines from the story of Waldhere. The first is Hildeguthe's speech to Waldhere, urging him to the fight with Guthhere. The

second is the interchange of words between Waldhere and Guthhere. There is not, therefore, a long interval between the two fragments we possess.

The personages mentioned in these two leaves are Ætla, Guthhere, Waldhere, Hildeguthe, and Hagena, and they told Stephens that he was in possession of an early version of the romance of Walther of Aquitaine. There are three forms, Müllenhof says, in which this saga of Walther has come down to us-a German form, a probably Frankish form, and a Polish form. The oldest of these is the German. The German form is not in existence, but we have a translation of it into Latin hexameters written in the tenth century by Ekkehard of St. Gall. Our fragments are probably an English translation from the original German version. The story, as Ekkehard tells it, is perhaps worth a sketch —

Attila has invaded the Franks under Gibica's rule, and taken from them tribute, treasure, and a noble youth, Hagen, as a hostage. Marching on, he attacks the Burgundians and takes Hildegund, daughter of Hereric their king, as hostage. Lastly, he descends on the Aquitanians, and their king Ælfhere gives him his son Walther as hostage, and Walther is already affianced to Hildegund. These three then are

brought up together and become personages in the court of Attila. Hildegund has the care of all the treasures, Walther is the leader of the Hunnish host, and Hagen, his nearest friend, is his war-comrade. At a certain time Hagen flees to the Franks to join his new liege, Gunther, and afterwards Walther and Hildegund also escape. They carry off treasure from the Huns whom Walther has made drunk; and both, mounted on Walther's war-horse, Lion, ride away till, on the fourteenth day, they reach the Rhine, not far from Worms. The ferryman tells the tale of the great horse, the warrior, the maiden, and the treasure chests, in the hall of Gunther, King of the Franks. Hagen breaks forth into joy: "This is my comrade Walther from the Huns." Gunther cries out also for joy: "This is the treasure of Gibica, I will have it"; and with Hagen and eleven warriors he pursues after Walther who has reached the forest of the Vosges. But Hagen is sorrowful, not wishing to fight with his friend, and he warns Gunther that if he had ever seen Walther in the wrath of battle, he would not think him so easy to despoil.

Now night has come, and in a pleasant cave, between two

1 I use the better known form of the names in this account.

hills, and soft with green grass, Walther is slumbering, his head on his lady's lap, while she keeps watch; for Walther has known no sleep for fourteen days save when he leant upon his shield. In the dawn Hildegund sees a dust-cloud and wakens Walther. "Slay me," she cries, "lest I should belong to the Huns and not to thee!" But Walther knows the helm of Hagen, and laughing says: "These are not Huns, but Niblung Franks" (Franci nebulones); and vows that the Franks shall not have a grain of the treasure. They parley, but in vain, and Hagen withdraws from the battle and sits down to look on from a neighbouring hill. Then the fight begins, and Walther, swording in a narrow place where only one can meet him, slays the eleven warriors, so that Gunther is left alone. Walther, watching from his vantage ground, sees Gunther fly to Hagen, and, after talk, these two kiss one another, and Walther fears that the kiss bodes no good. Nor, indeed, does it, for they have agreed to draw Walther from his hold and ambush him upon the way.

It is now again night, and Walther, having wept and prayed over the warriors he has slain, sleeps in a cave, and in the morning, taking horses and treasure, goes on his way. But when a mile was now measured, they hear the beating of horse hoofs, and see Gunther and Hagen riding down upon them. "Flee, flee!" cries Hildegund. "No," he answers; "if honour fail, shame waits on my last hour." Then he appeals to Hagen, for old friendship and love, as Cuchulainn appealed to Ferdia, not to fight with him; but Hagen has lost his nephew-"my tender, soft, bright flower" in the battle, and he will have requital for his blood. So two meet with one, and Walther smites off Gunther's leg, and Hagen Walther's right hand, for Walther's sword has flown to pieces, so dire was the blow he gave to Hagen's helm. But a right hand lost is nothing to the great warrior, and driving the stump of his arm into the shield, he fights on with his half-sword in his left hand. And now enraged he strikes Hagen so fierce a stroke that his right eye is forced out and all his face laid open to the jaw. is enough, and they sit down in full friendship again, renewing their bond of blood; joke over their wounds, and part-Hagen with Gunther for Worms; Walther and Hildegund and all the treasure for Aquitaine, where, after a glorious marriage and his father's death, he reigns triumphantly for thirty years.

This

This is the outline of a story which is told with a great deal of vigour, and with some feeling for natural scenery, that kind of soft woodland in which the romance writers delighted. It