pain he died. And Haethcyn his brother's slayer became king, and strife broke out between him and the Sweons over the wide water. For Haethcyn had borne away the young wife of Ongentheow, the Sweon king, in vengeance of the raiding Ohthere and Onela, Ongentheow's sons, had done on his land at Hreosnabeorh. Then Ongentheow, old and terrible, pursued and hewed down the sea-chief Haethcyn, and took again his wife. He drove his foes before him into Raven's-wood, and they were weary of wounds, bereft of their king. All the night long he laid siege against them, taunting them that in the morning he would slay them with the sword or hang them on the gallows for sport to the fowls of the air. But in the dawn they heard Hygelac's horn and trumpets sounding, and took comfort. Brother came to avenge brother, Hygelac to avenge Haetheyn, following the bloody tracks of yesterday's battle. And Ongentheow sought the heights, fearful of the seamen, warding his wife and sons, and refuged in the earth fort. But victory was to Hygelac; Ongentheow's gray hairs did not save him from death. Wulf, son of Wonred, met the Sweon king, and smote so hard that the blood spurted in streams under his hair. Fiercely the old hero struck back, and Wulf fell, his helmet cleft, on the earth, but was not yet fated, and stood up, though his wound pained him. Then Eofor, Wulf's brother, rushed in on Ongentheow, and let his broadsword - an old sword of the giants-break over the shield-rim on the helmet of Ongentheow, and the king bowed down, struck to his life. And Eofor took from him his byrnie of iron, his hard-hilted sword and his helm, and carried them to Hygelac. So Hygelac became king, and gave gifts to Wulf; and to Eofor he gave his only daughter. That is the feud and that the enmity between the Sweons and the Geats.1 In some of these wars Beowulf took part. "He had avenged," he says, "the sorrows of the Weders." But he had also roamed the seas and undertaken many adventures, and by the time he went to Hrothgar, when the poem opens, he had seen many of the fates of men. We are told that his strength was spoken of "from hall to hall by the sea-farers," and his fame widespread, through distant ways. Though he was still 1 Nor then did it end, for the grandsons of Ongentheow-Eanmund and Eadgils-came into the land of the Geatas, and Eanmund slew Heardred, Hygelac's son, at a feast. Weohstan the Waegmunding, Wiglaf's father, then took up the feud and slaughtered Eanmund. Long afterwards Eadgils, invading again the Geatas, is slain by Beowulf. Three generations the quarrel lasted, and when Beowulf dies, one of his warriors declares that the deadly hate will break out again. The young then, he had known life, and it seemed to him grim; needing fortitude rather than joy. To deepen this, came the Teutonic doctrine of the fate-goddess Wyrd, whose hand arranged the destinies of men, and had settled their death-day. The name of the goddess passed to the thing she ordained, and in the later interpolations of the poem the word is used in this sense, as well as in the sense of a personal Being. We hear of Wyrd herself, and we hear of the Weirds of men. doctrine naturally acted differently on different types of men, and the poet makes it act with distinction on Beowulf himself. It settles his courage with firmness in the midst of desperate adventure. "Wyrd' goes ever as it must," he says, when he thinks he may be torn by Grendel to pieces. "It shall be," he cries, when he goes to fight the dragon, "for us in the fight as Wyrd shall foresee." Yet his position is not that of pure Fatalism. The goddess may save a man if only his courage keeps his might at full strength in the battle. "Wyrd often preserves a hero from death if his power is at its best. Nor yet was I fated," he says to Hygelac when he describes his fight with Grendel's mother. While this sense of a fixed fate made him resolute to put into battle all his strength, it also established in him, combined as it was with his gentleness and tenderness, that grave melancholy of life so characteristic of the Northmen. However men fought and endured, Wyrd had doomed them. This appears all through the poem, and Beowulf's last words are, "Wyrd carried away all my kinsmen at the fated time." It was, then, not only the mighty aspect of the man, with his thirty-fold strength, but it was also the grave conception he had of life written on his face, which made the warden of the coast, and Wulfgar, when they beheld him, say, "Never saw I greater earl, nor one of a more matchless air." With this went also the passion for new life, for movement, which Tennyson has drawn in Ulysses, but which is far more English than Greek; the inability to remain at ease, the longing "to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield," which has always been the mark of English seamen. Hygelac was now at peace; all the wars were over; and Beowulf could not stay feasting in the hall. Some wandering sailors told him of the trouble of Hrothgar from Grendel. I will go on adventure, he thought, as Drake would think years afterwards, and deliver the Danish king. His thegns "whetted him" to the deed; the sea-chief sailed away, and the poem begins. We approach it with a reverence which it deserves for its great age, and with a delight which is born of its association with the history of our people and our poetry. It is a moment of romantic pleasure when we stand beside the long undiscovered sources of an historic river, beside whose waters a hundred famous cities have arisen. It is a moment of the same romantic pleasure when we first look at the earliest upwelling of the broad river of English poetry, and think of the hundred cities of the imagination that have been built beside its stream. CHAPTER III BEOWULF The Poem THE poem opens with an account of the forefathers of Hrothgar the Scylding, King of the Danes. He is the builder of Heorot, the hall where Beowulf contends with Grendel. Hrothgar is the second son of Healfdene, who is the son of another Beowulf than the hero of the poem; and this other Beowulf is the son of Scyld, from whom the dynasty of the Scyldings takes its name. In ancient days, so ran the legend, Scyld, when he was but a child, was drifted in an open boat to the shores of the Danes. When coming thus out of the secret of the sea the bark touched the land, the folk found the naked child lying asleep in the midst of arms and gems and golden treasure, and took him up and hailed him king. With as many treasures as he brought, with so many they sent him away when he died. As he came alone and mysteriously out of the sea, so he passes away alone and mysteriously into the sea, and the introduction to the poem describes his burial. It is the burial of a hero who had passed into a divine being, but it is also the burial of a great sea-king, the earliest record by some hundred years for the introduction is probably from an ancient song about Scyld-of many burials of the same kind among the Northern lords; but touched with so poetic a hand that it is first of all accounts in art as it is first in time. When the hour of fate had come, Scyld departed. Then his faithful comrades bore him down to the flowing of the sea, There at haven stood, hung with rings, the ship, 1 Hringed-stefna is sometimes translated "with curved prow," but it means, I think, that in the prow were fastened rings through which the cables were passed which tied it to the shore. Thus, into the silence of the sea the hero went alone, lying dead among his treasures, and the wind in his banner of battle. It is a later heathen belief that the souls pass over an unknown water to the realms beyond, and it may be that this belief was one of the reasons why the Northmen sometimes buried their dead in boats, so that when they came to this great sea they might have carriage. Odinn, in after-myth, receives those who are buried like Scyld. When Sigmund bears Sinfiötli to the seashore, he lays him in a skiff which a gray-mantled pilot brings to the beach. This is Odinn, and he sails away with the body. Balder himself, whose myth is later than this of Scyld, is buried in a great ship. The gods place his body on a pyre in the midst of the bark; it is set on fire, and pushed into the sea. Even a living man, in later times, buried himself in the way of Scyld. Flosi, in the Njal saga, weary of life, puts out to sea in a boat that all men call unseaworthy. "Tis good enough," he said, "for a death-doomed man." Of him, too, it might be said, none of men could tell who took up that lading." 1 As the poem begins with this burial, so it ends with the burial of Beowulf. His burial has nothing mythic, nothing mystic surrounding it. It might be that of an historical personage; and the contrast between the shore-burial and the 1 In the Ynglinga Saga, the burial of Haki is nearer to that of Scyld. Sore wounded, he had one of his ships loaded with dead men and weapons, and the sail hoisted. Then he let tarred wood be kindled, and a pyre made on the ship, while the wind blew seaward. Almost dead, he was laid on the pyre and the burning ship sailed out to sea. None of these, however, quite resemble the burial of Scyld, the most romantic, I think, of them all. |