Fell the wondrous road 1 handiwork of God. Welled the death-wounds forth! foamy-breasted (walls),2 Sea that sheltered them no more, with His sword of old; So that, by its dint of death, slept the doughty men, Fast encompassed there, fled out of their souls, overwhelmed them all, All the host sank deep. -- "So did the mightier Warden of the sea-flood drown all the manhood of Egypt. With His death-grip, wrathful and dreadful, He decided the battle. Nor was one left to tell through the burgs that most baleful of tales, to tell to their women the death of the hoard-wards; sea-death swallowed the mighty hosts. They fought against God." This is the end of the Overthrow. The close of the poem runs on for seventy-four lines. It tells how Moses, on the farther shore, gave everlasting redes to men; and the poet turns aside to preach a little sermon to his hearers of the joy of the grace of God; how lightly it is lost by sin, and how eternal a pit is hell; how near at hand are the arch-thieves, old age, and early death; and last, the Judgment Day. Then Moses speaks of the glory of God the leader of the Hebrews, of the lands and honour they shall win. And when he ended, "the folk rejoiced, the trumpets of victory sang, the banners arose to that fair sound." They looked on the sea, and all bloody seemed to them the foaming wave through which they had moved with their sarks of the battle. The men sang of glory, the women in their turn. their war song. 579. Then was easily to see On the Ocean's shore, That greatest of folk-troops sang many an Afric maid, all adorned with gold. 584. And the Sea-escaped began On the jetsam of the waves,3 from their seines to share, Wite 1 Wit-rôd (rad), Zauberstrasse, says Dietrich, which I have adopted. rod, "the rod of punishment," is the other reading; and this seems to parallel what follows. 2 Or take famigbôsma (as Grein) as the nominative, and translate: "Then the foamy-bosomed smote the flood-wards"; i.e. the waves, coming in crested with foam and driven by the wind, smote on the walls of sea which guarded on either side the path. The other reading, which makes God strike with His old sword the foaming walls of sea is, in my opinion, not only the most poetical, but the most in accord with the rest of this poet's work. 8 On y lafe," on the leaving of the waves," that is, "on the shore." Jetsam, a word half French, half Scandinavian, that which is cast overboard or, after a wreck, by mariners on the coast. I venture to use it then for the sand which makes the beach, which is cast up by the waves. Bucklers and breast-armour. Justly fell to them, but its Wardens 1 lay 1 Werigend, "the defenders, the wardens; " hence those who had, as masters, kept guard over the Hebrews; their enslavers, or here, perhaps, their pursuers. Or, it might refer back to the treasures of the Egyptians, "the defenders of these treasures lay dead," and, as the Egyptians are throughout the poem called the hoard-wards, this is the most likely meaning. CHAPTER XIX THE "DANIEL" AND "CHRIST AND SATAN" THE Daniel follows the Exodus in the Junian Manuscript, and is in the same handwriting as the Genesis and Exodus. It is a long poem of 765 lines, and its end is wanting. The writer wished, I think, to connect it with the Exodus, and there is an introduction of some forty verses which takes up the history of the Israelites at the Exodus, and sketches it as far as the appearance of Nebuchadnezzar on the scene. After that the poet paraphrases, with some closeness, and with much dryness, those portions of the book of Daniel which have to do with the dreams of Nebuchadnezzar, the story of the three children, and the feast of Belshazzar. There is scarcely any dialogue to enliven the story, and though the text of the Bible is treated with some freedom, the freedom is unrelieved by a single touch of imagination. It is a dreary poem. How any one in the world can say, as some have said, that the Daniel was written by the same poet who wrote the Exodus or the Genesis, passes belief. The only passages which have any life are those which are borrowed from the Song of the Three Children in the Apocrypha, and this, with other interpolations, has been partly worked into the Daniel from the Azarias of the Exeter Book.1 I have already drawn attention to the threefold translation varied into three different aspects of nature-of the phrase which concerns the cooling wind which blew in the fiery furnace. This is the one oasis in the desert of Daniel. As to its date, some say that it was written after Ælfric, others that it belongs to the time of Elfred. Its inferiority makes us say that it does not matter a pin when it was written. It is another matter when we come to the second part of the poems which pass under the name of Caedmon, and which are 1 The text supposes that the first seventy-five lines of the Azarias were worked into the Daniel. But the more probable supposition is that the Azarias was a rifacimento of a portion of the Daniel. in a different and later handwriting from the first part. Grein has given to this collection of psalm-like poems the name of Christ and Satan. They are a kind of Paradise Regained. They treat, first, of the Fall of the Angels; secondly, of the Harrowing of Hell, of the Resurrection, Ascension, Pentecost, and the Judgment Day; and thirdly, of the Temptation. The first, second, and third poems are not (and the best German critics agree in this) one poem, but three fragments of separate poems. Groschopp, who has treated of them in a distinct work, considers them to be three fragments taken out of one united poem, which a later "restorer" has attempted to bring into a unity of his own. There are but few who think that he has proved his point. The great interest of his labour lies in this that his investigation of the language of the poems makes it more than probable that they are older than the rest of those contained in the Junian MS. He even supposes, from the antique form of the Anglo-Saxon, and from the resemblance of the subjects treated to those mentioned in Baeda's account of Caedmon's works, that we may have here some of the work of the Caedmon of Baeda.1 Wülker disagrees with him, and thinks that Ten Brink's view that the Christ and Satan is later than Cynewulf much more probable. The extreme simplicity, directness, and rude passion of the narrative, make it likely, in my opinion, that this set of poems is earlier than the rest of the book, except, perhaps, some portions of Genesis. Dialogue, which has died out in Exodus and Daniel, and the representation of a situation in long speeches rather than in description, return upon us in these poems. The human interest is thus made greater; nor are the characters ill-sustained. They are, at least, alive; and this is especially true of Satan, whose character, as painted here, is more various, more the object of the writer's pity, more full of regret for all he has lost, even for those he has led with him to ruin, than the Satan of Genesis B. The poetry has a clear clang, a sharp descriptiveness which is nearer to oral than to written After the dreary waste of Daniel it is a comfort to come upon this rugged, varied and somewhat primæval mountain side of song. verse. 1 The first three parts of the first poem on the Fall of the Angels, as if they were separately made, end with three similar hymns of praise. They are like three lays, into which a Scôp might divide his one subject, to be sung on three separate evenings; and such may have been the form of some of Caedmon's religious songs. The others, too, may be separate Cantatas, within a general paraphrase of the history of redemption. 2 This has, however, nothing to do with their supposed antiquity. The description of hell has some new elements in it, and these seem, though I do not wish to make too much of this, to belong to a time when the Northern idea of the realm of the dark death-goddess Hel had begun to be influenced by the Christian Hell. If that conception mingled at all with the hell now before us, we might be able to suggest a conjectural date for this poem. The Northern Helle is not a place of punishment or filled with fire, nor is it dwelt in by the evil only. All go down to it save the heroes who die in battle even Brynhild and Balder. It lies low down to the North, in a pale, mistworld (Niflheimr), covered with night, very cold, swept with winds; with gates, a great hall where the goddess dwells, a fountain in the midst where dragons and serpents lie, and twelve roaring rivers, gloomy and joyless. Muspell is the fireworld in the South, and no human beings ever pass into it. Various fragments of this conception appear in the hell of this poem. Fire-breathing dragons are at its gates, and serpents swarm in it. There is a hall in it, in which Satan wanders like Hel. It is cold and dark, and over it broods abysmal cloud. Those who wander in it are black-visaged. These are the heathen fragments. The Christian hell-in which the name of the goddess was changed into the name of a place is made a realm of fire, like Muspell, but unlike Muspell is filled with human souls as well as demons. This place is vigorously described in these poems. It is sunk deep in the lowest abyss, "underneath high Nesses," a new image in the description of hell. This is twice repeated, and links the conception of the place to the medieval notion of the last pit of hell. Below these, as if on their strand, the fiends sometimes assemble and mourn. The cliffs stand round a "deep, tossing, and weltering sea of fire, greedy and ravenous loathsome lair." This heaving and leaping sea is Hell's floor "an ocean mingled with venom and with venom kindled." Serpents move in it and twine round naked men; adders and dragons dwell in it (in Judith hell is called a "hall of serpents"); its wind-swept hall is filled with anguish. The devils wander to and fro in it howling in woe; and twelve miles beyond the gates of this narrow realm of hate the gnashing of their teeth is heard in the abyss of space. The gates are huge, dragons sit at them, and they are fast shut and immovable, save when Christ comes upon them, when they are battered down to the noise of thunder at dawn. When Satan speaks, fire and poison fly from his lips with his words, and flicker through hell, and he is as restless in hell as he is said a |