Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

wonders of the hoard." Seven went with him, and one bore a lighted torch. Little was left in the cave, but they bore it forth, laded a wain with the wrought gold, heaved the dragon over the cliff, and carried the hoar-headed warrior to the point of Hrones-naes.

[blocks in formation]

So cried Wiglaf in his pride and sorrow; and they burned their king, as I have told at the beginning; and then they made his barrow and sang his death-song.

worked upon that place,

that was high and broad,
far and wide to be descried;
they uptimbered there

and the best of Brands 1
as most worthily (his men),
might imagine it.

Then the Weder-folk
On the hanging cliff, a howe
By the farers on the waves
And within a ten of days
Of the Battle-fierce the beacon;
With a wall they wrought around,
All the men of wisest mind,
Then they did into the barrow
And the precious things of price,
The high-hearted men
Let the earth hold fast
Gold within the grit-wall;
Of as little use to men
Then about the barrow
Twelve in all were they,
Who would speak their sadness,

So with groaning sorrowed
All his hearth-companions,
Quoth they that he was,
Of all men, the mildest,
To his people gentlest,

armlets and bright gems,
all that from the hoard
late had heaved away;
of the earls the treasure,
where it now abideth,
as of old it was.
rode the Beasts of battle,
bairns of Æthelings,

tell their sorrow for their king.

all the Geat folk,

for their house-lord's overthrow;
of the world-kings all,
and to men the kindest,
and of praise the keenest.

Beowulf, 1. 3157.

With these words of pathetic farewell Beowulf closes; and I think that this carefully-wrought conclusion, and this retrospective summary of the hero's character, go far to prove, however many ballads and lays may have been used by the writer, that the poem was composed as a whole, with one aim, by one poet.

1 Bronda betost. I do not think I can allege any authority for translating Brond here as a title of Beowulf. But the O. N. Brand-r a sword, often means a warrior, as the German Degen does. And we use the term "a good sword" for a good fighter. I have let the translation remain, but otherwise it would be "the best, the most famous of Burnings."

CHAPTER IV

THE EPISODES OF "BEOWULF," AND THE 66 FIGHT AT

"" FINNSBURG

THE episodes in the poem of Beowulf are sufficiently important to deserve separate treatment. One of them is connected with the Fight at Finnsburg, a distinct fragment of heathen English poetry; and this fragment is included in this chapter. Another, the first episode, is the story of Scyld and his burial, but this belongs so plainly to the mythical elements in the poem that I reserve it for the chapter on those ele

ments.

I begin, therefore, with the second episode which is that of Beowulf's swimming match with Breca. On the evening of his arrival at Hrothgar's court, Beowulf is mocked by the jealousy of Hunferth, who is the king's feast-companion. "Art thou that Beowulf who strove with Breca in swimming, risking your lives in the deep water, when winter's flood weltered with great billows? Seven nights ye strove, and he conquered thee in swimming." Beowulf answered, full of wrath, that Hunferth was a liar, and that the victory was his, not Breca's. He describes his adventure, his battle with the seamonsters, his coming to the land. The interest of the story lies in this that even if the story be mythical, it is coloured by the sea-life of our ancestors or of their northern kindred. Many were the young men in the ancient days who challenged one another to go forth in winter time upon the sea to fight

[ocr errors]

1 There are those, of whom Laistner is the most minute, who turn the whole of this Breca and Beowulf story into a Nature myth. "Beowulf, who is a wind hero" (the cloud-cleanser, for Laistner makes Beowa = der Feger, and Wolf Nebel), "is in this story of Breca, the spring-wind. Breca is der Brecher, who rules over the Brondings, that is, the sons of the flaming brand, and is himself a son of Beanstan who stands for Bohnstein, the sun. His swimming wager with Beowulf through the wintry sea, in the teeth of the icy northern storm, means 'the sun and the wind fight with the winter.'" This is the most interesting of the mythical explanations of the story. There are many others, but they are easily imagined and easily invented.

Five nights

with whales and great seals and the walrus. Beowulf and Breca kept together, not swimming, but sailing in open boats (to swim the seas is to sail the seas), then storm drove them asunder when they were near the land indented coast where the sea-beasts had their haunt.

some

"Flood

1 I may as well introduce here in a note two verses and a half of AngloSaxon poetry, which belong to that early time when Christianity and Heathendom were still somewhat interwoven. They are supposed to be of the eighth century, and they refer to some whale or walrus hunt on the sea-coast. The lines seem apart from the English type of poetry, and I should conjecture that they were carved much later by some Englishman who had been roving with the Northmen, and who, perhaps by way of the Mediterranean, came to France, and left his casket behind him. This inference is suggested by the history of the lines.

They are cut in runes on the side of a casket made of whale or walrus bone, and they record the closing event of the hunt. On another of its sides is the rude carving of a scene (as Bugge has shown) out of the Weland saga. A woman, Beadohild, comes to Weland; the body of her murdered brother lies at her feet, and another man, Egil, Weland's brother, catches birds that Weland may make his feather-garment for his flight. Over his head Egili may be traced, written in runes. The casket was found, as well as conflicting evidence will allow us to judge, in the sacristy of a church at Clermont-Ferrand in Auvergne. Thence it came into possession of a family in Auzon, HauteLoire, and was used as a work-basket. The silver bands were removed from it, and it fell into pieces. In this state it was bought at Paris from an antiquarian dealer by Franks, who gave it to the British Museum. The next thing to say is that the maker not only knew the Weland saga, but was also a Christian, for on the side opposite the scene from the saga is carved the birth of Christ, and the worship of the Magi. In runic writing near the three men the word Magi is cut. Stephens identified the carving on the top and the sides of the casket as the Taking of Jerusalem, the Beheading of John the Baptist, and the Suckling of Romulus and Remus by the Wolf. It is plain that these identifications are disputable. If the Latin wolf-story be really represented, it suits my conjecture that the writer was a Northumbrian who went with a Viking to the Mediterranean. One side, long lost, has now, I am told, been found, and is said to represent part of the Siegfried story.

Here are the lines, with my translation

[blocks in formation]

The lines have been translated in many different fashions; and we owe to Mr. Sweet the explanation of gasric by garsecg, which makes the last line clear. But he makes fiscflodu the subject and ban the object. "The fish-flood lifted the whale's bones on to the mainland." Wülker has shown, as I think, the impossibility of this translation. Flodu is a neuter plural, and must be the object after ahof and ban the subject. The whale's bone he takes to mean the whole whale, and translates "the whale heaved up the fish-floods." Ferg(enbyrig) has also its difficulty; and Sweet translates it by "the mainland' but, again, Wülker seems right when he translates it wasserburg, meeresburg. Fergen, firgen, frequently means "water, the sea," and fergen byrig would be "a sea like a fortress." Wülker does not, however, ask himself what the writer of the runes saw when he was writing them, nor is there any need for the harsh taking by him of the bone of the whale for the whole body of the

drove us apart," said Beowulf, and the whole description breathes of the Northern seas

Wallowing waters,

coldest of weathers,

Night waning wan; while wind from the North,
Battling-grim, blew on us;

rough were the billows.

Beowulf, 1. 546.

A great sea-beast attacks him, he is drawn out of the boat into the sea, and plunges to the bottom with the foe; but he stabs him to the heart, and rises again amidst the herd. It is plain the fight takes place near to the land, for the dead are lying on the sea-strand in the morning, "put to sleep by swords." Beowulf slays nine of the nickers, "so that never again they shall hinder the journey of those that fare upon the sea." Then the sun arose

From

Bright beacon of God;
So that now I could see
The windy rock-walls!
An earl yet undoomed,

eastward came light,
the billows grew still;
the sea-nesses (shine),
Wyrd often delivers
if his daring avail.

1. 569.

"Then the flood bore me up to the land of the Fins, worn with my voyage."

Whether this adventure actually belonged to Beowulf or got into his story from some other quarter, makes little matter. Breca, who is in the tale a young fellow, is afterwards chief of the Brondings, a tribe mentioned in Widsith. The story seems legendary, not mythical; and the return of Breca to his home reads like a piece of Homer. When the sea had upborne him whale. The story told in the lines, and I presume that it is the story told by the hunter of how he got the ivory of the casket, seems to be something like this-

The bone of the whale is the ivory jaw and teeth of the Sperm whale, a portion of which is here made into a casket. It is this, set in his mighty head, which lifts the sea in front of him as he rushes through it, into a piled-up heap of waters which, indeed, driven before him into a wide curve, would closely resemble the half circle of the outwork of a fortress; and many a time the whalemen have seen the animal carrying the sea in front of him in this fashion. Or, our casket-maker- and this explanation gives more meaning to the jerg(enbyrig)-may have seen the whale broach head foremost into the air, bearing up with him, as it were, a castle of water, a mountainous burg of sea. Then he tells the rest of the story of his piece of ivory. The hunters drove the great beast shoreward, or of itself it got entangled in the shallows and reefs, and there it died on the shingle pierced with lances; but before it died all the shallow waters of ocean, lashed by its struggles, wailed and mourned.

If this be a true explanation, it is the rapid record of the hunt in which this very piece of ivory was secured; and it tells first of how the whale behaved in deep ocean, and then how it died in the shallows. Perhaps, for the sake of the vividness of the picture, and of seizing this bit of our fathers' sea-life clearly, this note is not too long. See Note at the end of this volume.

on the land of the Heathoraemas it is said, "Thence he sought his sweet home-land, beloved of his folk, the land of the Brondings, his fair city of peace, where he kept his people, his citadel, his treasure. So, in good sooth, did the son of Beanstan fulfil against thee (Beowulf) all the pledge that he had made." Some history lies at least in the names, and removes the tale from the region of pure myth. Moreover, this nicker story, and the description of the nickers that lie and sleep on the reefs around the sea-hole where Grendel lived, render it, I think, probable that the walrus and the greater seals lived in prehistoric times on the coasts of Norway and Sweden, and that out of them were created by the popular imagination the sea-monsters of mythology and legend.

The third episode is introduced in the description of the bard who, in the morning after Grendel's death, strives to compose with art a tale of Beowulf's exploit, so that he may sing it in the evening. Apparently he kindles himself up to this creative endeavour by reciting the saga of Sigemund the Waelsing. What we hear of it in Beowulf is quite different from the Norse or the German versions, and is probably the oldest literary form of the saga. It is not Sigurd or Siegfried the son of Sigmund, who destroys the worm (not here as yet named Fafnir), but Sigmund himself; and the bard at Hrothgar's court looked back on the story as an old one. He told what he "had heard men say of Sigemund's noble deeds, of much that was unknown, of the battles of the Waelsing, of the feuds and the crime, of his far journeys of which men knew nothing certainly, save Fitela (the Sinfiötli of the Edda), who was with him; for ever they were true comrades in all battles, and very many of the race of the eotens had they slain with swords. But to Sigemund came no little fame, and after his death it lasted, since the hero had slain the worm, the watcher of the hoard. He, going under the gray stone, alone had dared the dreadful deed. Fitela was not with him. Yet his sword drove through the wondrous worm, so that the noble iron stood fast in the wall of rock. There lay the dragon dead. The offspring of Waels enjoyed the hoard of rings. At his own will he bore into the breast of the ship the glittering treasures. The worm (so I read the meaning) melted in his own heat. Of wanderers he was the most widely famed among all people by deeds of strength; a shelter of warriors. For that in old time he had honour." This is all that is said in Beowulf about the Volsunga

« AnteriorContinuar »