touches which mingle earth and heaven, or which go home to the depths of the human heart. But in many places it is imaginative by its direct vision of the thing or the situation which is described, and by the short and clear presentation of it. A certain amount also of imagination collects round the monsters of the moor and sea, but that is rather in the myth itself and in our own imagination of these wastes of nature than in the poetry, though I do not deny it altogether to the verse. Then, again, the poem is lamentably destitute of form. Each of the lays used had no doubt its own natural form, which we should find good if we could isolate them one from another. But the poet did not understand how to shape them afresh or to interweave them well. The Grendel part is much better done than the Dragon part; indeed, there are portions of this last story in the poem which seem to have been broken on the wheel. But when all is said, we feel that we have scarcely a right to estimate the poem in this critical fashion unless we could have heard it delivered. To judge it in our study is like judging an altar-piece far away from the town and the associations for which it was originally painted. If we want to feel whether Beowulf is good poetry or not, let us place ourselves in the hall as evening draws on, when the benches are filled with warriors and seamen, and the chief sits in the high seat, and the fires flame in the midst, and the cup goes round—and then hear the Shaper strike the harp. With gesture, with the beat of his voice and of the hand upon his instrument at each alliterative word of the saga, he sings of the great fight with Grendel or the dragon, of Hrothgar's giving, of the sea-voyage, to men who had themselves fought against desperate odds, to sailors who knew the storms, to the fierce rovers of the deep, to great ealdormen who ruled their freemen, to thegns who followed their kings to battle and would die rather than break the bond of comradeship. Then as we image this, and read the accented verse, sharply falling and rising with the excitement of the thing recorded, we understand how good the work is, how fitted for its time and place, how national, how full of noble pleasure. CHAPTER V 66 THE MYTHICAL ELEMENTS IN BEOWULF" Now that we have gone through the Beowulf and its episodes, we are in a better position to consider certain elements in it which belong to literature, and to those myths which are the mothers of poetry. The historical and geographical questions are apart from my subject, nor do they belong to our England; but the question of the cycles of song which we trace in the poem, of the myths of Beowulf and Grendel, of Seyld and the Dragon, belongs to literature and to English literature. As to the cycles of song, we have in the Beowulf evidence of heroic sagas which are contemporary with the supposed historical life of the hero, that is, with the sixth century; and evidence also in it of still earlier cycles. The first saga-cycle includes the songs sung concerning the earlier deeds of Beowulf before he became king. I do not mean the Grendel story, which was taken into the legend of Beowulf after the lay of his death, but the lays to which the hero himself alludes when he is dying. Then it is also plain that there was a lay which concerned the deeds of Hygelac, and especially his death in the sixth century. If Hrothgar too was an historical personage, and we may well believe it, his doings at Heorot, his feuds and battles were sung; and the mention of him and his quarrel with Ingeld in the poem of Widsith makes this very probable. We also understand from the accounts of the fates of Hrethel and his sons that there were a number of lays about treaties, feuds, and wars among the Swedes, Danes, Geats, Frisians, and others, which have no record except in the pages of Beowulf, but to which allusions are made in later sagas. Far-famed heroes like Ecgtheow, Ongentheow, Froda, pass us by, noble phantoms, the likeness of a kingly crown upon them, and are seen no more. The whole cycle of these lays is probably contemporary with those songs sung among the Goths of which Jordanes tells the barbara et antiquissima carmina which Eginhard in the ninth century says were collected by command of Charles the Great, but which have unfortunately been lost. Beowulf suggests to us the existence of a still earlier cycle. The poets at the court of Hrothgar sing not only of heroes of their own time, but of men and women who have passed away, who have already become legendary. They chant the deeds of Finn and Hnaef and Hildeburh and Hengest, of Heremod and Healfdene, of Hoce; and the mention of these names, outside of Beowulf, in the poems of Widsith and the Fight of Finnsburg confirms the conjecture that there was a whole cycle of lays which preceded Beowulf and dealt with these partly mythical, partly historical personages. Another legendary hero whom we touch in the later part of Beowulf is Offa, and the stories connected with him have already become lays. A yet older lay is that of Sigemund and Fitela, and we are told in Beowulf that the story was already ancient in the days of Hrothgar. If Sigemund be Siegfried, and Siegfried, as Vigfusson thinks, Arminius, we reach back, but only through the name, to the first century. But we seem to be able to go even farther back to a still earlier cycle, to personages who are not legendary, but mythic. We come on Ing, the first king of the East Danes, the divine root of the Ynglings as well as of the Scyldings, of the Angles as well as of the Danes, and Ing is, some say, the same as Sceaf. We hear of Weland, the semi-divine smith, whose name is mossed with gray antiquity. Most important of all, we have in the legend of Seyld with which the poem opens, and whose tale is the same as Sceaf's the story of the divine founder of the Teutonic tribes north of the Elbe, the earliest ancestor-god our fathers worshipped. These tales, these allusions belong to a distant cycle of lays, and may have been sung in centuries long anterior to our poem. In this point of view then, that of age, and suggestions of a still greater age, the interest of Beowulf is extraordinarily great. Embedded in it we find lay after lay, like fossil after fossil each of which testifies to a different stratum of song. The next question has regard to myths and mythical elements. There are commentators who seem to make the whole poem and all the personages in it mythical. This is to go too far in an easy path, and to forget the slow upbuilding, I do not say of the poem as we have it, but of the subject. A common nature-myth no doubt runs through the whole of it. An historical myth of great antiquity, the myth of Seyld or Sceaf, appears in its introduction. Added to these mythical, there are legendary elements, which have had either a root in some actual historical event, or have been connected with some hero who actually fought and ruled, and whose deeds, passing through legend, became part of the folklore of the nations; and the half-mythic, half-real animals of the sea in the story, belong, I think, to this folk-tale element. Added once more to this, there are historical elements like the battle of Hygelac with the Frisians. Thus myth, legend, the folk-tale and a little history are conglomerated in the poem. These various elements do not exist separately, or at least it is very rarely that they do so. For the most part they interpenetrate one another. This is the case in the lay of the prince who sang his death-song and hid his treasure; who died after all his people had perished, and whose treasure the dragon found and guarded. A possible bit of history, a folk-tale, and a dragon myth mingle in that lay. Again, to leave out many others, we come across elements which belong to commonly extended folk-tales in the story of Beowulf's youth. It is stated that he was not esteemed when he was young, and then appeared suddenly, to the surprise of all, as a great warrior. This is also told of the legendary Offa, son of Wermund, and stole afterwards into the tale of Offa of Mercia. Now it is one of the well-known characteristics of the heroes of the folk-tales a characteristic handed down perhaps from some nature-myth that their early years are obscure, and their person despised, that they are slothful or have some bodily defect, and that all in a moment, when their brothers have failed, they suddenly shoot into power and intelligence. The very nursery tales, the flotsam and jetsam of the folk-tales, are full of the dull boy who rises, like the sun freeing itself from clouds, into the sudden and bold adventurer. - We get nearer to myth in the nickers of the poem, but there is a mixture of natural fact in the description of them. These great sea-beasts who attend on Grendel's dam, and guard, like the herds of Proteus, her sea-cave, may be partly mythicalimages of the monstrous fury of the waves, of the lower powers of the wintry sea. We are told that their name is afterwards mixed up with Hnikarr (who is Woden in his relation to the sea), and with the Nix, the water demon, in his various forms. But when we touch them in the poem, we are 1 Hygelac became in after days a legendary person. He is identified with Hugleik of the Heimskringla, and with a certain Huglacus Magnus, of whom an account it given in a MS. of the tenth century, where he has become a mythic personage, and where the enormous strength of Beowulf seems to have been added to him. with regard to them on the borderland between fact and myth, for at times they are scarcely to be distinguished from the tusked seals, and they are hunted by Hrothgar's men in much the same way as the Esquimaux to this day hunt the walrus. When they are also mentioned in the story of Beowulf's swimming match with Breca, they are half-mythical and halfactual sea-beasts, just like the story itself, which is myth, legend, and fact all rolled together. These are not pure myths, but there are three things in the poem to which we may give that name - the story of Scyld, the contention of Beowulf with Grendel and the dragon, and the representation of Grendel and his dam. The first of these is the story of Scyld. It is the introduction to the whole poem, and is followed by his burial, of which I have already written. Here is the passage have in stories heard, in the far-off days; mighty deeds of war. See now of the Spear-Danes we from the Scathers' host, taken their mead-benches! since when erst he was Comfort did he find for that! Beowulf, 11. 1-7. How he was forlorn is explained later on in the account of his burial when his subjects recall how he came as a child to their shores. "They laid him," it is said, " in the ship's bosom, with no less of costly treasures on his breast than those had done, who at his beginning had sent him forth of old, alone, an infant, over the ocean waves." Who those were, none knew. He had come in a boat, drifting to the shores of Scania, and when he is launched by his people into the sea after his death, and the poem says "That none knew who took up that lading," it refers to the mysterious Those who had sent him forth. The next lines mark what the God-given child did for Scedeland He up-waxed beneath the welkin, in his worthy glories grew, O'er the pathway of the whale, had to pay him tribute, 11. 8-11. Of him was born Beowulf (that is the Beaw of the AngloSaxon genealogists, not our Beowulf, who was a Geat, not a Dane), "the son of Seyld in Scedeland." Then Scyld died at his appointed time, and was buried. |
