Ætheling am I, and to earls am known; with the rich and with the poor; Widely fares (through hall) — rather than for friends if that I should have or the goods that shine. And not rarely do I rest I Though the sons of men, If this riddle be by Cynewulf, as I think it is, he sketches in it his own position and temperament, and with that, the position and temperament of the Scôp. He was not only ennobled and at home with the rich, but also sang with the poor and stayed in their houses. He loved to win gifts and rings, and to excite the warriors who roved for plunder; but he sang a different kind of song to the elder and wiser men. And we may judge from all that is left to us that these songs of "wisdom were the great sagas like Beowulf, tales of law and justice and noble war; sometimes riddles and gnomic verses fitted for well-witted men; even songs of history like that of Widsith; and, when he had so sung, all men sat silent, listening. Moreover, he was eagerly sought after, but it was often his habit, like many of his clan, to hide himself in solitude, musing like his fellow in Beowulf on new poems; or indulging the melancholy found in the Lament of Deor, and which lay deep in the temperament of Cynewulf. Of this there is ample proof at the end of the Elene. In that poem Cynewulf sketches his early life as a poet. Once he received treasures and appled gold, once his youth was swift and happy, but now all joy was fled away, and sore had been his trouble. But at last, when he seemed to have lost the art of weaving words, God "unbound his breast, unlocked the craft of song, and again he practised with delight his versing." Cynewulf had been then a Scop attached to a court, and also a wandering singer. He had had his pleasure and also his pain - had been Widsith and Deor in one. When, however, we meet with the wandering Scôp we meet with that which is not usual. His place was, generally, like 1 The passage is most difficult. It means, according to my translation - and I read fremdum instead of fremdes - that the warriors enjoy the singing of a stranger, since he is new to them, more than the singing of their own bards. Deor's, a fixed place, with an appointment of food and money or land which attached him to the court of the chieftain or king. When he wandered, it was either from a roving spirit, or as an attendant on an embassage, like Widsith, or because misfortune had befallen his lord, like the "Wanderer," or because, like Deor, he was dispossessed by a rival. Below the Scôp there were a great number of inferior singers who made it their business to go from place to place, to whom the name of Scôp was not given — who did not shape, but sang that which had been shapen by the Scôp. These were the gleemen, though their name is sometimes given to the Scôp— and in later Anglo-Saxon times, they were not unfrequently accompanied by jugglers, tumblers, and wrestlers. These two -the Scôp and the gleeman-were professional persons, but they were not the only singers. Almost every one made verses or sang them. Heroes in the midst of battle sang as they advanced, like Harold Hardrada at Stamford Bridge; Vikings, as they drave their ships through the gale or stormed a town on the river, shouted their hymn of defiance to the sea, or their praises of their ship, or the battle-stroke of the moment. Warriors chanted their deeds of the day in the hall or the camp at night, as Woden's chosen did in Valhalla. The old chiefs sang the glory of their youth. Their very swords and spears were thought to sing. The spear yells, the sword shouts in battle. Then, the wanderer who came into the hall to claim hospitality sang his stave of thanks, or versed for the chief in the high seat, who he was. The king himself often broke in with his tale, and seized the harp as Hrothgar did in Heorot. Even the preachers afterwards, like Ealdhelm, sang ancient songs in the public ways to draw the people round them. In the women's chambers, also, the old lays were sung. Elfred, we are told, sang the ballads of his people at his mother's knee. At the feasts of the commoner folk it was the same as in the noble's hall. Freedmen, peasants, even the serfs, sent round the harp, (as we hear from the Caedmon story in Baeda), telling, as Greek and Roman did, alternate tales. The player beat the harp in time with the thoughts and images of his song; his voice rang out the alliterated words and the accented syllables of the verses. Gesture accompanied and exalted the things described. The listeners often joined in, moved to excitement, and a whole chorus of voices filled the hall, the monastery, or the farm-building. As the practice of the art was widely spread, so was it greatly honoured. The very name of Scôp, like the independent word Poet, brought the minds of those that heard it back to the Shaper of the universe, who himself gave the art of song. Saga was Odin's daughter among the Northmen. The view of the Greeks, of Homer, that the minstrel's inspiration and invention were divinely given, was held by our English forefathers. We are told in Baeda's story of the poet Caedmon that all men held his gift to be divinely given him of the Lord. Cynewulf, as I have quoted above, says that "God unlocked his breast and gave him back the power of song." In the Gnomic Verses this opinion is combined with the thought that the poet is less troubled with selfish and tormenting thought than other men, because he has so many human things to think of. "To all men," the versifier says, "wise words are becoming; a song to the gleemen and wisdom to men. As many as men are on the earth, so many are their thoughts; each to himself has a separate soul. So, then, he who knows many songs and can greet the harp with his hands, hath the less of vain longing, for he hath in himself his gift of joy which God gave to him." The joyousness of the gift is expressed by many words. Song and music are almost synonymous with gleo and wynn and dream, with glee and delight and joy. The lay is in Beowulf the healgamen, the rapture of the hall. The harp is the wood of social joy, the wood-beam of delight. Playing and singing are"to awake the joyous wood, the rapture of the harp, to rouse the happy lay," to practise the "glee-craft," to have the "jocund gift of poesy.'" Wisdom and prophecy are by other words connected with song and poetry. When we travel as far back as we can go with certainty to the times when literary men in Rome discussed the Germania, we find the Teutonic tribes harpists and singers of verse. "They are a fair-haired folk," says Tacitus, "blueeyed, strongly built," and he tells of their love of song. "They celebrate, in ancient lays, Tuisco, their earth-born god, (that is, whom the Germans thought to have sprung out of the earth where they dwelt, so long was it since they had settled there), and Mannus his son, the forefathers and founders of their race." "Their legends say that Hercules had been among them, and they call on his name above all others in their warsongs when they march to battle." Other battle hymns were accompanied by the loud beating of the spears of the host against their shields, or by the roaring sound the warriors made when they laid their lips to the upper rim of the shield and hummed into it and over it. With this music they kindled themselves to battle, and according to its tone they foretold the issue of the fight. In the Annals, we hear of the larger type of poetry, of the beginnings of the sagas. They have songs, Tacitus writes, in honour of their deliverer Arminius;1 there are other pieces also which they sing in their bivouacs and at their feasts. All this music and verse was, as we see, already old in the time of Tacitus, and belonged to religion and to war- a music of solemn ceremonies, sorrowful or festival. "Of all ceremonies, going into battle was the most religious," save perhaps that other great ceremony which was always attended by songs -the burial of a king or hero, an instance of which we have in the closing lines of Beowulf. For 1900 years, then, we know that the English race has been a singing folk, and though we are not alone in that characteristic, we are almost alone in this, that we possess in our own language products of that singing temper in poems like those of Widsith and The Fight at Finnsburg which may range from the fifth to the seventh century. Moreover, there are lays imbedded in the Beowulf which seem to go back to a still more remote antiquity. If this be true, if we may venture to speak of any of our poetry as continental, the poems make us understand, better than any historical statement can do, that the first English were not in Britain, but in the Low Dutch lands and Denmark-that there was an England there before our England. The first emigration was to Britain, the second to America. And as the Pilgrims and I use a fine comparison of Freeman's-"took with them to America the Bible, an old Shakspere, their ballads, the Gesta of English soldiers and sailors, in the memory of nurses, children, and women, so the English brought to Britain, in that first pilgrimage, Widsith, Beowulf, The Fight at Finnsburg." Many other lays, no doubt, came with them, but their verse, Time, too greedy of the excellent, "devoured with privy paw, and nothing said." 2 1 Vigfusson has written a short essay in the supplement to the Corp. Poet. Boreale, in which he more than suggests that Arminius is identical with Siegfried. If this be true, and there is much probability in the argument, it adds another charm to the great story, and a new interest to the statement of Tacitus. The Roman soldiers may then have heard the earliest lays of the Volsung and Niblung saga. Arminius, "canitur adhuc barbaros apud gentes." I cannot find the passage; I quote from memory. I may as well say in this note that the mention of Attila in Widsith, in our earliest English poem, written perhaps before the English left for Britain, adds an additional interest to Mr. Hodgkin's theory that it was the pressure of the Huns at the back of the north-German tribes which was the cause of the English migration. Two great sea-ruling peoples arose then from the fierce driving of the Huns the Venetians and the English. CHAPTER II BEOWULF Introduction THE Beowulf MS. (Cotton Vitellius A. xv.) was one of those collected by Sir Robert Cotton. It was in Little Deans Yard, Westminster, when the fire which, in 1731, destroyed so many manuscripts took place, and was fortunately among those which were not fatally injured. In 1753, having spent some time in the old dormitory at Westminster, it was transferred to the British Museum. In 1705 Wanley, employed by Hickes, the Anglo-Saxon scholar, to make a catalogue of the old northern books in the kingdom, discovered the poem of Beowulf in the Cottonian library and calls it a tractatus nobilissimus poeticè scriptus. It is a parchment codex, and the handwriting of the two copyists is of the beginning of the tenth century. Thorkelin, a Danish scholar, had two copies of it made in 1786, and published the whole of it for the first time in 1815. This edition made the poem known, and it was discussed in English and foreign reviews. Meantime, in 1805, Sharon Turner gave the first account of the poem in his history of the Anglo-Saxons. Turner again, in 1823, and Conybeare, in 1826, filled up that account and translated portions of Beowulf into English verse, and in 1833 and 1837 John M. Kemble edited, with historical prefaces, and translated the whole of the poem. This scholarly book increased the interest of foreign scholars in the poem; and, since then, a great number of editions and translations have been published, while the essays, dissertations, articles, and notices on the poem and the subjects contained in it, fill a long list, and are written by English, French, German, Dutch, Danish, and American scholars. The poem, consisting of 3183 lines, is divided into two parts by an interval of fifty years, the first containing Beowulf's |
