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 The history of early English literature: 
 
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THE HISTORY OF EARLY ENGLISH 
 LITERATURE 
 
.m:^ 
 
g Enfjii^IiitBniturei 
 
 ENGLAND 
 
 Sttmfyr^eeogrt^deSUBnSi 
 
 MaamillBa ia Co. 
 
THE HISTORY 
 
 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATUfiE 
 
 BEING THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH POETRY FROM 
 
 ITS BEGINNINGS TO THE ACCESSION 
 
 OF KING iELFRED 
 
 BY 
 
 STOPFORD A. BROOKE 
 
 Look unto the rock whence ye are hewn, 
 
 And to the hole of the pit whence ye are digged. 
 
 ISAUH, li. 1 
 
 Wefa gntfe 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 AND LONDON 
 
 1892 
 
 <?> 
 All Hghts reserved 
 
\U8R/|RY 
 
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 COPYBIQHT, 1892, 
 
 bt macmillan and CO. 
 
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 Typography by J. S. Gushing & Co., Boston, U.S.A. 
 Pbesswork by Berwick & Smith, Boston, U.S.A. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 This book is the history of the beginnings of English Poetry. 
 It is the beginning also of a history of that poetry which, I 
 hope, with perhaps too bold an ambition, to finish in the years 
 to come. Life gives too short a time now for a long work, but 
 it is a pleasure to have at least brought to an end this tale of 
 the origins of English verse. 
 
 It begins in the older England over the sea. It ends with 
 the accession of Alfred. When he came to the throne in 871, 
 literature, both Latin and English, had perished, after a career 
 of two hundred years. The final home of both had been Nor- 
 thumbria. A few years after his accession the last unplun- 
 dered seats of learning were destroyed. All the Muses were 
 now silent. But before .iElfred died a new English literature 
 had begun, and in a new land, and the King was himself its 
 origin. What had been was poetry; this was prose. The 
 country of English poetry had been Northumbria ; the country 
 of English prose was Wessex. At this date, then, the curtain 
 naturally falls on the first act of this history. At this date, 
 in the intervals of Alfred's wars, it will naturally rise on the 
 beginning of the second act. 
 
 The English literature of this period is entirely poetry, and 
 this book is mainly dedicated to that poetry. I have not put 
 aside the life of the people, the Latin literature, or the politi- 
 cal history of England ; but I have only spoken of them so far 
 as they bore upon the poetry or illustrated it. That poetry is 
 certainly not of a very fine quality, but it is frequently re- 
 markable. ■ It has its own special qualities, and with the ex- 
 
EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 ception of perhaps a few Welsh and Irish poems, it is the only- 
 vernacular poetry in Europe, outside of the classic tongues, 
 which belongs to so early a time as the seventh and eighth 
 centuries. The Welsh and Irish poems are few, problematical, 
 and their range is limited ; but the English poems are numer- 
 ous, well authenticated, and of a wide and varied range. In 
 these two centuries our forefathers produced examples, and 
 good examples for the time, of religious, narrative, elegiac, 
 descriptive, and even, in some sort, of epic poetry. This is 
 a fact of singular interest. There is nothing like it — at this 
 early period — elsewhere in Europe. But the interest is even 
 greater when we consider this poetry in connection with the 
 whole of English song. It will be seen that a great number 
 of the main branches of the tree of English poetry had already 
 opened out at this time from the stem, and that the ideal and 
 sentimental elements of the earliest poetry have continued, 
 with natural changes, up to the present day. Here, then, in 
 the two hundred years between 670 and 870, the roots of 
 English poetry, the roots of that vast over-shadowing tree, 
 were set ; and here its first branches clothed themselves with 
 leaves. Here, like the oaks of Dodona, it began to discourse its 
 music ; and there is not a murmur now of song in all its imme- 
 morial boughs which does not echo from time to time with the 
 themes and the passion of its first melodies. Here, too, we 
 can best discern, and here isolate most easily, those elements 
 in English character which, existing before the race was mixed, 
 have been, not the cause of our poetry, but the cause why the 
 poetry has been of so high an excellence, — that steady con- 
 sistency of national character, that clinging through all diffi- 
 culty to the aim in view, that unrelenting curiosity, that desire 
 to better what has been done, which, though not art them- 
 selves, are the effectual powers which enable art to strive, to 
 seek, and at last to reach its goal. 
 
 Moreover, no national art is good which is not plainly that 
 nation's own. In this Anglo-Saxon poetry of which I write 
 we grasp most clearly the dominant English essence. The 
 
PREFACE 
 
 poetry of England has owed much to the different races which 
 mingled with the original English race ; it has owed much to 
 the different types of poetry it absorbed — Greek, Latin, 
 Welsh, Erench, Italian, Spanish — but below all these admix- 
 tures, the English nature wrought its steady will. It seized, it 
 transmuted, it modified, it mastered these admixtures both' of 
 races and of song. 
 
 Of what kind the early English poetry is, what feelings 
 inspired the poets, what imaginations filled their hearts, how 
 did they shape their work — that is the vital, the interesting 
 question ; and to answer it, the poetry itself must be read. I 
 have therefore not written much about the poems, but I have 
 translated a great quantity of what seemed to me not only 
 their best, but also their most characteristic passages. I have 
 also, when they were short enough, translated whole poems , 
 like the fourth Riddle and the Wanderer. 
 
 How to translate them was my chief difficulty. It was 
 necessary, above all, that the translation should be accurate, 
 but it was also necessary that it should have, as far as possible, 
 the rhythmical movement of verse. Of all possible translations 
 of poetry, a merely prose translation is the most inaccurate. 
 
 The translations here given are as accurate as I could make 
 them. I do not mean that there are no mistakes in them, — 
 which would be an insolence I should soon repent, — but I 
 mean that there is nothing out of my own fancy added to the 
 translation. The original has been rigidly followed, and, for 
 the most part, line for line. I have nearly always bracketed 
 inserted words ; and the only licence I have taken is the intro- 
 duction of such words as then and there and all, when I needed 
 an additional syllable for the sake of the rhythm which I 
 adopted. Permission to do this was, I may say, given to me by 
 the Anglo-Saxon poets themselves ; it is their constant habit. 
 
 Then I felt that the translation should be in a rhythm 
 which should represent, as closely as I could make it, the 
 movement and the variety of the original verse. A prose trans- 
 lation, even when it reaches excellence, gives no idea whatever 
 
EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 of that to which the ancient English listened. The original | 
 form is destroyed, and with it our imagination of the world to 
 which the poet sang, of the way he thought, of how he shaped 
 his emotion. Prose no more represents poetry than architec- 
 ture does music. Translations of poetry are never much good, | 
 but at least they should always endeavour to have the musical 
 movement of poetry, and to obey the laws of the verse they 
 translate. 
 
 A translation made in any one of our existing rhyming 
 metres seemed to me as much out of the question as a prose 
 translation. Kone of these metres resemble those of Anglo- 
 Saxon poetry ; and, moreover, their associations would modern- 
 ise the old English thought. An Anglo-Saxon king in modern 
 Court dress would not look more odd and miserable than an 
 Anglo-Saxon poem in a modern rhyming metre. Blank verse 
 is another matter. It frequently comes near to the "short 
 epic line " of Cynewulf, but it fails in the elasticity which a 
 translation of Anglo-Saxon poetry requires, and in itself is too 
 stately, even in its feminine dramatic forms, to represent the 
 cantering movement of old English verse. Moreover, it is 
 weighted with the sound of Shakspere, Milton, or Tennyson, 
 and this association takes the reader away from the atmosphere 
 of early English poetry. I felt myself then driven to invent 
 a rhythmical movement which would enable me, while trans- 
 lating literally, to follow the changes, and to express, with 
 some little approach to truth, the proper ebb and flow of 
 Anglo-Saxon verse. 
 
 The Anglo-Saxon line is divided into two halves by a pause. 
 The first half has two "measures," and the first syllable of 
 these is accented, or " stressed." The second half has the same 
 number of measures and accents. The binding together of 
 these two halves is done by alliteration. Generally speaking, 
 the two accented syllables in the first half and one of the ac- 
 cented syllables in the second half begin with the same conso- 
 nant or with any vowels ; almost always with different vowels. 
 Frequently, however, there is only one alliterated syllable in 
 
PREFACE 
 
 the' first half of the line. Unaccented syllables, the greater 
 number of -which were placed at the beginning of the second 
 half line, after the pause, filled up the line. One school of 
 poets, of whom Cynewulf was the chief, used a short line, with 
 few slurred syllables. Another school which has been called 
 the Caedmonian School used a line with a varying number of 
 unaccented syllables, and as a great number of these were often 
 inserted, the line has been called the " long epic line " in con- 
 trast with Cynewulfs shorter line. A poet of this school 
 could use the shorter line when he pleased. He might have 
 a line of only eight syllables, or one of three times that length, 
 expanding it to express his swelling passion, or contracting it 
 to suit a sharp question or a concise description. The variety 
 then of the line was great, and its elasticity. It was capable 
 of rapidity and solemnity ; and its harmony and order were 
 secured by the last alliterated stress being on the first syllable 
 of the last word but one of the full line. 
 
 In order to be able to fulfil these needs and follow these 
 peculiarities, I chose, after many experiments, the trochaic 
 movement used in this book, each half-line consisting of 
 trochees following one another, with a syllable at the end, 
 chiefly a long one, to mark the division of the line. I varied 
 the line as much as I could, introducing, often rashly, metrical 
 changes ; for the fault of this movement is its monotony. I 
 have sometimes tried an iambic movement, but rarely ; for 
 this trochaic line with a beat at the end of each half-verse 
 seemed to me to get the nearest to the sound of the Anglo- 
 Saxon line, even though it is frequently un-similar to that line 
 itself. I used alliteration whenever I could, and stressed as 
 much as possible the alliterated words, and I changed the 
 length of the line with the changes of the original. But 
 when I could not easily alliterate my line or stress the allit- 
 erated word, I did not try to do so. It was better, I thought, 
 to give literally the sense and the sentiment of the original 
 than to strain them or lose them by a rigid adherence to allit- 
 eration and accent. I have made clear the division of the 
 
EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Anglo-Saxon line by leaving a space in the midst of each line 
 of my translation. The two half-lines are, of course, intended , 
 to be read right across the page, with a slight pause upon the 
 space between them. I think the method used is on the whole , 
 the right method, but I am by no means satisfied with what 
 I have done. I submit it with much deference to those who 
 understand the difficulties of such a translation. 
 
 This book is written from the literary point of view, and 
 desires, above all, to induce English-speaking folk to rever- 
 ence, admire, and love the poetry which their fathers wrote in 
 old time, since it is worthy. I have not therefore, except 
 when I thought it necessary, entered into the critical or scien- 
 tific questions which hum like bees around the poems. On 
 these questions a great number of books, reviews, and pam- 
 phlets have been written. I have not avoided this side of the 
 matter from any want of gratitude to the critics, or from any 
 lack of appreciation of the work of Anglo-Saxon scholars. 
 On the contrary, it is my duty and my pleasure to acknowl- ; 
 edge, that were it not for the intimate and exhaustive labour 
 of German, English, and American scholars, a book like this, 
 which views the poetry of the ancient English only as litera- 
 ture, could not have been written at all, or, at least, not on any 
 sure foundation. No translation worth reading, or giving a 
 clear representation of what the Anglo-Saxon poets thought 
 or felt, coiild have here been made, had it not been preceded 
 by the long, careful and penetrating labour of the philologists ; 
 nor could any just literary estimate of the poems or any use- 
 ful arrangement of them have been worked out in this book, 
 without the minute and accurate toil expended on them, and 
 on their subjects, sources and dates by a multitude of critics 
 among whom the Germans are pre-eminent. Moreover, had 
 it not been for the labour and genius of the later historians of 
 early England, especially of Mr. Green, I could not have had 
 the materials for binding up, as I have tried to do, the poetry 
 of England with the history of England. 
 
 I cannot, so numerous are they, mention the many scholars 
 
PREFACE 
 
 to whom my thanks are due, but my gratitude to them is none 
 the less. Where I have specially used the work of any one 
 of them I have acknowledged it in the text. Two, however, 
 above all, ought to be thanked by me, as they have been 
 thanked by all who have cared for ancient English poetry. 
 Professor Grein is gone from us, but he will never be forgot- 
 ten. To his Dictionary I owe my first interest in the Anglo- 
 Saxon language, my first understanding of its power and 
 charm. To his translation of the poems into German I owe 
 my first appreciation of the poetry of early England. The 
 reading of that translation made me eager to read the poems 
 in the original, and I could not rest till I was able to do so. 
 When I had read them I could not rest till I had written this 
 book. The other scholar to whom this book owes so much is 
 Professor Wulker. He needs no praise, but he may take grat- 
 itude from me. Had it not been for his Ch'undriss zur Ge- 
 achichte der angelsdchsischen Litteratur, one like myself, who late 
 in life began to read the Anglo-Saxon literature, could never 
 have found his way through the tangled mazes of Anglo-Saxon 
 criticism, nor known what to look for, or where to find his 
 wants fulfilled. I cannot understand why the University Pro- 
 fessors of Anglo-Saxon in this country do not have that book 
 translated, and edited up to date. 
 
 I was fortunate enough while these pages were passing 
 through the press to be in time to see Professor Earle's book, 
 The Deeds of Beowulf, and though I do not agree with his 
 theory of the origin of the poem, I wish to thank him for hav- 
 ing, by his translation and notes, made Beowulf a more literary 
 possession for the English people. I have also to thank Mr. 
 Gollancz for permitting me to use the early proof sheets of his 
 edition of the Christ. I saw these sheets after I had made the 
 translations of the Christ contained in this book, and before he 
 had re-written his translation as it now appears. I made some 
 changes in my translation and adopted some of his phrases. I 
 also adopted his new division of the poem, and his ending of 
 it at line 1663. Since then his book has been published, and 
 
EAELY ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 my personal thanks are now mingled with those due to him 
 from all who care for English literature. To Miss Kate War- 
 ren, an accomplished student of Anglo-Saxon poetry, and an 
 excellent teacher of our modern literature, I am also indebted 
 for steady and valuable help frankly given to me throughout 
 the writing of this book. She made the map which accom- 
 panies these volumes, and the Index is also her work. I have 
 had the map drawn to illustrate the chapter which treats of 
 the question — Why Northumbria was the special home of 
 English Poetry. It represents the general relation of the Eng- 
 lish kingdoms to the Welsh, Irish and Pictish peoples, and it 
 follows, in its main divisions, the map at p. 21 of Mr. York 
 Powell's History of England. It does not pretend to give the 
 boundaries between the several English kingdoms or between 
 the English and the Welsh at any particular period from 600 
 to 800. Maps which explain the to-and-fro of those boundaries 
 from time to time will be found in Mr. Green's Making of 
 England. I have also had placed in this map, and underlined 
 in red, the names of the most famous monastic centres of 
 learning which had been set up before the death of Baeda. 
 
 And so, I bid this book farewell. It has tried, with many 
 others^ to save for remembrance and seclude for thought the 
 neglected lands of early English poetry. Like the ancient 
 places of this country where our forefathers met together for 
 religion or war or council, they seem to appeal to England to 
 take care of them, to give them interest and affection. Ear too 
 few of them remain, far too many of them have perished. The 
 silent stream of time, with mordant and -quiet wave, washed 
 into forgetfulness those pleasant fields, 
 
 rura quae Liris quieta 
 mordet aqua tacitumus amnis. 
 
 STOPFORD A. BROOKE. 
 August 2, 1892. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 I. WiDsiTH, Deor, and the Scop 1 
 
 II. Beowule — Introduction 12 
 
 III. Beowulf — The Poem 26 
 
 IV. The Episodes of "Beowulf" and the "Fight at 
 
 FlNNSBURG" 59 
 
 V. The Mythical Elements in "Beowulf" . , 74 
 
 VI. Waldherb . . 93 
 
 VII. The Conquest and Literature .... 101 
 
 VIII. Armour and War in Poetry 120 
 
 IX. The Settlement in Poetry 133 
 
 X. The Sea 162 
 
 XI. Christianity and Literature 189 
 
 XII. MONASTICISM AND LITERATURE 218 
 
 XIII. The Rise of Literature 234 
 
 XIV. Literature in Northumbria 254 
 
 XV. Caedmon 279 
 
 xvL "Genesis A" 290 
 
 xvn. "Genesis B" 301 
 
 XVIII. " Exodus " 316 
 
 XIX. The " Daniel " and " Christ and Satan " . 325 
 
 XX. "Judith" and other Caedmonian Poems . . 332 
 
 XXI. Northumbrian Literature other than English . 341 
 XXII. " The Discourse of the Soul to the Body " and 
 
 "The Elegiac Poems" 352 
 
 xxiii. Cynewulf 371 
 
 XXIV. The Signed Poems of Cynewulf .... 387 
 XXV. Unsigned Poems either by Cynewulf or by Men 
 
 OF his School 408 
 
 XXVI. The School of York 444 
 
 Notes 459 
 
 Index 491 
 
 xii 
 
THE MATERIALS FOR THE HISTORY OF ANGLO-SAXON POETRY UP 
 TO THE ACCESSION OF jELFRED THE GREAT 
 
 The Exeter Book formed part of the library which Leofric, the first 
 bishop of Exeter, collected and left to his cathedral church. He cata^ 
 logued it himself as a Mycel Englisc hoc be gehwilcum t>ingum on leo'S- 
 wisan geworht : "A mickle English book on all kinds of things wrought 
 in verse." It is still kept in Exeter Cathedral, and has been there, since 
 Leofric died in 1071, for 821 years. It is a varied anthology, and con- 
 tains poems which range from the eighth to the tenth or eleventh century. 
 One or two may belong to the seventh century, and some may be of even 
 higher antiquity. Widsith, for example, may contain verses which were 
 made in the old Angle land over the seas. Of the poems mentioned in 
 these volumes, it holds, and I give them in the order they are in the Book : 
 The Christ, Guthlac, Azarias, The Phcenix, Juliana, The Wanderer, 
 Gifts of Men, The Seafarer, Widsith, Fates of Men, Gnomic Verses, The 
 Panther, Whale and Partridge, The Soul to its Body, Deor, Biddies 1-60, 
 The Wife's Complaint, The Descent into Hell, Piddle 61, The Message of 
 a Lover, The Buin, Biddies 62-89. Others, either of little value or later 
 than the eighth century, are also contained in it. 
 
 The Vercelli Book was discovered in the capitular library at Veroelli 
 in Upper Italy by Dr. Blum in the year 1832. No one knows how it got 
 there, but Wtilker conjectures that a Hospice existed in that town for 
 Anglo-Saxon pilgrims who went on pilgrimage to Rome, and who crossed 
 by the Mont Cenis or the Great or Little St. Bernard Passes. A scanty 
 library may have grown up there, and this manuscript have been left to it 
 by some English voyager. The book is a volume of Anglo-Saxon homilies, 
 but interspersed among them are Mx poems — The Andreas, The Fates of 
 the Apostles, The Address of the Soul to the Body, The Dream of the 
 Rood, The Elene. The last is a fragment on the Falsehood of Men. The 
 handwriting is of the eleventh century. 
 
 The Manuscript of Beowulf is in the British Museum (Cotton Vitellius 
 A. XV.), and the same MS. contains the poem of Judith. 
 
 The Junian Manuscript, of the Caedmonian poems. — It contains 
 Genesis, Exodus, Daniel, Christ and Satan, and is in the Bodleian. 
 
 Two fragments. — (i.) The Fight at F^nnsburg. It only exists in a 
 copy of it made by Hickes from a leaf of parchment used in the bind- 
 ing of a manuscript of homilies. This leaf, found in Lambeth Palace 
 Library, is now lost, (ii.) Two vellum leaves found by Professor Wer- 
 laufi in the National Library at Copenhagen contain two fragments of a 
 poem to which the name of Waldhere has been given, 
 xiv 
 
CHAPTEE I 
 
 WIDSITH, DEOK, AND THE SCOP 
 
 "WiDSiTH told his tale, unlocked his word-hoard," is the 
 beginning of the earliest poem we possess in the English 
 tongue. Widsith — that is, " the Far-Traveller " — may be the 
 actual name of the writer, or a name which as a wandering poet 
 he assumed ; or, as it occurs only in th6 introduction, which was 
 probably written much later than the body of the poem, it may 
 be a title given to the poet by the writer of the introduction, 
 and this seems the best explanation of the term. The sugges- 
 tion that it is another name for Woden, and that Widsith is 
 therefore a mythological person, does not seem to have suffi- 
 cient ground for its adoption. He is rather the " poetic repre- 
 sentative of the singer " who loved to wander from court to 
 court and land to land; and his name, whether assumed by 
 himself or given to him by an after-writer, expresses this very 
 well. 
 
 The poem begins with an introduction of nine lines. This 
 is followed by a catalogue, from the tenth to the seventy -fifth 
 line, of the Tarious places and kings and tribes that Widsith 
 had visited. An interpolation then of twelve lines succeeds, 
 and may have been inserted in the seventh century, and in 
 England. The conclusion contains a personal account of the 
 poet's way of living.and of his last journey, and this runs on 
 from verse 87 to the close.^ The catalogue and the personal 
 account are very old, older than anything else we have of 
 Anglo-Saxon poetry, and may date from the time when the 
 English as yet kept their seats upon the continent. The theo- 
 ries concerning the origin and date of the poem are numerous, 
 and I place in a note at the end of this volume a short discussion 
 of them. To treat of them here would confuse the personal 
 impression which the poem was certainly intended to make. 
 
 1 Verses 131-134 are, it is supposed, a later interpolation. 
 
 1 
 
EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 The Preface (lines 1-9) which may have been written in 
 the old Angle-land, tells us that Widsith, "who most of all men 
 visited kindreds and nations, received in the hall for his sing- 
 ing memorable gifts." Born among the Myrgings,^ he became 
 the singer of the court, and while still young went, in this capac- 
 ity, " with Queen Ealdhild the weaver of peace," the daughter of 
 Eadwine and the wife of Badgils King of the Myrgings, to seek 
 the home of Eormanric (Hermanric), King of the Ostrogoths 
 who lived "east from Ongle"; and this was his first journey. 
 
 Here the Introduction ceases, and at the 10th line Widsith 
 himself, writing in his old age, describes his journeys.^ "Many 
 men and rulers I have known," he says ; " through many 
 stranger-lands I have fared, throughout the spacious earth, 
 parted from my kinsmen. Therefore I may sing in the mead- 
 hall how the high born gave me gifts." Two among the rest 
 were most gracious to him, G-uthere the Burgundian, "who 
 gave me an arm-ring, no sluggish king was he, and .^Ifwine^ in 
 Italy, Eadwine's bairn. He was of all men swiftest of hand in 
 winning of honour, and freest of heart in the dealing of rings." 
 
 These names occur in the long list of kings and tribes whom 
 he visited — a list which has certainly undergone some later 
 interpolations. Many of the ancient names belong to the 
 North German cycle of romance. A special place is given to 
 Offa of Ongle. We hear also of personages known to us from 
 the poem of Beowulf, of Einn, and Hnaef, of Hrothgar, Ingeld, 
 and of the town of Heorot. It is a list of great importance for 
 the history of the ancient tribes of Germany and for the heroic 
 sagas of that country, but it has no literary value, and no per- 
 sonal interest. The personal interest comes in at line 87, after 
 an interpolation of twelve lines. Widsith tells of his voyage 
 to Eormanric, of his return, of the welcome his lord gave him, 
 and of the songs he sung at home with his brother bard Scil- 
 
 1 The Myrgings, the dwellers near the marh, lived perhaps in the Elbe- 
 land between the Elbe and the Eyder, and were neighbours of the Angles. 
 
 2 I assume here, (or literary purposes, that the poem was written by one man, 
 and that it is a personal account of his wanderings. In that way we can see 
 the thing as JSlfred saw it, and it is the first way in which we should look at 
 it. The critical consideration of its genuineness comes in afterwards, and will 
 be found in a note at the end of this volume. 
 
 " On the supposition that this list is the genuine work of Widsith, that is, 
 of a poet who in his early youth, visited Hermanric, this " ^Ifwine in Italy " 
 cannot be Alboin, but, as Guest conjectures, some Chief fighting in Italy 
 probably during the inroad of Alaric and under his banner, in the beginning " 
 of the fifth century. If that explanation be rejected, the name .ffilfwine unless i 
 we advance the date of the poem to the seventh century, must have been inter- - 
 polated, for Alboin died in 572, two hundred years later than the death of 
 Hermanric (370) whom Widsith says he visited in his youth. 
 
WIDSITH, DEOR, AND THE SCOP 
 
 ling._ The little tale is so simple, so direct, and so full of the 
 detail of memory, that here if anywhere we seem to get to the 
 genuuie matter. 
 
 For a longish time lived I with Eormanrio ; 
 
 There the King of Gotens with his gifts was good to me ; 
 
 He, the Prince of hurg-indwellers, gave to me an armlet. 
 
 On the which 600 scats of heaten gold 
 
 Scored were, in scillings reckoned.i 
 
 This I gave to Eadgils, to my lord who guarded me — 
 
 When I homeward came — for his own possession, 
 
 Eor my Master's meed, Lord of Myrgings he — 
 
 Since he granted land to me, homeland of my fathers. 
 
 And another gift Ealdhild gave to me, 
 
 Eolk queen of the doughty men, daughter of Eadwine. 
 
 Over many lands I prolonged her praise. 
 
 When so e'er in singing I must say to men 
 
 Where heneath the sky I had known the hest 
 
 Of all gold-embroidered queens giving lavishly her gifts. 
 
 Scilling then and with him I, in a voicing clear, 
 
 Lifted up the lay to our lord the conqueror ; 
 
 Loudly at the harping lilted high our voice. 
 
 Then our hearers many, haughty of their heart, 
 
 They that couth it well, clearly said in words 
 
 That a better lay listed had they never. 
 
 The poem now represents his further wanderings among the 
 Gothic tribes that, one after another, fought and began to settle 
 in the provinces of Italy ; and again, when he grew older, his 
 visits to the Gothic princes while they were still fighting with 
 the Huns in the dark woods about the Vistula. " Often was 
 battle fierce," he sings, " when with hard swords the host of 
 the Hreads had to guard the old fatherland against the bands 
 of Mtla, (Attila) all about the Wistla Wood." He names many 
 of the warriors with whom he companied, and in whose camps 
 he sang, but most " Wudga. and Hama " (both of whom become 
 personages in the hero sagas), "not the worst of my friends, 
 though I name them the last." Then in four lines he sketches 
 that long and dreadful war which the East Goten waged with 
 the Huns, and so great is the power, even of poor poetry, that 
 we see, as if they were alive, Wudga and Hama whirling the 
 spear for wife and child in Wistla Wood. 
 
 1 The portions of a bedij, outlined on the gold, would be called scillings ; 
 when these were adjusted to a fixed scale upon the weight of the solidus, the 
 scilling would become (1) a definite division of a ring, (2) a division equal in 
 weight to a solidus, and this is the meaning here; but see, for the whole 
 matter, English Coins, British Museum. 
 
EARLY ENGLISH LITEEATURE 
 
 Oft from their hosting hurtling through air 
 Midst the fierce folk flew the spear yelling. 
 Exiles, they ruled o'er their women, their men ; 
 Gold-wreathen warriors, Wudga and Hama. 
 
 Then, leaving out verses 131-134, which are an interpolation, ; 
 the Traveller ends his verses by a description of the wandering 
 singer and of the glory of his art. Thus, drifting on, the glee- 
 men rove through many lands — 
 
 Say (in song) their need, speak aloud their thankword ! 
 Always South or Northward some one they encounter, 
 Who, — for he is learned in lays, lavish in his giving ~- 
 Would before his men of might magnify his sway. 
 Manifest his earlship. 
 
 Till all flits away — 
 Life and light together — laud who getteth so 
 Hath beneath the heaven high established power. 
 
 The poem has but little literary value, but a certain literary- 
 charm is diffused over it by the names it enshrines — names of 
 men concerning whom great sagas were written, and whose 
 gests and government made a noise which filled the ear of the 
 world. If the writer really saw Hermanric and Attila before 
 they became heroes of Teutonic saga, we transfer to him and 
 to his poem our pleasure in their cycle of stories. The very 
 possibility that he saw these men excites us. Moreover, if we 
 consider the poem to be of the fifth century, the light of four 
 cycles of lays is reflected backwards upon it. Its names bring 
 before us the sagas of Hermanric, of Alboin, of Gudrun, and | 
 Beowulf; the story of Off a, and of the fight at Einnsburg. We , 
 may be said to be present at the birth and to watch over the! 
 cradle of these great Teutonic sagas. Even if the poem be of 
 the seventh century, and these sagas are behind it and not 
 before it, this reflected literary charm is still present. All the 
 great figures rise before our eyes as we read their names in the 
 dry detail of the catalogue. We may also bind it up with 
 another fancy for which we have a good foundation. We may 
 fairly imagine the delight of .Alfred when he read this poem. 
 The catalogue of tribes and kings, the geographical details it 
 contains would fall in with the temper of the king who trans- 
 lated and added to Orosius, who wrote down from Ohthere's 
 and Wulfstan's lips their voyages to the North Sea, and to the 
 mouth of the Vistula. Moreover, the passion for roving, for 
 adventure, which is keen above all other nations in the people 
 of our island, makes this poem representative of the English. 
 
WIDSITH, DEOE, AND THE SC6p 
 
 Widsith is our Ulysses. "I have fared through many stranger 
 lands, through the spacious earth ; good and evil have I known." 
 It is the true description of a common type of Englishman in 
 every period of our history. Nor is Widsith's pleasure in his 
 art or his practical pleasure in the receipt of gifts, less char- 
 acteristic of the English. But the gifts are little in comparison 
 with his joy in his work, and his reverence for it. Even great 
 kings are but little, he thinks, without their singer. In his 
 hands their history lies, and their honour. Horace did not 
 feel more strongly the need of a sacred bard to chronicle great 
 actions than did the earliest of English poets. 
 
 The poem is then not only the story of wanderings, it also 
 sketches the life and the repute of the Scop — the name given 
 to the singer and poet who was retained in the court of a king 
 or the hall of a great noble. He was frequently one of the 
 thegns, and received money and landright from the king. He 
 may have been, if not a thegn, on an equality with them ; and 
 was often, as we see in Beowulf,'^ a renowned captain. Some- 
 times, like Widsith, or perhaps like Cynewulf at one period of 
 his life, he took to roving, and singing from court to court. In 
 this fashion he became the travelling geographer and historian, 
 the bringer of news, the man who, by singing the great deeds 
 of warriors in various lands, knit together by a common bond 
 of admiration the heroes of diverse peoples, and made the great 
 stories the common property of the Teutonic tribes. 
 
 As Widsith is the picture of the poet in his happiness, singing 
 his life in a lyrical fashion, (it has been attempted to arrange 
 the poem in strophes), so the Lament of Deor images the Scop 
 in his sorrow. This song is much later, I think, than Widsith. 
 It belongs to a time when the Gothic cycle of lays had at least 
 well begun. Hermanric has become legendary. Theodric has 
 become the fabulous hero. But the prominence of the story of 
 Weland, and the mention of Geat, localise the poem among the 
 Northern Teutonic tribes. Erom these it was brought to Eng- 
 land, perhaps by some belated Angles, if Sweet be right in his 
 conjecture that it may have been composed before the English 
 migration. I think it is likely to be much later, and to have 
 been made in England — it is put by some as far on as the^eighth 
 century, — but no decision can be come to on the matter. Its 
 form is remarkable. It has a refrain, and there is no other 
 early English instance of this known to us. It is written in 
 
 1 Beowulf is the name of a poem, and of the hero whose deeds are sung in 
 the poem. Whenever I mention the poem, I print its name in italics, and 
 whenever the hero is meant, his name is in ordinary type. 
 
6 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 strophes, and Sweet thinks that it may be a solitary remnant 
 of a number of English strophic lays which belonged to the 
 same class as some of the old Scandinavian lays which were 
 rudely atrophic.^ One motive, constant throughout, is ex- 
 pressed in the refrain. This dominant cry of passion makes 
 the poem a true lyric, and we ought to look upon it with 
 pleasure, for it is the Father of all English lyrics. 
 
 Deor is not like Widsith, a treasure-gifted singer, always in 
 favour of his lord. Like the Wanderer who looks back with 
 mourning on the time when he was his master's favourite, he 
 has been deprived of his rewards and lands, and has seen a 
 rival set above his head. It is this whirling down of Fortune's 
 wheel that he mourns in his song, and he compares his fate 
 to that of others who have suffered, so that he may have some 
 comfort. But the comfort is stern like that the Northmen 
 take. Others, he thinks, have gone through great griefs, and 
 come out on the other side of them — so also may he win 
 through his pain. 
 
 Here is the song, and the legendary woes of which he speaks 
 show that the English knew the story of Weland well, the 
 story of Great, of Hermanric, of Theodric, and the tale which 
 became in after years the saga of Gudrun — 
 
 Weland for a woman ^ knew too well exile! 
 Strong of soul that earl, sorrow sharp he bore ; 
 To companionship he had care and weary longing, 
 Winter-freezing wretchedness. Woe he fomid again, again, 
 After that NithhM in a Need had laid him — 
 Staggering sinew-wounds — sorrow-smitten man! 
 That he overwent ; this also may I. 
 
 Not to Beadohild was her brothers' death 
 On her soul so sore as was her self-sorrow, 
 When that she was sure, with a surety far too great, ; 
 
 That with child she was. Never could she think, 
 With a clear remembrance, how that came to be 
 That she overwent ; this also may I, 
 
 Of this meed of Hild we've from many heard ; 
 And so bottomless was the passion Geit felt, 
 
 Ge:tTtTottiti%"Lro?\rv°Ji^i^s^^^^ 
 
WIDSITH, DEOE, AND THE SCOP 
 
 That Love-sorrow stole all his sleep away ! 
 That he overwent ; this also may I. 
 
 For a thirty winters did Theodrio fast 
 Hold the Maerings' burg. Many knew of that. 
 That he overwent ; this also may I. 
 
 "We in songs have heard of the wolfish thought 
 That Bormanric had 1 Ear he owned the folk 
 Of the Gotens' realm. Grisly was that king. 
 Many a warrior sat, with his sorrows cloaked, 
 Woe within his waiting ! Wistfully he longed 
 That the kingdom's kingi overcome should be ! 
 That he overwent ; this also may I. 
 
 I omit here what seems a Christian interpolation of the 
 ordinary gnomic character. We may, however, give thanks to 
 it, for. I suspect we owe the preservation of this lyric to the 
 zeal of the interpolator who saw in the sadness of Deor an 
 opportunity for introducing his gentle phrases on the vanity 
 of life and the mercy of God. The rest is Deor's own. The 
 Heorrenda who conquered Deor may be the Horant of the 
 Gudrun saga of whom it is said that he bound all men with 
 his song, that the beasts who listened to him ceased to graze 
 iu the woods, and the worms and fishes forgot their daily work 
 in his singing. " Now," he says, " I will say concerning my- 
 self" 
 
 Whilom was I Scop of the Heodenings : 
 
 Dear unto my Lord ! Deor was my name. 
 
 Well my service was to me many winters through ; 
 
 Loving was my Lord ; till at last Heorrenda, — 
 
 Skilled in song the man ! — seized upon my land-right 
 
 That the guard of earls granted erst to me. 
 
 That one overwent ; this also may I. 
 
 With this song begins and ends the Old English lyric. We 
 have in Anglo-Saxon a few elegiac poems of fine quality, but 
 the true lyric — short, at unity with one thought, with one cry 
 of joyful or sorrowful passion — does not occur again till long 
 after the Conquest. 
 
 We have yet another sketch of the Sc6p which we may well 
 set beside the sketches in Widsith and in Deor, though it 
 belongs to a later time in Anglo-Saxon literature. It is the 
 eighty-ninth riddle of Cynewulf which Dietrich has happily 
 solved as the Wandering Singer — . 
 
 1 1 have introduced king into the text. 
 
EARLY ENGLISH LITERATtlEE chap. 
 
 ^theling am I, and to earls am known ; 
 
 And not rarely do I rest with the rich and with the poor ; 
 
 Midst the Folks I'm famous. "Widely fares (through hall) — 
 
 And for me a foreigner,! rather than for friends — 
 
 Loud the plunderers' applause, if that I should have 
 
 Glory in the Burgs or the goods that shine. 
 
 Also very great the love that well-witted men 
 
 Have of meeting me. I to many folk 
 
 Wisdom do unveil. Not a word on earth 
 
 Then is said by any man. Though the sons of men, 
 
 Though the Earth-indwellers, eagerly seek after 
 
 Footprints that I leave, frequently I hide. 
 
 Prom all men that are, my (unfoUowed) way. 
 
 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 Sc6p. 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 Beovmlf, 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, listen- 
 ing. 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 ScQp 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 Scop 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 /remdum mstead of /remdes — that the warriors enjoy the singing of a 
 stranger, since he is new to them, more than the singing of their own hards 
 
1 WIDSITH, DEOR, AND THE SC(3p 9 
 
 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 mis- 
 fortune had befallen his lord, like the " Wanderer," or because, 
 like Deor, he was dispossessed by a rival. 
 
 Below the Scop there were a great number of inferior singers 
 who made it their business to go from place to place, to whom 
 the name of Sc5p was not given — who did not shape, but sang 
 that which had been shapen by the Scop. These were the 
 ^ leemen . though their name is sometimes given to the Scop — 
 and in later Anglo-Saxon times, they were not unfrequently 
 accompanied by jugglers, tumblers, and wrestlers. These two 
 — the Scop 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. War- 
 riors 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. Alfred, 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. Ereedmen, 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 exditement, 
 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 Scop, like the independent word 
 
10 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 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 Cfnomic 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 sepa- 
 rate 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 Beoijoulft)xe heal- 
 gamen, 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 Ger- 
 mania, we find the Teutonic tribes harpists and singers of 
 verse. "They are a fair-haired folk," says Tacitus, "blue- 
 eyed, 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 war- 
 songs 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 
 
1 WIDSITH, DEOR, AND THE SCOP 11 
 
 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 ; ^ 
 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 cere- 
 monies, 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 aiiy historical statement can do, that the first English 
 were not in Britain, but in the Low Dutch lands and Den- 
 mark — that there was an England there before our Eng- 
 land. 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 G-esta 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 ex- 
 cellent, " devoured with privy paw, and nothing said." 
 
 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 Sieg- 
 fried. 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 Vol- 
 sung and Niblung saga. Arminius, " canitur adhuc barbaros apud gentes. 
 
 2 I cannot find the passage ; I quote from memory. I may as well say m 
 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 Vene- 
 tians and the English. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 BEOWULF 
 
 Introduction 
 
 The Beowulf MS. (Cotton Vitellius A. xv.) was one of those 
 collected by Sir Eobert 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 1763, 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 poetic^ 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 schol- 
 arly book increased the interest of foreign scholars in the 
 poem ; and, since then, a great number of editions and trans- 
 lations 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 
 12 
 
BEOWULF 13 
 
 great deeds against the monster Grendel and his dam, the sec- 
 ond Beowulf's conquest of the Fire-drake and his death and 
 burial. The first division may be again divided into two — 
 the fight with Grendel, and the fight with Grendel's mother 
 — and some suppose that they are due to different hands. 
 Several episodes are introduced which are linked on, often 
 very roughly, to the history of Beowulf, and two or three 
 of these seem to be taken from other sagas of even an earlier 
 date than the original lays of the legend. 
 
 The same kind of controversy which has raged over the com- 
 position of the Iliad and Odyssey has raged also over Beowulf. 
 It is said that it is a single poem composed by one man ; and, 
 on the contrary, that it is a poem built up, in process of time, 
 by various hands, and consisting of various lays of different 
 ages ; and this opinion, to take one instance, has been worked 
 out by Miillenhof with a minuteness which makes the most 
 severe demands upon our credulity. We are to conceive first 
 of two old lays by different authors, then of a continuation of 
 one of these, and then of an introduction to the whole by two 
 other authors. The fifth — a reviser — added another portion 
 and altered the previous work to suit his addition, and another 
 reviser, the sixth in the series, increased the poem by episodes 
 from other sagas and by Christian interpolations. Elaborate 
 arrangements of this kind are as doubtful as they are interest- 
 ing. The main point, however, seems clear. Beowulf was 
 biult up out of many legends which in time coalesced into 
 something of a whole, or were, as I think, composed together 
 into a poem by one poet. The legends were sung in the Old 
 England across the seas, and brought to our England by the 
 Angles, or by that band of Jutes or Saxons whom many sup- 
 pose to have settled, at an early time, in northern Northum- 
 bria. They were then sung in Northumbria, added to by Nor- 
 thumbrian singers, and afterwards, when Christianity was still 
 young, compressed and made into a poem by a Christian singer. 
 
 The first question we have to ask is with regard to the date 
 of the story. Is it entirely mythical and legendary, or is there 
 any actual history contained in it which will enable us to date 
 its composition ? Such a connection with known history has 
 been suggested. The Hygelac of the poem, Beowulf's lord, has 
 been identified with the King Chochilaicus, who is mentioned 
 in the Historia Francorum of Gregory of Tours, and in another 
 chronicle — the Gesta Begum Francorum. 
 
 About 512-520, when the conquest of Britain had but begun, 
 when the victory of the Britons at Mount Badon caused a long 
 
14 EARLY ENGLISH LITEEATURE chap. 
 
 pause in the advance of the English, we are told that Chochila- 
 icus made an expedition from the modern Gotaland to the Attu- 
 arii of the Frisian shore — the Hetware of the poem — to plun- 
 der and to slay. When he was about to leave, having laden his 
 ships -with slaves and spoil, the Frankish king Theodoric sent 
 his son to attack him with an army of Franks and Frisians. In 
 the battle Chochilaicus fell and all the booty was recovered. 
 
 This affair is four times mentioned in the poem of Beowulf, 
 if we identify Hygelac with Chochilaicus. We are told that 
 fate carried away Hygelac in feud against the Frisians. He 
 fell under his shield. His life and the jewelled collar he had 
 from Beowulf passed into the power of the Franks. Beowulf 
 himself, before he goes down to fight with the dragon, tells of this 
 fight ; how Hygelac fell, how he avenged his lord's death. Two 
 other allusions are made in the poem to the same expedition 
 and battle. It is said, therefore, that it must have been after 
 the date of 520 that the main story of the poem arose. Of that 
 there can be no doubt, but we have also to. remember that parts 
 of the poem are drawn from lays older than 620 ; lays, some of 
 which, as the preface about Scyld, may go back to a remote 
 antiquity. But the poem itself carries us past the death of 
 Hygelac in 520 to Beowulf's death in 570. Only after that 
 date, then, could the last part — the fight with the Dragon — 
 begin to be welded to the first part of the story, and this would 
 take at least thirty years to accomplish. This would bring us 
 to the year 600. If we take that date, and if we make the 
 poem Northumbrian, this first interweaving of the lays would 
 be made about the time of jEthelfrith, before Northumbria had 
 become Christian.^ 
 
 The second question to ask is. Where is the scene of the 
 poem laid ? It has been supposed by some, who hold that it 
 was composed from end to end in England, that the scenery is 
 English, and Mr. Haigh has ingeniously endeavoured to identify 
 its descriptions with places on the coast of Yorkshire. But 
 there is not one word about our England in the poem, not a 
 single hint that the original singers knew of the existence of 
 such a people as the English in Britain. The personages, the 
 
 1 This argument is based on the supposition that Beowulf was, at least partly, 
 an historical personage. But the supposition is a doubtful one, and we can 
 come to no certainty with regard to the date of the story. I have almost as- 
 sumed that the poem arose into shape in Northumbria, hut Professor Earle 
 thinks that Mercia was the place ot its birth, and Ten Brink endeavours to 
 establish West Saxon connections for it. Professor Earle's interesting book 
 The Deeds of Beowulf, has just been published, and his theory of the origin of 
 the poem is fully expounded in it, 
 
BEOWULr 15 
 
 tribes are all of the continent — 'North, South, East and West 
 Danes, the Geats, the Sweons, and the Frisians. The Danes 
 dwelt in Seeland, and their chief town was there ; the Geats in 
 Scandinavia, in Gotaland, and their king's town was on the 
 west coast near the mouth of the Gotaelf . The name Wederas 
 and Weder-Geatas suggested to Grain a connection with the 
 Island Vaderoe or Veiroe, and with the group of islands Vade- 
 roane. The scenery then is laid on the coast of the North Sea 
 and the Kattegat, the first act of the poem among the Danes in 
 Seeland, the second among the Geats in South Sweden. 
 
 It is held then that the earliest lays of the story arose among 
 the Geats and the Danes, and it is chiefly with these tribes, their 
 manners, and their customs, that we are here concerned. But 
 their manners and their customs were the same as those of the 
 Angles. Angle and Geat and Dane spoke the same language, 
 and were all kinsmen — and I am not sure whether we might 
 not with propriety call Angle the tribes of South Sweden, or 
 at least the Geats of the poem. At any rate Beowulf became 
 English. The earliest lays of the poem were adopted by the 
 older England on the mainland,^ the scenery of the poem was 
 scenery with which the elder English were well acquainted 
 before they came to Britain. However we may hold that the 
 poem was altered and edited, its foundation lays were sung by 
 a people who lived in South Sweden, in Denmark, in the Isles, 
 and about the Elbe. Having thus conjectured the date at 
 which the story began to take shape, and the place in which it 
 arose, we may ask what theory we may form concerning its 
 upbuilding. A multitude of theories have been put forward, 
 differing here and there in minor points from one another. But 
 the main lines are almost the same in the greater number, and 
 I have brought them together here into as compact a form as I 
 
 1 There is a theory of EttmiiUer's which is interesting. In his view the story 
 arose in the sixth or seventh century among the Geatas, inhabitants of South 
 Scandinavia, who along with the Danes set up a Dano-Gautic kingdom which 
 lasted till 720 or 730 a.d. But there were Danish and Geat settlers from this 
 kingdom in Northumbria in the eighth century, and these brought the Song 
 of Beowulf with them. Then some English poet, a layman, perhaps a pagan, 
 put it into vernacular English. Afterwards, in the eighth or ninth century, this 
 poem was redone by a clerical person in the West Saxon dialect. 
 
 Another suggestion may be made. If it should ever come to be clearly 
 established — as some believe — that a branch of the same Jutish folk who seized 
 on Kent in 450, had, about the same time, settled on the coast of Scotland, south 
 of the Forth, so that Eadwine when he came there found English already spoken 
 in the country— why then, the mythical lays of Beowa (added afterwards to 
 the Beowulf legend) may have been brought to this part of England and sung 
 in English there as early as the fifth century — and by the very folk, the Jutes, 
 among whom they originally rose. The Angles would then have found them 
 there, heard them sung, and adapted these mythic lays to their Beowulf story. 
 
16 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 can.^ The account is eclectic; I have added a few conjectures 
 of my own, and I must risk some repetition for the sake of 
 clearness. 
 
 The date of the death of Hygelac (512-520) is taken as the 
 starting-point of the poem, and it is supposed that there was 
 a Beowulf — an historical personage — who was present at his 
 overthrow, a relation of Hygelac's, a mighty warrior and 
 seaman, whose strength was very great — so that in tradition 
 it was said to be as the strength of thirty men — and who 
 slew the slayer of Hygelac in the fight. The fame of this great 
 warrior (unmentioned in the Chronicle of Gregory of Tours) 
 had been, according to the poem, spread far and wide among the 
 Geats, the Island Danes, and the Angles, but now it became still 
 greater. In every hall, at every feast, while he was alive, his 
 gests were sung, and out of these rude songs was formed the 
 germ of the story. After his death in 670 he grew into the 
 legendary hero ; wonderful tales collected round his boyhood, 
 like the story of the swimming match with Breca, and his man- 
 hood's deeds became more and more marvellous. These leg- 
 ends entered into the original historic lays or became separate ' 
 lays. A hero saga had begun, and was spread all over South • 
 Sweden and Denmark, among Geats, Danes, Angles, and it may 
 be among the Saxons. That is the first step. The second is 
 the addition to the legend of already existing myth, and of lays 
 which were older than the historic Beowulf, older, that is, 
 than the sixth century. It is suggested that there was among 
 these Scandinavian, Danish, and Angle tribes an ancient myth 
 concerning a divine hero whose name was Beowa, whom the 
 introduction of the poem describes as one of the ancestors of 
 Hrothgar the Dane. Beowa is the son of Scyld, son of Sceaf, 
 who appears in the Anglo-Saxon genealogies as one of the 
 ancestors of Woden. Beaw is his name in these genealogies, 
 and we find traces of him in some names of places in England, 
 such as Beowanhamm and Grendlesmere. This mythic hero 
 was the real conqueror of Grendel and the conqueror of the 
 Dragon. As time went on, these mythic deeds were trans- 
 ferred to the historic Beowulf. The subject had now grown 
 into almost epic proportions. Not very much later the second 
 part of the Grendel story was added to the first — the fight 
 
 1 They will all be found with all their differences in Walker's Grundriss, 
 pp. 269, etc. etc. The above account follows, on the whole, the analysis Ten 
 Brink, following others, makes of the origin of the lays ; but it does not dis- 
 allow, but rather avers, that the poem, as we have it, was put into form by one 
 poet, and with a distinct effort at unity of effect and purpose. 
 
BEOWULF 17 
 
 with Grendel's mother. The additions afterwards made — the 
 episode of Scyld, of Fiiin's battle, of the Swedish war, of 
 Thrytho,^ and others — were such as might easily be foisted in 
 by different bards, to fill up the portions of the saga which 
 they chose out for their evening song to the warriors. 
 Many more, no doubt, crept in, but those that remain are 
 those which Time has selected. The lays in this condition 
 were developed in our England and continued to be sung, even 
 after the introduction of Christianity, in their ancient pagan 
 shape. The warriors in hall were not likely to ask for any 
 Christianising of these songs. Lastly, some poet, with much 
 sympathy for heathen sagas and with as much Christianity as 
 belonged to a man of the world, took all the lays, recast them 
 in his own mind, formed them into a whole, embodied the 
 episodes out of other sagas, conceived the character of 
 Beowulf afresh, and with an ethical purpose, made it the 
 central motive of the whole, and wrote the poem, for the most 
 part, as it is. This is different from saying, as so many do, 
 that it was a fortuitous congeries of lays ; but, at the same 
 time, it asserts — and it is necessary to assert this — that there 
 were separate Beowulf lays existing, of different ages, long 
 before this continuous poem was composed by a single poet 
 with a single aim. He used these lays, and sometimes, it seems 
 to me, inserted their very words. Existing thus in ISTorthumbria 
 from the beginning, as I think, of the eighth century, it passed 
 through England, and I imagine that now and again slight 
 additions were made to it by those who wished to Christianise 
 it more than the original writer had done. To such persons, 
 we owe, it may be, the homiletic parts of the poem. The final 
 fortune that befell it was its translation into the Wessex dialect, 
 and it is in that dialect that we possess it. 
 
 The last thing to say with regard to these questions of date, 
 origin, and place is that we may fairly claim the poem as Eng- 
 lish. It is in our tongue, and in oiir country alone that it is 
 preserved. The memory of it seems to have died out of South 
 
 iThe episode of Thrytho, for example, and all the allusions to the Offa 
 legend in the latter part of the poem might very easily have been intruded into 
 . it by some singer of Offa's court, in order to please or admonish the king, or 
 Ec^erth his son. The poem, reads in the special place where this episode 
 occurs as if this had been done. It is there in much confusion, and the inser- 
 tion seems never to have been harmonised with the original. I should con- 
 jecture that this episode was the very last which was introduced into the 
 poem. This is very different from saying, as Earle does, that the Offa episode 
 gives the key to the formation of the whole poem ; and that the poem was 
 made, as it stands, at the court of Offa, with the distinct purpose of instructing 
 Ecgferth in the duties of a prince. 
 
18 EARLY ENGLISH LITEKATTJRE chap. 
 
 Sweden and the Danish isles. It was kept alive by the Angles, 
 and those who preserved it and the country that sheltered it 
 may claim the honour of its possession. In its pages are our 
 folk, their ways of life and fashion of thought ; and not only 
 ours, but those of all North Teutonic folk from the end of the 
 fifth century to the end of the seventh, to the end, I daresay, of 
 the eighth. Any record of the manners and customs of the Teu- 
 tonic peoples of those centuries is of great historical value. 
 We have in the ancient Teutonic laws hints which throw light 
 upon the habits of that time ; but we have little that vividly 
 represents the daily life of the North Teutonic peoples. It is 
 this very want which is supplied by Beowulf. That tale gives 
 us a picture of human life at this early time — let us say from 
 the sixth to the eighth century — full of detail, painted in 
 colours fresh and vivid, in which we see the works of war and 
 peace, the king's hall, the harbour and the coast, the ships 
 a-sailing, the life of the rovers, the settled town, the moorland 
 round it, the hunt, the feast, the relations of the chief to his 
 thegns and to his people, the customs of the court, of land and 
 of gifts, the position of women, the burial of great personages. 
 Behind the wars and tribal wanderings, behind the contentions 
 of the great, we watch in this poem the steady, continuous life 
 of home, the passions and thoughts of men, the way they talked 
 and moved and sang and drank and lived and loved among one 
 another and for one another. This is the value of Beowulf as 
 history, and it is of especial worth to us. It is a record of the 
 way our forefathers lived both on the continent and in our own 
 country, and the record ought to be of surpassing interest. 
 
 There are other matters of interest which belong to the poem, 
 matters religious, mythical, and literary, but they will be better 
 discussed in another place. At present only one thing more 
 remains before we come to the poem itself. It is to collect 
 out of it the early history of its hero, and to bring that history 
 up to the point at which the poem begins. There are materials 
 enough for this work. Many allusions are made to the hero's 
 youth. He gives an account of his early years in his death 
 song. His dearest comrade, Wiglaf, speaks of his early wars. 
 To coUect all these scattered hints into one continuous story 
 will make the whole poem clearer, and will enable me to sketch 
 the character of Beowulf as he appears in youth and manhood. 
 It is the English ideal of a hero as it was conceived by an Eng- 
 lishman some twelve hundred years ago. 
 
 Among the thegns who served Hrethel, King of the Geats, 
 was Ecgtheow, of the family of the Waegmundings, a wise I 
 
BEOWULF 19 
 
 and great warrior ; and Hrethel, seeing his prowess, gave him 
 his only daughter to wife, and of these two came Beowulf 
 whom his grandfather loved, for he left to him a famous coat 
 of mail that Weland the great forgeman had smithied. Now 
 Hrethel had three sons, Herebeald, Haethcyn, and Hygelac, 
 and these were uncles of Beowulf. The first two perished 
 before the action of the poem opens, and only Hygelac was 
 left alive to be King of the Geats. Hygelac had a daughter 
 who is scarcely in the story, and, byiis second (?) wife Hygd 
 a son called Heardred, Beowulf's cousin. Not one of these is 
 left alive at the conclusion of the pOem. On his mother's side 
 all Beowulf's kindred are gone. 
 
 On his father's side, that is among the Waegmundings, none 
 are left but Wiglaf, son of Weohstan ; the last thus of aU the 
 hero's race, for Beowulf died childless. This fewness of 
 kindred, this solitariness, is one of the pathetic points of the 
 poem. Beowulf speaks of it again and again ; to Hrothgar, 
 to Hygelac, to others ; and it is the last of his thoughts when 
 he is dying. This, as well as his immense strength, isolates 
 the hero, and the inward pathos of it — always great to a 
 Northman — gave him, it may be, some of that gentleness for 
 which, among a violent race, he is celebrated in the saga. 
 Mildness and more than mortal daring meet in him, and the 
 mildness, even more than the daring, separates his figure from 
 the rest. 
 
 Ecgtheow, his father, had in his younger days great praise 
 among the coasts and isles for the mighty fight he had with 
 Heatholaf, a Wylfing, whom he slew with his own hand. 
 Then he took to roaming the seas and reached in his roaming 
 the court of Hrothgar, King of the Scylding Danes, when 
 Hrothgar was still young, and he became the king's man. 
 For Hrothgar healed, for his sake, Ecgtheow's feud with the 
 Wylfings, sending old-time treasures to them over the water's 
 ridge. Afterwards, Ecgtheow went back to the land of the 
 Geats, taking with him his son Beowulf, who seems to have 
 been known, perhaps born, at Hrothgar's court, and settled in 
 his home, " living many winters ere he died, and all the wise 
 men, far and wide on earth, remembered him:" This wisdom 
 descends to Beowulf. Though he is young when he comes 
 to Hrothgar to conquer Grendel, it is of his counsel as 
 much as of his strength that we hear. Wealhtheow, the 
 queen, begs him to be friendly in counsel to her sons. 
 Hrothgar says to him, " thou boldest thy fame with patience, 
 and thy might with prudence of mind. Thou shalt be a 
 
20 EAKLY ENGLISH LITEEATURE chap. 
 
 comfort to thy people and a help to heroes." When he gives 
 an account of the patched-up truce between the Danes and 
 the Heathobeards, his political vision of the end shows how 
 clear and experienced was his judgment of human nature. 
 When Hygelac his lord is dead, Hygd the queen begs him to 
 rule the kingdom because its foes were many, and none could 
 order matters more wisely than he. When he is dying, he 
 looks back on his life, and that which he thinks of the most, 
 is not his great war-deeds, but his patience, his prudence, his 
 power of holding his own well, and of avoiding new enmities. 
 Nowhere is this temper better shown than in the words he 
 speaks to Hrothgar when the king bursts out into an old 
 man's passionate sorrow for the death of ^schere, his dearest 
 thegn — " Sorrow not, wise man," says Beowulf, " it is better 
 that a man should avenge his friend than mourn him over- 
 much. Each of us must await the close of life. Let him 
 who can, gain honour before he die. That is best for a 
 warrior, when he is dead. But do thou, throughout this day, 
 have patience of thy woes ; I look for that from thee." 
 
 Gentle like Nelson, he had Nelson's iron resoluteness. 
 What he undertook to do, he went through without a thought 
 save of getting to the end of it. His very words when he 
 spoke made those who heard him conscious of his firm-set 
 purpose (line 611). "Firm-minded Prince" is one of his 
 names. The heights his character gained he was able to keep ; 
 and a similar phrase to that is twice used of the hero. Fear 
 is wholly unknown to him, and he seems, like Nelson, to have 
 inspired his captains with his own courage. It is a notable 
 touch that when his thegns go to bed in the haU that Grendel 
 haunts, it is said of them " that none of them thought that he 
 should ever again seek his well-loved home, the folk in the free 
 burg where he was brought up " — and with this thought they 
 all fell asleep. It is a trait worthy of the crew of the Victory. 
 
 But his gentleness did not keep him back from fierce self- 
 defence. When Hunferth accused him of being beaten in his 
 match with Breca, his answer is full of scorn, of mocking, and 
 of savage retort. " Drunken with beer, my friend, hast thou 
 Spoken of Breca — thou who wast thine own brother's mur- 
 derer. Grendel, the grisly monster, had never wrought so 
 many ills for thy king, nor such a shame in Heorot, had thy 
 courage been as fierce as thou claimest ! " Yet afterwards, 
 when Hunferth, sober, lends him the old-world sword, Hrunt- 
 ing, he forgets his wrath and asks, if he die in his fight with 
 Grendel's mother, that Hunferth may have one of his own 
 
BEOWULF 21 
 
 swords. This swift wrath, forgetfulness, and generosity, are 
 all of Nelson's character. The boastfulness was not. Beownlf 
 always boasts before a battle of what he has done and will do 
 against the foe. When he is going to die he sings a death-lay 
 of his own glories. This, of which in some writer I have seen 
 blame, is the fashion of the Northmen. Every Icelandic story 
 is full of it, and all who hear Beowulf boast are as much 
 pleased as the above writer is displeased. 
 
 Nor was he less prompt in the blood-feud than in speech, 
 but the vengeance was not private or hasty. It is specially 
 said of him that he did not, like some others, "kill his 
 drunken hearth-companions ; nor was his mind cruel." So 
 also his sense of honour, of which he was so jealous, was not 
 held in a nice readiness to take personal offence, but in abso- 
 lute truthfulness — "I swore no false oaths," he said when 
 dying. So also he kept his honour in faithfulness to his lord 
 — " on foot, alone in front, while life lasted, he was his king's 
 defence." He kept it in an equal faithfulness when his lord 
 was dead, and that to his own loss ; for when Hygd offered him 
 the kingdom he refused ; and trained Heardred, Hygelac's son, 
 "to war and learning; guarded him kindly with honour," and 
 avenged him when he was slain. He kept it in generosity, for 
 he gave away all the gifts he received; in courtesy, for he 
 gave gifts even to those who had been rude to him, and he is 
 always gentle and grave with women. Above all, he kept it 
 clean in war, for these things are said of him — " So shall a 
 man do when he thinks to gain praise that shall never end, and 
 cares not for his life in battle." " Let us have fame or death ! " 
 he cries ; and when Wiglaf comes to help him against the 
 dragon, and Beowulf is wrapt in the flame, Wiglaf recalls to 
 him the aim of his whole life. " Beowulf beloved, bear thygelf 
 well. Thou wert wont to say in youth that thou wouldst never 
 let Honour go. Now, strong in deeds, ward thy life, firm- 
 souled Prince, with all thy might ; I will be thy helper." 
 
 These are the qualities of the man and the hero, and I have 
 thought it worth while to dwell on them because they repre- 
 sent the ancient English ideal, the manhood which pleased the 
 English folk even before they came to Britain ; and because, in 
 all our history since Beowulf's time, for 1200 years or so, they 
 have been repeated in the lives of the English warriors by land 
 and sea whom we chiefly honour. The type, especially, of the 
 great sea-captains has been the same throughout. But it is not 
 only the ideal of a hero which we have in Beownlf, it is also 
 the ideal of a king ; the just governor, the wise politician, the 
 
22 EARLY ENGLISH LITEEATURE chap. 
 
 builder of peace, the defender of liis o-wn folk at the price of 
 his life ; the " good king, the folk-king, the beloved king, the 
 ■war-ward of the land," the winner of treasure for the need of 
 his people, the hero who thinks in death of those who sail the 
 sea ; the gentle and terrible warrior who is buried amid the 
 tears of his people.^ 
 
 When Ecgtheow, to return to the tale, from whom this pru- 
 dence and wisdom of Beowulf came, had settled down at home, 
 Hrethel, Beowulf's grandfather, took the boy at seven years old 
 into his court, gave him treasures and the daily feast; and 
 remembering his kinship, made him equal to his own sons, Here- 
 beald, Haethcyn, and Hygelac. But the boy was at first sloth- 
 ful, and the Geats thought him an unwarlike prince, and long 
 despised him. Then, like many a lazy third son in the folk- 
 tales, a change came ; he suddenly showed wonderful daring, 
 and was passionate for adventure. In this youthful prime he 
 challenged Breca to the swimming match and the slaying of 
 sea-monsters, and proved himself the master of the stormy sea. 
 After that, tragic sorrow fell upon his grandfather's house. 
 Haethcyn, Hrethel's second son, slew by mistake his eldest 
 brother, piercing him to the heart with "an arrow from his 
 hornfed bow," and Beowulf, more than sixty years afterwards, 
 recalls in a pathetic passage the terrible grief of Hrethel, and 
 compares it to the grief of an aged freeman who lives to see 
 his young son hiing on the gallows tree, a joy of ravens. Old 
 and gray-headed, he can give his boy no help. Morning after 
 morning he remembers his dead. 
 
 2456. Sorrow-laden does lie look, in the Bower of his son, 
 
 On the wasted wine-hall, on the wind-swept resting-places, 
 Now bei-eft of joyous noise. 
 
 Ear the Riders sleep ; 
 In their howe the heroes lie. Clang of harp is there no more, 
 In the dwellings no delight, as in days of old.^ 
 
 So Hrethel mourned ; " dirge after dirge he sang. All too 
 empty meadows and dwellings seemed to him," and of that 
 
 1 At this point of view we may fall in with Professor Earle's contention that 
 the poem was intended to set up an heroic example of a king and warrior. 
 " It is, in short," says Earle, " the institution of a prince." 
 
 2 These verses have the look of an insertion, as if the poet knew of this 
 mournful song and used it for this place. I should like to be able, in this fash- 
 ion, to class it as an old English lyric. It has picturesqueness, simplicity, and 
 passion ; and a sweet movement. Compare — 
 
 He Baddens, all the magic light 
 Dies, off at once from bower and hall, 
 And all the place is dark, and all 
 The chambers emptied of delight. 
 
BEOWtlLF 23 
 
 pain he died. And Haethcyn his brother's slayer became king, 
 and strife broke out between him and the Sweons over the 
 ■wide water. Eor 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 Eaven'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 Haethcyn, 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.^ 
 
 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 O^K^tlieow-Eanmnnd and 
 EadSls-came into the land of the Geatas, and Eanmnnd slew Heardred 
 Hygflac's son, at a feast. Weohstan the Y^«f"°''<i™f 'J!i§lfl^l^?f,^^i' ^^^^^^^ 
 took nn the feud and slaughtered Eanmund. Long afterwards BadgUs, mvaa- 
 nfagCthe Geatas, Is^slain by Beowulf. Three generations the quarrel 
 lafted, and when Beowulf dies, one of his warriors declares that the deadly 
 hate will break out again. 
 
24 EARLY EKGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 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 ar- 
 ranged 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. The 
 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 Beo- 
 wulf'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 Wulf gar, 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. i 
 
 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 
 
BEOWULF 25 
 
 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 undis- 
 covered 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. 
 
CHAPTEE 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 intro- 
 duction 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,i the ship, 
 Ice-bright, for the outpath eager, craft of jEthelings I 
 
 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. 
 26 
 
CHAP. Ill BEOWULF 27 
 
 So their lord, the well-beloved, all at length they laid 
 In the bosom of the bark, him the bracelet-giver, — 
 By the mast the mighty king. Many gifts were there, 
 Fretted things of fairness brought from far-off ways ! — 
 Never heard I of a keel hung more comelily about 
 With the weeds of war, with the weapons of the battle, 
 With the bills and byrnies. On his breast there lay 
 A great heap of gems that should go with him. 
 Far to fare away in the Flood's possession. 
 
 Then they also set all of gold a standard. 
 High above his head ; let the heavmg ocean bear him. 
 Gave him to the sea. Sad was then their soul, 
 Mourning was their mood. None of men can say. 
 None of heroes under heaven, nor in hall the rulers. 
 For a truthful truth, who took up that lading. 
 
 Beowulf, 11. 30-40; 47-52. 
 
 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 Sinfiotli 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. Mosi, in the Njal saga, weary of life, puts out 
 to sea in a boat that all men call uaseaworthy. " '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." 
 
 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 per- 
 sonage; 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 cue 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. 
 
28 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 sea-burial is •worth, making immediately. Beowulf, dead after 
 his fight with the dragon, and his gray hair lying round his 
 head, is borne to the top of the great cliff that overlooks the 
 sea, to the very edge, where the wanderers on the sea may 
 hereafter mark his lofty barrow. The cliff has its own name. 
 Men saw from its height the whales tumbling in the waves, 
 and called it Whale's Ness (Hrones-naes) . There then the folk 
 of the Geats made ready a funeral pyre, firm-fixed on the earth, 
 and they hung it with helms and with shields of the war-host, 
 with shining shirts of battle, as the hero had asked of them — 
 
 In the midst thereof the mighty-famous king, 
 
 Their beloved lord, mourning, laid the warriors. 
 
 Then the hugest of the Bale-fires 'gan the heroes waken 
 
 High upon the hill, and the reek of wood arose 
 
 Swart above the swimming fire.i while the hissing sound of flame 
 
 "Was with weeping woven — for the wail of wind was still — 
 
 Till the fire had broken house of bone in twain. 
 
 Hot upon his heart ....... 
 
 Heaven devoured the smoke. 
 
 Beowulf, \> 3143. 
 
 This was the burning; after the burning the barrow is 
 raised ; and it shall be told at the end how the people of the 
 Weders built up on the point of the Ness a mound, high and 
 broad, to be seen from far by the sailors whom Beowulf loved*;| 
 There is yet another burial told of in the poem. The bard at ' 
 Hrothgar's table sings of the death of Hnaef, kinsman of 
 Hildeburh (perhaps her brother), and of the burning of 
 Hildeburh's son on the same pyre as Hnaef, "The blood- 
 stained battle-sark, the golden helm, thie boar crest, iron-hard, 
 were piled on the wood ; and, with the two chieftains, many 
 another jEtheling who had fallen, writhing on the field of 
 slaughter." 
 
 Then beside the pyre of Hnaef Hildeburh bade 
 Lay her well-beloved son all along the blazing flame, 
 Eor to burn the bone-chest — on the bale to place him. 
 Wretched was the woman, wept upon his shoulder. 
 Sorrowed in her dirges, and the smoke of war arose ! 2 
 Curlmg to the clouds went the greatest of corpse-fires, 
 Hissmg round the burial-howe. Then the heads were molten, 
 Oraped the gates of all the wounds ; then out gushed the blood 
 
 1 Swi&Sole is here, I think, the quivering clear space of vat)oron<! flamn lia- 
 
 sThVwavTw^,,^'"'^ "1'^ the W-rolfing smXe"lbove TTS thS 
 18 the way I here understand swa¥,ul or sweo^ol, which is talcRu tn mnan 
 
 ^l^Tl7^ir^'\^°'^'^'T'^'f'^''^^ fl™«." b»t th: word is obs^re. 
 
 passe'^^prardsTtK™^!^?"""' ^"^'"'^ ^°^'^ "-" "*''« •>-» <>* "''"I' 
 
BEOWULF 29 
 
 From the foe's bite on the body ; and the blaze devoured all, 
 Greediest it of ghosts. Beowulf, 1. 1114. 
 
 This is an inland burial, but the other two are by the sea ; 
 and the sea-note struck thus at the beginning and close of the 
 poem is heard constantly sounding through its verse. The 
 men are sea-folk. Beowulf in his youth is a sea-rover, a fighter 
 with searmonsters, a mighty swimmer of the sea. All the 
 action is laid on the sea-coast. The inland country, not the 
 sea, is the unknown, the terrible. Grendel and his dam are 
 more sea^demons than demons of the moor. Their cave is 
 underneath the sea. Nor in the last part of the poem are we 
 without the all-prevailing presence of the ocean. The dragon 
 lives in a cavern on the edge of the sea. The king and the 
 dragon fight in the hearing of the waves. Beowulf's barrow, 
 heaped high on the edge of the sea-ness, is a beacon for 
 " those who sail through tJie mists of the sea." The back- 
 ground of all the action is the great deep — ■ the chorus, as it 
 were, of this story of the fates of men. Thus the ocean 
 life, the ocean mystery, the battle with the ocean and on the 
 ocean begin the English poetry, and they are as vivid in it 
 now as they were in the youth of our people. The Battle 
 of the Baltic, the Fight of the Revenge, the Sailor Boy, Hervi 
 Biel, Swinburne's sea-songs, a hundred ballads, taste of the 
 same brine and foam which the winds drove in the faces of 
 the men who wrote Beowulf, the Seafarer, and the Middles 
 which concern the sea. .Nay, more, the very temper of mind 
 which pervades modern poetry of the sea — a mingling of 
 melancholy and exaltation — is to be found in English poetry 
 before the Conquest, and strange to say it is not found again, 
 except in scattered ballads, till we reach our own century. 
 "^ The action of the poem now begins with the voyage of Beo- 
 wulf to the Danish coast. The hero has heard that Hrothgar, 
 the chief of the Danes, is tormented by Grendel, a man-devour- 
 ing monster. If Hrothgar's warriors sleep in Heorot — the 
 great hall he has built — they are seized, torn to pieces, and 
 devoured. "I will deliver the king," thought Beowulf, when 
 he heard the tale from roving seamen. " Over the swan-road 
 I wUl seek Hrothgar; he has need of men." His comrades 
 urged him to the adventure, and fifteen of them were willing 
 to fight it out with him. Among the rest was a sea-crafty man 
 who knew the ocean-paths. Their ship lay drawn up on the 
 beach, under the high clifE. Then 
 
 There the well-geared heroes 
 Stepped upon the stem, while the stream of ocean 
 
30 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATUEE 
 
 Whirled the sea against the sand. To the ship, to its^reast, 
 
 Briglit and carv5d things of cost carried then the heroes, 
 
 And the armour well-arrayed. So the men outpushed, 
 
 On desired adventure, their tight ocean-wood. 
 
 Swiftly went above the waves with a wind well-fitted, 
 
 Likest to a fowl, the Floater, foam around its neck, 
 
 Till about the same time, on the second day, 
 
 The up-curved prow had come on so far, 
 
 That at last the seamen saw the land ahead ; 
 
 Shining sea-cliffs, soaring headlands, 
 
 Broad sea-nesses. So the Sailer of the Sea i 
 
 Reached the sea-way's end. Beowulf, 1. 211. 
 
 This was the voyage, ending in a fiord with two high sear 
 capes at its entrance. The same kind of scenery belongs to 
 the land whence they set out. When Beowulf returns over the 
 sea the boat groans as it is pushed forth. It is heavily laden ; 
 the hollow, under the single mast with the single sail, holds 
 eight horses, swords and treasure and rich armours. The sail 
 is hoisted, the wind drives the foam-throated bark over the 
 waves, until they see the Geats' cliffs— the well-known sea- 
 nesses. The keel is pressed up by the wind on the sand, and 
 the "harbour-guard, who had looked forth afar o'er the sea 
 with longing for their return" — one of the many human 
 touches of the poem — "fastens the wide-bosomed ship with 
 anchoring chains to the strand, lest the violence of the waves 
 should sweep away the winsome boat." 
 
 I have brought the two voyages together that we may see 
 the customs of embarking and disembarking twice over, and 
 realise the kind of sea and coast the shipmen of the poem 
 sailed by — brief stretches of sea, between short bays pro- 
 tected on either side by capes rising from the mainland till 
 they became cliffs above the open sea. At the end of the bay 
 into which Beowulf sails is a low shore, on which he drives 
 his ship, stem on. Planks are pushed out on either side of the 
 prow ; the Weder folk slipped down on the shore, tied up 
 their sea-wood; their battle-sarks clanged on them as they 
 moved. Then they thanked the gods that the wave-paths had 
 been easy to them. 
 
 The scene which follows is almost Homeric in its directness 
 and simplicity, and in the clearness with which it is presented. 
 On the ridge of the hill above the landing-place the ward of the 
 coast of the Scyldings sat on his horse, and saw the strangers 
 bear their bright shields over the bulwarks of the ship to the 
 
 I I have taken sund-lida for ' the ship ' ; but sund liden, which is Wiilker's 
 reading, makes the line "then was the Sea sailed over, at the end of the sea-way." 
 
BEOWULF 31 
 
 shore. He rode down, -wondering, to the sea, and shook 
 mightily in his hands his heavy spear, and called to the men — 
 
 Who are ye of men having arms in hand, 
 
 Covered with your coats of mail who your keel afoaming 
 
 O'er the ocean street thus have urged along, 
 
 Hither on the high sea 
 
 Never saw I greater 
 Earl upon this earth than is one of you ; 
 Hero in his harness. He is no home-stayer, 
 'Less his looks belie him, lovely with Ms weapons. 
 Noble is his air ! Beowulf, 11. 237, 247. 
 
 Beowulf replies that he is Hrothgar's friend, and comes to 
 free him from "Grendel, the secret foe on the dark nights." 
 He pities Hrothgar, old and good. Yet, as he speaks, the 
 Teutonic sense of the inevitable Wyrd passes by in his mind, 
 and he knows not if Hrothgar can ever escape sorrow. " If 
 ever," he says, " sorrow should cease from him, release ever 
 come, and the welter of care become cooler." The coast guard 
 shows them the path, and promises to watch over their ship. 
 The ground rises from the shore, and they pass on to the hilly 
 ridge, behind which lies Heorot. What do they see as they 
 look backward and forward from the ridge ? This is the place 
 to collect together all that can be said of the scenery in which 
 the action is laid, and I shall not say anything of it, not even 
 use an adjective, for which I have not some authority in the 
 poem.' 
 
 Behind them lay the head of the bay, the low sandy shore 
 on which they had driven their ship ; the ship itself tied by 
 cables to the strand. The deep blue water beyond spread out, 
 between two rising nesses, to the entrance of the fiord through 
 which; as through a gate, they saw the open sea. Only one 
 figure animated this landscape, the Coast-ward, sitting high on 
 his horse, with his spear resting on his thigh. Below them, 
 as they look landward, about a mile away, the great hall, 
 Heorot, rose in the midst of a cultivated plain, which years of 
 labour had reclaimed from the moor and fen. On every side 
 of it the wild land climbed slowly upwards, on one side 
 towards the coast, on the other to the savage and uninhabited 
 inland country. 
 
 The hall was a rectangular, high-roofed, wooden building, 
 
 1 The sole exception to this is what I say about the gardens and the corn- 
 land, and the women tending the cattle, 
 
32 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 its long sides facing north and south. The two gables, at 
 either end, had stag-horns on their points, curving forwards, 
 and these, as well as the ridge of the roof, were probably 
 covered with shining metal, and glittered bravely in the sun. 
 Eound about it lay the village, scattered houses, each in its 
 own garth, with apple-trees and beehives and outhouses. Out- 
 side these was the corn-land, and the meadows on which sheep, 
 oxen, and horses were grazing. Paths went in and out among 
 the houses, and there was a wide meadow, like a village green, 
 in the midst, between the hall and the houses of the hamlet, 
 down which in the morning walked the king and queen from 
 the sleeping-chambers to the hall, attended by their young 
 men and maidens. On the outskirts of the meadow, and out 
 into the open, the young men rode, breathing their horses ; and 
 in a place apart, as poets love it, walked to and fro the bard, 
 framing his songs for the evening feast. The women sat spin- 
 ning at their doors, or moved hither and thither, carrying water 
 or attending to the cattle. This then was an island of tilled 
 and house-built land at the edge of a wild waste of fen, but at 
 a short distance from the sea. It is the image of a hundred 
 settlements such as the Angles and Danes and Geats had buUt, 
 and whence their young men ran out their ships to harry richer 
 shores. 
 
 When Beowulf and his men looked inland beyond the dwell- 
 ings, they saw nothing but the great moorland where the wolf 
 and the stag and the wild boar roamed at wUl. Patches of 
 wood were scattered over it, and these grew thicker towards 
 the horizon, where the whole moor lifted into low hills. Over 
 it, in ceaseless inovement, the gray mists rose and fell, and 
 among them, as night drew down her helm, dreadful creatures 
 seemed to stalk, and the loathsome light of their eyes burned 
 through the mist like flame.^ 
 
 1 1 may as well, to illustrate this description, quote the passage from Alfred's 
 Orosius where Ohthere gives an account to the king of the scenery ol the North- 
 men's coast. In his time there was, no doubt, in South Sweden and Jutland a 
 wider fringe between the sea and the moor than that which Ohthere gives to 
 the upper coast of Norway. But when Beowulf was first sung, it is more 
 than probable that the coasts of the Geats and Danes were sparsely populated. 
 At any rate this following passage is interesting: " Ohthere said that the coast 
 of the Northmen was very long and very narrow. All that is fit either for 
 pasture or plowing lies along the sea-coast, which, however, is in some parts 
 very cloddy. Along the eastern side are wild moors, extending a long way up 
 parallel to the cultivated land. The Finlauders dwell in the moors." The dis- 
 tance varies between the sea and the moors, but " northward, where it is nar- 
 rowest, it may be only three miles across, but the moors are in some parts so 
 wide that a man could scarcely pass over them in two weeks, though in other 
 parts perhaps in six days." — Ingram's translation of Olithere's account. 
 
BEOWULF 33 
 
 When, turning from the inland, the men looked towards 
 the sea, they saw that the coast was broken into short bays 
 and headlands, down to which the moor ran from the hills. 
 Between each headland there was a narrow valley, hollowed 
 out by descending streams, and each stream finally fell over a 
 ledge of rock into the head of a bay. The slopes rising into the 
 nesses were " steep and stony," and the trees that grew along the 
 bed of the streams were rough and blasted by the sea salt and 
 the wind — "a joyless wood." And among these fiords, at the 
 head of a cavernous sea^gorge, there was close to Heorot a 
 deadly place which they were afterwards to do with, of which 
 a clear description is given in the text. It is the dwelling- 
 p]S,ce of Grendel and his dam — ^"the mickle mark-steppers 
 who hold the moors " — the sea-end of a " hidden land, wolf- 
 haunted, full of dangerous morasses." This was the scene 
 they saw, but it was scarcely new to the men, for they daily 
 looked on a similar landscape in their own land. 
 
 What they had now to do was to reach Heorot, and they 
 took the " path paved with stones " which led straight from 
 the low ridge to the " glitterrag hall." As they walked 
 
 Hard and riveted by hand, 
 Beamed tlie battle bymie. Braced with rings, the sheer sword 
 Sang upon their shirts of war i when af orward to the hall, 
 In their grisly war-gear, ganging on they came. 
 Then they set, sea^wearied, broadly-shapen shields. 
 Targets wondrous hard, 'gainst the wall of Heorot ! 
 And they bowed above the bench, and their bymies rattled, 
 "War-array of iEthelings ! Up arose the spears. 
 Weapons of sea rovers, stood up all together. 
 Gray above, a grove of ash. Beowulf, 1. 321. 
 
 Outside the hall a warrior on guard asks them of their 
 ancestry and their coming. 
 
 From what land do ye bear your gold-flakfed shields, 
 Gray-coloured sarks and grinning-masked helms 
 And a heap of host-shafts? Of Hrothgar I am 
 Voice-man and servant. Ne'er saw I strangers — 
 So many of men — of a mightier mood. 
 I ween that in war-pride and not in outlawry. 
 But for high-heartedness, Hrothgar ye sought. 
 
 Beowulf, 1. 333. 
 
 1 This 1b otherwise translated — " The bright ringed-iron rang on their war- 
 shirts," that is, the iron rings of which the bymie was made, rattled as they 
 moved; but we have had this before, and though repetition is frequent in 
 Anglo-Saxon poetry we need not select a repetition when the words may bear 
 another meaning. 
 
34 EARLY ENGLISH LITEEATURE chap. 
 
 Beowulf tells his tale, and Wulfgar, " who knew the usage 
 of the court," bids them wait without while he brings their 
 errand to Hrothgar. Hrothgar sits on the high seat in the hall 
 with his earls around him, old and bald-headed, and declares 
 (and it is characteristic of the great noble throughout this tale 
 to know the lineage of all who are also noble) that he knew 
 Beowulf's father and mother, and Beowulf himself when he was 
 a boy. He knew also his war deeds, and that he has the 
 strength of thirty men in his grip. Wulfgar summons the 
 strangers in, "the king," he says, "knows their kinship, but they 
 must go into the hall armed- only with helm and swords and 
 war-shirts ; their shields and spears must be left outside ; " such 
 was the custom of the court. They left the benches then that 
 were set against the outside of the hall on either side of the 
 door, and entered. Beowulf saw before him a hall,^ differing 
 somewhat in arrangement from that of his lord Hygelac. At 
 home among the Geats there was no dais. But here, as in the 
 later Icelandic halls, Beowulf saw Hrothgar enthroned on a 
 high seat at the east end of the hall. This seat is sacred. 
 It has a supernatural quality. Grendel, the fiend, cannot 
 approach it (line 926) . 
 
 His queen, Wealhtheow, sat with him, and his daughter 
 Preaware, and their women. At the foot of the king's "gift 
 stool," as his seat is called, sat Hunferth^'the speaker, perhaps 
 the jester, the boon companion of the king. The other tables 
 ran at right angles to the dais nearly the whole length of the 
 hall, and ■were covered with boar's flesh and venison and cups 
 of ale and mead. On these benches sat the thegns of Hrothgar, 
 and among them his sons, between whom Beowulf is afterwards 
 seated. In the midst, on the many-coloured floor, paved per- 
 haps with variegated stones, were the long hearths in which, 
 the fires were piled, and in the roof were openings through 
 which the smoke escaped. The walls and supporting shafts 
 were ornamented with gilding and walrus bone and were hung 
 with shields and spears, and with tapestries. 
 
 Gold-varied gleamed 
 Woven webs on the walls. Beowulf, 1. 994. 
 
 1 Both halls are of a simple construction in comparison with the elaborate 
 and much later Icelandic hall, such as we find in the Njal Saga. In Heorot 
 the beds are laid with their heads against the main wall, and the place they 
 occupy is the place of the tables and benches. In a great Icelandic hall the 
 beds are in the aisles on either side of the body of the hall, but here the hall is 
 without aisles. 
 
 2 Unferth is perhaps the best spelling of the name. He is the bitter-tonguedv 
 the envious, the fierce-tempered in his cups. His position and character 
 resemble closely those of Conan in the Finn Legend. 
 
BEOWULF 35 
 
 This was the aspect of the hall within, and the customs that 
 prevailed in it are now presented to us. When Beowulf had 
 told of his wish to fight with Grendel, and Hrothgar had 
 taken his offer with joy, seats are found for him and his 
 companions, and the song and feast begin again. A thegn 
 bore round the enchased ale-cup and poured out the pure 
 drink. Danes and Geats, a goodly company, sat together. 
 
 And the Scop, from time to time. 
 Chanted clear in Heorot. There was cheer of heroes. 
 
 Beowulf, 1. 496. 
 
 When the song was over, Hunferth, drunk and jealous, 
 challenges Beowulf concerning a swimming match he had 
 with Breca, his rival. Hunferth declares that Beowulf was 
 beaten. The answer is triumphant and laughter fills the hall. 
 Then rose Wealhtheow, the queen, in her golden ornaments, 
 and greeted the guests. But first she brought the full cup to 
 her husband and bade him be blithe at the beer-drinking; 
 and the victory-famed king took the cup with joy. Then the 
 great queen, peace-bringer to nations, and followed by Ereaware 
 her daughter, went round the hall to each of the warriors, 
 gave a bracelet now to one, now to another, and last of all 
 bore the cup to Beowulf and greeted him, and the fierce hero 
 took the cup from her hands and said — 
 
 "This was my thought when I shipped on the sea; sat 
 down in my boat with a band of my men, that I would fully 
 work out the will of your folk, or fall on the field of slaughter, 
 fast in the grips of the foe. Earl-like will I fulfil the daring 
 deed, or abide my end-day in this mead-hall." The proud 
 words pleased the queen, and she went to sit beside her lord. 
 And now night had come and the mists, and under its shadow- 
 helm creatures came stalking, wan under the clouds. The 
 king stood up, and his thegns ; each man greeted the other. 
 Hrothgar gave over the hall to Beowulf and went to his 
 dwelling outside where the queen awaited him. Then the 
 benches and tables were removed. Beowulf stripped off his 
 armour, gave it in charge to one of his thegns, and laid down 
 with naked hands, his cheek upon his pillow. Around him 
 many a snell seaman stooped to his hall-rest. 
 
 Grendel now comes before us, and the main action of the 
 first part of the story — the fight of Beowulf with him. I 
 gather together all the things said of him in the poem. He is 
 a grim and giant demon, of the old Eoten race, of so great 
 strength that Beowulf, who has the power of thirty men, 
 
EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 scarcely overcomes him. His fearful head is so huge that 
 four men carry it with difficulty. The doors of the hall burst 
 open with the smiting of his hand, and the hall cracks and 
 groans with the dreadful force he puts forth in ba,ttle. His 
 whoop in pain rings through the house. The nails of his 
 hands are like iron, monstrous claws, and it seems he wore a 
 kind of glove, large and strange, made fast with wonderful 
 bands, wrought by curious skill with devil's craft and out of 
 dragon-hides.^ Mnally, he is spelled against all weapons. 
 Like many an Iceland troll, no sword can bite his skin ; he 
 must be fought with naked hands. 
 
 ""^He is the fiend of the moor, the quaking bog and morass. 
 Lonely and terrible he goes, a mighty mark-stepper who holds 
 the fen and its fastness ! Perhaps the gnomic verse which 
 tells of the Thyrs, the giant, is written with Grendel in the 
 writer's mind — • pyrs sceal on fenne gewuniom, ana innan lande. 
 " The giant shall dwell in the fen, alone in the land." " In 
 Evernight Grendel kept the misty moors." Darkness is his 
 native land, and helmid night. There is no joy where he is. 
 He is called the dark death-shadow. The Christian editor 
 brings him from Cain, with other dreadful creatures — eotens 
 and elfs and orks and the giants (with a classical reminiscence) 
 who fought with God. In all this he is the impersonation of 
 the superstitious dread which men felt when they looked from 
 their island of reclaimed land over the surrounding moors and 
 saw the strange shapings of the cloud upon them as evening 
 fell, and heard through the mist the roaring of the sea. Then, 
 as men sat by the fire, dreadful tales were told, tales of those 
 who were lost in marsh or pool, in the tempest and the snow 
 — slain by the evil will of the ghostly dwellers in the wastes.' 
 It was the same horror of the desolate lands which created in 
 Scotland the kelpie in the black pool, the river demons of 
 Tweed and Till, and the misshapen monsters that rose out of 
 the sea. 
 
 For Grendel was not only the demon of the mist and moor, 
 but also of the sea. The trackless moors in Beowulf va,n right 
 up to the cliffs, and the actual dwelling of Grendel and his 
 
 1 This glove business (line 2085) is probably a Cliristian Interpolation. No 
 heathen Englishman would have written of devils' crafts; and the glove 
 which is said to " hang down " is probably a kind of pouch. 
 
 2 He seems to be the master and briuger of the mist, and we might illustrate 
 this connection of his evil will with the stormy and misleading powers of 
 nature by the power which Dante gives the Devil over mist and rain. " Quel 
 mal voler," who 
 
 MoBse il fume e il vento 
 
 Per la vh'tu, ohe sua natura diede. 
 
BEOWtTLF 37 
 
 mother is in a cave, the entrance to which is under the sea, 
 and their companions are sea-monsters. The Mere, that is, 
 the sea-hollow where they haunt, is called the mere of the 
 nickers, and a full account of it and its scenery is elsewhere 
 given. The only point to be made here is that these sea- 
 wolves, as they are called, represent not only the ghastliness 
 of the deadly fen, but the ghastliness of the deadly sea-gulfs 
 among the cliffs, deep, narrow-entranced clefts filled with 
 boiling waves, which invariably collect ghostly legend round 
 their solitudes. 
 
 The character of this man-beast is like his shape. He is 
 said to be greedy of blood, fierce, ravenous, furious, joyless, 
 firm in hatred of men, pleased with evil ; and he is, like evil, 
 restless. The moment night comes he roams incessantly. It 
 adds a special touch of horror to him that, when he had 
 emptied Heorot by his harryings, he spends the dark nights of 
 winter in the hall. Only at night can he appear. He is the 
 creature of the winter and the sunless gloom, like the Ice- 
 landic Trolls who, at the touch of the sun, burst asunder, or C^ 
 change into stone. He abhors the pleasant noise of men, and 
 chiefly the song and the harp, like those giants who hated 
 agriculture and the sound of church bells. It is this which 
 leads him to attack the hall, and when he attacks there is so 
 much of the savageness of a wild beast in his work that some 
 have supposed that he represents the furious bear of the 
 North. He laughs as he sees his victims, springs on them 
 and tear's them limb from limb, breaking the bones, drinking 
 the blood, and devouring them, head and hands and feet and 
 all. Those he does not eat in the hall he carries away to the 
 moor and consumes them alone, unpityingly. On the first 
 night he invaded Heorot, he slew thirty men, but after a night 
 or two, tiie warriors did not sleep in the hall for twelve years, 
 but outside in their houses, into which he does not seem to be 
 able to enter. Now and then, however, men, with the valour 
 of drink in them, slept in the hall, and in the morning the 
 mad fury of the monster is plain enough. The "benches are 
 covered with blood, the hall afloat with gore." With all this, 
 he has, when he meets his match, the blind fear of the wild 
 beast, terror driving him to cry out for the darkness of the 
 morasses whence he came ; terror the Icelandic story does not 
 
 give to Glam. ■. • x. 
 
 The description of his onset when Beowulf and his thegns 
 wait for him in the hall is full of power. " In the wan night 
 came the shadow-ganger stalking, while the warriors slept — 
 
38 EARLY ENGLISH LITEEATUEE chap. 
 
 all save one." Beowulf, awake in wrath, abided the battle. 
 Then, for the poet repeats what he has said already, gathering 
 himself together for the great event, beginning a new song — 
 
 711. Erom the moorland came, under misty hills, 
 Grendel ganging on I Wrath of God he bore ; 
 Neath the clouds he strode. 
 
 He smote the door with his palms, and it fell inwards. Ire- 
 ful, the bale-bringer trod over the fair-paved coloured floor. 
 Loathsome light, like flame, stood in his eyes. He saw the 
 heroes sleeping in the hall, and his heart laughed. He thought 
 how he would glut his hunger. He seized a thegn and rent 
 him to pieces. Then he laid hands on Beowulf and knew that 
 at last he had met his match. Fear got hold of him, he strove 
 to flee back into his native darkness. But Beowulf remem- 
 bered his evening boast, and his fingers cracked as he gripped 
 the monster. The hall sounded with the struggle ; its walls 
 cried aloud. It was wonder it did not fall to the groimd. 
 Were it not bound so fast with well-smithied bands of iron, it 
 would have perished. Dreadful was the noise as the wrestlers 
 wfought from bench to bench ; dire terror stood over the North 
 Danes who heard from the wall (from their houses outside) 
 the whoop of Grendel, his awful song. The thegns of Beowulf 
 join the fight, draw their old swords, but Grendel's flesh is 
 charmed. 
 
 At last the grip of Beowulf dragged out Grendel's arm from 
 the shoulder, the sinews were torn apart, the bone burst, and 
 the monster, streaming forth blood, fled away doomed to the 
 ocean-cave under the slopes of the fen. He reaches it and dies. 
 
 When the morning dawns Beowulf has hung the arm and 
 claw of Grendel on the cross-beam above the king's seat in the 
 hall ; and many come to see them. Then the awaking of the 
 hamlet is described. The men, riding, follow over the moor 
 the blood-stained track of Grendel's flight until they reach the 
 cliffs and the deep cleft in them where the waves are seething, 
 and this is what they saw : " There the foaming sea was wel- 
 tering with blood. The fearful upleaping of the waves, all 
 mingled with ulcerous gore, boiled with blood of the sword. 
 The death-doomed had dyed it when in his despair, he had laid 
 down his life in the lair of the fen, his heathenish heart. 
 There HeP took him away." Then the old men and their 
 
 1 This exactly expresses the personality and the business of the dark god- 
 dess Hel. If the line be Christian, the personality of Hel seems a remnant of 
 the old belief. 
 
BEOWULF 
 
 young comrades come back from their glad course, proudly 
 riding on their horses. They set the games on foot. They 
 rode races on their yellow steeds where the paths seemed fair 
 to them. A famed ^theling, a king's thegn mindful of songs, 
 who many old-time sagas remembered, framed a tale well 
 bound together. We see him, as I thtak the passage means, 
 pacing the meadows, musing how he will throw into words his 
 song of praise of Beowulf when the feast begins, and he thinks, 
 that he may weave it well, of the ancient song of Sigemund 
 which it was his wont to sing. As the morning light grew 
 stronger many more go to the high hall to see the wonder of 
 Grendel's hand ; and with them at last the king arrives. 
 
 From his bridal-bower did the Ward of hoards of gold 
 Mighty, march in glory ; mickle was his troop. 
 
 Known by worth he was, and, with him, his Queen, 
 With a many of her maids measured down the meadow-path. 
 
 Beowulf, 1. 921. 
 
 Heorot is now cleansed, a great feast is appointed, and we 
 again see the customs of the hall. It is filled in the afternoon 
 with kinsmen and friends, and Hrothgar,.in requital of Gren- 
 del's overthrow, gives to Beowulf a golden ensign, a helm, a 
 coat of mail, and the great treasure of a sword. Also eight 
 steeds are led into the hall for him and displayed, and on one 
 of them lies the saddle itself of Hrothgar, his war-seat in 
 battle, wrought with embroidery and gems. A sword, an heir- 
 loom, is given to each of Beowulf's thegns, and blood money 
 paid for Hondscio, that one of them whom Grendel had torn in 
 pieces. So was fulfilled the great duty which fell to the lot of 
 kings — the free giving of gifts. 
 
 After this, while the feast goes on, the minstrel sings the 
 saga of Finn and his sons, of Hengest, Hnaef and Hildeburh. 
 When the song is over the servants pour forth the wine, and 
 Wealhtheow came forth from the women's chamber, going 
 under her golden crown, and offered the wine-cup to her lord, 
 wishing him joy on the cleansing of Heorot, and on his desire 
 to call Beowulf his son. Then she turned to Beowulf, bringing 
 him also the cup, and with the cup gave him a byrnie and 
 armlets and a jewelled collar, well known all over the north, as 
 fine as the Brosings' collar that Hama wore, and had wrested 
 from Eormanric.^ " Use this collar, dear Beowulf ! " cries the 
 queen. 
 
 1 " This necklace is the Brisinga-men — the costly necklace of Freyja, which 
 she won from the dwarfs and which was stolen from her by Loki, as is told in the 
 
40 EAELY ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 When Beowulf, on his return home, recalls that festal day, 
 he recalls it with that grave and imaginative humanity, equally 
 touched with fatalism and tenderness, which is one of his chief 
 qualities. "Dark and true and tender is the North" exactly 
 marks his soul. " There was song and social glee," he says to 
 Hygelac, " when we were at the feast that evening," and he 
 sketches King Hrothgar, and his singing, and the old man's 
 memories. 
 
 There was song and social glee, and the Scylding gray, 
 
 Asking after many (tales), told of ancient times. 
 
 Whiles, the Beast of war waked the harp's delight, 
 
 Greeted the glee-wood ; now he told a tale 
 
 Sooth and sorrowful ; then a story strange 
 
 Did the king big-hearted sing aright from end to end. 
 
 Then again began that gray-headed warrior, 
 
 All upbonnd with eld, for the battle strength to mourn 
 
 That he had when young ; and his heart within him swelled 
 
 Now that old in winters on it all he tHought. 
 
 So the livelong day lingered we within. 
 
 And delight in hall we seized till the dark came on.i 
 
 Beowulf, 1. 2105. 
 
 And now that night had come and Hrothgar had gone and 
 Beowulf with him to sleep outside, the hall, as in times before 
 Grendel had wasted it, was prepared for the sleeping of the 
 earls of Hrothgar. They bared the bench-floor, beds and bol- 
 sters were laid over it. At their heads, hanging on the waU, 
 they set their disks of war, their glittering shield-woods. On 
 the shelf, over each warrior, it was easy to see the high-crested 
 helm and the war-shirt of rings and the stout spear. This was 
 
 Edda. Like the Ikm of Aphrodite it awakened desire. As Here wears It, so 
 the Norse goddess wears it. As Freyja has an inaccessible chamber, so also 
 has Here, one which was wrought for her by Hephaistos. When Freyja 
 breathes deep with anger, the Brising necklace starts from her breast. When 
 Thor, to get his hammer back, dresses up in Freyja's garments, he puts on the 
 Brisinga-men. The jewel is then so closely woven up with tie myth of Freyja 
 that from its mention here in Beowulf w& may safely infer the familiarity of 
 the Enghah with the worship and story of Freyia." This is Kemble's view, 
 but I have my doubts of it all. I think the old smgers of Beowulf knew little 
 or nothing about these matters. 
 
 1 It is not an uninteresting illustration of this passage to quote the followin? 
 from an account which Prisons gives of a banquet to which Attila invited him 
 (448 A.D.). The singing habits are the same — nay, the very feelincs- " Wlien 
 evening came on, torches were lighted, and two barbarians coming in and 
 standmg opposite to Attila recited songs previously composed, in which they 
 sang of his victories and his warlike virtues. The banqueters gazed earnestly 
 on the minstrels ; some were delighted with the poems ; others, remembering' 
 past conflicts, felt their souls stirred within them; while the old were melted 
 into tears by tlie thought that their bodies were grown weak through age and 
 their hot hearts compelled into v&^se." — Dynasty of Theodosius, Hodgkin, 
 
BEOWULF 41 
 
 their use at night — that they were often thus ready for war, 
 at home, as in the host, whenever their Man-lord might have 
 need of them : an apt and ready folk they were ! 
 
 WhUe the warriors sleep, another part of the tale begins — 
 the story of the mother of Grendel, of her vengeance for her 
 son, and of her slaying in the sea-cavern by Beowulf. She, 
 like her son, is a spirit of Elsewhere, foreign to human nature, 
 greedy and ragiug, restless, a death ghost, a scathe of man, a 
 huge mark-stalker, a creature of the mirk and mist. She 
 swims the sea like a sea-monster, clutches to Beowulf in- its 
 depths; a sea^wolf (firim-ijoylf) , a sea-woman (merewif), (grund- 
 wyrgen), a wolf of the sea7bottom. Her hands are armed with 
 claws, and grim is her grasp. ITo common weapon can bite 
 her flesh, only a sword, by eotens made long since ; but her 
 blood is so venomous (she is an aettren ellorgaest) that even 
 this magic-tempered blade melts away with it, like ice in the 
 sun. No good thing belongs to her save her fierce sorrow for 
 her son's death and her desire to avenge it. In the dead of 
 night she bursts into the hall now reoccupied by the thegns, 
 seizes on .^Eschere, Hrothgar's right-hand man in war, and 
 bears him away to her cave. She, like her son, rent the body 
 limb from limb. The head of .lEschere was found lying on the 
 cliff.^ Beowulf had slept outside Heorot, but at dawn he is 
 summoned, and loud is the king's outburst of grief when 
 Beowulf asks him if he had a quiet night. "Ask not thou 
 after hSlppiness ; sorrow is new again to the Dane's people. 
 Dead is ^schere, Yrmenlaf's elder brother ; my rune-wit, my 
 rede-giver, my shoulder-to-shoulder man, when we in war 
 warded our heads, when the foot warriors rushed together, and 
 the boars (the chiefs) crashed in the onset. Such should- an 
 earl be ! " He tells the tale of the night, describes the place 
 
 1 That this story of Grendel's mother was originally a separate lay from 
 the first seems to be suggested by the faet that the monsters are described over 
 again, and many new details added, such as would be inserted by a new smger 
 who wished to enhance and adorn the original tale. The details of the scenery 
 are so particular, and seem so much derived from personal observation, that it 
 has often occurred to me that in this second part we have the original myth 
 (with the Grendel-mother addition), actually localised by the new poet m the 
 scenery that surrounded the town where his tribe lived. If that should be 
 true, and if it also should be true that the fight of Beowulf with Grendel s 
 mother was a later addition to the first story, it makes the first story very old. 
 The scenery in the second part is continental— that is, it was described belore 
 the Angles left their native land. The first story would then belong to a 
 time long previous to that departure. This is a possible but a doubtful inter- 
 ence. It might be said that, though the first story belonged to the Angles on 
 the continent, the second was added in England or recast m England, and the 
 scenery drawn from English scenery, as Mr. Haigh suggests. But I remember 
 no such place as that described on the coasts of Yorkshire or Northumberland. 
 
42 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 where Grendel's mother lives. " Seek it if thou darest ! " he 
 cries ; " I will pay thee with old treasures, with rings of gold." 
 The reply of Beowulf is couched in his grave, half-reproving, 
 fatalistic way. Life is nothing, high deeds and courage are 
 all, and the vengeance for a friend. "Sorrow not, wise man" 
 — but I have quoted the passage before — " Not in earth's breast, 
 nor deep in the sea, nor in the mountain holt, nor in the abyss 
 of ocean, go where she will, shall Grendel's kin escape from 
 me." 
 
 They mount their horses then and ride to the cliffs, to the 
 dwelling of the fiends. It is this dwelling we must now discuss. 
 It seems to be conceived by many as a deep morass in the 
 midst of the moor, overhung by trees. But this is a careless 
 reading of the text. It is a sea-mere, a sea-pool. jEschere's 
 head is found on its edge, and its edge is the sea-cliff (Jiolm- 
 clif). In its waters are sea-dragons that seek the sea; the 
 nickers lie there on the sloping rocks of the ness, monsters 
 that at mid-day go out into the open sea, and voyage on the sail- 
 road. The one of these who is killed swims in the holm (in 
 the sea). Beowulf, before he plunges, arms himself to mingle^ 
 in the depths of the sea, to seek the welter of the sea — the 
 mere-grundas, the sund-gebland. It is the ocean surge (the 
 brim-wylm) which receives him as he plunges. The beasts who 
 attack him are sea-beasts (sae-deor monig) . Grendel's mother 
 is the sea-wolf (brim-wylf). It is a sea-headland where Beo- 
 wulf's thegns sit and watch for his return ; the booty he brings 
 back, the sword-hilt and Grendel's head, is sea^booty (sae-lac). 
 When they all return, they return from the searcliff {holm-dif). 
 
 There is not a trace in all this of a deep pool in the moor, of 
 a morass. We are on the sea^nesses, looking down into a sear 
 hole, and it is not difficult, from the indications given, to sketch 
 the place with some accuracy. Indeed, so clearly is it drawn 
 that I believe the describer had seen the very spot. In a verse 
 of the poem it is said to be well known (line 2135), and a much 
 greater amount of trouble is taken with this piece of natural 
 description than is usual in early English poetry. It completes 
 our vision of the scenery round Heorot. It tells about the 
 range of cliffs up to the very edge of which extends the moor. 
 It is the jBrst in the long series of natural descriptions which 
 have made English poetry celebrated for more than a thousand 
 years, and the supernatural element in it is the product of that 
 work of the imagination on Nature, and that transference of 
 human passion to Nature, of which modern English poetry is 
 so full, Hrothgar describes the place — 
 
BEOWULF 43 
 
 Secret in its gloom the land- 
 Where they ward ; wolf-haunted slopes, windy headlands (o'er the 
 
 sea) ; 
 Fearful is the marish-path, where the mountain stream, 
 'Neath the Nesses' mist, nither makes its way. 
 Under earth i its flood is, nor afar from here it is, 
 But the measure of a mile — where the mere is set. 
 Over it (outreaching), hang the rustling trees ; 2 
 Held by roots the holt is fast, and o'er-helms the water 1 
 There an eyil wonder every night a man may see — 
 In the flood a fire ! Of the sons of men 
 None alive is wise enough that abyss to know. 
 If the heather-stepper, harried by the hounds. 
 If the strong-homed stag seek out this holt- wood, — 
 Put to flight from far — sooner will he flee his soul. 
 Yield his life-breath on the bank — ere he will therein 
 Seek to hide his head. Not uuhaunted is the place ! 
 Thence the wylming of the waves whirled is on high, 
 ' Wan 8 towards the clouds, when the wind is stirring 
 Wicked weathers up ; till the lift is waxing dark. 
 And the welkin weeps. 
 
 Beowulf, 1. 1357. 
 
 What we see then is this. At a certain point in the cliff' 
 face, between two jutting nesses, there is a deep sea-gorge, 
 with a narrow entrance from the sea. The waves are driven 
 into it, boil and welter in the confined space, and are whirled 
 on high. At the landward base of the cliffs, the rocks slope 
 downwards, and on these rocks, as we see afterwards, the 
 nickers (pictured from the great seals and walruses) are lying, 
 whose habit it is — and the phrase points to an observation of 
 real animals intruded into the tale — to sleep in the morning 
 stretched out on the ness-slopes, and at mid-day to get ready 
 
 1 " Under the earth " means that the stream had worn itself a deep channel 
 far below the surface of the moor. Through this it flows till it reaches the cliff 
 over the stony lip of which it leaps in a waterfall. 
 
 2 Erimge is Wiilker's reading, and means " rime-clad or decayed." But I 
 do not see the meaning. It was not winter when Beowulf came. Nor can it 
 mean withered, brittle boughs, for the stream and the sea-mists would make 
 the foliage of these trees plentiful, and withered boughs would not hang down 
 or cover the waters with a helmet. So I have taken the reading hrinde = hrin- 
 ende (rustling or roaring), O. N. Anna, to "resound" — which is the reading 
 of the MS. In the Blicknng Homilies, hrimge bearwas occurs, but I do not see 
 that the phrase there forces us to adopt it here. There is no reason for the 
 trees decaying in the circumstances described, but a good deal of reason in the 
 leaping water and the dreadful storms for their roaring or rustling. 
 
 " Wonn, translated wan above, means dark or black in Anglo-Saxon. It is 
 an epithet of the raven or of night. The modern meaning of the word is pale, 
 colourless ; and " the word," as Skeat says, " has thus suffered a remarkable 
 change. The sense, however, was probably dead or colourless which is appli- 
 cable to black and pallid alike" {Etymological Dictionary. W. W. Skeat). 
 Whenever I use the word in this book, it has its Anglo-Saxon meaning of 
 black. 
 
44 EARLY ENGLISH LITEKATUBE chap. 
 
 " for a sorrow-bringing expedition into the open sea, into the 
 sail-road." At the land end of the sea-gorge the cliff rises 
 and forms the neck between the two lateral nesses, and the 
 moor, coming down to the neck, has been worn away into a 
 deep channel by the working of a mountain stream. All 
 along this hollow channel the descending stream has made 
 trees grow, but when the torrent comes to the edge of the 
 cliff — "a ledge of gray stone," — it leaps over in a waterfall 
 into the weltering waves below. Over this waterfall the 
 trees, fast-rooted, hang down and darken the pool underneath. 
 They rustle in the wind that comes up from below, and the 
 vapours from the spray of the waterfall and the sea-tumble 
 underneath mingle with the inland mists driven seaward from 
 the moor. 
 
 I have seen such places on xhe coasts of Cornwall and the 
 north-west of Ireland. I have no doubt that there are many 
 such among the" fiords of Norway and Sweden. Legends 
 always collect round them, and the touches of fire on the 
 flood, of land animals not daring to take shelter in them, -^ it 
 is plain there was a path to the sea-level by which Beowulf 
 and the thegns descend, — of their being the dwelling-places 
 of the "worm-kind, wild sea-beasts, strange wave-swimmers 
 with battle tusks, mere-women, sea-wolves, wolves of the 
 abyss, of the sea," and the rest, might be paralleled again and 
 again. 
 
 When Hrothgar and Beowulf and their attendant thegns 
 mount their horses and ride to this place, additional touches 
 of description make us realise that we are on the cliffs, and 
 make the scenery more clear. They pass along " steep over- 
 hanging clefts by narrow roads, above precipitous cliffs and 
 nicker houses " — that is, by paths on the side of the cliff, a 
 precipice below them, and at their base shelving rocks, where 
 again the great sea-beasts are said to be asleep. At last they 
 reach the sea-hollow, where the water is tossed in waves. 
 They descend to the rocks, and find the head of JSschere, east 
 down by the mere-wife ere she plunged to find her dwelling. 
 The water is troubled and bloody, under the overhanging 
 joyless wood. They blow on the horn an eager war-music, 
 and the sound rouses from their sleep to a fierce anger the 
 strange sea-dragons tumbling in the wave. The lord of the 
 Geats shoots one with an arrow, and slays him ; he is stabbed 
 with boar-spears, and drawn with sharp hooks on to the rocks 
 — it is a walrus-hunt, — and the men gaze on the grisly guest, 
 the wondrous wave-swimmer. The picture is extraordinarily 
 vivid. 
 
BEOWULF 45 
 
 Then Beowulf armed himself before he plunged, and Hun- 
 ferth, honouring him whom he had mocked, gave him a well- 
 known sword, ".Hrunting by name, one of the old treasures of 
 the world, its iron edge hardened with the sweat, that is, the 
 blood of war, damasked as it was forged with distilled venom 
 of twigs, and never had it deceived any man in battle." 
 " Remember ! " cried Beowulf, " son of Healfdene, what we 
 have spoken of before ; if for thy need I lose my life, that 
 thou wert to be in a father's stead to me. Be guardian of 
 my hand-comrades, send the treasures thou hast given me to 
 Hygelac, that he may know, when he see the gold, that I found 
 a good giver of rings, and let Hunferth " — so magnanimous is 
 Beowulf — " have the curious sword thou gavest me. I will 
 work fame with Hrunting, or let Death take me." Then 
 the ocean surge received him, and it seemed a day's space ere 
 he reached the bottom. "It was a day's spac^" says the 
 poem, but the phrase must be metaphorical, for he plunges in 
 at morning, and at the ninth hour (line 1600) he comes again 
 to land, having fought his fight and finished it. 
 
 Grendel's mother saw him, and grasped him in her dreadful 
 claws ; and the tusked sea-beasts attacked him, but the sea- 
 wolf bore him upwards from the bottom into her ocean-hall, 
 a cave where the water was not.^ There was firelight in the 
 
 1 This cave under the sea seems to be another of those natural phenomena 
 of which the writer had personal knowledge (line 2135), and which was intro- 
 duced by him into the mythical tale to give it a local colour. There are many 
 places of this kind. Their entrance is under the lowest level of the tide. 
 The diver plunges, and rising through the water, finds himseU in a high arched 
 cavern, with a sloping beach of sand, up which the water flows to the level of 
 the tide. But beyond the level of the tide the cavern, covered with fine dry 
 sand, extends inland under the rocks, lit and aired by crevices in the roof which 
 penetrate to the outer surface of the cliff. It is in such a cave, "whose only 
 portal was the keyless wave," that the lovers in Byron's Island take refuge, 
 and Byron found the original in Mariner's account of the Tonga Islands. It 
 is such a cave in one of the islands of the Fiord that Miss Martineau describes 
 as the shelter of Rolf in her story of Feats on the Fiord, and I might give 
 many more instances of this trick of Nature. The probability is that a cave of 
 this kind was known to the people who composed the lay of Beowulf's battle 
 with Grendel's mother; and the waves, in such a place as the poem describes, 
 would be likely to hollow out a cavern of this fashion. They have begun to 
 do so, for instance, at Boscastle in Cornwall. All the statements in the 
 account confirm this conjecture. Beowulf and Grendel's dam, close embraced, 
 dive upwards into the cave. When they get in they are in " a sea hall where 
 the water is not." On the walls of the cave are hung weapons; there is a 
 rocky couch in it, and treasures lying about ; and the fight is conducted on the 
 dry sand, under a lofty roof. There is firelight, but I think, when we look at 
 all that is said of this light, the writer meant that the light was like fire, and 
 that in reality he thought of the pale daylight that filtered through the rocks 
 above. " He saw firelight, a brilliant beam brightly shining," that is the first 
 statement, and it is a touch which belongs to the story of Grettir's attack on 
 the Giant in the cave under the force. Then when he looks round after he 
 
46 BAELY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 roofed cavern brightly shining ; and Beowulf struck at the 
 mere-woman. The ringed blade sang a greedy war-song on her 
 head. But the war-beam would not bite — for the first time 
 — into the flesh of its foe, and the hero flung it, angry, on the 
 floor, and trusted to his grip alone. The sea-wolf seized him 
 in her fierce grasp, and, as he stumbled, overthrew him, sat on 
 his breast, and drew her short sword, the seax, broad and 
 brown-edged, and stabbed at his heart. But his war-sark, the 
 battle net, lent help to him, and withstood the blow. He 
 leaped to his feet and looking round him saw among the arms 
 hanging on the wall a sword, hallowed by victory, an old 
 sword of the eotens, doughty of edges, greater than another 
 could wield in the war-play, a pride of warriors. He seized 
 the gold-charmed hilt and smote at her neck therewith. The 
 brand gripped on her throat, broke the bone-rings, pierced 
 through hejj body ; she fell on the floor. The blade was 
 bloody, Beowulf rejoiced in his work. A light, a beam 
 streamed into the cave, and was in it as when from heaven 
 brightly shines the candle of the firmament. Again he looked- 
 round, and lifted his weapon, and there by the wall lay Gren- 
 del, dead, weary of war. The body sprang far away when the 
 hero smote off its head.* All the blood streamed into the 
 water ; and the thegns of Hrothgar, sitting on the shore, and 
 it was near the ninth hour, saw that the waves were mingled 
 with blood. "We shall not see him again," they said, and 
 took their way back to Heorot. But Beowulf's own thegns 
 remain, sick in their mind, wishing, not hoping, to see their 
 dear lord again. While they waited, the giant's sword blade 
 melted in Beowulf's hand, by reason of the " battle sweat of 
 the icicles of war" (the blood droppings from its edge), so 
 poisonous was the gore of the two monsters — melted, " likest 
 to ice when the Father looses the band of frost, when he un- 
 winds the ropes of the flood," and Beowulf took the hilt and 
 Hrunting and Grendel's head, as he dived up through the 
 cleansed seas, rejoicing in his sea-booty. The brave band 
 were glad to see the seaman's Helm, and loosed his armour, 
 
 has slain the sea-wolf, he sees bj; the light Grendel lying dead on a rocky 
 conch and the light is thus described — "A glancing light gleamed, a light 
 stood within, even as from heaven serenely shines the candle of the firma- 
 ment." This seems to mean daylight. But even had they firelight, it would 
 not change my contention. We have here a cavern of which kind many known 
 examples exist, and such a cavern was, I think, known to the poet. It marks 
 especially the sea^nature of the Grendel-kin. 
 
 1 This sword, then, could divide the charmed flesh of Grendel, being a 
 magic sword. The fact that these monsters keep their own bane in their own 
 dwelling, puts us in mind of many analogous examples in Folk-Tales, 
 
BEOWXILF 47 
 
 and measured back tlie path to Heorot. Proudly they marched, 
 and four men bore on spears the giant head of Grendel, en- 
 tered Heorot, and flung it by the hair at the feet of Hrothgar 
 and his queen. " So, son of Healfdene, we have brought thee 
 this searspoil, which here thou beholdest." Then the tale of 
 the fight was told, and the golden hUt of the Eoten sword 
 given to the king.* He wondered as he saw it, for there on 
 the guard of pure gold was written the origin of a combat 
 in ancient times, and 
 
 Rightly graven there, in the runic signs, 
 It was set and said for (what King) the sword. 
 At the first was forged. Finest it of steels ; 
 And with spotted snakes was the hilt entwined. 
 
 Beowulf, 1. 1695. 
 
 Then Hrothgar tells of King Heremod, who slaughtered his 
 people, and gave no gifts. Not so will he act. " Go, honoured 
 in. war, to thy seat. There shall be many treasures common to 
 us both, when morning comes." When the feast was over, 
 " swart was the night-helm, dark o'er the warriors. The great- 
 hearted rested till the black raven, blithe-hearted, welcomed 
 the joy of Heaven." The sun arose ; " brightly it came, o'er 
 the shadows sliding." Then Beowulf and Hrothgar took leave 
 of each other and declared a firm alliance of Scylding and 
 Geat, "after old custom doing all things. Hrothgar kissed 
 and wept over Beowulf, and love of the hero glowed in his 
 blood. Long was his gift-giving praised among men." 
 
 So Beowulf departed, and marching over the grassy plain, 
 found beyond the ridge his ship anchored to the beach, and the 
 warden of the coast on guard. To him the hero gave a sword, 
 with gold wires round the hilt of it, and for that gift the war- 
 rior was ever after more honoured at the mead. In the hollow 
 bosom of the ship, imder the mast, the treasures, arms, and 
 horses were stowed away, and the next day the adventurers 
 landed on their own coast, where Hygelac dwelt near the sea- 
 wall in a noble hall. The customs in that hall are much the 
 same as those in Heorot. There does not seem, however, to be 
 any dais at the east end of the building. The king sits in the 
 middle of the long bench on the south side, and Beowulf oppo- 
 
 1 " It went to the noblest of the world kings of the two seas, of those who 
 in Scedenig treasure divided," line 1685. This supports the theory, I think, 
 of the continental origin of this lay. Scedenig is the O. N. Sean-ey, the 
 southernmost part of the Scandinavian peninsula and the whole of the Danish 
 kingdom. 
 
48 EAKLY ENGLISH LITERATURE ohap. 
 
 site him on the northern side. In this hall the queen, Hygd, 
 does not sit with the king, as Wealhtheow among the Danes 
 appears to do when the supper begins. Hygd comes in during 
 the feast and bears the mead-cup round. Beowulf is then 
 called on for his tale. He tells it from the beginning, and 
 orders the treasures given him by Hrothgar to be brought into 
 the hall. He gives everything away except one horse and the 
 sword. The gray coat of mail he bestows on his lord Hygelac, 
 crying, " Use it well," and four of the eight horses Hrothgar 
 had given him. Three more of the horses, slender and of 
 bright saddles, he gives to Hygd, and above all, the great and 
 glorious collar, like the Brising collar, which Hygelac loses 
 afterwards when he is slain in Friesland. Hygelac is not back- 
 ward in return of gifts. He gives to Beowulf a sword enriched 
 with gold, seven thousand in money, a country seat, the dignity 
 of a prince.^ It is now, then, that Beowulf, when he is thirty 
 years old, seems to have attained a settled position — heritable 
 land, a home and its rights. With this interchange of gifts 
 the first part of the poem closes. 
 
 The second part of the poem of Beowulf opens fifty years 
 later, and is the tale of Beowulf's fight with the Fire-Drake, 
 and of his death and burial. The history of those fifty years 
 is soon told. On his return from his slaying of Grendel he 
 had been Hygelac's faithful thegn. Always on foot, and in 
 the front, in the clashings of battle, and also in peace, he had 
 never failed his lord. But most of all he was true comrade in 
 the last fight, when Hygelac fell in combat with the Frisians 
 and the Hugs. He could not save his king, but he avenged 
 him on Daeghrefn, the champion of the Hugs, and in the same 
 way as he slew Grendel. " I slew him ! " cries Beowulf, " not 
 with the sword, but in battle I grasped the throbbing of his 
 heart, and broke his bone-house." Nor was he wounded him- 
 self, but, carrying off thirty war-harnesses,^ went down to the 
 sea, unpursued, so great was the terror of him, and swam (i.e. 
 sailed) home with his old swimming skill over the seal's bath, 
 to bring the news to Hygd, the wife of Hygelac. And Hygd, 
 thinking her son Heardred too young for so many enmities, 
 offered the throne to Beowulf. But the hero refused, faithful 
 to his master's son, and brought him up and loved him and 
 maintained him. But in vain, for Heardred fell, murdered by 
 
 1 Brego-stol, " a throne," hence •' rule." When Hygd, after Hygelac's 
 death, offers Beowulf the kingly power, it is brego-stol which she offers him. 
 
 2 This touch illustrates the way in which additions were made to a folk-tale. 
 Beowulf has the strength of thirty men in the original tale. Here, then, the 
 new inventor makes him carry oft thirty coats of mail. 
 
BEOWULF 49 
 
 Eanmund. Beowulf then became king, and when he was 
 settled, remembered vengeance and slew Eadgils, the brother 
 of Eanmund, slayer of Heardred. 
 
 Noble, valorous, unconquered, he had outlived every enmity 
 and every conflict, and dwelt, worshipped by his people, at 
 peace, until when he was near his eightieth year the dragon 
 came to spoil his folk. This was *his final weird. We hear 
 how the fate arose. One of his thegns found the secret barrow 
 where the dragon's hoard was hidden, and stole a gold cup 
 while the monster slept. 
 
 The account given of the building of this barrow and the 
 hiding of the treasures in it is very romantic, and is either a 
 legend used by the writer or is invented entirely by him. The 
 lament of the prince reads like a separate piece of poetry 
 which has been inserted by the singer. Portions of it resemble 
 the fragment of the Ruined Burg, and the poetical quality of 
 this little lyric, which might be quite isolated from the rest 
 of the poem, is as good as that of the Euin. As wild and 
 desolate too as the scenery in which it is placed, is the short 
 story which leads up to the lament of the prince. Three 
 hundred years ago, in Hygelac's land, this prince dwelt with 
 his nobles. A great war, a life-bane, took away his folk, and 
 of all, none at last was left but he. " Mourning his friends," 
 he wandered to and fro alone, " and wished for delay of death," 
 even then, that he might enjoy the precious treasures, the last 
 legacy of a noble race. But when he felt death at hand, he 
 brought together all the costly things, gold cups and rings, 
 treasured jewels, helms and swords, a golden banner, great 
 dishes and old giants' work, and hid them in a huge mound, 
 low by the headland near the moving of the waves, and sung 
 over them his lament — 
 
 " Hold thou here, O Earth, now the heroes could not, 
 Hold the wealth of earls ! Lo, within thee long ago 
 Warriors good had gotten it. Ghastly was the lif e-hane 
 And the battle-death that bore every bairn away. 
 All my men, mine own, who made leaving of this life ! 
 They have seen their joy in hall ! • 
 
 None is left the sword to bear, 
 Or the cup to carry, chased with flakes of gold, 
 Costly cup for drinking. All the chiefs have gone elsewhere. 
 Now the hardened helm, high-adorned with gold, 
 Of its platings shall be plundered ! Sleeping are the polishers. 
 Those once bound to brighten battle-masks (for war). 
 So alike the battle-sark that abode on field, (stricken) 
 O'er the brattling of the boards, biting of the swords. 
 
50 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Crumbles, now the chiefs are dead ! And the coat of ring6d mail 
 
 May far and wide no longer fare with princes to the field 
 
 At the side of heroes. Silent is the joy of harp, 
 
 Gone the glee-wood's mirth ; nevermore the goodly hawk 
 
 Hovers through the hall ; the swift horse no more 
 
 Beats with hoof the Burh-stead. Bale of hattle ruinous 
 
 Many souls of men sent away, afar." 
 
 So, in spirit sad, in his sorrow he lamented. 
 
 All alone when all were gone — Thus unhappy, did he weep 
 
 In the day and night, till the Surge of Death 
 
 On his heart laid hold. Beowulf, 11. 2247, etc. 
 
 This- is the hoard over which, the dragon watches. The 
 Worm and the place are both accurately described, and it is 
 fitting that we should collect what is said of both, first of the 
 worm, and then of the place. This dragon story is not, like 
 that of Grendel, unique. There are a multitude of parallels to 
 it in the Folk-Tales, and the most famous of these is the story 
 in the Volsunga Saga. But the drake in Beowulf is not the 
 huge earth-worm like Fafnir. That beast is found in our 
 poem at line 887. He is there the guard of the hoard, and 
 lives, like our present dragon, under a hoary rock, a wondrous 
 spotted worm; and when he is slain, his own heat melts him 
 away; like the chimaera, nothing of him is left. He, like 
 the Volsunga Fafnir, is wingless, for it seems that men who 
 became dragons had, as dragons, no wings. 
 
 The Fire-Drake here is the true dragon, our old Romance . 
 acquaintance, whose breath is fire, whose wings are strong (the 
 wings mark the dragon proper), and who has feet and claws in 
 front. At least it appears as if in the fight he threw his fore- 
 feet around Beowulf's neck. But he is also scaleless, naked, 
 and Beowulf's sword and knife pierce his flesh, though the 
 sword breaks on the bones of his head. Like many another 
 dragon in Folk-Tales, he is a seeker, a finder, and a keeper of 
 hidden treasures, of which he is proud, and which he guards 
 with jealous covetousness. He lies round them in a cave, as 
 Fafnir, like a Python, lay coiled over his hoard. So constant 
 was this habit among the dragons, that gold is called Worms' 
 bed; Fafnir's couch, Worms' bed-fire. Even in India, the 
 cobras, especially their king, are guardians of treasure. Three 
 hundred years before Beowulf met the drake, that beast, — so 
 old is he (and great age is a characteristic of the dragons),—: 
 flying by night, and wrapt in his own fiery breath, had found 
 the ancient hoard. All day he watches it now in the hollow of 
 the barrow under the hill, or sleeps around it. Probably he 
 was not yet long enough to quite encompass it, since the gold 
 
BEOWULF 51 
 
 cup is stolen from. Mm, and there is evidence in the poem that 
 the thief got in between his head and his tail ^11. 2289-2290), 
 and I have somewhere else seen a folk-tale in which this element 
 of the dragon story appears, and where, owing to this gap, the 
 hoard is robbed by a peasant. He is, however, fifty feet in 
 length. He moves on the earth, hunts his foe by scent, smells 
 round his cave ; hunts also by sight, and finds the footsteps of 
 the robber near the cavern. He is once called the Earth-Drake, 
 a name I have not elsewhere seen. But the air is also his 
 proper element. He flies in it, and is called the wide-fiier, the 
 deadly lift-flier, the war-flier. But it is always by night that 
 he flies. He is the old foe who comes out in the twilight; 
 before day dawns he returns to his cave. In this he is quite 
 unlike those dragons who sun their gold in fine weather. But 
 our dragon is wholly of the night. It is said of him : "Who, all 
 on fire, seeks to the mountains, naked, full of hate, flying through 
 the night enfolded in flame ; whom the earth-dwellers gazed at 
 from far," and it is a fine touch of description. Mre, then, as 
 well as earth and air, is in his power. Fire is his very nature ; 
 he goes forth with burning, winged with flame. Fire is his 
 weapon ; when he is robbed, he longs to take vengeance by fire, 
 but he must wait till nightfall. Then he rushes from the cave, 
 and rising in the air, spits forth gleeds, and the hate he feels 
 intensifies the glow. When he comes forth to fight, he breathes 
 -hot and venomous fire, the hot sweat of battle ; it wells from 
 his breast. His breath, of fire enwraps him, so that he seems 
 embroidered with gouts of flame. The steam of his breathing 
 is like the hot gore of battle ; earth resounds as he moves over 
 it. In the crisis of the fight he gathers in his breath till his 
 breast swells, and pours a welter of flame on Beowulf, flinging 
 it far and wide. Finally, he can make himself into a bow, or 
 like a ring ; he rolls along in curves when he comes out of his 
 lair. Like so many dragons then, splendour and pliability 
 mark him ; and "glitter, gold and fire," as Grimm says of other 
 worms, gather round his presentation. Moreover, he lives close 
 to the desolate and hoar heath that runs inland from his cavern, 
 and the wild heath is the constant companion of the northern 
 and gold-guarding dragons. A dragon is called a heath-worm. 
 The " fani-gold " is gold of the fen in the heath where dragons 
 lie. It is on the "glistening heath" that Fafnir has his den, 
 and the haeden gold of Beowulf may mean gold of the heath as 
 well as heathen gold. This then is the image of the great 
 beast, whom the hero, like Hercules, Apis, Jason, Sigmund, 
 Sigurd, Frotho, and a hundred others, lays to sleep ; by whose 
 
52 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 breath he dies, like Thor by the breath of the Midgard ser- 
 pent.^ 
 
 The poet not only describes the beast, he enables us to place 
 him. The scenery and his refuge may be conceived with clear- 
 ness from many indications in the poem. The Nesses rise one 
 after another along the coast, with dips of land beneath them. 
 The loftiest of these is called Hrones-naes the Whale's Ness ; 
 next to it is Earna-naes the SearEagles' Ness.^ The cliff-face 
 descends between these in a scoop, and the meadowy space 
 between the two Nesses is walled in on either side by their lat- 
 eral rocks. On the top of one of these ridges is a grove of 
 trees. Close to these trees, on the edge of the rock wall, and 
 looking over to the opposite rocks where the worm has his shel- 
 ter, Beowulf sits before he goes down to the meadow below to 
 fight the dragon ; on the same ridge his thegns watch the old 
 king contending with the beast, and into the wood behiad, all 
 of them, save Wiglaf, fly in fear. It is on this side also that 
 Beowulf, with his back to the cliff below, is driven to bay by 
 the dragon. On the other side, but higher up the dell, nearer 
 to the edge of the sea-cliff, whence the raging of the waves may 
 be heard, the great barrow stands, built by the prince over the 
 treasures and bodies of his tribe. Near it is the cave, entered 
 into by a rocky arch, within which are the treasures and the 
 lair of the worm. A stream breaks out of the mouth of the 
 cave, and flows down the slope of the meadow, to lose itself in 
 
 1 There is another picture of a dragon in Anglo-Saxon literature which I 
 may as well insert here for the sake of comparison. It is in the Fifty-Second 
 Riddle of Cynewulf . The beast he conceives has two resemblances to the. JBeo- 
 wulf dragon. He is a swift flier in the air, and a guardian of treasure. But 
 a new touch is added by Cynewulf. This dragon dives into the waves and dis- 
 turbs the sea. Like the dragon of Beowulf, he has paws with which he walks 
 the earth. These are the four wondrous beings with which the riddle begins— 
 
 Four beings I saw, strange was tbeir fashion, 
 Travelling together : their foot-tracks were black. 
 Very swart was their spoor. 
 
 Then the riddle changes from plural to singular, from the feet of the dragon 
 to the dragon himself — 
 
 Swifter than the swallows, swimming quickly in the ah' I 
 In the deep, he dived, dashed it into foam, 
 Like a fighting warrior ; then he showed the ways 
 O'er flaked heaps of gold, to all the four beings. 
 
 " Dashed it to foam " is, literally, behaved himself stormily in it, and the last 
 lines mean that the dragon led his four feet to the place where the gold lay, 
 each piece of it piled in a heap, overlapping the other like plates of iron on a 
 stitched coat of mail. 
 
 2 It is suggested that the name may be connected with Ran, the giant goddess 
 of the sea, the daughter of yEgir — Ran's Naes; but with Earna-naes immedi- 
 ately following, the unmythologioal explanation is plainly right. 
 
BEOWULF 58 
 
 tlie gray heath and moor-land. This is the place, and when 
 the dragon is slain, his carcase is pushed over the cliff to fall 
 on the beach below, while Beowulf's body is borne upwards 
 for burial to the point of Hrones-naes. 
 
 It was from this hidden and lonely dell that the dragon, 
 when he awoke and found he was robbed, went forth at night 
 for vengeance, vomiting gleeds. The palace hall was devoured 
 by the flame. It was the "greatest of sorrows — the sacred 
 gift-stool of the Geats was destroyed." But the fire of battle 
 did not blaze less hot in Beowulf than of old, and he said he 
 would alone, not with a host, go forth in his old age to meet 
 the worm. So he let an iron shield be made, for a forest-wood 
 ■ — a wooden shield — would be burned up by the breath of 
 fire ; and with thirteen men (the thirteenth is the thief of the 
 cup who alone knows the way) went to the ness opposite the 
 cave and sat thereon, and Wyrd was very nigh him. Like an 
 Indian chief, he sang his death-song, recounting his life, and 
 deeds of war. " I all remember, since I was seven years old." 
 He bids his thegns farewell, takes his shield and war-mail, not 
 naked now as he strove with Grendel, because he has to fight 
 with fire. " Not one foot will I fly the Ward of the hill ; but 
 at the rock-wall it shall be as Wyrd wills, Wyrd the measurer 
 of each man's life. Wait ye on the hill, clad in your byrnies. 
 Then the fierce champion, brave under helm, beneath the stone 
 clifEs bore on his mail-sark." And he saw, by the rock-wall, 
 an arch of stone standing and a stream from under it break 
 from the mountain ; the flood of that burn was hot with battle- 
 fire, for it was aflame with the breath of the Fire-Drake. 
 Enraged, the king shouted ; stark of heart, his cry was like a 
 storm. " His shout, clear sounding in battle, entered in under 
 the gray stone. Then the hoard-ward knew the voice of a 
 man." And first rolled forth the monster's fiery breath — hot 
 sweat of battle, and the earth roared. The lord of the Geats 
 upraised his shield, standing with his back against the steep 
 rockj and' the worm, rolling in curves and burning, moved 
 forth to the fight. Beowulf swung up his hand and smote the 
 grisly head with his sword, but the brown edge slid off on the 
 bone, bit too feebly on it, for Wyrd did not permit him victory, 
 and in a moment the king was wrapt in whirling fire. Again 
 they met, and the fire was worse than before, nor was there 
 any who helped the hero. All of his thegns, looking on, fled 
 to the wood in terror — all save one. Wiglaf alone, whose 
 breast welled with sorrows as he looked, Wiglaf, Weohstan's 
 son, one of the Waegmundings, kinsman of Beowulf, remem- 
 
54 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 bered the land, the folk-rights Beowulf had given him, and 
 seized the fallow shield, and gripped his ancient sword (Onela 
 had given it him, a gianfs sword it was), and cried to his com- 
 panions — " We promised, drinking mead in the hall with our 
 lord, that we would repay him with help in need. Dearer far 
 it is to me that flame should clasp me along with my gold- 
 giver than that we should bear home our shields in safety." 
 Then through the deadly reek he waded, and stood beside the 
 king. "Well-loved Beowulf ! " he cried, "as long since in thy 
 youth thou saidst thy Honour should never fail, so now strong 
 in deeds, ward thy life. I will stand by thee." Wiglaf's 
 shield was soon burnt up, but he fought on under Beowulf's 
 iron targe. The king smote hard again, but Naegling, Beo- 
 wulf's sword, snapped asunder, an old gray brand, that never 
 before had failed in battle,^ at which the Drake rushed on and 
 clasped the hero round the throat, and the king's life-blood 
 bubbled forth in waves. Now Wiglaf struck lower, and his 
 sword dived into the dragon so that the fire abated. Then 
 Beowulf drew his deadly knife, bitter and battle-sharp, the 
 seax that he wore on his byrnie, and cut in twain the worm 
 through the middle. Thus the battle ended. 
 
 But in the poisonous grapple the king had got his death 
 wound. It began to burn and swell and the venom boiled in 
 his breast. So he sat down, wisely thinking, and looked on 
 the giant's work, and how the stone arches of the cave were 
 fast on the pillars, while Wiglaf washed his wounds and un- 
 loosed his helm. And then he spoke, and the whole scene has 
 a dim likeness in it to the death of Arthur, as human, as 
 pathetic — 
 
 "Now to some son of mine I would give this Warweed, had 
 it so been granted to me that an heir, sprung from my loins, 
 
 1 There is a curious passage introduced here hy some late editor. Naegling, 
 which may mean Nailer, the sword which drives like a nail into the foe— or 
 perhaps with jewelled nails in the hilt (Nagelriug, in the Wilkina. saga, is the 
 best sword in the world, and is a part oi the ancient story of Angerboda) — 
 breaks, the writer says, because the hand that swayed it was too strong for 
 the sword. This is absurd, for Beowulf had fought with it all his life. But 
 the intrusion of the detail here is done by some one who had heard of the leg- 
 endary Offa and of his fight. 
 
 The legend goes that Offa, getting ready for his island duel at Fifeldor in 
 defence of his blind father Wermund, broke all the swords that were given 
 him when he waved them in the air — so mighty was his strength. At last 
 Wermund reminded him of a magic sword that long since he had hidden in 
 the earth. So bitten with rust and worms and thin was Skrep, for that was 
 the sword's name, that Offa feared to break it and forbore to fight with It 
 in the battle. At last, angry, he raised it aud struck, and Wermund was saved 
 from despair by hearing the hiss with which Skrep cut his enemy in half, from 
 helm to thigh. 
 
BEOWULF 55 
 
 should come after me. Fifty of winters I held my sway over 
 this people; nor was there one folk-king of them all, of all who 
 sat on their lands around me, who durst greet me with their 
 war-friends, to press on me with the terror of war. I tarried 
 at home on the hour of my fate ; I held my own fitly ; I sought 
 out no feuds ; I swore not many oaths and kept them not ; so 
 may I for all this, though sick with deadly wounds, have com- 
 fort, since the Master of men is not bound to charge me with 
 murder-bale of kinsmen when out of my body life takes its 
 flight." It is an English death, and in the same temper many 
 an English soldier has passed away. Nor is his desire to see 
 the treasure less natural to our nation, less characteristic. 
 "Now hasten, Wiglaf beloved," he adds, "and view the hoard 
 beneath the hoary rock ; bring it here that I may see the ancient 
 wealth, the bright and cunningly-set gems, so that I may, all 
 the easier, after the sight of it, give up my life and my people- 
 ship that I have held so long." 
 
 Wiglaf hurries to the cave, and he beheld marvels there ; 
 glittering gold lying in the den of the worm, vessels of old 
 time, pitchers and cups, plates and precious swords and helmets, 
 eaten through and worn with rust, curiously wire-enwoven 
 armlets, a sword iron-edged, and, greatest of wonders, an all- 
 golden banner at rest, high over the hoard, curious handiwork 
 woven with magic songs, and from it shone so mystic a light 
 that Wiglaf saw by its gleaming all things in the cave. Then 
 he loaded himself with the treasure and came forth to find 
 Beowulf bleeding away his life, sprinkled him again with 
 water, showed him the treasure to cheer him, until the last 
 words of the old king, gazing sadly on the golden store, broke 
 from his breast. " I thank the Glory-king for these treasures 
 that here I stare on, for that I, ere I die, have won them for 
 my people, have paid my own old life for them. But do thou 
 supply the need of my folk ; I may no longer be here." 
 
 " Bid the battle-famed build a barrow up. 
 
 Clear to see wben Bale is burnt, on tbe cliff above the surge ; 
 
 Which may for my folk, for remembering of me. 
 
 Lift its head on high on the Hrones-ness ; 
 
 That sea-sailing men, soon in days to be, 
 
 Call it ' Beowulf's Barrow,' who, their barks afoam, 
 
 Prom afar are driving o'er the ocean mists." 
 
 Beowulf, 1. 2802. 
 
 Then he did off from his neck the golden ring and gave it 
 to Wiglaf, also his gold-wrought helm and collar and byrnie. 
 "Use them well," he said, "thou art the last left of our kin- 
 
S6 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 dred, of the Waegmundings. Wyrd swept them all away, each 
 at the fated hour ; earls in their strength. I must go after 
 them." This was the last word of the old man, the "last of 
 the thoughts of his heart." And as Wiglaf sat there mourning, 
 the thegns who had been untrue to their lord, and fled when 
 they should have helped, came stealing down from the holt 
 where they had refuged, and, ashamed, gazed at Wiglaf and 
 their king. Wearied he sat, near his lord's shoulders, and 
 reproached them bitterly ; and the deep disgrace it was for an 
 English warrior to fail through cowardice in the duties of 
 comradeship is nowhere better set forth than in the following 
 speech — 
 
 "This, in sooth, one may say, who has a mind to speak the 
 truth, that the Man-lord who gave fair things to you, the bright 
 weeds of war in which here ye stand ; when at the ale-bench 
 he allotted helm and byrnie to the sitters in hall (as a war- 
 leader to his thegns, whom far off or near, the trustiest of men 
 he was able to find) • — has utterly wasted these weeds of the 
 battle. When War met him, the king of the folk had no cause 
 to boast of his comrades in arms. . . . Too few of those who 
 should ward him pressed round their Lord when the stress of 
 fight came upon him." 
 
 " Now shall getting gems, giving too of swords. 
 
 And the pleasure of a home, and possession of the land, 
 
 Be no more to kin of yours ; and each man of that kindred 
 
 Must bereft of land-right roam, when the lords shall hear 
 
 Prom afar (of all your fear), of your flight (to-day). 
 
 Of your deep disgrace. Death is better far 
 
 For whatever warrior than a life of shame ! " 
 
 Beowulf, 1. 2864. 
 
 I have translated this passage for its historic value. It equals 
 the passage in Tacitus which describes the tie of chief to 
 coinpanion and companion to chief among the Germans, and 
 which recounts the shame that fell on those who survived 
 their lord. 
 
 The news of the death of the king is now carried to the 
 host who waited on the sea-edge the issue of the fight. The 
 messenger describes what he has seen, and then (relating in 
 an episode, which I have elsewhere spoken of, the blood-fend 
 between themselves and the Sweons) predicts that the Sweons 
 will come and harry them now that Beowulf is dead. There 
 are treasures where he lies, but none shall wear them in 
 memory of the dead, neither warrior nor maiden fair; and 
 with the word he thinks again of the fates of war that over- 
 
BEOWULF 57 
 
 hung them because " the leader of their battle has ceased from 
 laughter, from sport and singing joy." Therefore shall the 
 maidens, sad of mood, of gold bereft, not once, but often, tread 
 an alien land. 
 
 Therefore shall the spear, 
 Many a one, now morning-cold, be by fingers met around. 
 Lifted in the hands (of ghosts) ; and the Harp shaU never more 
 "With its clanging walie the warriors, but the Raven wan. 
 Fiercely-eager o'er the fated, shall be full of talking, 
 To the earn shall say how it sped him at the gorging. 
 When he with the wolf on the war-stead robbed the slain. 
 
 Beowulf, 1. 3021. 
 
 This is a finer use than usual of the common poetic attendants 
 of a battle, the wolf, the eagle, and the raven. The three are 
 here like three Valkyrie, talking of all that they have done ; 
 and I have elsewhere said that the wild note that fills the 
 passage is repeated centuries after in the ballad of the Two 
 Ravens. 
 
 Then all the host rose and went, weeping, to see the king 
 where he lay, under the Ness of the SearEagle, and the poet 
 (whose work is here not a little spoiled by later insertions) 
 paints the scene so that we see it with our eyes. They found 
 the giver of rings dead, outstretched upon the meadow, and 
 Naegling, his sword, broken by his side, and the Fire-Drake, 
 scorched with his own gleeds, fifty feet of him, on the fire- 
 blackened and blood-stained ground. They saw the rocky 
 arch above the cave, and the stream that rushed from it, and 
 Wiglaf, seated on a stone in that grassy place, near his dear 
 lord, and the shamed cowards standing by, and, in the midst 
 of all, shining as if in mockery, golden cups and bowls 
 scattered on the grass, rings and jewels, "swords that had 
 lain a thousand winters, it seemed, in the lap of earth, so 
 rusty, eaten through " were they ; and above them, as fitted a 
 dead hero, as was the honour of Scyld when he died, the 
 golden banner glistened. 
 
 Add to this the picture of the host descending into the 
 hollow between the cliffs, and gathering round their king, and 
 we see the whole as the poet meant us to behold it. Wiglaf 
 tells them how bravely the battle was fought ; how impossible 
 it was to hold back the prince from dying for his folk ; how 
 he had seen the cave and the golden things and borne them 
 forth to Beowulf while he was yet alive. " He bade me greet 
 you, and prayed you to make a high barrow for him on the 
 cliff. Let the bier be made ready, and I will show you the 
 
58 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap, hi 
 
 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. 
 
 Now tlie gleed shall fret — 
 And the wannish flame wax high on the War-strength of the warriors, 
 Him who oft awaited iron showers in the fight, 
 When the storm of arrows, sent a-flying from the strings, 
 Shot above the shield wall, and the shaft its service, 
 Pledged with feathers, did, following on the barb. 
 
 Beowulf, 1. 3114. 
 
 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. 
 
 Then the Weder-folk worked upon that place, 
 
 On the hanging cliff, a howe that was high and broad, 
 
 By the farers on the waves far and wide to be descried ; 
 
 And within a ten of days they uptimbered there 
 
 Of the Battle-fleroe the beacon ; and the best of Brands ^ 
 
 With a wall they wrought around, as most worthily (his men). 
 
 All the men of wisest mind, might imagine it. 
 
 Then they did into the barrow armlets and bright gems, 
 
 And the precious things of price, all that from the hoard 
 
 The high-hearted men late had heaved away ; 
 
 Let the earth hold fast of the earls the treasure. 
 
 Gold within the grit-wall ; where it now abideth, 
 
 Of as little use to men as of old it was. 
 
 Then about the barrow rode the Beasts of battle, 
 
 Twelve in all were they, bairns of jEthelings, 
 
 Who would speak their sadness, tell their sorrow for their king. 
 
 So with groaning sorrowed all the GSat folk, 
 
 All his hearth-companions, for their house-lord's overthrow ; 
 
 Quoth they that he was, of the world-kings all, 
 
 Of all men, the mildest, and to men the kindest, 
 
 To his people gentlest, 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 retro- 
 spective summary of the hero's character, go far to prove, how- 
 ever 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 
 Brand here as a title of Beowulf. But the O. N. Brand-r a sword, often 
 means a warrior, as the German Dec/en does. And we use the term " a good 
 sword " for a good fighter. I have let the translation remain, hut otherwise 
 It would be "the best, the most famous of Burnings." 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE EPISODES OF " BEOWULF," AND THE " EIGHT AT 
 EINNSBUEG-" 
 
 The episodes in the poem of Beowulf are sufBciently impor- 
 tant to deserve separate treatment. One of them is connected 
 with the Fight at Finnshurg, a distinct fragment of heathen 
 English poetry; and this fragment is included in this chap- 
 ter. Another, the first episode, is the story of Seyld 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 Breea. 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 wel- 
 tered with great billows ? Seven nights ye strove, and he con- 
 quered 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 sea- 
 monsters, 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 
 
 1 There are those, of whom Laistner is the most minute, who turn the whole 
 of this Breca and Beowujf story into a Nature myth. "Beowulf, who is a 
 wind hero " (the cloud-cleanser, for Laistner makes Beowa = der Peger, 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. 
 
 59 
 
60 EARLY ENGLISH LITEKATUEE chap. 
 
 with whales and great seals and the walrus.^ Five nights 
 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 — some 
 indented coast where the sea-beasts had their haunt. " Flood 
 
 1 1 may as well introduce here in a note two verses and a hall of Anglo- 
 Saxon poetry, which belong to that early time when Christianity and Heathen- 
 dom 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 evi- 
 dence 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, Haute- 
 Loire, 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 anti- 
 quarian 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 Chris- 
 tian, for on the side opposite the scene from the saga is carved the birth of 
 Christ, and the worship of the Ma^i. 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 identi- 
 fications 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 — 
 
 HronaeB ban 
 Fiscflodu ahof on ferg(enbyrig) ; 
 WarJ3 gaeric grorn, pjser he on greut giawom. 
 
 [This] bone of the whale 
 Up-heaved the fish-floods to a fortress of waters ; 
 Sore the sea wailed, when he swam o'er the shingle. 
 
 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 maTs-ea fiscflodu the subject and ban the object. "The fish-flood 
 lifted the whale's bones on to the mainland." Wtilker 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 dif&eulty ; and Sweet translates it by " the mainland '"; 
 but, again, Wiilker seems right when he translates it wasserhurg, meeresburg'. 
 Fergen, firgen, frequently means " water, the sea," and/e»\(/e}i byrig would be 
 "a sea like a fortress." Wiilker 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 
 
IV THE BPISOBES — BEOWULF 61 
 
 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, hlew 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 — 
 
 Erom eastward came light, 
 Bright heacon of God ; the hillows grew still ; 
 So that now I could see the sea^-nesses (shine), 
 The windy rock- walls ! Wyrd often delivers 
 An earl yet undoomed, if his daring avail. 1. 569. 
 
 " Then the flood bore me up to the land of the Tins, 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 hy 
 the hunter of how he got the ivory of the casket, seems to be somethmg like 
 
 'xhe bone of the whale is the ivory jaw and teeth of the Sperm whale, a por- 
 tion of which is here made into a casket. It is this, set m his mighty head, 
 which lifts the sea in front of him as he rushes through it, into a pded-up heap 
 of waters which, indeed, driven before him into a wide curve, would closely 
 resemble the half circle of the outwork of a * o.^^tjess ; and many a time the 
 whalemen have seen the animal carrying the sea m front of him in this fashion. 
 Or, our casket-maker— and this explanation gives more meaning to the ferg- 
 (m6«rt(/)— may have seen the whale broach headforemost into the air, bear- 
 ing up Vith him, as it were, a castle of water, a mountainous burg of sea. 
 T&n heTells the 'rest of the story of his piece of ivory. ,The hunters frove the 
 great beast shoreward, or of itself it got entangled i"; t^« sl'^il'^Y'^fpH nil the 
 Ind there it died on the shingle pierced with lances ; but before it died all the 
 shallow waters of ocean, lashed by its struggles, waded and mourned. 
 
 If this be a true explanation, it is the rapid record of the l"i°t ™.^^X™^ 
 
 verv piece of ivory was secured ; and it tells first of how the whale behaved m 
 
 deS Tean aX^ea how it died in the shallows P^'^S^w's'S deaAy 
 
 » vivHness of the picture, and of seizing this bit of our fajthers sea-hfe clearly, 
 
 this note is not too long- See Note at the end of this volume. 
 
62 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 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 searhole 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 Tafnir), but Sigmund himself; and the bard at Hroth- 
 gar'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 Sinfiotli 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 
 
BEOWULF 63 
 
 Saga.' Whether the episode be as old, or older than the rest 
 of the poem, cannot be said for certain, but it is worth while 
 to put it clearly forth, so famous is the story ; and the rude 
 simplicity of the tale, undeveloped as yet into the two person- 
 ages of Sigmund and Sigurd, makes for its antiquity. It 
 pleases me to think that it is in English literature we possess 
 the first sketch of that mighty saga which has for so many 
 centuries engaged all the arts, and at last in the hands of 
 Wagner the art of music. 
 
 The fourth episode is the story of Finn king of Friesland 
 over-lord of Jutland ^ and of his sons, in battle with Hnaef and 
 Hengest his lieutenant, and of the events which followed. It 
 is sung at the feast in Heorot after the death of Grendel. 
 That it was a well-known and popular lay is plain, not only 
 because the bard sings but a portion of it, as if the rest were 
 well known to his hearers, but also because we possess a frag- 
 ment of another poem on the same subject, written also in 
 English by another hand. Curiously enough this other frag- 
 ment, which has been entitled the Fight at Finnsburg, supplies 
 us with a part of the tale which is wanting in Beowulf; and I 
 shall speak of it before I come to the related episode in 
 Beowulf. 
 
 It seems that Finn, king of the North Frisians and of the 
 Eotenas, i.e. of the Jutes, son of Folcwalda, was married to 
 Hildeburh, daughter of Hoce the Dane and sister of Hnaef. 
 Finn, angry with or jealous of the Danes, invited Hnaef to come 
 and stay with him as guest (much as iEtla invites the Niblungs) 
 with the intention of slaughtering him. Hnaef comes with 
 sixty men, and his right-hand man was Hengest. They are 
 lodged in a great hall in Finnsburg — Finn's town in Jutland, 
 
 1 1 have wondered If the phrase used about the treasure hid in the dragon's 
 cave in lines 3069, 3OT2 may not be a late intrusion into the story from the 
 Volsunga Saga, and related to the curse which attended on the hoard of the 
 Nibluugs. 
 
 2 1 foUow Grein in the arrangement of this story ; but it has been explained 
 in many other ways. It is questioned whether this fragment relates the first 
 battle with Finn (as in the story told above), or whether it is an account of the 
 second battle in which vengeance is taken on Finn. It is questioned who is 
 besieged in Finnsburg — Finn himself or his enemy? And it is questioned 
 whether this fragment is part of a larger poem, or the lay of a single battle? 
 Various have been the answers to these questions and the ingenuity of the 
 theories is such that the main question — of what kind is the poetry? — some- 
 what disappears. 
 
 There was no doubt a Finn saga sung all over the coasts of the Northern 
 Sea, with many stories built into it, and some of these many have been, in 
 variant forms, carried on into later sagas. I do not think that this English 
 fragment is a part of this larger saga, but that it is a separate lay, of which 
 we have lost the beginning and the end. 
 
64 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 — and at night, when all are asleep, Finn and his men sur- 
 round the hall with fire and sword. It is at this point that 
 the Fight at Finnsburg begins. 
 
 This fragment of fifty lines which, for the sake of form, I 
 speak of here and not separately, is probably much of the same 
 date as the early lays of Beowulf. It was discovered by Dr. 
 George Hickes on the cover of a MS. of Homilies in the library 
 at Lambeth Palace, and published by him in his Thesaurus 
 Linguafum Septentrionalium. The leaf itself has been lost. 
 We have only the copy Hickes made of it. It is a happy for- 
 tune which has selected so vigorous and picturesque an episode 
 for preservation. The shout of Hnaef, aroused from sleep by 
 the cry of the besiegers, his call to his comrades, the fierce and 
 rapid speech of the warriors to one another, the challenges, the 
 delight in war, have almost an Homeric manner, and we ought 
 to have some pride when we think that verse of this direct and 
 passionate character was written by men of our own race so 
 many years ago. 
 
 Hnaef ^ had leaped to his feet " young and warlike," at the 
 noise of the foe outside, and cried aloud — 
 
 This no eastward dawning is, nor is here a dragon flying, 
 Nor of this high hall are the horns a burning. 
 
 But they rush upon us here ; — Now the ravens sing," 
 Growling is the gray-wolf, grim the war-wood rattles, 
 Shield to shaft is answering. Shining now the moon is, 
 Full the welkin under ; now the woeful deeds arise, 
 ' Which will into making put all this malice of the folk ! 
 But do ye awaken now, men of war of mine. 
 Have your hands ar-ready, think on hero-deeds. 
 Eight ye in the front, be of iiery mood. 
 
 1 Wiilker thinks that this young fellow is Hengest and not Hnaef. In his 
 opinion (and he follows others) the fight in this fra;gment is to be introduced 
 between lines 1145, 1146 in Beowulf. Hnaef has already fallen, and it is Hen- 
 gest who speaks. See for the rest of this view page 315 in the Grundriss. 
 
 2 Fuijelas singa^, gylle^ graegliama, is often translated, " the birds sing, 
 the cricket chirps," but the phrase seems to have no meaning. I think that 
 Hnaef is declaring that war and fighting is, come upon them, and he uses the 
 well-known images of the bird and the beast of battle to tell his folk what is 
 at hand. Thefugelas, the " birds," would then mean the ravens whose song 
 went with the hosts to war, and gylleS graeghama would then be " the gray 
 wolf (him of the gray cloke) is howling." Others, however, make graeghama 
 mean the " gray war shirt," and gylleV " is ringing," and this seems adopted by 
 the best scholars. If so, I certainly would not retain the translation otfugelas 
 as " birds," but take it metaphorically, and translate it " arrows " or " spears." 
 Both, when flying through the air, are spoken of by the Anglo-Saxons as 
 "adders of the battle," and I see no reason why they should not be called 
 " birds." As to the spears singing, yelling through the air, that is a common 
 phrase in ancient folk-poetry. 
 
BEOWULF 65 
 
 Then did many a tliegn 
 , Rise, begemmed with gold, girt liim with his sword. 
 
 And two lordly warriors went to guard the doors, 
 Sigef erth and Eaha, and their swords tliey drew. 
 At the other gates up-stood Ordlaf and Guthlaf, 
 And Henggst himself. He strode upon their track. 
 
 Garulf and Guthhere, two other warriors, urge each other on, 
 and a fierce hero cried aloud, " Who held the door ? " And the 
 answer came such as Ulysses might have given in his hall to 
 Antilochus. 
 
 Sigeferth's my name, quoth he, I'm the Secga's lord. 
 Widely linown, a wanderer ; many woes I bore. 
 Battles hard to bear ! Here is banned to thee 
 Whatsoever thou thyself will'st to seek on me.i 
 
 Then was at the wall wail of deadly battle, 
 
 Then the boat-shaped shield must the bone-helm break 
 
 In the hands of heroes. All the house-floor rang again ; 
 
 Till amid the fight headlong fell Garulf — 
 
 He the earliest of all of these earth indwellers. 
 
 Son of Guthlaf — good men many fell about him. 
 
 High the heap of corses ; ^ hovered there the raven, 
 
 Swart and sallow-brown ; shone the gleam of swords, 
 
 As if all Finns-Burh were with fire aflame. 
 
 Never heard I that more nobly sixty heroes brave 
 
 Better bore themselves in the battle-strife of men. 
 
 Never since did swains of war better pay for sweetened mead 
 
 Than his house-carles then paid to Hnaef their due. 
 
 Five of days they fought and there fell of them. 
 
 Of his war men, none ; but well they held the doors. 
 
 The few lines which follow seem to tell that their chief was 
 at last wounded to the death. He said that his byrnie was 
 broken, and his helm cloven, and he gave over the command 
 to another. But no name is here mentioned, and we should 
 not have known what happened were it not for the singer in 
 Hrothgar's hall. He has taken up the story at the very point 
 where the fragment of the Fight at Finnsburg drops it. We 
 hear that it was Hnaef who was slain, and that Hengest, 
 succeeding him, fought on until nearly all the men of Finn 
 were slain, and among them Finn's sons by Hildeburh. 
 
 1 This is a very doubtful translation, hut I suggest it, and mean by it " The 
 fate, whatever it may be, which thou thinkest to inflict on me, will be your 
 own. You would slay me, I Will slay you; that is determined for you." But 
 it may be better to translate it more simply and literally " I have borne many 
 woes, hard battles, which are again decreed here ; which thou wilt seek with 
 me." 
 
 2 This is a guegs at the meaning. There are a number of different readings. 
 
66 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 It is a tragic position, such as is frequent in these Northern 
 stories, and the woman dominates it. Hildeburh has lost her 
 brother Hnaef at her husband's hands, and she has lost her 
 sons who had fought against her brother. Peace is made 
 between Hengest and Finn, pledges and blood-money taken ; 
 but the central point of passion in the singer's song is the 
 grief of Hildeburh and the burning on one pyre of her 
 brother's body with that of her son. No man could believe 
 that this peace would last; too much of grief, anger, and 
 brooding revenge is contained in the things done. 
 
 Hengest went with Finn to Friesland and spent the winter 
 with him and Hildeburh. He remembered his land, but the 
 " ocean rolled in storm, and the waves were locked with ice," 
 and he could not go. But when the winter was gone and the 
 bosom of earth was fair, he "thought more of vengeance than 
 of voyaging," and stayed on to slake his wrath. Finn knew 
 it ; and Hengest fell by the hand of Hunlafing.' Nor did the 
 feud end there, for Guthlaf and Oslaf took up the quarrels of 
 their dead chieftains Hnaef and Hengest, and gathering a host 
 sailed away to Friesland. In turn, they attacked Finn in his 
 hall, stormed' it, and brought death-bringing sword-bale to him. 
 All his high Burg was covered with the dead, and the Scylding 
 Danes loaded their ships with his plunder. Moreover, they 
 took Hildeburh (who, we may imagine, had wrought against 
 her husband), and bore the royal woman back over the sea- 
 road to the Danes, to her own people. It is but the outline of 
 a story, but it is of that quality in the events which is capable 
 of fresh development as singer after singer took up the theme. 
 The situations are passionate, and the events ; and every singer 
 could refit them as he pleased and create new ones. It is a 
 pity they did not get hold of it in Iceland, where they might 
 have given it the form it so lamentably lacks at present. 
 
 Another story, the story of Heremod (not, I think, the 
 mythic Heremod), was also in vogue when BeowwZ/grew into 
 a poem, and was evidently used to point the moral of the duties 
 of a king ; a stock example of a bad chieftain. The tale is 
 used in this fashion twice in Beowulf, and enables us to see 
 one of the ways in which the bards filled up their subject when 
 they sang. Heremod's shame is contrasted with the glory of 
 Sigemund, and with the prudence, patience, generosity, and 
 gentleness of Beowulf as a chieftain. But his wickedness 
 caused him to be remembered, and he illustrates that type of 
 
 I This passage, lines 1143-1145, is otherwise explained. See Earle's note oa 
 the passage. Deeds of Beoioulf. Clarendon Press. 
 
BEOWULF 67 
 
 man among the Northerns, of which there are examples in the 
 Icelandic sagas, whom power and pride destroy through the 
 indulgence of passion. Heremod slew all his servants till he 
 was left alone in a joyless life ; he gave no rings to men, and 
 when his strength was decayed, he was betrayed to his foes. 
 
 The next episode is that of Thrytho, the wicked woman, as 
 Heremod was the wicked king. She is contrasted (and her 
 story is brought in for that purpose) with Hygd, the queen of 
 Hygelac, young, wise, well-trained, and generous. No one 
 dared look Thrytho in the eyes, save only her husband, and who- 
 ever did, paid for his courage, for she had him slain. She 
 seems also to have compassed the death of her husband. But 
 afterwards, driven by her father's counsel from her country, 
 the mythic Offa married her and tamed her. But she was 
 happy to be tamed, for great love held her for this prince of 
 heroes. As a violent woman stained with crime, she stands 
 alone in Beowulf} 
 
 The women of Beowulf are of the fine Northern type ; trusted 
 and loved by their husbands and by the nobles and people ; 
 generous, gentle, and holding their place with dignity. They 
 serve the heroes in hall w-ith the mead, not as servants, but as 
 doing honour to their friends. They, like the king, bestow 
 gifts. At the king's death they are regents while their sons 
 are young, and can dispose of the kingdom, as Hygd attempts 
 to do. Wealhtheow is lady of the feast, and when Beowulf 
 comes to her husband's help, is mindful of courtesies, and wel- 
 comes him. Her heart is pleased when the hero boasts of his 
 prowess. When he has conquered Grendel, she is the first to 
 speak to him at the feast. But she does all in order. First 
 she speaks to her husband, then to his nephew Hrothulf, and 
 claims the kindness of Hrothulf for her sons. Her motherhood 
 is foremost in her heart. When she sees Beowulf sitting 
 between her boys, she gives him a jewelled collar, and begs 
 his friendly counsel for them. Her last words make clear that 
 she is obeyed like her lord, and sketch in a moment the Teu- 
 tonic tie of king to thegn, of people to their king. 
 
 1 Two accounts seem to be given of her, one after another ; two forms per- 
 haps of the original saga. One represents her as a termagant even after her 
 marriage, the other as mild and gentle after her union with Offa. The other 
 explanation which gives her two different husbands and makes the whole 
 story one, is given above in the text. Suchier finds parallels to the story in 
 many other sagas. Thrytho has herself been compared with the historical 
 CynebriS, the Drida of Matthew of Paris ; and it is probable that this tale of 
 Drida slipped into the legend of the Mercian Offa from the saga of Offa the 
 Angle. 
 
68 EAKLY ENGLISH LITEKATUEE chap. 
 
 Here is every earl to the other true, 
 Mild of mood he is, true man to his lord, 
 All the thegns at one, ever eager are the people 
 Do as I demand of you, warriors drinking here ! 
 
 Beowulf, 1. 1228. 
 
 The other women are Hildeburh and Freaware. Of the first 
 enough has been said in the Finn story to make us feel her 
 character; of the second Beowulf speaks when he gives an 
 account of his doings to Hygelac. 
 
 Nothing is said of her personally, but Beowulf's talk about 
 her sets before us another episode intruded into the poem. It 
 contains a position of affairs which we might easily match in 
 the Icelandic stories.' There has been a desperate battle be- 
 tween Hrothgar the Dane Freaware's father, and Froda, King 
 of the Heathobeardnas, in which Froda is slain. To appease 
 the feud, Hrothgar gives his daughter to wife to Ingeld son of 
 Froda, and it is owing to this custom of putting an end to wars 
 by means of a marriage that women have in Northern poetry 
 the name of "peace-weavers." Beowulf has not much hope 
 that this peace will last, and the reason he gives illustrates the 
 way a quarrel broke out again among our forefathers. " What 
 will happen," he asks, " when Freaware, the Danish princess, 
 comes into the hall of the Heathobeardnas, and they remem- 
 ber the slaughter of their folk that the Danes had made? 
 What will happen when they see with her a son of the 
 Danes wearing the sword of Froda ? " The answer he gives 
 has all the character of an extract from a separate saga 
 inserted in this place. 
 
 The Prince of the Heathobeardnas and his -people will take 
 it ill, when Freaware steps into the hall, that the Danish 
 prince who attends on her (one of her brothers, of whom seven 
 sagas were written) should boast himself there of the spoils of 
 the Heathobeardnas. On him gleams the heirloom of the old 
 hero, his hard and ring-decked sword, a treasure of the Heatho- 
 beardnas. Then at the beer-drinking a gray spear-warrior 
 will see the jewelled hilt, and remember him of the spear- 
 death of Froda who carried it of old. Wrath will be in his 
 soul ; he will turn to Ingeld, the 'yo^n-g chieftain at his side, 
 and stir his war-fury with this word — 
 
 1 This episode of Freaware and Ingeld the son of Froda may be compared 
 with the saga of Ingellus in Saxo Grammaticus. That saga is worked up out 
 of old Northern lays, and we have here a part of one of these. " When With- 
 ergyld was slain " is otherwise translated " where the indemnity, or the ven- 
 geance, failed." The phrase is on the next page. 
 
BEOWULF 
 
 Canst thou not, my friend, know at sight this sword, 
 
 Which indeed thy father into fighting bore, 
 
 Underneath his hosting-helm, in his latest hour ? 
 
 Dear that iron was, where the Dane-folk murdered him 1 
 
 Theirs was then the war-iield, when Withergyld lay low, 
 
 After heroes' slaughter ! Keen the Soyldings are ! 
 
 Now of these same slaughterers here the son of one, 
 
 Prideful of his spoils, paces through the hall, 
 
 Yelps in triumph of the slaying, hears with him the treasured sword 
 
 That thyself of riglit should'st alone possess. 
 
 Beowulf, 1. 2047. 
 
 Thus with bitter words he stirs up Ingeld, till the Lady's 
 thegn, for that his father slew Froda, sleeps blood-stained 
 after the biting of the bill, having paid the forfeit of his life ; 
 but the slayer escapes, knowing well the land. Then the sword- 
 oaths on either side will be broken, both by Danes and by 
 Heathobeardnas. Deadly hate will boil in Ingeld — though he 
 has caused the death of the boasting Dane — and the love^he 
 had for Freaware will become cooler through the waves of care. 
 Therefore, ends Beowulf, put no trust in that alliance ! ^ It is 
 a visrii picture, and, as we read it, a whole troop of similar 
 motives come flying to its side out of the Icelandic tales. 
 
 The other episodes are the death' of Hygelac, the earlier 
 events of Beowulf's life, the earlier wars of the Geats. Of 
 these I have already given an account in the story of Beowulf's 
 life. The manners of our forefathers, as the tale represents 
 them, now remain to be noticed. 
 
 Of the customs of the men and women from whom we have 
 descended, and of their types of character much has been told 
 in the poem and in the episodes. We have seen them as kings 
 and queens, and there is a certain grave stateliness about their 
 bearing and speech, and about the ceremony with which they 
 are approached. They are respected by, and they respect, 
 their followers. Rank is duly observed, and it is fitting that 
 kings and nobles know the rank, the ancestry and the renown 
 of other kings and nobles in other countries. The tie that 
 
 1 There is an allusion to this same story of Ingeld and Freaware and Hroth- 
 gar in the WidsUh ; and Beowulf's prediction (put, after the event, into his 
 mouth to show his wisdom) was fulfilled. Ingeld did go to war with Hrothgar 
 his father-in-law, to avenge his father's death. The warriors of the Heatho- 
 beardnas came sailing into the same fiord that Beowulf sailed into when he 
 came to Heorot, lauded, stormed over the hill, and attacked Hrothgar in his 
 hall. Bat the -king, though old. was still dreadful. Hrothnlf, his nephew, 
 whom we hear of in the poem, was faithful, and they stood bravely to their 
 arms for the homestead. The Heathobeardnas were pushed back to the sea, and 
 Ingeld was slain. The lines from WidsUh tell us the story. " Hrothwulf and 
 Hrot'igar hewed down at Heorot the host of the Heathobeardnas. There they 
 bowed the point of the sword of Ingeld." 
 
70 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 knits the thegns — the comrades in war and feast — to the 
 king and to each other is kept unbroken, and is the first of 
 the duties of life. The breaking of it through cowardice or 
 untruth is attended with mortal disgrace, with outlawry it 
 may be, and brings dishonour on the families of the cowards. 
 Extreme courtesy is the rule, rudeness such as Hunferth's the 
 exception; and jealousy and drink, combined with a character 
 which is itself violent even to slaying of his kinsmen, are 
 carefully assigned as the causes of this rudeness. Hospitality 
 and frank generosity, lavish gifts and their interchange are 
 also rigorous duties of life. If they drink hard, we have seen 
 that they also sing well. Poets are always at their feasts, and 
 the playing of the harp ; and singing and harp-playing are not 
 only in the hands of professionals, if I may use the word. 
 Every warrior is supposed to be capable of these arts. As to 
 the hard-drinking, it has been, if we look into these Anglo- 
 Saxon poems, much exaggerated. It does not seem that they 
 drank as hard as the gentlemen of the eighteenth century in 
 the British Isles. Frequently we find passages, not only here 
 in these early poems, but afterwards, where the man who gets 
 drunk is looked on with scorn and reproof. All this is very 
 different from the traditional image of our English ancestors, 
 which is still painted of them by some of our own writers, 
 and by our neighbonrs over the channel. In Taine's History 
 of English Literature his sketch of the early English folk is 
 ridiculous. One would think that the ancestors of the French 
 were less greedy, less drunken, less brutal, less vicious than 
 those of the English; that they were more dignified, more 
 loyal, of better manners, and of better laws, than the Teutonic 
 folk. The contrary was the case; and as to literature, the 
 forefathers of the French had none which time has considered 
 worthy to last. 
 
 There is, in conclusion, a word to say upon the literaryx 
 merit of Beowulf, and on the Christian elements in the poem. 
 The first of these Christian elements is the sense of a fairer, 
 softer world than that in which the Northern warriors lived. 
 I shall draw attention to this change hereafter, but here is an 
 instance of it. After the description of Heorot among its 
 desolate moors the Christian poet writes — "He said, who could 
 tell the tale of the creation of men from old,i that the Almighty 
 
 1 It seems to me (and perhaps others have without my knowledge thought 
 the same) that this Christian piece may be from Caedmon. It reads like a 
 quotation, " He who could the creation oi men from old relate, said — " and 
 the hues which 1 have translated above might be part of the three leaves miss- 
 
BEOWULF 71 
 
 had wrought the earth, the glorious-glancing plain that water 
 girts around : and in victorious power set the gleam of sun and 
 moon to give light to dwellers in the land, and adorned the 
 fields of earth with branched and leafy trees." The lines seem 
 to have a softer movement than the other Beowulf verses, and 
 above all, that sought-out pleasure in natural beauty which 
 does not belong to the pagan, but does eminently belong to the 
 Christian poetry of the English before the Conquest. 
 
 Another Christian passage derives all the demons, eotens, 
 elves, and dreadful sea-beasts from the race of Cain. The folly 
 of sacrificing to the heathen gods is spoken of ; but a kind of 
 excuse is made for this, as if the writer were sorry for his fore- 
 fathers. "They knew not the Lord God." In another passage, 
 with curious forgetfulness of this previous statement, Hrothgar 
 is made to give thanks to God for the death of Grendel, and 
 Beowulf's work is done in the strength of God. " The King of 
 Glory works wonder on wonder ; let thanks to him be quickly 
 given. Now hath a hero, through the might of God, done that 
 which all our wisdom could not do. Eo, whatever woman 
 brought forth this son may say that the eternal Creator was 
 gracious to her child-bearing." 
 
 As to the Wyrd, God has either made it, or He can avert it, 
 or He is identified with it ; all these ideas are expressed. Then 
 there is the sermon of Hrothgar to Beowulf after the victory 
 over Grendel. It is couched in the manner of the gnomic verses. 
 God is director of the fates of men, and they are many. A few 
 are sketched, and the fate of the man of mighty race who comes 
 to a prosperous kingdom is cliosen. He is happy, till a portion 
 of pride enters into his soul — pride which in all early English 
 poetry is the chief overthrower of the life of man — and the 
 passage where the slayer of the soul lodges the bitter arrow, 
 the deadly sin of pride, in the heart of the man is a good 
 example of homiletic English verse, and its metaphor con- 
 stantly occurs in Anglo-Saxon poetry. 
 
 The only other point is the belief in immortality, of which 
 the early Teutonic pagans had but a dim vision, for the Val- 
 halla seems to have been a post-Christian conception. The 
 poet uses of the death of Hrethel and others common phrases 
 like those we find in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle : "He gave up 
 human joy and chose the light of God " or "he chose the ever- 
 lasting gain." Wherever these phrases occur, they spoil the 
 
 ing in the MS. of the Genesis after the 168th line. Those missing pages would 
 contain the account of the creation of the sun and moon, and of the clothing 
 of the earth with grass and trees. The Beowulf lines are 92-97. 
 
72 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATtIRE chap. 
 
 natural impression of the poem, and we owe some thanks to the 
 poet that he was merciful, and thought too well of his original 
 story to do much of this kind of work. 
 
 When we think of the whole poem as it appeals to us in its 
 unity, and ask ourselves what poetic standard it reaches, we 
 must confess that it is not one of the great poems of the world. 
 If we think of the date at which it was composed, the English 
 have a right to be very proud of it, for it stands alone. There 
 may have been others as good in the vernacular languages of 
 Europe, but time has not chosen to preserve them, and this 
 which it has preserved has a certain distinction in the fact that 
 the story is unique, and the Grendel myth in it stands alone. 
 
 It has been called an epic, but it has no continuous self- 
 evolution. It has, rather, two narratives concerning two 
 remarkable events in a hero's life, each of which might* be 
 considered apart. It is narrative, then, rather than epic, but 
 it has an epic quality in this — that the purification of the 
 hero — the development of his character to perfection — is the 
 main motive of the tale. When he appears again after fifty 
 years of silence, he has the same moral dignity, the same equal 
 and heroic heart in age that he had in youth. But we find him 
 in a nobler position. He is not now the isolated hero ; he has 
 become the father of his people, the image of a great and worthy 
 king. And at the last he dies for the sake of his folk, and leaves 
 an immortal name. He knows, as he goes forth to the dragon, 
 that Wyrd will now conquer his body, but she shall not con- 
 quer his soul. The moral triumph is attained, and fate, not 
 Beowulf, is really conquered in the contest. This is the puri- 
 fication of the hero, and it is the ever-recurring theme of many 
 a splendid poem. The subject, standing thus at the head 
 of English literature, has silently handed down a great tradi- 
 tion of which our poets have not been unworthy. Nor have 
 they been unworthy of the character-drawing which is so excel- 
 lent in this poem. The unity of Beowulf's character gives to 
 a broken-up poem some unity of design. There is also a force, 
 a clear outline, a distinctiveness of portraiture in the other 
 characters, which foretell that special excellence in English 
 poetry — an excellence which has made its drama perhaps the 
 most varied in the world. 
 
 It is another excellence of Beowulf that, when we leave out 
 the repetitions which the oral condition of the poem created 
 and excuses, it gets along. It is rapid, and it is direct. The 
 dialogue is short, and says forcibly what it has to say ; but it 
 says it without much imagination, with scarcely one of those 
 
BEOWtlLF 73 
 
 touches which mingle earth and heaven, or which go home to 
 the depths of the human heart. But in many places it is imagi- 
 native 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 inter- 
 weave 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 judg- 
 ing 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 war- 
 riors 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 allit- 
 erative word of the saga, he sings of the great fight with Gren- 
 del or the dragon, of Hrothgar's giving, of the searvoyage, 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 excite- 
 ment 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. 
 
CHAPTEE V 
 
 THE MYTHICAL ELEMENTS IN 
 
 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 Scyld and the 
 Dragon, belongs to literature and to English literature. 
 
 As to the cycles of song, we have in the jBeoiow?/ evidence of 
 heroic sagas which are contemporary with the supposed histor- 
 ical life of the hero, that is, with the sixth century ; and evi- 
 dence also in it of still earlier cycles. The first sagarcycle 
 includes the songs sung concerning the earlier deeds of Beo- 
 wulf 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 person- 
 age, 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 con- 
 temporary with those songs sung among the Goths of which 
 Jordanes tells — the barbara et aniiquisslma carmina which 
 74 
 
 4 4 
 
CHAP.v THE MYTHICAL ELEMENTS IN "BEOWULIT" 75 
 
 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. 
 Th'd poets a,t 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 
 Mnn 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 FigM ofFinnsburg 
 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 Pitela, 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 Scyld- 
 ings, of the Angles as well as of the Danes, and Ing is, some say, 
 the same as Seeaf. 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 Scyld with which the poem 
 opens, and wkose 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 ele- 
 ments. 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 histor- 
 ical mjrth of great antiquity, the myth of Scyld or Sceaf, ap- 
 pears in its introduction. Added to these mythical, there are 
 legendary elements, which have had either a root in some 
 
76 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 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 
 OfEa, son of Wermund, and stole afterwards into the tale of 
 Olfa of Mercia. Now it is one of the well-known character- 
 istics 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 idto 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 G-rendel's dam, and guard, like 
 the herds of Proteus, her sea-cave, may be partly mythical — 
 images 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. 
 
V THE MYTHICAL ELEMENTS IN "BEOWULF" 77 
 
 with regard to them on the borderland between fact and myth, 
 for at times they are scarcely to be distinguished from the 
 tuisked 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 half- 
 actual 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 introduc- 
 tion to the whole poem, and is followed by his burial, of which 
 I have already written. Here is the passage — ■ 
 
 See now — of the Spear-Danes we have in stories heard, 
 All the fame of our folk-kings in the far-off days ; 
 How the doughty nobles did mighty deeds of war. 
 Oft has Scyld, the son of Scef, from the Scathers' host, 
 From the multitude of tribes, taken their mead-benches ! 
 Awe-inspiring was that earl, since when erst he was 
 Found in his forlornness. 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 tliose 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 Scede- 
 land — 
 
 He up-waxed beneath the welkin, in his worthy glories grew, 
 
 Till that every one, of. the folk abiding round 
 
 O'er the pathway of the whale, had to pay him tribute, 
 
 Had to give him service. That was a good king. 11.8-11. 
 
 Of him was born Beowulf (that is the Beaw of the Anglo- 
 Saxon genealogists, not our Beowulf, who was a Geat, not a 
 Dane), "the son of Scyld in Scedeland." Then Scyld died at 
 his appointed time, and was buried. 
 
78 EAKLY ENGLISH LITEEATURE chap. 
 
 This is our ancestral myth, the story of the first culture-hero 
 of the North, " the patriarch," as Eydberg calls him, " of the 
 royal families of Sweden, Denmark, Angeln, Saxland, and Eng- 
 land. We might say that Sceaf (the Scyld of the poem) 
 belongs especially to England, for it is only in England that 
 this myth has been preserved. It is told, not only in Beowulf, 
 but by four English chroniclers, who add details not given in 
 Beowulf — jEthelweard, William of Malmesbury, Simeon of 
 of Durham, and Matthew of Westminster. The myth lasted 
 then in the popular voice till the time of Henry II., and Eyd- 
 berg says, with that certainty of a theorist which awakens 
 doubt, that " a close examination shows that these chroniclers, 
 with the Beowulf poem, have their information from three dif- 
 ferent sources, which again have a common origin in a heathen 
 myth." They describe the boat drawing near the Scanian land, 
 and a little boy asleep in it, with his head on a sheaf of corn, 
 and around him treasures and tools, swords and coats of mail. 
 The boat is richly adorned, and moves without sail or oar. The 
 people draw it ashore, take up the boy with gladness, make 
 him their king, and call him Scef or Sceaf, because he came 
 to them with a sheaf of grain. This Sceaf is the same as the 
 Scyld of Beowulf, or, as Scyld in the poem is the son of Sceaf 
 (Earle translates Scyld Scejing, Scyld of the sheaf), the story 
 of the father is there attributed to the son. Though the tale 
 exists only in these English sources, yet the name Scef or Sceaf 
 is elsewhere, found in Northern Saga, and according to state- 
 ments which may be traced to a Scef Saga, Denmark, Angeln, 
 the north of Saxland, Gotaland, and Svealand were ruled by 
 him. " Legend derives from him," says Eydberg, "the dynasty 
 of TJpsala." Beowulf, as we have seen, brings all the royal 
 family of Denmark from Scyld, the son of Sceaf, who in the 
 Eormanna sogur is called the god of the Scanians. Matthew of 
 Westminster says that he ruled in Angeln, and the Anglo- 
 Saxon Chronicle, in the complete genealogy of Wessex, traces 
 back to Sceaf the origin of the West-Saxon kings. He is also, 
 if we may believe Eydberg,' the same as Skelfir, in the Ice- 
 landic Sagas, who is the progenitor of the Skjoldings and the 
 Ynglings, and is further identified with Heimdal, the Vana god, 
 who, under the name of Eig, lived among men for a time, and 
 
 1 Rydberg, Teutonic Mythology, pp. 87-96. When we have made every 
 allowance for a certain fancifulness, and for the bias which a well-loved theory 
 creates, this book is a real contribution to Northern mythology, and the myth 
 of one original ancestor hero of the Danes, the English, the Saxons, and 
 others, is rendered extremely probable. 
 
V THE MYTHICAL ELEMENTS IN "BEOWULF" 79 
 
 did for them the same good deeds that Sceaf did for Scania. 
 He is then, it seems, the mythical hero from whom the tribes 
 round the mouth of Elbe, and north of it in Denmark, South 
 Sweden and the islands derive their origin and their civilisa^ 
 tion. His story is the myth of the man who first taught them 
 agriculture, and this is signified by the sheaf which is his pil- 
 low in the boat, and by his very name. The lines in Beowulf 
 continue the sketch of him as the " culture-hero." When he 
 waxed to man's estate he became, we hear, the king, estab- 
 lished law and government, and first welded together from one 
 centre the scattered tribes into a people. " All the folk abid- 
 ing round had to give him service." 
 
 The question as to the place where he set up his kingdom, 
 and whence he spread his cultivating influence, also belongs to 
 the myth, and may belong to the larger question — Whence, in 
 distant prehistoric times, came the Teutonic Aryans ? The old 
 Teutonic myth declares that out of Ash and Embla, two trees, the 
 gods made the first human pair. These trees were found upon the 
 seashore, as if they had drifted thither out of the great Ocean. 
 We may infer then that there was a tradition that on some place 
 on the seacoast the Northern race stepped into history. The 
 myth of Sceaf, in all its forms, tells the same tale ; and the very 
 region is named. The coast to which he comes from the sea is 
 the coast of Southern Scandinavia. It is in Scedeland, we hear 
 from Beowulf, that this dawn of Northern culture begins. 
 " Scef," writes .^thelweard, " cum uno dromone advectus est 
 in insula oceani quae dicitur Scani." William of Malmesbury 
 and Matthew of Westminster bring him to the same place. 
 When he grows up, he is, however, especially linked to Angeln. 
 In the tale William of Malmesbury heard, Sceaf reigns, in a 
 town which was then called Slaswich, but now, Haithaby. 
 ^thelweard tells the same tale — "Anglia Vetus sita est inter 
 Saxones et Giotos, habens oppidum capitale quod sermone 
 Saxonico Sleswic nuncupatur, secundum vero Danes, Haithaby." 
 According then to the English tradition, Sceaf is our origin ; 
 the maker of the old England realm, the root of the English 
 stem, and probably the divine race-hero and then the tribal 
 deity whom the Angles worshipped when they came to Britain. 
 It is in Sceaf then, as I dare to conjecture, and not in Woden, 
 that we English find our earliest origin. He, veiled in the 
 mists of ancient myth, may be our most ancient forefather, our 
 ancestral god. The traditions of English chroniclers enshrine 
 the story, and the ancient lay, of which we here speak, used as 
 the introduction to Beowulf, tells of him — under the name of 
 
80 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 his son Scyld — of Ms advent to the land whence our fathers 
 came, of his glory, his death, and his romantic burial. 
 
 This ancestor-worship was part of the ancient religion of the 
 Angles. The founders of their tribes, the heroes who taught 
 them agriculture and organised war, who had wrought many 
 peoples into one nation, were supposed to be still alive in the 
 hills and barrows where they had been buried, and to have a 
 continual interest in their folk. In process of tinle they became 
 more and more divine, and the mysterious passage of Scyld 
 after his death into the unknown seas, and his reception by 
 unknown beings, may symbolise his gradual rise from the hero 
 into the semi-divine personage. 
 
 Behind these ancestor-deities were greater Beings, objects 
 of a more solemn worship ; and I venture to think that in early 
 times the English had very few of these gods, and that their 
 conceptions of them were of great simplicity. They wor- 
 shipped a personification of the Heaven, whom they may 
 afterwards have called Woden, and who lived, not in the 
 shielded hall of Valhalla, but in the watch-tower of a moun- 
 tain fort in the sky. They worshipped Earth, the wife of 
 Heaven, the great Mother of all. They worshipped their Son, 
 whom after-ages called Thor or Thunder, " the farmer's 
 friend," the god of the work done on the soil of the earth, the 
 glorious summer who fights with the wintry giants and with 
 the monsters who make the blight and the fog — a personi- 
 fication of the beneficent and renewing powers of nature. 
 This is the Trinity which includes, as I permit myself to 
 think, all the great gods reverenced by our English fore- 
 fathers. The complicated mythology which in after times 
 the Norsemen made, partly out of old heathen and partly out 
 of Christian elements, and which we are accustomed to impute 
 to our forefathers' religion, was, it seems to me, at first 
 unknown to them. If we would realise what the English 
 thought of religion when they came to our island, we must 
 clear our minds of these late conceptions, and think only of 
 the Heaven and the Earth, and the Summer ; of the Father 
 and Mother of all things and of their Son, who may have been 
 called — for we do ' not know whether they were or not — by 
 the English equivalents of Woden, and Erigg, and Thor.^ As 
 time went on, new forms of these old thoughts produced new 
 deities. We have instances of these in the two goddesses 
 
 1 1 have placed a note at the end of this volume on the relation of Woden to 
 Soeaf , and on the question as to whether the Angles gave the name of Woden 
 to their highest God. 
 
V THE MYTHICAL ELEMENTS IN "BEOWULF" 81 
 
 named by Baeda — Eheda (Hrede) and Eostra (Eastre), 
 nature-deities, both of them probably personifications of the 
 glory and brightness of the summer. Rheda, according to 
 Grimm, is the shining and renownful goddess ; Eostra the 
 radiant being of the dawn, of the upspringing light. It was 
 the worship of this latter goddess, and not of Balder, that the 
 Christian priests found so deeply rooted among the English 
 people that they adopted her name into Christianity, and 
 transferred it, with all the thoughts that belonged to her myth, 
 to the day of the resurrection of Jesus. They could not afford 
 to lose all the emotions which belonged to the conquest of the 
 Winter by the Summer.^ 
 
 In opposition to, and beneath these beneficent powers, were 
 the personifications of the destroying and harmful powers of 
 nature, of the deep abyss of darkness, of the winter, the frost 
 and storms, of the deadly vapours of the moorland and the fen, 
 of the angry and overwhelming waves of the sea — the crea- 
 tures of the dark, the giants, the ogresses, the fierce elves of 
 the wood, the furious wives that rode the winds and the waves, 
 who afterwards rose into goddesses or sank into witches — the 
 demons of sea and land and sky. These could scarcely be 
 called objects of worship, but objects of fear who were hated 
 by the strong, and propitiated by the weak. Wells, stones, 
 trees, hills, and a multitude of other things in nature received 
 veneration, and finally behind them all rested, it seems, the 
 Wyrd, the Fate-G-oddess, who ruled the destinies of men, who 
 tended to become in men's minds supreme even over the 
 highest gods. This was the simple, rude, primeval religion of 
 the early tribes who came over to England, and their sacrifices 
 and feasts were probably imageless. 
 
 The early nature-worship contained in this religion is par- 
 ticularly enshrined in the second myth of which we have here 
 to speak, — the myth of Beowulf ; not of the quasi-historic 
 hero of the poem, but of his name-sake the son of Scyld, 
 whom the Anglo-Saxon genealogies call Beaw and who is 
 usually styled Beowa. His mythical deeds, as I have pre- 
 viously explained, were transferred in process of time to the 
 hero of the poem, and we may therefore consider them in that 
 connection. ' Beowulf, in his youth, overcomes Grendel and 
 
 iRhedmonath a dea illorum Rheda, cui in illo sacrificabant, nominatur . . . 
 Antiqui Anglorum populi, gens mea . . . apud eos Aprilis Esturmonath, quon- 
 dam a dea illorum, quae Eostra vocabatur . . . nomen habait : a cujus nomine 
 nunc pascbale tempus oognominant, consueto antiquae observationis vocabulo 
 gaudia novae solfnnitatis vocantes. Baeda, De temporum ratione, cap. 13, 
 
82 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 his dam, and in his old age, the dragon. In the latter strife 
 he dies himself. 
 
 Both contests are, at least partly, two different forms (modi- 
 fied by local elements) of the same original nature-myth of 
 the Sun overcoming the Night, of the Night overcoming the 
 Sun. Among the Northern tribes who had only two seasons, 
 this daily contest was extended to the yearly recurring battle 
 between Winter and Summer; between the frost and storm- 
 giants who destroyed men and the labours of men, and the bright 
 beings who, coming in the summer, brought life and fruitful- 
 ness and peace to men. Varied modifications of this, arising 
 from peculiar features of the scenery and climate in which the 
 inheritors of the general myth lived, were continuously made. 
 Grendel and his mother, when we consider them as mythical, 
 represent not so much the fierce winter powers, as the winter 
 powers on the searcoast, the demoniac welter and destroying 
 strength of the stormy sea ; and along with that, the horror 
 and the pestilence of the moors beyond the fringe of inhabited 
 land which extended between the sea and the moor; the 
 malarious fogs which brought death and disease to men and 
 vegetation, the blinding mist, the overwhelming and destroy- 
 ing rains and hail and snow to which the moorland seemed to 
 give birth. Beowulf would then symbolise the Summer who 
 puts an end to these terrors, the strong bringer of light and 
 fruitfulness, the saviour of men. The dragon story is another 
 form of the same root-thought, and we need not particularise 
 it too much. Some have, with great nicety, made Grendel 
 represent the wild sea of the spring equinox, and the dragon 
 the storms of October and November, in fighting against 
 which the summer dies. But when the myth first arose there 
 was none of this complex thinking. It was a kind of childish 
 story about summer and winter, about storms and calm, such 
 as might arise to-day in Greenland. 
 
 The general statement is, then, that the whole tale of 
 Beowulf and Grendel and the dragon had its far-off origin in 
 the myth of the Summer conquering the Winter. But there 
 are special elements in the myth of Grendel and Beowulf 
 which make this general statement inadequate. The Grendel 
 story seems to me the acorn of the whole poem, the aboriginal, 
 primeval matter. The theory which some have started, that 
 the dragon story was the earliest, and that Grendel was grafted 
 upon it, appears to be wanting in the sensitive instinct for what 
 is old. The dragon tale is the ancient myth of the serpent 
 Darkness attacking the Light, but it is that myth in a some- 
 
V THE MYTHICAL ELEMENTS IN "BEOWULF" 83 
 
 what modern shape, degraded into one of its thousandfold forms 
 in the Folk-Tales, and centuries later than a grim, gray-haired 
 creation like that of Grendel. It is, however, uplifted to a 
 higher level in the poem, though still further modernised, by 
 being moralised. The composer of Beowulf intended, I think, 
 and this seems also Professor Earle's view, to represent under 
 the destroying fires of the dragon, the evil forces which injure 
 just government and noble kingship, and which are overthrown 
 by the self-sacrifice of Beowulf for his people. The dragon 
 myth in Beowulf seems to be a modern form of the ancient myth, 
 and to have been made more modern by an ethical direction. 
 
 It is very different with Grendel. His story is the antique 
 matter of the poem, and it is, as it stands, unique. It received 
 no further circulation, and it awakens great curiosity. The 
 name itself of the monster is a puzzle. Grimm connects it with 
 the Anglo-Saxon grindel (a bolt or bar), a word found in various 
 forms among the Teutonic languages. It carries with it the 
 notion of the bolts and bars of hell, and hence of a fiend. He 
 compares it to the German hoUriegel (a hell-bar), hence the 
 devil or the devil's own ; and he compares Grendel, thus derived, 
 with Loki, whose name he links to Ivkan, to shut up. This is 
 somewhat far-fetched, and a much simpler etymology has been 
 suggested. Ettmuller was the first, I think, to connect the 
 name with grindan, to grind, to crush to pieces, to utterly 
 destroy. Grendel is then the tearer, the destroyer, and if we 
 bind him up as a water-spirit with the stormy sea, this deriva- 
 tion well expresses the crushing and battering force of the 
 waves that grind the rocks, break up the ships, and rend the 
 seamen. But I suspect that the name belongs to the most 
 ancient forms of the Teutonic tongue— to a language as old as 
 the hills— such as was spoken in the Stone Age to which I 
 should like to refer the myth of Grendel. It may have come 
 to the Teutons through the Celts; and indeed the only resem- 
 blances to it I have been able to find are Celtic. 
 
 With regard to the conception and story of Grendel and his 
 mother, there are two questions to ask. First, Is there a,ny- 
 thing like it in the myths of other countries ? and secondly, 
 Is there anything that resembles it in after-story ? 
 
 As to the first question, there are general resemblances m 
 many demoniac and robber forms, in the Eakshasas of India, 
 and other oriental persons who are cannibals, and m all the 
 ogres of the Folk-Tales. Polyphemus, too, lives in a cave by 
 the sea, and devours men. The story of Cacus may be com- 
 pared. But these have no closeness to the subject-matter or 
 
84 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 G-rendel. We come nearer to it when we think of the giants of 
 the Northern imagination, the eotens who dwell, like Grendel, 
 in the wild wastes, who afterwards become the hill-folk ; the 
 trolls who live in the crags and caves, but who are also con- 
 ceived, in the earlier and simpler way, as the huge indwellers 
 of the dark caves under the overhanging cliffs which run back 
 from the beach of the great ocean which clasps the Earth. 
 Grendel may be a local personification of one of these giants, 
 with traits added to him derived from the scenery of the place 
 where the story first upgrew, and I daresay something of this 
 conception entered into him. But there is more in him. He 
 belongs not only to the sea, but to the moor and the marsh, 
 and those who have made him the personification of the plague 
 of the poisonous fen, and Beowulf the healthy storm wind that 
 disperses the deadly vapour, have something to say for them- 
 selves. But to confine the conception of Grendel to this, and 
 to leave out the sea, is to be too fond of a single idea. He is a 
 mixture of many things, the last result of a number of rude 
 folk-ideas. The nearest parallel to him which I have been able 
 to find is a Celtic myth, and it seems to be of the same great 
 age which I impute to Grendel. In it also the thoughts of the 
 sea and the moor are combined, not of the moor itself, but of 
 the mists and waters of the moor. For Grendel is essentially 
 a water-demon. 
 
 ■ In the mythic history of Ireland, the Fomori disturb Par- 
 tholon and his people under the leadership of a giant and Ms 
 mother. The Fomori are monsters, one-handed, one-footed. 
 Their name is derived from fomuirib (under seas), and they 
 are water-demons who are hostile to men, who pay unwelcome 
 visits to the land, who, dwelling in the seas, have power over 
 the ocean and lakes, who are also mythic representations of 
 the mists and baleful fogs, the cold and stormy winds that 
 injure the farmer's work. The Welsh have also a Mallt y 
 Nos, the Night Mallt, a she-demon associated with the cold 
 malarious fogs on marshy lands at night. Now these Fomori, 
 demons like Grendel of the sea and mist, but also, like him, 
 semi-human, are fought with by Nuada of the Silver Hand, i 
 and conquered, as Grendel is by Beowulf ; and this battle is, ' 
 of course, as that of Beowulf also, made by the mythologists 
 into the dispersion of the mists by the sun, and the stilling of 
 the winter storms and sea by the triumphant summer sun.^ 
 It is curious that in the Beowulf myth Grendel loses his arm, 
 
 1 For all this I refer my readers to the Hihbert Lectures of 1886, by John 
 Rhys, Professor of Celtic at Oxford, pp. 592, 603, 610, 
 
V THE MYTHICAL ELEMENTS IN "BEOWULF" 85 
 
 but in the Irish myth that Nuada, the conqueror of the Fomori 
 loses his hand ; like Tyr, when in the Norse tale he binds the 
 Fenri wolf. The hand business is thus reversed. 
 
 I have also found in Curtins's Myths and Folk-Lore of Ire- 
 land an independent parallel to the rending away of Grendel's 
 arm. It is in the Tale of the Seven Brothers and the King of 
 France (p. 270). The King of France loses his children, and 
 asks Finn to help him. He sails over the sea, and one of the 
 seven brethren with him is Strong. They hear that when a 
 child is born to France, a hand comes down the chimney and 
 takes the child away. On their arrival a child is born, and at 
 the dead of night the hand descends and gropes for the child. 
 " Strong caught the hand, and it drew him nearly to the top 
 of the chimney. Then he pulled it down to the ashes, again 
 it drew him up." All night this struggle continued, and every 
 stone in the castle of the King of France was trembling in its 
 place from the strife. But at break of day Strong tore from 
 its shoulder the arm with the hand, and there was peace. 
 Then they go to find the other three children, and find them 
 drawing water to cool the shoulder of MacMulcan, from whom 
 the arm has been torn. They deliver the children, and Mac- 
 Mulcan, who has a sister, pursues them. They saw the sea 
 raging after them. " That is MacMulcan," says Wise, another 
 of the seven brothers. This daemonic sea-fiend drags the ship 
 down, and they are only saved by Strong making a flail out of 
 MacMulcan, and thrashing the head off his body on the ship ; 
 and the sea is filled with blood. This is a curious parallel. 
 Strong is of course the same as Strongback in the common 
 folk-tale; but nevertheless he suits with Beowulf's mighty 
 strength. The sailing over the sea is like Beowulf's voyage. 
 The trembling of the house in the strife is like the shaking of 
 Heorot. The rent arm is, of course, a similar incident. By 
 itself it might only be a coincidence, but what follows is 
 remarkable. MacMulcan is, like Grendel, a creature of the 
 sea, is identical in the tale with the raging sea. His head is 
 struck off, and the sea, as in Beowulf, is filled with blood. He 
 has a sister, like Grendel's dam, a female demon. I wonder 
 if the Grendel tale may not be a Celtic story, which in very- 
 ancient times became Teutonic. These are the only simili- 
 tudes to Grendel of sufficient importance I have been able to 
 recover, and they point to the myth of Grendel being, as I 
 maintain, of a primeval age, of the age of the giant rather than 
 of the hero myths; that is, it existed before the myth of 
 Beowa, which was afterwards bound up with it. The deadly 
 
86 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATUKE chap. 
 
 influences of nature were probably impersonated before the 
 beneficent influences. 
 
 It was necessary, since so much has been made of it, to 
 discuss this story from the point of view of the Nature- 
 mythologists ; but I think that we may wander far, and with 
 great vagueness, in that direction. I am much more disposed 
 to refer the whole story of Grendel to such a tale as may have 
 arisen all over the ISTorth in the remoter days of history. In 
 very early times a general tale might have grown up of the 
 struggle of the first Teutonic settlers with the aboriginals who 
 lived in caves in the unknown lands, and whose size would be 
 magnified by superstitious dread. There are stories of this 
 kind in Iceland, of wights who lived in deep and gloomy 
 caverns. There is a cave-dweller's tale (edited by G. Vigfus- 
 son), and the cave-wight in it, whose burning eyes are like 
 two full moons, chants monstrously and in a big voice a song 
 which is supposed to be a death-song over the cave-kin of the 
 country.' No doubt if such a story was used in a heroic tale 
 like Beowulf, myths of nature would be mixed up in it, and it 
 would be handled as poets handle folk-tales. It would lose 
 the simple form, the naturalness of narrative, and take heroic 
 proportions with a semi-divine element mingled up with it. 
 Now if such a conjecture were hereafter to be rendered prob- 
 able, we might find that the story as it stands in the Grettis 
 Saga would be one of the representatives of this quasi-historical 
 source of the Grendel story. 
 
 As to the after existence of the story, that fortunately lies 
 plain before us. The first time that any one who knew the 
 Beowulf poem read the Grettis Saga, he recognised his old 
 acquaintance under another form, and said to himself that the 
 story of Grendel had been brought over to Iceland from 
 Scandinavia or England, or that the same thoughts out of 
 which the Grendel story grew took a similar form in similar 
 circumstances of climate, in a land incessantly covered with 
 dark and dangerous mists. The point of difference is that 
 Glam, who represents Grendel, has nothing to do with seas 
 and waters, nor is he a primeval demon. He is only the 
 embodied ghost of a thrall into whom the demon nature of the 
 Haunter he has slain has entered. The semi-divine element 
 is altogether gone out of him. But the fight of Grettir with 
 him is very similar to the fight of Beowulf with Grendel. 
 Farther on in the tale is another parallel. Grettir overcomes 
 
 1 Grettis Saga, Magnusson and Morris, Notes, p. 277. 
 
V THE MYTHICAL ELEMENTS IN "BEOWULF" 87 
 
 a giant -who lives in a cave underneatli the waterfalls. This 
 second tale seems to have grown out of the fight of Beowulf 
 with Grendel's dam, and is connected not with the sea, but 
 with the turbulent waters of the earth. I content myself with 
 quoting from Morris and Magnusson's translation the pas- 
 sages out of the saga which was probably written down in the 
 thirteenth century. 
 
 It is told in the story that the valley where Thorhall fed 
 his sheep was so haunted that his shepherds were evilly 
 entreated, and none at last could be got to tend the outlying 
 folds. But in the end he found a herd — Glam by name — 
 "huge and uncouth, with gray and glaring eyes and hair that 
 was wolf-gray, who was minded to do the work." This is a 
 description which recalls Grendel, and the things afterwards 
 told of his ways are also in tune with the monster. Folk 
 cannot abide him; he is a leather of church song, and his 
 whoop is as big as his body. Moreover, he is pagan at heart. 
 " The ways of men," he says, " were better when they were 
 heathen." •He goes forth to the hills on Christmas Eve and, 
 like Grendel, into the heavy weather — thick mirk, roaring 
 wind, and driving snow. The haunter meets him, and next 
 day he is found dead, blue as hell and as great as a neat — 
 a thing of loathing. But he begins a new life and haunts in 
 his turn instead of the haunter, slaying those who meet him, 
 riding the house roofs at night, a dreadful scather of men, and 
 worse in winter (here the old myth creeps in) than in summer. 
 
 Thorgaut, a tall strong man, says that he will serve Thorhall 
 the farmer, and strive with Glam. But on Christmas Eve he 
 is slain, and Glam waxes mightier now and slaughters the 
 cattle and the neat-herds at the farm, till all men, save the 
 farmer and his wife, flee from the place; and it was feared 
 that the whole valley would be laid waste. News of this is 
 brought to Grettir as news of Grendel is brought to Beowulf, 
 and he has like Beowulf the strength of many men. So he 
 comes to Thorhall-stead and says that he will have a sight of 
 the thrall and lies down at night in the hall waiting for Glam, 
 and the hall was all broken and wrecked, as Heorot was after 
 the strife. Then there is a great battle which is like the 
 battle between Beowulf and Grendel. " Light burned in the 
 hall through the night, and when the third part of the night 
 was passed, Grettir heard huge din without, and then one went 
 up upon the houses and rode the hall and drave his heels 
 against the thatch so that every rafter cracked again. That 
 went on long, and then he came down from the house and went 
 
EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 to the door ; and as the door opened, Grettir saw that the 
 thrall stretched in his head which seemed to him monstrously 
 big and wondrous thick cut. 
 
 "G-lam fared slowly when he came into the door and 
 stretched himself high up under the roof, and turned looking 
 along the hall, and laid his arms on the tie-beam and glared 
 inwards over the place. The farmer would not let himself be 
 heard, for he deemed he had had enough in hearing himself 
 what had gone on outside. Grettir lay quiet, and moved no 
 whit ; then Glam saw that some bundle lay on the seat, and 
 therewith he stalked lip the hall and gripped at the wrapper 
 wondrous hard ; but Grettir set his foot against the beam, and 
 moved in no wise ; Glam pulled again much harder, but still 
 the wrapper moved not at all ; the third time he pulled with 
 both hands so hard that he drew Grettir upright from the 
 seat ; and now they tore the wrapper asunder between them. 
 
 "Glam gazed at the rag he held in his hand, and wondered 
 much who might pull so hard against him ; and therewithal 
 Grettir ran under his hands and gripped him round the mid- 
 dle, and bent back his spine as hard as he might, and his 
 mind it was that Glam should shrink thereat ; but the thrall 
 lay so hard on Grettir's arms that he shrank all aback because 
 of Glam's strength. 
 
 " Then Grettir bore back before him into sundry seats ; but 
 the seat beams were driven out of place, and all was broken 
 that was before them. Glam was fain to get out, but Grettir 
 set his foot against all things that he might ; nathless Glam 
 got him dragged from out the hall ; there had they a wondrous 
 hard wrestling, because the thrall had a mind to bring him out 
 of the house ; but Grettir saw that ill as it was to deal with Glam 
 within doors, yet worse would it be without, therefore he strug- 
 gled with all his might and main against going out-a-doors. 
 
 "Now Glam gathered up his strength and knit Grettir 
 towards him when they came to the outer door ; but when 
 Grettir saw that he might not set his feet against that, 
 all of a sudden in one rush he drave his hardest against the 
 thrall's breast, and spurned both feet against the half-sunken 
 stone that stood in the threshold of the door ; for this the 
 thrall was not ready, for he had been tugging to draw Grettir 
 to him, therefore he reeled aback and spun out against the 
 door, so that his shoulders caught the upper door-case and the 
 roof burst asunder, both rafters and frozen thatch, and there- 
 with he fell open-armed aback out of the house, and Grettir 
 
 over him. 
 
V THE MYTHICAL ELEMENTS IN "BEOWULF" 89 
 
 "Bright moonlight was there without, and the drift was 
 broken, now drawn over the moon, now driven from off her ; 
 and, even as Glam fell, a cloud was driven from the moon 
 and Glam glared up against her. And Grettir himself says 
 that by that sight only was he dismayed amidst all that he 
 ever saw. 
 
 " Then his soul sank within him so, from all these things, 
 both from weariness, and because he had seen Glam turn his 
 eyes so horribly, that he might not draw the short-sword, and 
 lay wellnigh 'twixt home and hell. But herein was there 
 more fiendish craft in Glam than in most other ghosts, that 
 he spake now in this wise — 
 
 " Exceeding eagerly hast thou wrought to meet me, Grettir, 
 but no wonder will it be deemed, though thou gettest no good 
 hap of me ; and this must I tell thee, that thou hast got half 
 the strength and manhood which was thy lot if thou hadst not 
 met me : now I may not take from thee the strength 
 which thou hast got before this ; but that may I rule, that 
 thou shalt "never be mightier than now thou art ; and nathless 
 art thou mighty enow, and that shall many an one learn. 
 Hitherto hast thou earned fame by thy deeds, but henceforth 
 will wrongs and manslayings fall on thee, and the most part 
 of thy doings will turn to thy woe and ill-hap ; an outlaw 
 shalt thou be made, and ever shall it be thy lot to dwell 
 alone abroad; therefore this weird I lay on thee, ever in 
 those days to see these eyes with thine eyes, and thou wilt 
 find it hard to be alone — and that shall drag thee unto 
 death." 
 
 "Now when the thrall had thus said, the astoniment fell 
 from Grettir that had lain on him, and therewith he drew the 
 short-sword and hewed the head from Glam, and laid it at his 
 thigh." 
 
 The next parallel to Beowulf in the Grettis Saga is still 
 more remarkable. The parts of Grendel and his dam are 
 reversed. It is the Troll-wife who goes forth to a certain 
 house to slay and cut men to pieces and to carry them off to 
 her cave under the force. It is the man-giant who stays at 
 home in the cave. The creatures are water dwellers and are 
 mixed up with the powers of water like Grendel and his 
 mother. The cave where they dwell and the firelight in it are 
 like the cave and the fire in the ancient poem. The battle 
 with the giant in it is as like the battle with Grendel's dam as 
 the previous battle of Grettir with the Troll-wife is like that of 
 Beowulf with Grendel. The Troll-wife dies of the loss of her 
 
90 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 arm as Grendel dies of the same loss. The tearing, rending 
 and battering down of the house belongs to the idea of Gren- 
 del. When Grettir comes to the edge of the waterfall and 
 plunges into the boiling wave and dives under the waterfall to 
 reach the cave while the priest sits waiting above, we recall 
 Beowulf coming to the edge of the Ness and diving into the 
 welter of water and up into the cave, while the thegns sit 
 waiting on the rocks above. When Grettir slays the giant 
 and the waves of the force are stained with blood and the 
 priest, believing Grettir dead, goes home, we remember the 
 blood-stained sea and that the thegns of Hrothgar returned, 
 thinking that Beowulf was dead. There is even a parallel in 
 one of the words used. The giant fights with a glaive which 
 cuts and thrusts, and the saga says that men called that weapon 
 " heft-sax." Hrunting, the sword Hunferth lends to Beowulf, 
 is called haeftmece, and the term occurs only this once in the 
 whole of Anglo-Saxon literature. The question then arises, 
 Did it slip from Beowulf into the Grettis Saga ? 
 
 Here are the parts of the story necessary to quote. They 
 are, as before, taken from Morris and Magnusson's transla- 
 tion. 
 
 Steinvor, the good wife of Sandheaps, has lost her good man 
 and her house carle by a haunting.' Blood was left in the 
 house, about the outer door. Grettir heard the tale and says 
 that he will abide the night in the house, and he lay down 
 but did not take off his clothes. "When it drew towards 
 midnight he heard great din without, and thereafter came into 
 the hall a huge Troll-wife, with a trough in one hand and a 
 chopper wondrous great in the other ; she peered about when 
 she came in and saw where Guest (this was Grettir's assumed 
 name) lay, and ran at him, but he sprang up to meet her, and 
 they fell a-wrestling terribly and struggled together for long 
 in the hall. She was the stronger, but he gave back with 
 craft, and all that was before them was broken, yea, the cross- 
 panelling withal of the chamber. She dragged him through 
 the door, and so into the outer doorway, and then he betook 
 himself to struggling hard against her. She was fain to drag 
 him from the house, but might not till they had broken away 
 all the fittings of the outer door, and borne them out on their 
 shoulders : then she laboured away with him down to the 
 river, right down to the deep gulf. 
 
 " By then was Guest exceeding weary, yet must he either 
 gather his might together or be cast by her into the gulf. All 
 night did they contend in such wise. . . . But now when they 
 
V THE MYTHICAL ELEMENTS IN "BEOWULF" 91 
 
 came to the gulf of the river, he gives the hag a swing round 
 and therewith got his right hand free, and swiftly seized tlie 
 short-sword that he was girt withal, and smote the Troll there- 
 with on the shoulder and struck off her arm, and therewithal 
 was he free, but she fell into the gulf and was carried down 
 the force." 
 
 So ends the first fight, but, as in Beowulf, there is another 
 underneath the waterfall. Grettir is sure that there is more 
 to be known of these monsters, and he passes to the cliff, fifty- 
 feet above the whirlpool, and girt with the short-sword leaped 
 off the cliff into the force. 
 
 " And Grettir dived under the force, and hard work it was 
 because the whirlpool was strong, and he had to dive down to 
 the bottom before he might come up under the force. But 
 thereby was a rock jutting out, and thereon he gat; a great 
 cave was under the force, and the river fell over it from the 
 sheer rocks. He went up into the cave, and there was a great 
 fire flaming from amidst of brands ; and there he saw a giant 
 sitting withal, marvellously great and dreadful to look on.. 
 But when Grettir came anigh, the giant leapt up and caught 
 up a glaive and smote at the newcomer, for with that glaive 
 might a man both cut and thrust ; a wooden shaft it had, and 
 that fashion of weapon men called then, heft-sax. 
 
 " Grettir hewed back against him with the short-sword, and 
 smote the shaft so that he struck it asunder; then was the 
 giant fain to stretch aback for a sword that hung up there in 
 the cave; but therewithal Grettir smote him afore into the 
 breast, and smote off wellnigh all the breast-bone and the belly, 
 so that the bowels tumbled out of him and fell into the river, 
 and were driven down along the stream ; and as the priest sat 
 by the rope, he saw certain fibres all covered with blood swept 
 down the swirls of the stream ; then he grew unsteady in his 
 place and thought for sure that Grettir was dead, so he ran 
 from the holding of the rope and gat him home. Thither he 
 came in the evening and said, as one who knew it well, that 
 Grettir was dead, and that great scathe was it of such a man. 
 
 "Now, of Grettir must it be told that he let little space go 
 betwixt his blows or ever the giant was dead. Then he went 
 up the cave, and kindled a light and espied the cave. The 
 story tells not how much he got therein, but men deem tha.t it 
 must have been something great. But there he abode on into 
 the night ; and he found there the bones of two men, and bore 
 them together in a bag ; then he made off from the cave and 
 swam to the rope and shook it, and thought that the priest 
 
92 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap, v 
 
 would be there yet ; but when he knew that the priest had 
 gone home, then must he draw himself up by strength of 
 hand, and thus he came up out on to the clift." 
 
 The parallel is very close, and three suggestions may be 
 made concerning it. Either the Beowulf Saga was known 
 over Sweden and Norway, and its lays came from Norway or 
 the Western Isles to Iceland with the first settlers ; or some 
 of the roving Icelanders had heard of the tale in England, and 
 brought it back to Iceland in a broken fashion ; or there was a 
 tale older than Beowulf itself — a combination of a nature- 
 myth and a folk-tale — which was common property of the 
 Northmen, and out of which the Grendel story in Beowulf, and 
 the Glam and Troll story both grew independently of each 
 other. 
 
 One more parallel suggested in the Corpus Poeticum Boreale 
 (vol. ii. p. 503) remains to be noticed. "In the English poem 
 of Eger and Grime in the Percy MS., there is the echo of the 
 Beowulf story in the hand of Grey Steele, the monster knight 
 •of the moor ; and that noble brand Egeking mentioned there, 
 which King Fundus got from 'full far beyond the Greekes sea,' 
 may be the last traditional descendant of the hefti-sax," Beo- 
 wulf's haeft-mece. I do not see much in the sword-part of this 
 parallel. The haeft-mece in Beowulf is not Beowulf's sword 
 but Hunferth's, and though it is famous, it would scarcely 
 become traditional, as it fails in the encounter with Grendel. 
 The only really mythic sword in Beowulf is the ancient sword 
 of the cave itself, and. of that nothing is really left but the hilt. 
 There are swords enough to get Egeking from without tracing 
 it to a failure. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 WALDHEEE 
 
 It is a curious question how it came to pass tliat the story of 
 Beowulf and Grendel did not, like the other sagas of the North, 
 become a part of the Norse-G-erman cycle of romance. The 
 story stops dead ; we hear no more of it. The Goths or Jutes 
 who dwelt in the north of Denmark and Southern Sweden 
 possessed it. The Danes of the islands possessed it. It passed 
 downwards to dwell among the Angles, and the story may have 
 reached the sea-board Saxons who came to England. But it 
 gets, no further. Why did it not pass into the hands of the 
 old Saxons ? Why did it not become a part of Northern 
 German legend ? It does not do so ; there is no trace of it. 
 There is no evidence for the conjecture that it was one of the 
 ancient songs to which the Eranks listened. 
 
 I have sometimes thought that the Angles alone threw the 
 hiyths and tales of it into lays, and that when the whole body 
 of them emigrated to our island, they left the Continent naked 
 of the tale. It would not have had time then to become a part of 
 German saga. If the Danes had put it into verse, I do not 
 understand why it was not carried into Northern Germany. 
 I conjecture then that something broke the literary connection 
 on the Continent, or that the story was developed only when 
 the Angles got into Britain. 
 
 Again, if the Jutes or Saxons had it, why are there only 
 vague traces of it in place names in our Southern England ? 
 I conjecture again that the stories were not shaped into verse 
 by the Jutes. ^ Or it may be, since they were a small party of 
 warriors and had so desperate a bit of fighting to do, that they 
 would think, if they had the songs, more of slaughter and of 
 
 1 Unless, as I have before suggested, there were Jutish or Frisian settlers 
 on the sea-bo>rd, south of the Forth, among whom the Angles, on their arrival, 
 found the lays of Beowulf existing. Such a discovery, if we may with any 
 probability imagine it — would be likely to awaken in the Angles a fresh 
 interest in their own form of the Beowulf lays, and to increase the vogue of 
 the lays. ^ ^g 
 
94 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 plunder than of preserving poetry. But the Angles went en 
 masse, with all their women and all their bards, and they 
 would take their literature with them. It was they, I hold, 
 who in our England worked on the lays before the Christian 
 poet wove them together. 
 
 Again, if the lays existed in Southern Sweden and in the 
 north of Denmark, what became of them there ? It seems as 
 if there also they died out, or existed, not in verse, but only 
 as a folk-tale. It was perhaps in that form that they got into 
 Norway and thence to Iceland, if we may explain in this way 
 the similarities between the Beowulf story and the tales of 
 Glam and the Troll-wife in the legend of Grettir. But the 
 more likely conjecture is that these similarities arose from Ice- 
 landic rovers bringing back the story from England or the Isles. 
 Had the story really been established, even as a folk-tale, I 
 think we should have had some further trace of it in the 
 Norse tales. 
 
 I am inclined then to come to the conclusion that the Angles 
 alone retained the Beowulf lays, or alone made them into a 
 poem. If this have any truth in it, it isolates the poem with 
 us. But if we may be proud of this, we may be humbled by 
 another consideration. The Norse and Teutonic sagas were 
 developed on the Continent and in Iceland into full romances, 
 carefully worked and treated with art. There was enough of 
 poetic power to do this work. But after the seventh or eighth 
 century the story of Beowulf underwent no further develop- 
 ment, and what we have of it is rudely wrought. Yet we must 
 not blame the Northern Englishmen too much for this. There 
 was not time to work further at the tale. The Danes destroyed 
 the Northumbrian poetry, and when literature was revived in 
 Wessex by Mlhed, southern Englishmen seem to have had 
 little care for poetry of this kind, and little power of imagina- 
 tive invention. Beoivulf stanis alone then, when it is looked 
 at along with the carefully wrought tales of Sigurd or Theod- 
 ric, like some crag of Plutonic rock, rugged and weather-worn, 
 which rises among the later strata of a gentler age ; the sole 
 remnant of an ancient cycle of stories which have entirely 
 perished. 
 
 When that ancient cycle was dying a new cycle had begun, 
 and its tales grew by accretion for centuries in Germany and 
 among the Norse folk, and have continued working in literature 
 to the present day. It was not till quite lately that we had 
 some proof that any of them had an influence on English lit- 
 erature or touched at all our country. Now, however, since 
 
"WALDHEEE % 
 
 1860, we know that one at least of this new cycle of tales — 
 one which belonged to the Theodric cycle and was embodied in 
 the Vilkina saga — was domesticated in England; and if one 
 of them, and one of the least important, is found in a Southern 
 English dialect, it is of the highest probability that others 
 were also written down from the songs of wandering bards. 
 But, if they existed, they have all perished. No land was ever 
 more ravaged by successive wars than the land of ancient 
 English literature. Scarcely a shred of romantic manuscript 
 survives ; so thorough in destruction were pagan Dane and 
 Christian monk, were the years of ignorance, of long neglect, 
 of the tyranny of Latin, of the harrying of the monasteries by 
 war and by reform, of modern fires and modern damps. 
 
 The discovery of almost every importaiit extant Anglo- 
 Saxon poem has been of special interest. And the discovery 
 of the parchment leaves which tell us that the English had 
 examples before them of the Norse-German cycle after the 
 age of Beowulf does not want the element of sensation. Pro- 
 fessor Werlauff, looking through a great mass of loose papers 
 in the National Library at Copenhagen, turned up two vellum 
 pages of a great age which had been used for the binding of a 
 book, and saw that they were covered with Old English lines 
 of verse, sixty-two lines in all. How they came to Denmark 
 no one could tell, but it was conjectured that when Thorkelin 
 searched England for Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and found 
 Beowulf, he picked up also these two pieces of parchment and 
 brought them with him to Copenhagen. Werlauff handed 
 them on to Stephens to edit, and the literary exultation of 
 this scholar at the discovery makes his little book upon them 
 pleasant reading. 
 
 He found that the two sheets were not continuous but 
 different portions of the poem, and conjectured that the whole 
 of the story had been in manuscript. We had proof, he held, 
 that a poem belonging to the Teutonic cycle and perhaps as 
 long as Beowulf, existed in English, and Stephens thought 
 that the handwriting was as old as the ninth century and the 
 poem as old as the eighth. As the fragment refers to the 
 Weland and the Theodric Sagas, it makes it probable that both 
 these Sagas were known in England — a probability which is 
 confirmed by the Deor poem. Those who have written on the 
 fragment in Germany, and chiefly Miillenhof, agree on the 
 whole with these dates. Each sheet contains thirty-one lines 
 from the story of Waldhere. . The first is Hildeguthe's speech 
 to Waldhere, urging him to the fight with Guthhere. The 
 
EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 second is the interchange of ■words between Waldhere and 
 Guthhere. Tliere is not, therefore, a long interval between 
 the two fragments we possess. 
 
 The personages mentioned in these two leaves are Mtla,, 
 Gruthhere, Waldhere, Hildeguthe, and Hagena, and they told 
 Stephens that he was in possession of an early version of the 
 romance of Walther of Aquitaine. There are three forms, 
 Mullenhof says, in which this saga of Walther has come down 
 to us — a German form, a probably Prankish form, and a 
 Polish form. The oldest of these is the German. The 
 German form is not in existence, but we have a translation of 
 it into Latin hexameters written in the tenth century by 
 Ekkehard of St. Gall. Our fragments are probably an English 
 translation from the original German version. The story, as 
 Ekkehard tells it, is perhaps worth a sketch — 
 
 Attila ^ has invaded the Franks under Gibica's rule, and 
 taken from them tribute, treasure, and a noble youth, Hagen, 
 as a hostage. Marching on, he attacks the Burgundians and 
 takes Hildegund, daughter of Hereric their king, as hostage. 
 Lastly, he descends on the Aquitanians, and their king 
 ^Ifhere gives him his son Walther as hostage, and Walther 
 is already affianced to Hildegund. These three then are 
 brought up together and become personages in the court of 
 Attila. Hildegund has the care of all the treasures, Walther. 
 is the leader of the Hunnish host, and Hagen, his nearest 
 friend, is his war-comrade. At a certain time Hagen flees to 
 the Franks to join his new liege, Gunther, and afterwards 
 Walther and Hildegund also escape. They carry ofE treasure 
 from the Huns whom Walther has made drunk; and both, 
 mounted on Walther's war-horse. Lion, ride away till, on the 
 fourteenth day, they reach the Ehine, not far from Worms. 
 The ferryman tells the tale of the great horse, the warrior, 
 the maiden, and the treasure chests, in the hall of Gunther, 
 King of the Franks. Hagen breaks forth into joy : " This is 
 my comrade Walther from the Huns." Gunther cries out also 
 for joy: "This is the treasure of Gibica, I will have it"; and 
 with Hagen and eleven warriors he pursues after Walther who 
 has reached the forest of the Vosges. But Hagen is sorrowful, 
 not wishing to fight with his friend, and he warns Gunther 
 that if he had ever seen Walther in the wrath of battle, he 
 would not think him so easy to despoil. 
 
 Now night has come, and in a pleasant cave, between two 
 
 1 1 use the better kuo\ro form of tl^e names in thig account, 
 
WALDHERE 97 
 
 hills, and soft with green grass, Waltheris slumbering, his head 
 on his lady's lap, while she keeps watch; for Walther has 
 known no sleep for fourteen days save when he leant upon his 
 shield. In the dawn Hildegund sees a dust-oloud and wakens 
 Walther. "Slay me," she cries, "lest I should belong to the 
 Huns and not to thee ! " But Walther knows the helm of 
 Hagen, and laughing says : " These are not Huns, but Niblung 
 Franks" {Franci nebulones); and vows that the Franks shall 
 not have a grain of the treasure. They parley, but in vain, and 
 Hagen withdraws from the battle and sits down to look on 
 from a neighbouring hill. Then the fight begins, and Walther, 
 swording in a narrow place where only one can meet him,^lays 
 the eleven warriors, so that Gunther is left alone. Walther, 
 watching from his vantage ground, sees Gunther fly to Hagen, 
 and, after talk, these two kiss one another, and Walther fears 
 that the kiss bodes no good. Nor, indeed, does it, for they 
 have agreed to draw Walther from his hold and ambush him 
 upon the way. 
 
 It is now again night, and Walther, having wept and prayed 
 over the warriors he has slain, sleeps in a cave, and in the 
 morniag, taking horses and treasure, goes on his way. But 
 when a mile was now measured, they hear the beating of horse 
 hoofs, and see Gunther and Hagen riding down upon them. 
 "Flee, flee ! " cries Hildegund. "No," he answers ; "if honour 
 fail, shame waits on my last hour." Then he appeals to Hagen, 
 for old friendship and love, as Cuchulainn appealed to Ferdia, 
 not to fight with him ; but Hagen has lost his nephew — " my 
 tender, soft, bright flower " — in the battle, and he will have 
 requital for his blood. So two meet with one, and Walther 
 smites off Gunther's leg, and Hagen Walther's right hand, for 
 Walther's sword has flown to pieces, so dire was the blow he 
 gave to Hagen's helm. But a right hand lost is nothing to the 
 great warrior, and driving the stump of his arm into the 
 shield, he fights on with his half-sword in his left hand. And 
 now enraged he strikes Hagen so fierce a stroke that his right 
 eye is forced out and all his face laid open to the jaw. This 
 is enough, and they sit down in full friendship again, renewtag 
 their bond of blood ; joke over their wounds, and part — Hagen 
 with Gunther for Worms ; Walther and Hildegund and all the 
 treasure for Aquitaine, where, after a glorious marriage and his 
 father's death, he reigns triumphantly for thirty years. 
 
 This is the outline of a story which is told with a great deal 
 of vigour, and with some feeling for natural scenery, that kind 
 of soft woodland in which the romance writers delighted. It 
 
EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 is greatly enlivened by dialogue, whicli rises sometimes into 
 passion. There was evidently plenty of dialogue in the early 
 saga, and all that we have in our English fragments is dialogue. 
 The first of the two fragments, which I give here, is the speech 
 by which Hildeguthe kindles Waldhere to the fight with Guth- 
 here and the eleven warriors, and proves again, if we needed 
 proof, with what eagerness the Teutonic women joined in the 
 interests of war and felt for the honours of their lord. " Then 
 did Hildeguthe courage him greatly — " 
 
 " Truly of Weland the work ne'er deceiveth 
 Any of men wlio Mimming i can wield, 
 • Hoary of edges ! Oft failed in the war 
 
 Man after man, blood-marbled, sword-wounded' ! — 
 
 ^tla's fore-fighter, let not thy force now 
 Drop to-day downward ; let droop not thy lordship ! 
 
 Now is the day 
 Thou shalt have one thing or else another — 
 Or lose thy life, or long-lived dominion 
 Make thine among men, -Sllfhere's son ! 
 At no tiine, my Chief, do I chide thee with words ; 
 Since never I saw thee at the sword-playing — 
 Through wretched fear of whatever warrior — 
 Flee out of the fight, or in flight on the field, 
 Or care for thy corse, though a crowd of the foe 
 On thy breast-byrnie with bills were a-hewing ; 
 But to fight forward was ever thy seeking ! 
 O'er the mark was thy measure,^ Meter of meeds ! 
 So I feared thou would'st fight, too fiercely by far, 
 Around the camp-ramparts, in close set of war. 
 With some other of heroes ! Then honour thyself 
 By thy great doings while good fortune rules ! " 
 
 There are eight other lines, the allusions in which are ob- 
 scure, but these are enough to show the writer's hand. 
 
 1 Mimming (Mimungr) was the masterpiece of Weland, the most famous 
 sword in the Northern world. It descended to Widia or Wudga, his son. This 
 is the only mention of it in Old English, but we hear of it later on in the 
 romance of Sorn Child, a Middle English poem — 
 
 Than eche lete forth bring 
 A swerd hongand bi a ring; 
 
 To Horn Bcbe it bitaugbt. 
 It is the make (mate) of Miming; 
 Of all swerdes it is Icing. 
 
 And Weland it wrought ; 
 
 Bitterfer the swerd bight. 
 
 But Mimming is originally the work of Mimir, the great smith, who was the 
 master of Weland, and who is the same as Begin in the Volsunga Saga. At 
 least so Grimm declares. 
 
 2 "Thy measure o'er the mark," that is, I conjecture, "Thy place was 
 beyond the front-line of the battle." 
 
WALDHERE 99 
 
 The second fragment is not so vigorous or so human. It 
 is a portion of the dialogue between Guthhere and Waldhere, 
 and its main interest is in the mention of names which belong 
 to the cycle of Eomance that collected round Theodric. As 
 Weland's sword is spoken of in the previous passage, so here 
 Widia, Weland's son, "the kinsman of Nithad," is spoken of as 
 having rescued Theodric from great straits. It is plain that 
 the poem was written when the Theodric saga was well estab- 
 lished. 
 
 As to its date, the poem seems to be so antique in form that 
 it is put back to the eighth century, and its German original 
 belongs probably to the middle of the seventh. That was a 
 time of copious production of lays among the Lombards ; Vig- 
 fusson and Powell have unearthed from the record of Paul the 
 Deacon, who died in 790, two close paraphrases of old JSlf wine 
 lays which are contemporary with the poems of Caedmon, if 
 we take the probable date of them as between Paul and ^Ifwine. 
 .ffilfwine jEadwineson is Alboin, King of the Lombards, who 
 died in 672. They go on to say that "these songs " (assuming 
 that Paul's prose was derived from songs, and assuming also 
 their own date) "are the earliest remains of Teutonic epic 
 poetry which we have any exact knowledge of." The first of 
 these is certainly a brilliant example of the heroic lay; the 
 second seems to me much more like a piece of monkish history. 
 They wUl both be found at p. lii., etc., of the Introduction to 
 the Corpus Poeticum Boreale. There are, perhaps, several other 
 passages in Paul from poems of this early period. 
 
 One other vernacular fragment of song of an early time — 
 belonging to the heroic cycle ^ — is not English but German, yet 
 is connected in manner and style with Waldhere. It is the 
 ancient lay of Hadubrand and Hildebrand, and was found, as 
 Waldhere was found, on a piece of parchment used in binding a 
 book, in the monastery of Fulda. It is a MS., we are told, of 
 the eighth century, and was probably sung as a lay in the 
 seventh. The story is curiously like the story of Sohrab and 
 Eustum, though we do not know the issue of the fight. Hilde- 
 brand challenges his son Hadubrand, to single combat. Hilde- 
 brand asks of what parentage he is, and hears from Hadubrand 
 enough to prove that he is his son whom he had left behind in 
 Italy as a child of three years old when he fled years ago to 
 the east from Odoacer. He declares his fatherhood, his son 
 does not believe him — Hildebrand, he says, is long since dead. 
 At this the father mourns the fate which is near him of falling 
 by his son's hand ; but, as he speaks, the war-fever seizes on 
 
100 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap, vi 
 
 him and tlie men fall to Tvitli spear and axe. We hear no more, 
 but can well imagine that the story ends as Sohrab and Eustum 
 ends. This is the only piece of German heroic verse ^ which 
 can compete in age with those that we possess, and it is later, 
 I believe, than the Lament of Deor, later certainly than the 
 Fight at Finnsburg and the lays contained in Beowulf. 
 
 1 The Weissenbrunner Prayer in alliterative High German verse belongs 
 probably to the eighth century, but its only value is its age. In the ninth cen- 
 tury we find a Low German poem, the Seliand, of which we shall have some- 
 thing to say in connection with the poems attributed to Caedmon. But these 
 are plainly Christian; they do not intrude among the remnants which coming 
 down originally out of heathen times are romantic, not religious. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE CONQUEST AND LITEKATUEE 
 
 The Fight at Finnshurg and the lays from which our Beowulf 
 ■was composed were, as it seems to me, sung among the Eng- 
 lish who dwelt in the north of Denmark and the south of 
 Sweden, and whose tribal name was the Jutes or Goths. They 
 were also sung among the other English who dwelt in the south 
 of Denmark and who called themselves Angles. And I have 
 conjectured that it was in this part of the English territory that 
 they and Widsith were best preserved. The Angles, even in 
 their seats on the Continent, seem to have shown the same 
 desire to take care of literature which they afterwards had in 
 ISTorthumbria. I do not think, for reasons to which I have 
 alluded, that the songs of Beowulf w&ce much cared for, among 
 the other English whom we know as Saxons, who dwelt in 
 Hanover and Friesland, and who were the most southern of 
 these three tribes whose common name was English, whose 
 language was called English, but all of whom the Welsh and 
 Irish called Saxons.^ The Saxons also had, we may be sure, 
 their own lays, and if we could but discover iElfred's Hand- 
 book, we should no doubt find some of them in it. 
 
 When the English came over they continued to make songs, 
 to chant the daily chronicle of the conquest. This was their 
 only literature, their only history ; and though there is not much 
 to tell of it, yet the imagination loves to dwell upon its frag- 
 ments. In these rude chants begins the poetry of our island- 
 England. The glory of a thousand years of song shines back- 
 ward on its sources. During 147 years the poetry of England 
 was altogether heathen. It was unbroken by a single Chris- 
 tian voice, save perhaps, as the battle joined, by the chanting in 
 
 1 It is well, even at the risk of repetition, to mark out — and I refer my 
 readers to York Powell's Primer of Early England — the unity of the English 
 tribes in the continental England. It has more bearing on literary questions 
 than at first sight appears. 
 
 101 
 
102 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE Chap. 
 
 the distance of the British monks, which, when the English 
 heard, they declared to be the singing of spells and the singers 
 wizards. On this account .^thelfrith, at the battle of Chester, 
 slew the dark-robed creatures, one and all. " If they cry to 
 their God against us," he said, "they fight against us, though 
 they do not carry arms." 
 
 In the year 597 Augustine brought Christianity to England, 
 and the warriors of ^thelberht listened to the praise of Christ 
 instead of the praise of their war-god. But for many years 
 after, the war-songs, the rude verses sung by the freemen in 
 the village as they ploughed, the charms for fruitful earth, 
 against wounds, against the elves, the chants of the gleemen 
 round the moot-tree or in the ealdorman's hall continued to be 
 heathen. When Caedmon produced the first Christian poems 
 the people in Sussex were still heathen, and in many parts of 
 Christian England heathendom retained a considerable power. 
 No doubt, poems which we might call heathen, such for instance 
 as the Wanderer, were composed after Caedmon, as Christian 
 f poems were composed before him ; but nevertheless the date of 
 his death, 680 a.d., may be taken to mark most conveniently 
 the final conquest of heathen by Christian poetry. It ends a 
 period of 230 years, from 460 to 680. It is this period which 
 we shall consider in this chapter, collecting together the Old 
 English verse which belongs to the events of the invasion and 
 the settlement; and touching on other matters which are likely 
 to throw light on the growth of English literature. 
 
 The English tribes had, from the beginning of the fifth 
 century, made some small and scattered settlements on the 
 coasts of Eoman Britain, but it was not till the year 449-460 
 that they came to stay. In that year, the story goes, a band 
 of Jutes, under two war leaders, Hengest and Horsa, landed 
 at Ebbsfleet, and landed to remain. No doubt, as they pushed 
 the bows of their three long keels on to the shore of the Isle 
 of Thanet, they shouted short staves of verse with so great a 
 roaring that Gildas might well call them "whelps from the 
 lair of the barbarian lioness." But we may be sure that the 
 songs were louder when, in 466, their numbers swelled by new 
 arrivals, the whole host, clashing their spears on their shields 
 and singing hymns to their ancestral gods, crossed the inlet 
 that divided Thanet from the mainland and set forth to ravage 
 the country. Of a different character, and done by the Scop 
 of Hengest, would be the song that followed the fight at 
 Aylesford ; but it would be mixed with sorrow, for Horsa was 
 slain in that battle, and some days after they piled up his 
 
rn THE CONQUEST AND LITERATURE 103 
 
 barrow, facing it with flint stones, on the neighbouring hill. 
 There also they chanted, as his thegns did around the grave of 
 Beowulf, the great deeds and character of their fallen leader. 
 
 Three entries in the Ghronide then record the various stages 
 of the conquest of Kent ; and the eighteen years which it took 
 to accomplish, show how stout was the resistance of the Welsh, 
 as the English called the Britons. The last is as follows 473 
 A.D. : " Now Hengest and ^sc his son fought with the Welsh 
 and took countless booty, and the Welsh fled the English as it 
 were fire." This reads as if part of it were taken from a bat- 
 tle-song. The exultation in the countless booty that the Eng- 
 lish found in the fat meadows of the Eomney marshes, the 
 metaphor of the flight, as from fire driven by the wind, bear 
 with them the savour of the war-song. Some years afterwards, 
 47T, a band of Saxons landed in the south near Chichester, and 
 when fourteen years of warring had gone by, took Anderida, 
 491, the Eoman fortress where Pevensey afterwards stood. 
 This soon made complete the little kingdom, as it was after- 
 wards called, of the South Saxons or Sussex ; and the record 
 in the Chronicle which celebrates the slaughter of all within 
 Anderida may be derived from the song of victory. Henry of 
 Huntingdon's account of the siege is full of details which have 
 on the whole been accepted as historical, and it is conjectured 
 that he had before him some ancient versings of the fight. 
 
 I have connected these first battles with verse and song that 
 it may be clearly understood how large a part poetry played in 
 the life of the English. To dwell further in this fashion upon 
 the connection of battles with verse would be mere book-mak- 
 ing. I am content if my readers will realise that not a single 
 battle, or feast in the evening, or great ceremony, or vow over 
 the cup to carry the conquest further, or entrance of a fleet 
 into the Humber or the Forth, or burial of a leader, or settle- 
 ment by the river-side, but was accompanied with poetry. 
 Hengest and ^sc, Cerdic and Ida and iEthelfrith sang as 
 they fought. England was conquered to the music of verse, 
 and settled to the sound of the harp. She was not alone in 
 that, but it is as well to record it in this counection. 
 
 In 514, to follow Mr. Green's account, another band of Sax- 
 ons, under Cerdic and Cynric landed "for definite conquest" 
 near the Itchen river and fought their way up to Winchester, 
 and the fight there, and that which ensued at Charford in 519 
 were followed a year after by a victory of the Welsh at Mount 
 Badon which kept quiet for a time the English advance and 
 saved Amesbury from destruction : " Amesbury, choir of Am- 
 
104 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 brosius, probably the monastery of Britain — the centre from 
 ■which, flowed the blessings of civilisation and Christianity." ^ 
 Thus, Cerdic having been in 619 created king — a new title 
 among the English, — the first kingdom of Wessex, that is the 
 land now called Hampshire, was established. So then, Kent, 
 Sussex, and Hampshire — the south-east of Britain, were now 
 conquered and settled by the English. 
 
 There are two things bound up with literature, to say about 
 this last conquest in Wessex. The first is that at the battle 
 of Mount Badon we meet for the first time, if Dr. Guest and 
 others be right, with the historical Arthur whose myth has so 
 profoundly influenced the literature of Europe. If it was he 
 who conquered the English at Mount Badon and gave the land 
 peace for nearly thirty years from the invaders, and who pre- 
 served the monastery and learning of Amesbury, we have an 
 additional pleasure in thinking of the conquest his story made 
 in after years of the imagination of the English people. If he 
 actually brought a comfortable calm after the "tempest of 
 ruin " which fell upon the Britons, we feel as if the legend 
 that he is to come again and restore a golden peace received a 
 new touch of charm.^ 
 
 1 This is Dr. Guest's phrase. He identifies Mount Badon with Badbury in 
 Dorsetshire, and Amesbury with the Caer-Caradoc of the Triads. But it must 
 be remembered that Mr. Slcene places his historical Arthur in the north, and 
 identifies his twelve battles with sites in the country between and below the 
 Forth and the Clyde ; and, as far as I am fit to judge, he appears to have proved 
 his theory. — Four Ancient Boohs of Wales, vol. i. pp. 51-58. When two 
 authorities, however, each so wise in his work, disagree in their conjectures, 
 some may perhaps wish to choose that conjecture which pleases them best ; 
 and whether Arthur fought in the north or the south, he fought with so great 
 a fervour that we can bind up, without loss of sentiment, the historical with the 
 mythical hero. But, after all, I fancy that Arthur was criminally a mythic 
 name, and was given by the Celts in southern and northern Britain and else- 
 where, to any great chieftain who, among them, fought and conquered their 
 foes. 
 
 2 It is not unfitting, even at this early period of a history of English poetry, 
 to pause at the name of Arthur. Who he was, whether he really existed other- 
 wise than as a mythical personage, whether northern or southern Welsh obeyed 
 his call in war, are questions with which literature has but little to do, and 
 which history may not solve with certainty. What is certain is this, that no 
 name (and I speak only of our own laud) has had more power over English 
 poetry than the name of Arthur, and no story has had more influence over the 
 imagination of English poets. Like most of the great tales, his tale has a 
 divine vitality of its own, growing like a tree, continually reclothing itself in 
 new foliage and sending forth, from age to age, new branches, so sturdy, so 
 prolific, that they seem like distinct trees. Yet Arthur is always the roo1>stock 
 of them, and the life of the root seems inexhaustible. Again and again new 
 poetic periods, new forms of song, have started from Arthur. It was his story 
 that kindled Layamon who began, after the Conquest, imaginative English 
 poetry; which also stirred in that original English poet, the author of the 
 '' Grene Knight," and of the " Pearl." Chaucer, when he got home to his own 
 English work, could not refrain from Arthur. Spenser, desirous to couch the 
 
vn THE CONQUEST Am> LlTEUATURE 106 
 
 The second thing is in relation to the view that Gildas, 
 whose History and Epistle were written about 545-560, took 
 of the invasion and the invaders. When he was writing, the 
 greater part of the land, north and west of this conquered cor- 
 ner in the south-east, was Eoman Britain. Its fertile valleys 
 and river plains were covered with villas where the provincial 
 had lived with his serfs ; the land was richly tilled and fed 
 great herds of cattle ; but the hamlets were scarcely touched 
 with Eoman civilisation. The towns were filled with a mixed 
 population of pure Welsh and Eomanised Welsh, and were 
 often two towns in one, the Eoman town upon the river, 
 the ancient British town under the mounded fortress on the 
 hill, as, for example, was the case at Uriconium.^ The arts, 
 the literature, the laws of Eome prevailed in the towns side by 
 side with the vernacular poetry of the Welsh, but this Eoman 
 element seems to have been almost dead at the time of the 
 Conquest, at least in some of the towns. Bath, Grloucester, 
 and Cirencester appear from the Chronicle to have been under 
 the rule of Welsh kings. Christianity was established amongst 
 them, but we see from Gildas how little influence it had over 
 the lives of the priests and the Welsh princes of his time. 
 His epistle is a protracted denunciation of a condition of 
 society in which vice and crime ran riot. A few, however, 
 remained who were worthy of the better past, "by whose 
 worthy lives, a pattern to all men, our weakness is sustained." 
 His one hope for the country was in the restoration of the 
 purer life that had been, and he calls on all men to repair the 
 Church of God, to bring back learning to the monasteries and 
 good manners to the land. The hope was not fulfilled. The 
 
 new-bom Muse in the loveliest of cradles, found it in the tale of Arthur. 
 " Girt with British and Armoricfc Knights," Arthur kindled the first epic fire 
 in Milton. Wordsworth, when Man and Nature, hand In hand, passed for 
 moments from his view, felt, along with Scott, the alluring charm of Arthur. 
 Tennyson, beginning a new world of song, saw the hero and his knights and 
 ladies when first he wrote, and in after years wrought the scattered Idylls of 
 the King into our latest epic. 
 
 These are a few names out of many, but to what a vitality, to what a power 
 do they not bear witness ? I have said nothing of the influence the Welsh story 
 has had on literature at large, nothing of its invasion of our land alon^ with 
 the Normans, of the Anglo-Norman poems, nothing of its fresh invasion of 
 Wales from Armoriea, nothing of the story of Geoffrey of Monmouth with 
 which the historians were so indignant, of the work on it done by Walter 
 Mapes, and the further work done on it by Malory, nor of the extraordinary 
 impulse these three versions or enlargements of the tale had on literature. 
 Let them be only mentioned here. Enough has been said to more than excuse 
 a pause at Arthur's name. We meet it now in the sixth century. We have 
 him with us in the nineteenth, and he has played thepart of a living man right 
 through the literature of thirteen hundred years in Wales and England. 
 
 1 Guest, Origines Celticae, vol. ii. pp. 305, 306. 
 
106 EAELY BNaLlSH LITER ATtJEE chap. 
 
 ■whole of the old culture was annihilated by the English. Gil- 
 das saw a part of this hurricane of ruin with his own eyes, and 
 as we look back to his days from ours, in which English litera- 
 ture is one of the great powers, it is strange to listen to his 
 horror of the fierce and impious Saxons, wolves, dogs, whelps 
 of the lioness, barbarians, bastards, robbers, and yet to thiak 
 that in the loins of these ravaging English warriors were 
 Caedmon and Mliied, Baeda, and Dunstan. Nor is it less 
 strange to read of his misery for the trampling out of Chris- 
 tianity by the hoofs of pagans who not so very long after pro- 
 duced the first extant Christian poem in any modern tongue, 
 whose schools of learning under Christian bishops sent forth 
 missionaries to the heathen, instructed Europe in learning by 
 the voice of Baeda, and advised the great Charles on all points 
 of education and religious practice by the mild wisdom of 
 Aleuin. So strangely do the eyes of decaying culture mistake 
 the days in which it lives ; so important it was for the sake of 
 the literature of the world that in one country at least the 
 Roman literature should be expunged for a time in order that 
 the fresh originality of the Teutonic mind should have the 
 ground clear for its growth. When, having rooted itself, it 
 came again, through Eoman Christianity, into contact with 
 Eoman literature, it did not lose the freshness of its own 
 stock. It assimilated, at least in the North, Latin thought into 
 a living body of English poetry. 
 
 With the end of the time of quiet after 520 — a time which 
 seems to have lasted about thirty years — the West Saxons 
 under Cynric (652) opened from Winchester an attack on Old 
 Sarum, and soon won our Wiltshire, Dorsetshire, and Berk- 
 shire. From Berkshire they went eastward and having made 
 Surrey and the Four Towns their own, returned to Wiltshire, 
 and thence, but now under Ceawlin as leader, drove their 
 war-plough to Cirencester (Corinium), and thence through a 
 country crowded with the villas and estates of the provincials 
 till they met the three Welsh chieftains of Gloucester, Ciren- 
 cester, and Bath, at Deorham, a village northward of Bath. 
 There the We.*: Saxons (577) "fought with the Brits and slew 
 three kings, Commagil and Condidan and Farinmagil in the 
 place which is called Deorham, and took from them three cities 
 Gleawanceaster and Cyrenceaster and Bathanceaster." This 
 battle gave them the whole valley of the Severn south of Arden 
 and east of the river. Seven years after they made another 
 inroad up the Severn valley, entered Shropshire and went up 
 the river till they reached Uriconium (Wroxeter), and having 
 
VII THE CONQUEST AND LITERATURE 107 
 
 destroyed that town pushed northward still towards Chester. 
 They were met on the borders of our Cheshire by the Welsh 
 at Fethanleag (Faddilay), three miles west of Nantwich, and 
 Ceawlin, defeated there, " returned thence in wrath to his own 
 country." 
 
 I have introduced this bit of history because the destructions 
 of Bath and of Wroxeter are connected with our literature. 
 The first is bound up with the poem of the Ruined Burg, and 
 the second with a Welsh elegy which, independent of its 
 enabling me to draw attention to the influence of Welsh on 
 English verse, is almost a parallel to the Ruined Burg. 
 
 Bath, during the Roman period, ranked in importance with 
 Gloucester. They were both excelled by Cirencester, and 
 Cirencester was inferior only to York, London, and Colchester. 
 The Eoman remains, even now found in Bath, prove its wealth ; 
 and the public buildings of well-wrought stone, the temple to 
 its local deity, the colonnade and porches over its hot springs, 
 its wide forum and splendid baths, were still in existence when 
 the city was sacked and burned by Ceawlin. There is no 
 actual statement in the Chronicle that Bath was destroyed by 
 Ceawlin, but it was not the habit of the English at this time 
 to dwell in towns, and Bath remained for fully a century in a 
 state of ruin. These are the ruins that the poem called the 
 Ruined Burg describes, at least that was Leo's view, and is 
 Professor Earle's. Whether the lines are written about a city 
 or a castle has been questioned, but the phrases, " many mead- 
 halls," "high the crowd of pinnacles," — point to an extensive 
 town. 
 
 The date of the poem is of course much later than the over- 
 throw of Bath by Ceawlin, but it is bound up by imagination 
 with that terrible day. The poet who wrote the lay placed his 
 thought in the midst of the destruction of the town by the 
 West Saxons, and pitied those who suffered it. "In the wide 
 slaughter," he says, "they perished when came the days ot 
 bale." We see that many years of decay and the wasting of 
 Nature had passed over the ruins, when the smger stood trst 
 amongst them and was moved by their desolation. They are 
 " undereaten by old age." And we may guess the very time. 
 It was in 676 that Osric, an under-king of the Hwiccas, tounded 
 a monastery among the ruins of Bath ; and around it m later 
 years grew up a new town which was raised into importance 
 by Offa in 781. Some Scop, during these years between 676 
 and 781, coming in a chieftain's train to visit the place, or some 
 monk of the monastery, wandering among the rums m a winter 
 
108 EAELY ENGLISH LITERATURE Chap. 
 
 evening ("hoar-frost is on the mortar" he says) made these 
 verses, verses which have been rashly extolled as the best 
 which the Early English Muse has left us, but which, amid 
 their conventional expressions, have still a fine quality. 
 
 Wondrous is its wall of stone. Weirds have shattered it 1 
 
 Broken are the burg-steads ! Crumbled is the giants' work. 
 
 Eallen are the roof beams ; ruined are the towers ; 
 
 All undone the door-pierced towers ; frozen dew is on their plaster ! 
 
 Shorn away and sunken down are the sheltering battlements, 
 
 Undereaten of Old Age ! Earth is holding in its clutch 
 
 These, the power-wielding workers ; all forworn are they, forlorn in 
 
 death are they! i 
 Hard the grip was of the ground, while a hundred generations 
 Move away of men. Long its wall abode 
 
 Through the rule that followed rule, ruddy stained, and gray as goat, 
 Under storm-skies steady! Steep the court that fell, 
 StUl it f alleth . . . (skilful ancient work it was) ! 
 
 Strong in rede, (the builder Strengthened), strong of heart, in chains 
 
 he bound 
 All the wall-uprights with wires, wondrous- wrought together ! 
 Brilliant were the burg-steads, burn-fed houses many ; 
 High the heap of homed gables, of the host a mickle sound. 
 Many were the mead-halls, full of mirth of men, 
 Till the strong-willed Wyrd whirled that all to change ! 
 
 In a slaughter wide they fell, woeful days of bale came on ; 
 Eamine-death fortook fortitude from men ; 
 All their battle bulwarks bare foundations were ! 
 Crumbled is the castle-keep ; those have cringed to earth 
 Who set up again the shrines I ^ So the halls are dreary. 
 And this courtyard's wide expanse I ^ From the raftered woodwork 
 (See) the roof has shed its tiles I To ruin sank the marketr-place,* 
 
 1 Forworn is put in for the sake of the assonance with geleorene, but of 
 course I do not mean that forweorone has anything to do with werian. It 
 means (from weosan) decayed, tottering, decrepitus. I have put a full stop at 
 geleorene, which is not the ordinary reading. 
 
 ^ Betend crungon — ■ hergas to hrusan. Many translations have been made 
 of this obscure passage. B. and T. translate " The atoning bauds sank to 
 earth." I do not understand what they mean. Earle translates "Pitifully 
 fell the armies to the earth." I take betend{e) to mean those who restored or 
 kept up the shrines, and this, if it be a possible translation, has a clear meaning. 
 
 8. Teafor geapu. — Tea/or is often translated as an adjective, signifying red. 
 Leo, for example, takes the two words together and translates them rote 
 Liicken. I have chosen to render geapu (the wide opening) as the wide expanse ; 
 and teafor (which means "foundation place") the courtyard of , or the open 
 space surrounding, the fortress, a place where the foundations for new buildings 
 might be made. Teafor is then taken to be a repetition of geapu. " The wide 
 expanse, the foundation place is also dreary." After this I place a full stop, 
 and the words that follow begin a separate piece of the description. But this 
 may be too audacious, and would certainly be so, were not the whole passage 
 so obscure. 
 
 ^ Wong, which means a plain or a flat meadow, may here, I conjecture, mean 
 the forum, the open space in the midst of the town, with all its shops in ruin, 
 and this meaning agrees with the lines that follow. 
 
VH THE CONQUEST AND LITERATURE 109 
 
 Broken up to barrows ; many a brave man there, 
 Glad of yore, and gold-bright, gloriously adorned. 
 Hot with wine and haughty, in war-harness shone ; — 
 Saw upon his silver, on set gems and treasure. 
 On his welfare and his wealth, on his winsome jewels. 
 On this brightsome burg of a broad dominion ! — 
 There the stone-oourts stood ; hotly surged the stream. 
 With a widening whirling ; and a wall enclosed it all. 
 With its bosom bright. There the baths were set 
 Hot within their heart ; fit [for health] it was ! 
 
 " Thea they let flow in over the hoary stone the streams of 
 heated water. The waves filled the round and boiling mere.' 
 That was a kingly thing." ^ 
 
 The second literary interest connected with the West Saxon 
 advance is the Welsh song on the destruction of Uriconium. 
 That poem is an old marwnad or elegy, and was composed, it 
 is generally thought, by Llywarch Hen, who lived, men say, in 
 the sixth century.' It is " in the soldier's triplet, the oldest 
 known form of Welsh versification, and its style is lyrical." 
 It has, no doubt, suffered changes in the progress of time, buty 
 
 1 It might well be called a mere ; when the central bath was found in 1755, 
 sixteen feet below the surface, it was ninety feet long by sixty broad. " There 
 is a city six (12) miles from Bristol, where the hot springs, circulating in chan- 
 nels artificially constructed are collected into an arched reservoir to supply the 
 warm baths which stand in the middle of the place, most delightful to see and 
 beneficial to health. This city is called Bath from a word in the English tongue 
 which signifies bath, because infirm people resort to it from all parts of England 
 for the purpose of washing themselves in these health-bringing waters — and 
 persons in health also assemble there to see the curious bubbling up of the warm 
 springs." This is the account of Bath given in the Acta Stephani. It reads 
 as if the writer had seen our poem, and is certainly — since the Roman arrange- 
 ment was probably rebuilt or repaired — a confirmation of Earle's belief that 
 the ruined burg was Bath. 
 
 2 Wiilker reads idng huse, which may mean, " That was a place where a 
 king's Thing might assemble." I may as well, in passing from this poem, 
 quote, as an illustration of it, Gildas' description of the attack of the English 
 on a town. " All the columns " (he speaks of the assaults as if they were 
 made on the temple of God) " were levelled with the ground by the frequent 
 strokes of the battering ram, all the husbandmen routed, together with their 
 
 ■ bishops, priests, and people, whilst the sword gleamed, and the flames crackled 
 around them on every side. Lamentable to behold, in the midst of the streets 
 lay the tops of lofty towers, tumbled to the ground, stones of high walls, holy 
 altars, fragments of human bodies, covered with livid clots of coagulated 
 blflod, looking as if they had been squeezed together in a press, and with no 
 chance of being buried save in the ruins of the houses, or in the ravemng bellies 
 of wild beasts and birds."— This is Dr. Giles' translation, and he borrows m 
 places from the old translation. The whole passage is obscure. 
 
 » Guest's text of the poem is from the Red Book of Herghest, a MS. of the 
 fourteenth century; and his translation is " intended to be literal." He thinks 
 that this soldier's triplet {triban milwr) "suggested the use of final rhyme 
 to the Latinists of the third and fourth centuries who first introduced it, and 
 most of whom were Celts by birth." Is it not possible, then, that the rhymes 
 we find in Anglo-Saxon poetry may be derived from Celtic poetry ? 
 
110 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 if here we may follow Dr. Guest, it represents a poem con- 
 temporary with the fall of Uriconium, and written by one 
 who knew the details of the fight and had seen the place. 
 The poet paints himself as an eye-witness, as escaping with 
 his family from the slaughter, and looking down from a hill 
 upon the town in flames. We find ourselves, in its verse, 
 listening to another type of poetry than the English, to a 
 much more imaginative, to a much better shaped poetry 
 — poetry which, entirely Celtic in tone, had perhaps been 
 influenced by the Eoman culture. If it was really contem- 
 porary with the destruction of Uriconium in 584, we may 
 say that this Welsh piece, with others even earlier, is, with 
 some lays in Beowulf and the fragment of Finnsburg, and, 
 it may be, a few Irish fragments, the oldest extant modern 
 poetry. 
 
 Kyndylan of Pengwern (Shrewsbury) is the hero whose 
 death is lamented. He is slain defending Tren, the White 
 Town, the ca,pital of the district. Tren is identified by Dr. 
 C^uest as Uriconium, the town built, not of timber, but of hewn 
 stone, after the Eoman fashion. Five miles from it was the 
 British stronghold in the woodr along the Severn bank, near 
 Pengwern. Twelve miles up the valley of the Tern there is a 
 high and remarkable ?idge of rocks called Hawkstone, in front 
 of which ■ there was a strong British fortress, which, if the 
 ridge were then called the Hel or El, might take the name of 
 Eli. Erom these two the poet describes the eagles of the foe ^ 
 descending eager for the flesh of Kyndylan. "Pengwern's 
 eagle with the gray-horn beak, Eli's eagle, screaming aloud," 
 both sail down their several valleys eager for the blood of men. 
 There is no finer image in early poetry, and it brings the 
 fierceness of the contest before us with extraordinary vivid- 
 ness. Not far off from these two fortresses stood a little group 
 of Celtic churches, which Guest identifies with Baschurch, a 
 small town or village about seven miles north of Shrewsbury. 
 
 1 As both Pengwern and Eli, according to Guest's conjecture, were British 
 fortresses, the eagles coming from them and eager for the flesh of Kyndylan, 
 show us that these fortresses had been seized by the English. But it Is, per- 
 haps, fanciful to make the eagles into the foe, and more simple to think that 
 they only mean the birds of prey. It may be also fanciful of me to say that 
 the allusions to the wild boar are allusions to the Erfglish. But I let it stand. 
 Kyndylan, "whose heart is now cold as winter's ice," has died by the "thrust 
 of a wild boar through his head." The English called their chiefs the wild 
 boars and in the tenth stanza the term is used of the whole of the English host : 
 "The wild boar will not give back to Kyndylan his father's town." If the 
 original poem then be contemporary, the English in 584 were helmeted with 
 the boar, or crested with the boar, as we find them in Beowulf. 
 
TU THE CONQUEST AND LITERATURE 111 
 
 There lay Kyndylan, carried thither -when the fight was 
 over.' 
 
 Bassa's Churches 1 There rests to-night, 
 
 There ends, there shrinks within himself, 
 
 He, that was the Shelter in battle ; 
 
 Heart of the men oiArgoet. 
 
 Bassa's Churches are lovely to-night, 
 
 Their clover hath made them so ; 
 
 Ruddy are they ; overflowing my heart ! 
 
 Then he turns to describe Uriconium, its gracious site, its 
 pastures and ploughed lands, now stained with blood, its lusty 
 young warriors, its gray and grave warriors, all lost and over- 
 thrown; and, though it is not English poetry, yet I quote a 
 few of its stanzas because it is Welsh poetry concerning an 
 English battle — 
 
 The White Town in the bosom of the wood ! 
 There has ever been of its lustyhood. 
 On the surface of the grass, the blood. 
 
 The White Town in the country-side ! 
 
 Its lustyhood, — its gray thoughtfulness — '^ 
 
 The blood under the feet of its warriors. 
 
 The White Town in the Valley ! 
 
 Joyful its troop with the common spoil of battle ; 
 
 Its people are they not gone ? 
 
 The White Town between Tren and Trodwyd ! 
 More common was the broken shield 
 Coming from battle than the evening ox.* 
 
 The White Town between Tren and Traval ! 
 
 More common was the blood 
 
 On the surface of the grass than the ploughed fallow ! 
 
 I have drawn attention to this poem, and to the distinct 
 quality of its poetry, that we may, by placing a Welsh poem 
 into relation with the English, realise that the Welsh literature 
 began even in the sixth century to afEect the English south of 
 the Dee. The Celtic imagination began to influence the Teu- 
 tonic. The same thing may be said, and with greater propriety, 
 of the ISTorthumbrian English and the Celts, but while that is 
 
 1 The translation is Dr. Guest's. It will be seen by those who will refer to 
 his essay how largely I am here indebted to him (Origines Celticae, vol. n. 
 p. 290, etc.). Nothing can be more vivid and interesting than his discussion of 
 
 the poem. » „ ^ . ^ 
 
 2 Its gray-headed seniors. ' Returning from pasture. 
 
112 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 more or less understood, the necessary influence of the Welsh 
 on English song along the marches from Chester to the Bristol 
 Channel has not been sufiBciently considered. I believe that 
 this influence, when English literature again arose after the 
 Conquest, was a very powerful one, but even now its elements 
 must have begun to work. Both English and Welsh were 
 singing folk; both chanted their battles; among both, thejsiugs 
 and nobles had bards ; and the same kind of rewards — horses, 
 lands, collars, and the rest — were given to the poets of both 
 folk. When alliances were made between Welsh and English, 
 the poets of each people must have met and sung together. 
 When war was not going on, intercommunion of the two peoples 
 would have been frequent along the march. Travelling singers 
 would cross the border to and fro, going from village to village, 
 from farm to farm. The literary men of England, not so very 
 long after this time, corresponded with Welsh kings. Eald- 
 helm writes a letter to Geraint of Devon, in which he called 
 him the glorious lord of the western realm. 
 
 As to the alliances, they began to be made shortly after this 
 overthrow of the White Town. Ceawlin himself, its destroyer, 
 was utterly overthrown in 691 by the Hwiccas in alliance with 
 the Welsh. The house of ^Ua, on the fall of Deira, took 
 refuge, at least so it seems from Welsh tradition, with the 
 King of Gwynedd, and ^thelfrith's fear that this alliance of 
 the Deirans and the Welsh would be too much for him in 
 Northumbria, was the cause of his desperate attack on Chester 
 in 613.' In 631 Penda leagued himself with Cadwallon, King 
 of Gwynedd, against Eadwine. These instances, which might 
 be multiplied, are enough; they prove that there must have 
 been intercommunion of the poetical work of both peoples. 
 This is still plainer when we think that in the later wars, waged 
 by the West Saxons against the Britons, the Welsh were not, 
 as of old, exterminated, but were allowed to settle down after 
 conquest among the English, and were acknowledged as citizens, 
 as living under the king's peace. "They could hold," says 
 Ereeman, "landed property, their blood had its price, their 
 oath its ascertained value." 
 
 Welsh settlers then, we may be sure, brought with them 
 Welsh poetry. Even the unsubdued Welsh, during times of 
 peace, lived with the English in much the same way as the 
 English and Scots of the Borderland lived with one another 
 — in the constant association of raiding and fighting, but at 
 
 1 607 is the date of the battle of Chester in the Chronicle, but the Annales 
 Cambriae date it 613, and Dr. Guest thinks this is probably the true date. 
 
THE CONQUEST AND LITERATURE 113 
 
 the same time with an occasional interchange of mirth, of 
 singing, and now and then, it may be, of intermarriage. As 
 time went on, this literary intercommunion would increase 
 till the prohibition of the Welsh crossing the border was 
 enforced. In fact all along the marches from Chester to the 
 Bristol Channel, and along the eastern border of West Wales, 
 there was enough motion to and fro of the life of both peoples 
 to produce so much communion between their poetry as would 
 arise from the singers of one people hearing the singers of the 
 other. The English influence on the Welsh is inappreciable ; 
 but the Welsh poetry, being of a higher imaginative type, 
 would be certain to influence the English poetry. It is not 
 unimportant even at this early time to notice that the first 
 English poem of literary quality after the Conquest was made 
 by Layamon, whose home was at Areley, in Shropshire, and 
 whose subject was British; that the "Pearl," the loveliest of 
 Middle English poems, was probably written in Lancashire, 
 and is full of Celtic colour ; and that the first English lyrics 
 — like " Sumer is yeomen in " — were, I believe, born upon 
 the Welsh border of Mercia. 
 
 These things being said, there remains nothing more to be 
 usefully written in this place concerning the interests of Eng- 
 lish literature in Southern England. It is true that with the 
 arrival of Augustine, Eoman literature entered Kent with 
 Christianity. But it was not English, and it was not till the 
 year 669-671 that even Latin learning took root in Canterbury 
 and spread over the West Saxon realm. The history of that 
 belongs to another chapter. 
 
 We turn now to the Angles and their conquest of Middle 
 and Northern England, and touch on the few points which in 
 their wars are linked to literature, and as we have carried 
 Southern England up to 670, so we carry this Engle history up 
 to the same date. It is perhaps necessary to apologise for 
 introducing an historical sketch into a history of literature, 
 but it is better, I think, that my readers should have some 
 image of the divisions of England in their mind's eye, and 
 especially understand the original, certainly the literary, 
 apartness — even though they were at root one people — of 
 the Northumbrians and West Saxons. Moreover a great 
 number of the right answers to literary problems depends on 
 the history and geographical distribution of the peoples among 
 whom the literature in question arises, and even minor matters 
 or side issues of history enable us to guess with a greater 
 probability the causes of literary movements. Eor example, 
 
114 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 the persistency of York as a city, and the long continuance 
 of heathendom in Mercia — which belong to the story of the 
 conquests of the Angles, have a reniote but distinct bearing 
 upon the English literature in Northumbria.' 
 
 The Angles, then, the third tribe of the English on the 
 Continent, were the last to leave for the shores of Britain. 
 When they started we do not know, but it was probably early 
 in the sixth century. Ship followed ship, during a period of 
 years, for the shores of our island, till the whole of the Angles 
 had left their original country. In that they were different 
 from the two other English tribes. The greater part of the 
 Jutes remained behind in the fifth century, and, mingled up 
 with the Danes, came afterwards with them to England. As 
 to the Saxons, it was only their overflow that entered Britain. 
 But when the emigration of the Angles was over, their native 
 land was left uninhabited. Their exodus was like that of the 
 Israelites from Egypt. The women and children came away ; 
 the implements of farm and household were carried with them, 
 their cattle also and their slaves. Not a hoof was left behind. 
 The Chronicle says : " From Angle, which has ever since re- 
 mained a waste, between the Jutes and Saxons, came the men 
 of East Anglia, Middle Anglia, Mercia, and all Northumbria," 
 and Baeda bears the same testimony. I cannot help thinking 
 that this unity of the Angles had something to do with the rise 
 of vernacular literature in the north rather than in the south 
 of England. 
 
 Those nearest the seaboard left first, and they descended on 
 the "last unconquered remnant of the Saxon shore" — the 
 line of coast between the Orwell and the Wash. These, when 
 they settled, called themselves the North folk and the South 
 folk, and were probably two distinct bands from different parts 
 of Engle. The country they seized came to be called East 
 Anglia. Part of them, or a new band, pushed northward along 
 the coast to the Fens about the Wash, then northward still, 
 east of the Wolds, as far as the Humber, and these were called 
 the Gyrwas, and the Lindiswara. Another expedition of the 
 Angles, finding the coast of our Suffolk, Norfolk, and Lincoln 
 occupied, landed on the flat of Holderness and fought until 
 nearly the whole of our East Riding was in their hands. 
 Pressing still farther through a fertile land, studded with villas 
 
 1 It will be plain that I have followed, in the historical part of this chapter, 
 not any work of my own, but the work done by Mr. Green, Mr. Skene, Mr. 
 York Powell, Professor Freeman, Dr. Guest and others, and 1 trust that no 
 mistakes of mine may wrong these honoured names. 
 
VII THE CONQUEST AND LITERATURE 115 
 
 and rich with cattle, they stormed York, marched on to Aid- 
 borough, and were then stopped in their westward progress by 
 the great forest of Elmet. But they won the coast as far as 
 the Tees. This was the land of Deira, and the whole British 
 population were driven out of it to die in the woods and in the 
 caves of the rocks in utter misery and starvation. The great 
 Roman towns were sacked and ruined. The rich villas of the 
 meadows of the Derwent were burnt to the ground. It was 
 like the passage of the Chimaera over the hamlets of Lycia. 
 Nevertheless, a hundred and fifty years later, the centre of 
 European learning was at York, and the descendants of these 
 ravishing and burning warriors civilised the coast and filled 
 the river valleys with monasteries in which were born, cradled, 
 and nurtured the arts and sciences of Northern and Midland 
 England. It may be that York, the " city of the Caesars," was 
 not so absolutely ruined as the rest. It was almost too big to 
 ruin. At any rate it did not long remain a desolation. Early 
 in the seventh century it was again a city, and a royal city, 
 the capital of Eadwine. If it be possible that any of the 
 Roman learning was preserved during a milder conquest, the 
 fact would be another reason for the quicker rise and longer 
 continuance of English literature in Northumbria. Big towns 
 cherish and preserve literature. Even when the Danes came 
 to York, they came more to settle than to destroy, and what- 
 ever literature was saved in Northumbria from the Danish 
 horror was saved at York. 
 
 While Deira was being made, another band of Angles had 
 entered the broad estuary of the Eorth, and landing on its 
 southern bank — where they may have heard of their Frisian 
 or Jutish cousins, whom a certain tradition brings there long 
 before this time — fought their way westward as far as the 
 future site of Edinburgh, and turning round it, marched still 
 westward as far as the valley of the Clyde, and southward till 
 they reached the Tweed. After this the Angles drove their 
 way southward, across the Tweed, and it is here that we come 
 on the first known date in their conquests. Ida, whom his 
 foes called the Elame-bearer, began to rule in 547, and during 
 the twelve years of his reign made his way into our North- 
 umberland, seized on the basaltic rock of Bamborough seated 
 like a couchant lion on that stormy shore, enclosed it with a 
 hedge and then a wall; and from that fortress he and his 
 descendants won the land westward to Cumberland and south- 
 ward to the Tees. When this was accomplished men called 
 the country from the Eorth to the Tees and from the edge of 
 
116 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 Cumbria to the eastern coast, Bemicia. In 588 Bernicia and 
 Deira became one kingdom under JSthelric, and the name of 
 the -whole from the Forth to the Humber was Northumbria. 
 This is the kingdom which for reasons we can only conjecture 
 became the home of original literature in England. 
 
 Meanwhile the Angles who had settled down in Lincoln- 
 shire, pushed inland no doubt by new arrivals from their 
 fatherland, penetrated by the valley of the Trent to the place 
 where Nottingham now sits on the river and then to our 
 Leicester, and the settlement of Middle England began. The 
 Gyrwas south of the Lindiswara in the Een country, and 
 other Angle bands fought their way southward and westward, 
 and the shires (loosely speaking) of Huntingdon, Cambridge, 
 and Northampton, were first their prey and then their place 
 of rest. These became the South Engle. 
 
 While this was being done the West Engle, moving north of 
 these conquests, passed through the upper part of the present 
 shire of Nottingham into the Peak country of Derbyshire, and 
 then wheeling to the south, and leaving the Middle English 
 and the South English on their left, occupied the belt of coun- 
 try between the Middle English and the South English on 
 one hand, and the borders of our Shropshire and Cheshire on 
 the other, going as far south as the forest of Arden. After- 
 wards since they lived on the Marches nearest to the Welsh, 
 they came to be called the Mercians. These conquests fin- 
 ished the work of the Engle in central Britain in the latter 
 half of the sixth century. 
 
 There were now seven little kingdoms in England, but some 
 years later ^thelfrith, king of Northumbria (593-617), 
 joined all these kingdoms under his one sway, with the excep- 
 tion of Kent then ruled by ^thelberht, and I must hereafter 
 draw attention to this Northumbrian glory as one of the pos- 
 sible causes of native literature being more fully developed in 
 Northumbria than elsewhere in England. He was a mighty 
 man, and having first at Daegsastan (Dawston in Liddesdale) 
 beaten so completely the Scots who invaded him, that they 
 were for a long time forced into quiet, he went into the Welsh 
 country in 613, fought a fierce battle near Chester, and seized 
 the town, the surrounding lands, and the sea-coast at the 
 mouth of the Dee. 
 
 This conquest of his cut off Cumbria from North Wales, as 
 the battle at Deorham had cut off West Wales from our South 
 Wales. At two points then the English had reached the sea, 
 at Chester and at our Bristol, and the Welsh were now split 
 
vii THE CONQUEST AND LITERATURE 117 
 
 asunder into three kingdoms, the kingdom of Devon and Corn- 
 wall, the kingdom of our Wales, and the kingdom of Cumbria, 
 which extended from the Eibble to the Clyde. Afterwards 
 the western frontier of Mercia was drawn from the mouth of 
 the Wye to the Dee, and the river Tone was made by Ine the 
 frontier between Wessex and West Wales, but the conquest 
 was now practically finished, and the English settled down to 
 till the lauds they had won. 
 
 With the Middle English and Mercians literature has up to 
 this date nothing to do, nor indeed has Northumbria much to 
 do with it. The only thing needful to remark is that the wars 
 in and about Northumbria between the Angles and the Britons, 
 and during the whole of the period of which we are writing, 
 were, according to Mr. Skene, the source of a number of Welsh 
 poems which we have, much altered, in manuscripts, the earli- 
 est of which are of the twelfth century ; and that the Welsh 
 and English were nearer to one another and more mingled in 
 Northumbria than they were on the March or on the border 
 of West Wales.^ We have no trace of poetry among the 
 English during the years of the conquest of Northumbria. 
 But there are several instances during the wars between the 
 battle of Chester in 613 and the overthrow of Penda in 666 
 which prove that the war-song was still going on. 
 
 The first belongs to the battle between ^thelfrith of North- 
 umbria and Eaedwald, King of the East Angles, in 617. A 
 line of poetry from some old song is quoted by the chroniclers, 
 Henry of Huntingdon, Eoger of Wendover, and others — 
 
 With, the blood of Angles Idle's stream was foul,^ 
 
 and the description given by Huntingdon, as well as by the 
 rest, induces us to believe that they had before them some early 
 English account of the battle in verse. The troops advance 
 with fluttering standards, bristling spears, — phrases which 
 
 1 The Welsh, It Is true, settled down with the English under Ine, and the 
 same mixture took place when the Wessex frontier was pushed on as far as the 
 Tamar; it is also true that when OfPa extended the' Mercian frontier the 
 Welsh and the English settled down together in the new land which the English 
 won — and both these facts are of importance for our literary history; hut the 
 mixture between Welsh and English in the North was longer in time, more 
 complete, and its frontier more extended than it was in Mercia and Wessex. 
 
 2 It is probable that short historical records like this in poetry, as well as 
 others in rude prose (such as the pre-Christian entries in the Chronicle) , were 
 written down in the runic characters which came to Britain with the English, 
 and were preserved on oak, beech, alder, or birch frames, perhaps like those 
 later " Bardic frames " from Wales, which Dr. Guest describes {Origines CeU 
 ticae, vol. ii. p. 161) . 
 
118 EARLY EKGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 are, however, more Latin than English. iEthelfrith rushes 
 on the foe as if he had " found a prey." In 633 King Ead- 
 wine was slain by Cadwallon and Penda at Heathfield, and- 
 Henry of Huntingdon repeats the same phrase — one perhaps 
 of the conventional phrases of Anglo-Saxon poetry — "The 
 plain of Hethfeld reeked red from end to end with a river of 
 the blood of jEthelings ; a place of sudden woeful slaughter of 
 the bravest warriors." In 634 Oswald, the most Christian king, 
 met the forces of the leader of the Britons at Denises-burn, and 
 another fragment of an old song tells us that " the corses of 
 men of Cadwallon choked the Dennisburn." But Penda had 
 his way at Maserfeld in 642, and slew Oswald ; whence " it is 
 said," writes Huntingdon, "the plain of Maserfeld was white 
 with the bones of the Saints." At last, in 655, Penda the 
 Strong was made weak by Oswiu, and the " earth was wet with 
 his blood and the ground splashed with his brains." The bat- 
 tle was fought near the river Winwaed, which, swollen over its 
 banks with excessive rain, destroyed, as they fled from the 
 field, more of the heathen men than fell by the sword. So 
 great was the deliverance (and we hear, as we read of it, the 
 song of another deliverance of the same kind — " The river of 
 Kishon swept them away, that ancient river, the river Kishon") 
 — that it was celebrated in a battle song of which the Norman 
 chroniclers retained three lines — 
 
 At the Winwede was vengfid the war-death of Anna, 
 The slaughter of kings — of Sigbert, of Bogrice ; 
 The death of King Oswald, the death of King Edwin. 
 
 In 658 Cenwealh, the West Saxon king, fought a great battle 
 at Pen in Dorsetshire against the Welsh, and the account of 
 the Norman chronicler has it in the character of poetry. When 
 the fight was joined the English yielded, but they feared flight 
 more than death, and stood to their arms. " Then weary grew 
 the Welsh, their strength melted away like snow ; they fled 
 from Pen even to Pedred, and cureless was the wound given 
 there to the children of Brut." It seems doubtful if all of these 
 have an origin in Anglo-Saxon songs, especially the last, which 
 looks as if it had a Briton lay as its source. Yet the three 
 lines concerning the flight at Winwaed are enough to prove that 
 the ISTorman chroniclers had some English lays before them 
 when they prepared their history. 
 
 This brings the remnants of English literature, seen, it is 
 true, in mere flights of song, up to 670, which is about the date 
 of the first Christian poem, of Caedmon's song of the Creation ; 
 
vn THE CONQUEST AND LITBEATUKB 119 
 
 and which is also the date of the true beginning of Latin liter- 
 ature in the south, at Canterbury. A more detailed account of 
 the influences which in Korthumbria preceded and influenced 
 the beginning at Whitby of a vernacular poetry, is reserved to 
 a later chapter. Meanwhile, of what kind was the life these 
 warriors and settlers lived? What did they think as they 
 went to war, and as they struck in battle ? How did they feel 
 when they settled down to agriculture, when they built their 
 homesteads, and when they drank together in the hall ? What 
 kind was the scenery among which they lived? What did 
 they think and feel concerning the sea on which they sailed, 
 and the storms which roared upon their coasts ? Have we any 
 record in their literature of these matters ? Does their litera- 
 ture disclose to us their character, their emotions, their 
 thoughts in war, at home, and on the ocean ? These are the 
 questions which the following chapters will attempt to answer. 
 Before they were land-dwellers they were warriors, and we will 
 begin with war. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 ABMOUK AND WAR IN POETET 
 
 In the earliest poems of the English we have already seen 
 something of their customs of war, and of the armour they 
 used. War was one of their chief businesses, and being knit 
 up with courage, self-sacrifice, scorn of death, contention 
 against fate, faithful comradeship, rescue of the weak, defence 
 of the kinsfolk and the land, the praise of women, the worship 
 of the gods, glory after death, reverence for ancestors, roman- 
 tic adventure and other ideal matters, became naturally one of 
 the great subjects of song. Everything pertaining to it was 
 clothed in imaginative dress. The body-armour, the weapons, 
 and chiefly the sword, were glorified. The war-smiths, es- 
 pecially as forgers of the sword, were garmented with legend, 
 and made into divine personages. Of these Weland is the 
 type, husband of a swan maiden, and afterwards almost a god. 
 Battle, as in Homer, was attended by immortal creatures, — 
 among the Norsemen by the shield-women ^- the choosers of 
 the slain — by evil and good spirits among the English, and 
 by Wyrd herself, the mistress of them all. The meeting of 
 the warriors in fight — the wielding of the sword, the darting 
 and pushing of the spears, the shield wall as it drove its way 
 into the mass of the foe, the shower of arrows, the challenges 
 of the warriors as they fought, the crashing and shouting, the 
 way the armour behaved under the blows, were one and all 
 adorned with metaphor ; and every poet, while using the terms 
 that had become conventional and which the guests in the hall 
 expected, strove to add something of his own, or to express in 
 a new fashion the well-known forms of description. Then, 
 around the battle, and following it, like minor beings of fate 
 and slaughter, were the birds and beasts that prey upon the 
 slain — the eagles of the woods and of the sea, the kite and 
 the hawk of the rocks, the raven, the carrion crow, the wolf, 
 and the hill fox. These, screaming, croaking, howling, sang 
 120 
 
CHAP, vni ARMOUR AND WAR IN POETRY 121 
 
 the "horrid song" of death, and their omens often foretold 
 the issue of the fight. 
 
 An English -warrior went into battle with a boar-crested 
 helmet, and a round linden shield, with a byrnie of ring mail 
 (or in the case of the poorer sort a cloth or leather coat, often 
 covered with flakes of iron or horn), with two javelins or a 
 single ashen spear some eight or ten feet long, with a long 
 two-edged sword naked or held in an ornamental scabbard and 
 a great knob at the head of the hilt. In his belt was a short, 
 heavy, one-edged sword, or rather a long knife, called the seax, 
 which was used for close quarters and for finishing a foe. 
 Beowulf rips asunder the dragon with it, and Grendel's mother 
 uses it on Beowulf in the struggle when he lies on the sand of 
 the cavern. Some carried great axes, very heavy and long- 
 handled ; and the javelin, and bow with broad-headed arrows, 
 especially among the thralls, were frequent weapons. 
 
 In the Grafts of Men we see the Smith at work on this 
 armour : — 
 
 One, a clever smith may for use in war, 
 For the weapons' onset, ^ many (arms) make ready 
 When he forges fast for the fighting of the warriors 
 Either helm or hip-seax, or the harness of the battle, 
 Or the sword sheer-shining, or the circle of the shield 
 Eor to fix it firmly, 'gainst the flying of the spear. 
 
 Crafts, 1. 61. 
 
 At times an iron-bound club was carried, but the sword was 
 the special weapon of all the nobler sort. It was also the 
 noblest of all the pieces of armour, and it was fame for a smith 
 to have forged one that would last, because of its fine temper, 
 from generation to generation. If its maker was not known, 
 and it was of the finest quality, its origin was referred to the 
 elves, the dwarfs, or the giants. Magic runes were engraved 
 on the blade by the smith, it was damasked, spells were mut- 
 tered over it ; it seems sometimes to have been dipped, when 
 red hot, in blood, or in a broth of poison-twigs. The hilt was 
 wrought with wires of gold, silver, or iron, interwoven like 
 writhing snakes. Sometimes a blood-painted serpent, as in the 
 Icelandic lay of Helgi and Swava, lay above the edges or on 
 the ridge of the sword, whirling its tail round the hilt. Such 
 a sword received a name of its own, and had, as it were, a living 
 spirit in it that sorrowed and rejoiced. 
 
 Swords of this kind are named in Beowulf; "hard-edged 
 
 1 1 have translated waepen\>racu, not waepen^ciege. 
 
122 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATUEE chap. 
 
 and wonderful, damascened, and adorned with jewels," — 
 Hrunting, JSTaegling, and the sword of the cave, — but of all 
 these enough has been said. We touch on the proper litera- 
 ture of the sword in one of the Biddies of Cynewulf, where 
 it is finely personified. Cynewulf conceives it as itself a 
 warrior, wrapped in its scabbard as in a coat of mail ; going, 
 like a hero, into the battle ; hewing a path for its lord into 
 the ranks of the foe ; praised in the hall by kings for its 
 great deeds ; and strangest of all, and most poetical (unless 
 Prehn be wrong, from whom I take this explanation),^ mourn- 
 ing when the battle is over, for its childless desolation, for 
 the times when it was innocent of wars, for the anger with 
 which the women treat it as the slaughterer of men. The 
 power with which Cynewulf enters into the life of the things 
 he treats of can scarcely go further, but this is not apart 
 from Teutonic thought, which conceived a living being in the 
 sword.^ Here is the riddle. The Sword speaks : — 
 
 I'm a wondrous wight for the warstrife shapen ; 
 
 By my lord beloved, lovelily adorned : 
 
 Many coloured is my corslet, and a clasping wire 
 
 Glitters round the gem of Death which my Wielder gave to me : 
 
 He who whiles doth urge me, wide-wanderer that I am, 
 
 With himself to conquest. 
 
 Then I carry treasure. 
 Gold above the garths, through the glittering day ; 
 I of smiths the handiwork ! Often do I quell 
 Breathing men with battle edges ! Me bedecks a king 
 "With his hoard and silver ; honours me in hall, 
 Doth withhold no word of praise ! Of my ways he boasts 
 'Fore the many heroes, where the mead they drink. 
 In restraint he lulls me, then he lets me loose again. 
 Far and wide to rush along ; me the weary with wayfarings. 
 Me the stout in battle. . . . 
 
 . . . Ranging largely, I'm a foe. 
 Cursed of all weapons. Riddle, xxi. 
 
 He is cursed of them, for he breaks through armour and 
 beats down the spear and axe, but he pays the penalty. " No 
 son have I," so mourns the Sword, " who shall avenge me ; " 
 his fate is, if he shape the work of war, never to have a bride, 
 and the woman, whose joy he has lessened (by slaying her 
 
 1 Composition und Quellen der Rdtsel des Exeterbuehes, to which, both in 
 the translation and explanation of the Riddles, I am throughout indebted. 
 
 2 Eusebius, Ealdhelm, and Tatwine have all written riddles on the sword. 
 Cynewulf has most followed the first ; but Cynewulf adds all the imaginative 
 work. It is he alone who represents the sword as a warrior, wearing armour 
 of his own, showing his lord the way through the battle, and when the war 
 is over, mourning like a shattered veteran over his lonely future; 
 
viii AKMOUE AND WAR IN POETRY 123 
 
 lover ?), speaks to him words of reviling, strikes him with her 
 hands, and sings to him an evil song. "I take no heed," she 
 cries, " of the battle." 
 
 Another portion of the sword is also described, when Cyne- 
 wulf, making a riddle on the scabbard, tells of its fourfold 
 wood ; and then, in his fancy, likens the sword-hilt to the 
 Cross of Christ that overthrew the gates of Hell, and to the 
 gallows tree on which the Outlaw is hung. 
 
 In the hall I saw, where the heroes drink, 
 
 Borne above the floor, four, in kind, of things : — 
 
 Wondrous wood-tree, woven gold, ' 
 
 Treasure skilful- wrought, and of silver part ; ■ — 
 
 Image of his Cross who of It for us to Heaven 
 
 Lifted up a ladder, ere he of Hell's dwellers 
 
 Broke the burg asunder. Of this beam can I 
 
 Easily, before the earls, tell the ancestry — 
 
 There was yellow holly, and the yew, the hard tree, 
 
 And the oak and maple. To the ^thelings 
 
 All of them were useful. One the name they had — 
 
 " Wolf-head's tree." Riddle Ivi. 
 
 The English Shield was circular, with a polished or gilded 
 boss of metal, under which lay the aperture for the hand. 
 Band sceal on scylde — faest fingra gebeorh ( " a boss shall be 
 on the shield, iirm refuge for fingers"). The woodwork was 
 of yellow linden, covered with the skins of wild animals, fixed 
 to the linden-board with studs, and strengthened with circular 
 or intersected bands of iron, gilt or painted ; and there may 
 have been sometimes nailed on it the figure of a boar or the 
 sacred animal of the family. Our nearest likeness to it is the 
 Highland targe — 
 
 There's brass on the target of barkened bull-hide, 
 There's steel in the scabbard that dangles beside ; 
 The brass shall be burnished, the steel shall flash free. 
 At a toss of the bonnet of bonny Dundee. 
 
 The shield is also personified by Cynewulf ; but as its work 
 in the battle is to bear strokes rather than to give them, it 
 complains more than the sword. It is "sick of battles, no 
 physician can heal its wounds, always it must endure the 
 deadly strokes of swords." As we read, we feel the spirit 
 speaking in the shield, and are even touched with pity,^ so 
 well does Cynewulf do this work — 
 
 1 The contrary view is given in the parallel riddle by Ealdhelm. There, 
 the shield is a soldier proud of his wounds — 
 
 QuIb tantos casus, aut quis tam pluriraa leti 
 Suscipit in bello orudelis vulnera miles? 
 
124 EAELY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 I am all alone, with the iron wounded, 
 With the sword slashed into, sick of work of battle, 
 Of the edges weary. Oft I see the slaughter, 
 Oft the fierceful fighting. Of no comfort ween I, — 
 So that, in the hattle-hrattling, help may bring itself to me ; 
 Ere I, with the warriors, have been utterly fordone. 
 But the heritage of hammers i hews adown at me. 
 Stark of edges, sworded-sharp, of the smiths the handiwork, 
 On me biting in the burgs ! Worse the battle is 
 I must bear for ever ! Not one of the Leechkin, 
 In the folk-stead, could I find out. 
 
 Who with herbs he has then should heal me of my wound ! 
 But the notching on my edges more and more becomes 
 Through the deadly strokes of swords, in the daylight, in the night. 
 
 Riddle vi. 
 
 The same self-pity for its hard fate, which we find here in the 
 shield, is also found in the riddle on the head-piece of the 
 Helmet. Like the Antlers of the stag, in the 88th riddle, it 
 complains of the bitter weather. 
 
 Wretchedness I bear ; 
 Wheresoe'er he carries me, he who clasps the spear ! 
 On me, still upstanding, smite the streams (of rain) ; 
 Hail, the hard grain (helms me), and the hoar-frost covers me ; 
 And the (flying) snow (in flakes) falls all over me. 
 
 Riddle Ixxix. 6-10. 
 
 In the same way the Spear (R. Ixxii.) mourns that it was 
 taken away from the field (as a sapling of the forest land) 
 where earth and heaven nourished it ; that its nature has been 
 changed, and forced to bow to the will of a murderer. Yet, as 
 it learns to know its master better, it sees that he is no mur- 
 derer, but one who will fulfil a noble fame. Then the spear 
 changes its thought, and it is proud of its small neck and fal- 
 low sides, when the glow of sunlight glitters on its point, and 
 the warrior bedecks it with joy, and bears it on the war-path 
 with a hand of strength upon its shaft, and knows its ways in 
 battle.2 
 
 1 That which is left after the hammer work is done, — homera Idfe, i.e. 
 " the sword." 
 
 2 Gar is the usual word for "spear" — (gar-Dene = spear Danes). Gar 
 was the javelin armed with two of which the warrior went into battle, and 
 which he threw over the " shield-wall." It was barbed, but the other, shaped 
 like a leaf, without a barb, was called the " spere," the lance, concerning 
 which is Cynewulf s Riddle. This was shod on the top of the handle with a 
 heavy metal ball to give it weight, just as the sword was. There are other 
 names for the weapon. " Franca" is the javelin which, in the battle of Mai- 
 don, is whirled through the neck of a warrior. " Waelsteng" is the deadly 
 shaft or stake of the spear, and poetry uses it for the spear itself. " Daro'S " 
 is a dart, and " daro'Saesc " an ashen spear ; ord is the spear point. The shafts 
 of all these weapons were of ash, and the poets came to call the spears " ashes," 
 
VIII AEMOtJR AND WAR IN POETRY 125 
 
 In the same way the Battering Earn wails for its happy life 
 as a tree in the forest, and for all it suffered, when it was wrought 
 by the hands of man ; yet at the end, like the spear, it boasts 
 itself of its deeds of war, of the breach it has made for the 
 battle-guest to follow, of the plunder which they take together. 
 
 I beheld a tree in woodland, towering on Mgli, 
 
 Branched brilliantly ; and its bole abode in joy. 
 
 Wood that waxed each day ! Water and the Earth 
 
 Eed it faithfully, tiU far gone in days, 
 
 To another state it came, a most unhappy state. 
 
 Deeply was it down-stabbed, dumb was it in bonds. 
 
 O'er its wounds enwreathed, and with woful trappings 
 
 In the front 'twas fretted. Eor another false one, 
 
 Eor another battle guest, through the beating of its head. 
 
 Does it ope the way. Oft do these together 
 
 Ravage ragingly the treasure. East and restless i then 
 
 Was its follower to follow, when the first had cleft its path ! 
 
 None into the narrow strait now would dare to venture. 
 
 Riddle liv. 
 
 There is a very different tone in the riddle that represents 
 the Bow. The personification is just as vivid, but where the 
 shield mourns, the bow exults. His force as a warrior, his 
 slaughter of the foe, the deadly poison of his shafts are sung 
 with a savage joy. 
 
 A. G. O. E. is my name, turned the other way ; 
 
 And a wight well wrought am I, for the war enshapen — 
 
 If it hap I bend myself, and from out my bosom fareth 
 
 Venomous an (adder) stingy then I'm all on fire 
 
 Ear from me to drive away a very death to life. 
 
 Whensoe'er my master, who has made me for that woe. 
 
 Lets aloose my limbs, I am longer than before. 
 
 Till I spit out from me, with death-sorrow blended. 
 
 That all-baleful poison that I erst uptook. 
 
 Nor shall any of the men easily escape, 
 
 Not a warrior of them all, from what I then outcry ! 
 
 . . . Then a drink of death he buys — 
 (Brimming) sure the beaker that he buys with life ! — 
 If I am unbounden, I obey no man ; 
 Only when with skill I'm strung— Say what is my name ! 
 
 Riddle xxiv. 
 
 Two other riddles belong to war — one on the Coat of mail, 
 the other on the Horn. The first brings the iron from which 
 
 and the warriors who bore them the ' ' ash-bearers ' ' ( Genesis 2041) . Hrothgar 
 says that he has guarded his folk for fifty years with ashes and edges, with 
 spear and sword.— ^eoMM?/ 1773. t, , „ , , jji 
 
 1 Ragingly = most rapidly ; restless = unwearied. Ealdhelm has a riddle on 
 the Battering Kam which Cynewulf had before him. 
 
126 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 the rings are wrought out of the bosom of the earth, out of 
 the dewy meadow-land, just as Ealdhelm, from whom, the sub- 
 ject of the riddle is taken, says of his mail-shirt — 
 
 Rosoida me genuit gelido de visoere tellus, 
 Non sum setigero lanarum vellere facta, 
 Licia nulla trahunt, nee garrula fila resultant : 
 
 phrases which Cynewulf expands into poetry. But the most 
 remarkable line is that in which, with a sudden return to pagan 
 thought, he makes the mail-shirt say: "Me the snakes wove 
 not through the crafts of .Wyrds " — a line which takes us into 
 the heart of ancient heathendom, but which returns in the next 
 to the real worms of which he, with Ealdhelm, speaks, "Nee 
 crocea Seres texunt lanugine vermes." 
 
 Me the well-wet meadow, wonderfully frosty, 
 Out of its inside, in old time brought forth — ■ 
 Of myself I wot not as enwrought of wooly fleeces, 
 Nor of hairs through high-oraft of my heart ar-thinking. 
 I have no enwoven woof, nor a warp have I, 
 Nor resounds a thread of mine, through the smiting of the loom. 
 Nor the shuttle shoots through me, singing (as it goes). 
 Nor shall ere the weaver's beam i smite from anywhere (on me) ! 
 Me the Worms did not weave through the crafts of Wyrds, 
 Those who gloriously ^ the golden, godlike web bedeck. 
 Yet before the Fighters, far along the Earth, 
 Many a man doth name me — " marvellous delightful Weed. ' ' ^ 
 
 Riddle xxxvi. 
 
 The riddle on the Horn which begins the life of the thing 
 from the bull, the "weaponed warrior" of the text, is even 
 more vigorous than that on the war-shirt, and describes the 
 doings and uses of the horn in war and peace. 
 
 I a weaponed warrior was ! Now in pride bedecks me 
 A young serving man all with silver and fine gold, 
 
 1 The word is am, which Grein translates as a " weaver's beam," but Bos- 
 worth and Toller, " the reed or slay of the weaver's loom." 
 
 2 " With adornments." 
 
 = At Beuty Grange, in Derbyshire, an Anglo-Saxon barrow, opened in 1848, 
 contained a coat of mail. " The iron chain work consists of a large number 
 of links o£ two kinds, attached to each other by small rings half an inch in 
 diameter ; one kind flat and lozenge-shaped about an inch and a half long, the 
 others all of one kind, but of different lengths, varying from four to ten inches. 
 They are simply lengths of square rod iron with perforated ends through which 
 pass the rings connecting them with the diamond-shaped links; they all show 
 the impression of cloth over a considerable part of the surface."— Grave Mounds. 
 Jewitt, p. 254. 
 
 This seems to have been an ordinary mall-shirt, roughly made; but there 
 were others, worn by the great leaders, and forged of as delicate links as that 
 which Harry Wynd sold to Conachar's foster-brother. 
 
VIII ARMOUR AND WAR IN POETRY 127 
 
 With the work of waving gyres! Warriors sometimes kiss me ; 
 Sometimes I to strife of battle, summon with my calling 
 Willing war-companions ! Whiles, the horse doth carry 
 Me the march-paths over, or the ocean-stallion 
 Tares the floods with me, flashing in my jewels ■ — . 
 Often times a bower-maiden, all bedecked with armlets, 
 Filleth up my bosom; whiles, bereft of covers,^ 
 I must, hard and headless, (in the houses) lie ! 
 Then, again, hang I, with adornments fretted. 
 Winsome on the wall where the warriors drink. 
 Sometimes the folk fighters, as a fair thing on warfaring,^ 
 On the back of horses bear me ; then bedecked with jewels 
 Shall I puffs with wind from a warrior's breast. 
 Then, again, to glee feasts I the guests invite 
 Haughty heroes to the wine — other whiles shall I 
 With my shouting save from foes what is stolen away, 
 Make the plundering scather flee. Ask what is my name ! 
 
 Riddle xv. 
 
 There is no riddle on the hehnet, only on the Vizor of the 
 helm, but we have many a slight description of it throughout 
 ancient English poetry. " Grima," which is the mask, the vizor, 
 was used as a name for the whole helmet and included the crest, 
 when there was a crest. The grinning face-covering, the ear- 
 pieces, the projecting jut on the crown of the helm are fre- 
 quently alluded to, and were adorned with incised or raised 
 images of the boar. A helmet, found at Benty Grange, "has on 
 its crown an elliptical bronze plate, supporting the figure of a 
 boar — much corroded, carved in iron, with bronze eyes, — 
 • standing rampant like the crest of a knight." Such seems to 
 have been the ornament of the helmets which the thegns of 
 Beowulf wore when they approached Heorot. The translation 
 I give of this obscure passage follows Professor Skeat's read- 
 ing of the text. 
 
 O'er his glittering body. 
 High above the helmet's vizor, fire-hardened, gold-adorned. 
 Many-coloured, did the Boar hold the guard of life. 
 
 Beowulf, 1. 303. 
 
 On Hnaef s faneral pyre is laid his helm — " a swine all 
 golden, a boar iron hard ! " When Beowulf plunges into the 
 
 1 Bordum I do not take to be "on the tables," but hordumUhly^ed — 
 robbed of my covers, of the round tops, like shields, which shut down on the 
 drinking horn, and were, because they were adorned with jewels and gold 
 figures, wrenched away by the plunderers. , , ., , ,. 
 
 2 Literally, " a fair war-ornament." I have translated it as above, because 
 I want to give, in this place, the force of "fyrd," which is the militia; and 
 here I think, the levy en masse of the population for a war-expedition— tne 
 horn is part of the war-material, part of the ornamented thmgs used m tne 
 Fyrd. 
 
 3 Swelgan is literally "to swallow, drink in." 
 
128 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 sea he sets his bright helmet on, adorned with jewels, circled 
 round with a chieftain's chains,^ which a weapon-smith in days 
 of old had wrought and wondrously forged, beset with- swine 
 likenesses (here the boars seemed to be small, and fastened on 
 like nails on the cheek-plates), "so that never after brand nor 
 swords of battle should bite into it." Lastly, when Beowulf is 
 telling his story to Hygelac, he bids be brought into the hall 
 the " Boar head sign, the battle-steep helm." ^ Nor is it 
 only in Beowulf we find the boar-helm. Later on it ap- 
 pears in Cynewulf's Elene. When Constantino lies dream- 
 ing in his tent, he wakes up " overcovered with the boar-sign," 
 with his helmet. When the warriors of Helena land on the 
 shores of Greece, "on every earl was seen a masked-helm, a 
 costly boar-crest." 
 
 So were the warriors armed. They marched into the fight 
 led by the king and chiefs, sometimes on foot, sometimes rid- 
 ing on horses, under their banners, their chain armour ringing, 
 their long ashen spears in their hands, their swords by their 
 sides, and around them their henchmen, armed also with sword 
 and spears and shield, in close array. Before they joined 
 battle, the leader spoke to his soldiers, throwing up his shield 
 arm to call their attention. 
 
 'Fore the vanward of the warriors sprang the war-host leader ; 
 Bold that promise-bringer was, his sliield-hoard upheaved. 
 
 Eimdus, 11. 252, etc. 
 
 Then the trumpets blew, and singing their war-songs and 
 clashing their spears on their shields,' while the horses stamped 
 the earth, the main body of freemen, wolves of the battle 
 covered with their " vaulted shields," making a " shield-burg " 
 as they went, a "breast-net" of men, marched forward and let 
 fly their javelins and arrows above the yellow linden shields — 
 
 Then with boldness they 
 Letten forth be flying shower-flights of darts, 
 Adders of the battle, arrows hard of temper, 
 From the horn-curved bows. High aloud they shouted, 
 "Warriors fierce in fighting, sending forth their spears 
 Through the host of hard ones. Judith, 1. 220. 
 
 A passage in the Christ describes the same beginning of the 
 battle — 
 
 1 " Chains — " Gold links twisted like a coronet. 
 
 2 See Kemble, Saxons in England, chapter on Heathendom, and Grimm's 
 Teutonic Mythology, chapter on Freyr, for the connection these and otlier 
 writers establish between the Boar-sign and the golden boar which Freyr rode, 
 and his worship. 8 £lene^ I. go. 
 
viii ARMOUR AND WAR IN POETRY 129 
 
 To another, luck in war 
 Gives he on the battle-ground, when the javelin shower 
 Sends the shooters forth o'er the shelter of the shield — 
 Flickering iiight of arrows. Christ, 1. 673. 
 
 All these expressions, and many more, of the glitter and 
 rushing noise of battle are common phrases of the poets and 
 reveal the joy and glory our forefathers had in war. Cyne- 
 wulf paints the advance of the Franks" and Huns — 
 
 Then (in battle byrnies) were the men of bravery 
 
 For the fight well fitted; flickered then the spears, 
 
 And the wreathen shirts of war. With war- words and shields, 
 
 Heaved they up their hosting banner. Elene, 1. 22. 
 
 When Pharaoh's host draws nigh in the Exodus, this is what 
 the Hebrews see coming up from the southways — ■ 
 
 Then they saw. 
 Forth and forward faring, • Pharaoh's war array. 
 Gliding on, a grove of spears ; i glittering the hosts ! 
 Fluttered there the banners, there the folk the march trod. 
 Onwards surged the 'war, strode the spears along, ^ 
 Blickered the broad-shields ; blew aloud the trumpets. 
 
 , Exodus, 1. 155. 
 
 Around the march, on the battle-field, after the battle, the 
 beasts and birds of war collected — the gray wolf, the swart 
 raven, the dewy-feathered, horn-nebbed eagle, — choosers, like 
 Valkyrie, of the slain. The first, and perhaps the finest, asso- 
 ciation of these war-creatures is in Beowulf. It is already 
 translated, but I translate it again — 
 
 But the raven wan. 
 Eager o'er the fated, oftentimes shall speak. 
 Tell unto the earn how at eating he had sped. 
 When he with the wolf tore away the flesh of corpses. 
 
 Beowulf, 1. 3024. 
 
 There is nothing better in the Anglo-Saxon poetry of war 
 than this grim conversation. The wolf, the raven, and the 
 eagle never become Christian in English song. They are just 
 as savage in the later poems as they are in Beowulf, or in the 
 fragment of the Fight at Finnsburg. When Pharaoh's host is 
 on the march they accompany it all night, longing for the 
 slaughter. 
 
 1 Oferholt wegan ; oferholt=" o^eiviooA." A parallel passage in BeomM?/ 
 makes me translate it a " grove of spears " ; otherwise it would be, "a cover, 
 a shield." 
 
 ^ Oar as trymedon — "the spears strengthened themselves ; " "moved along 
 like a wall "is perhaps the poet's thought ; or, spears may mean the spearmen. 
 
130 EAELY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 Wheeling round in gyres, yelled the fowls of war, 
 Of the battle greedy ; hoarsely barked the raven, 
 Dew upon his feathers, o'er the fallen corpses ; 
 Swart that chooser of the slain ! Sang aloud the wolves 
 At the eve their horrid song, hoping for the carrion. 
 Kindless i were the beasts, cruelly they threaten ; 
 Death did these march-warders, all the midnight through. 
 Howl along the hostile trail — hideous slaughter 2 of the host. 
 
 Exodus, U. 161-168. 
 
 Then we see them while the battle is raging. This is the 
 description in Genesis of the fight between Abraham and the 
 Elamites — 
 
 So they rushed together — Loud were then the lances, 
 Savage then the slaughter-hosts. Sadly sang the wan fowl, 
 "With her feathers dank with dew, midst the darting of the shafts, 
 Hoping for the corpses". Hastened then the heroes. 
 In their mighty masses, and their mood was full of thought. 
 
 Then was hard play there. 
 Interchanging of death-darts, mickle cry of war ! 
 Loud the crash of battle ! "With their hands the heroes 
 Drew from sheaths their swords ring-hilted, 
 Doughty of the edges 1 Genesis, 1. 1982. 
 
 Again "we meet these beasts "when the Hebre"ws go forth 
 from Bethulia at the call of Judith. " The -vFarriors hurried, 
 heroes under helm, and bore the banner of victory forth at 
 the breaking of the day. Sounded then the shields, starkly 
 clanging — " 
 
 Then rejoiced the gaunt beast. 
 In the wood the wolf ; and the raven wan, 
 Slaughter-greedy fowl 1 Surely well they knew 
 That the war thegns of the folk thought to win for them 
 Fill of feasting on the fated 1 On their track flew fast the earn, 
 Hungry for his fodder, all his feathers dropping dew ; 
 Sallow was his garment, and he sang a battle lay ; 
 Homey-nebbed he was. Judith, 1. 205. 
 
 We meet them also on the march and in the battle in Cyne- 
 wulf's Elene, when Constantine fights with the Huns. 
 
 Forth then fared the folk troop, and a fighting lay 
 
 Sang the "Wolf in woodland, wailed a slaughter-rune ! ' 
 
 Dewy-feathered, on the foes' track. 
 
 Raised the Earn his song. Elene, 11. 27-30. 
 
 1 Carleasan is "without care or sorrow, reckless." I have ventured to 
 make cear stand for " pity." 
 
 ^ I have repeated ft/H in the translation. 
 
 ' Waelrune ne moS; literally, "hid not the slaughter-rune." The slaughter- 
 rune was the howling of the wolves. 
 
vm AEMOUR AND "WAR IN POETRY 131 
 
 Loud upsang the Raven 
 Swart, and slaughter-fell. Strode along the war host ; 
 Blew on high the horn-hearers ; heralds of the hattle shouted ; 
 Stamped the earth the stallion ; and the host assembled 
 Quickly to the quarrel ! Elene, 11. 52-56. 
 
 At last the battle is joined, and Cynewulf is all pagan in his 
 description — 
 
 Sang the trumpets 
 Loud before the war hosts ; loved the work the raven : 
 Dewy-plumed, the earn looked upon the march ; 
 Song the wolf uplifted, 
 Ranger ^ of the holt ! Rose the Terror of the battle ! ^ 
 There was rush of shields together, crush of men together, 
 Hard hand-swinging there, and of hosts down-dinging, 
 After that they first encountered flying of the arrows ! 
 On that fated folk, full of hate the hosters grim 
 Sent the showers of arrows, spears above the yellow shields ; 
 Eorth they shot then ^ snakes of battle 
 
 Through the surge of furious foes, by the strength of fingers ! 
 Strode the stark in spirit, stroke on stroke * they pressed along ; 
 Broke into the wall of boards, plunged the bill therein : 
 Thronged the bold in battle ! There the banner was uplifted ; 
 (Shone) the ensign 'fore the host ; victory's song was sung. 
 Glittered there his ^ javelins, and his golden helm 
 On the field of fight ! TiU in death the heathen, 
 Joyless f eU ! ^ Elene, 1. 109. 
 
 One more example shows the hirds of w^ar gorged with car- 
 cases after the battle. Abraham in the Genesis vowing to the 
 King of Sodom that he will not take scat or shilling from him, 
 
 1 Holies gehle'Sa — " comrade, indweller, of the holt." 
 
 2 This phrase is hke the picture of Terror and Strife and Rout in the 4th book 
 of the Iliad. 
 
 8 I repeat /oj-tS onsendan in the translation. 
 
 < Stundum is " at times," hence " eagerly." I have combined both mean- 
 ings in stroke after stroke. 
 
 6 I have put his in, because I think Cynewulf meant the Emperor's spears 
 and helm. . ^. , 
 
 6 Nor does Cynewulf leave them there. The Huns are driven m flight to 
 their camp, but are beaten from it. " Some, half alive, guarded their lives in 
 the rocky cliffs, some Drowning " (like an evil witch), " seized on in the river 
 stream." I have wondered as I read the description whether the poet may not 
 have remembered, as he wrote, the fight where Penda fell, and the flooded 
 waters of the river that swept away the Mercians and their king. ' Then,' he 
 continues, "was the host of the brave-hearted rejoiced; they chased the 
 stranger from break of day till evening fell. The snakes of battle, the ashen 
 darts, flew after them. Few of the host of the Huns came back to their home. 
 There it was seen that the King Almighty gave victory to Constantine, mag- 
 nificence and dominion through His rood-tree." These are lines that may well 
 resemble those sung after the fight of Winwaed by the bard of Oswiu. Did 
 Cynewulf, more than a century afterwards, enshrine, under the victory ot 
 Constantine the victory of Oswiu ; under the tale of the swollen Danube, tbe 
 drowning of the host of Penda ? 
 
132 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap, viii 
 
 save that part which Aner and Mamre and Eschol have fairly 
 won in the brunt of ashen spears, tells him that he need no 
 longer disquiet himself concerning the Northmen. 
 
 For the birds of oairion, 
 All along the mountain ledges, sitting blood bedropt, 
 Crammed and glutted are with the corpse-flesh of the host.^ 
 
 The picture of the vultures, thus sitting, dripping blood, on 
 the ledges of the cliffs travels beyond the conventional descrip- 
 tion, of which we find another example in a war-song written 
 when poetry had decayed, but which has attained a high rep- 
 utation because it happens to be one of the few pieces of 
 Anglo-Saxon poetry known to the Englishmen. 
 
 Behind them they left to have lust of the dead 
 Him of the sallow coat, him the swart raven, 
 Homy-nebbed fowl ; and the ash-feathered one. 
 White-tailed, the earn, to rejoice in the carrion, — 
 And the greedy war-hawk, and that grizzled beast. 
 Wolf of the weald. Brunnanburh, 1. 60-65. 
 
 1 Under beorhhleolSum blSdig sitta'5 
 
 jjBodherga wael >icce gefylled. Genesis, 1. 2159. 
 
 "Under the precipices of the mountain" is, of course, on the ledges at the 
 bases of the cliffs ; wael is often the battle-field strewn with corpses, the whole 
 slaughter of the fight; and " crammed and glutted " is to express the repeti- 
 tion of Jrt'cce gefylled,. 
 
CHAPTEE IX 
 
 THE SETTLEMENT IN POETET 
 
 When, after the year 613, the Conquest was practically 
 complete, the English had settled down oyer all the open 
 country into an agricultural life, family by family, kinsfolk 
 by kinsfolk, collected into hamlets round the heads of their 
 houses. They hedged and ditched their villages, built their 
 farm-steads, each with its garth and outhouses, laid out the 
 arable land and the meadow outside the hedge, organised their 
 village government, and established the places where the folk 
 met for religious worship and for council. As to the Eoman- 
 British cities which they had sacked and burned, these re- 
 mained in ruins, to be haunted by the owl and the fox. A 
 long time passed by before this agricultural people cared to 
 live in towns. They were like the Douglas ; they liked better 
 to hear the lark sing than the mouse squeak. 
 
 There was no further war with the Welsh, except upon the 
 marches of the north, west and south, or when a Welsh king 
 like Cadwallon united his forces with a king like Penda against 
 another English king. The wars which were now waged by 
 the English were those of English king with English king for 
 over-lordship. Even amidst these wars agriculture went stead- 
 ily on, and the arts of peace were developed in home and 
 village life. The English forged the ploughshare rather than 
 the sword. They built weirs, and fished, and set up water-mills 
 by the rivers.^ Boat-building, brewing, leather-tanning, pot- 
 tery, dyeing, weaving, the working of gold and silver, and 
 embroidery, grew and soon began to flourish. The days of 
 merchandise succeeded the days of piracy and plimder; life 
 became gentler, nearer in spirit to the homes of England as we 
 now conceive them. The main struggle was closed. 
 
 1 Mills. — Corn was usually ground by the women in stone querns, but we 
 find water-mills in a problematical charter of 838 (Ecgberht). "Et unam 
 molinam in torrente qui dicitur holan beorges burna." — Earle's Charters, 
 p. 288. 
 
 133 
 
134 EAELY ENGLISH LITEEATUKE chap. 
 
 There are many records in Anglo-Saxon poetry ■which, have 
 to do with this daily life of the people — life inland, life on 
 the seaboard, life on the sea, customs and manners, implements, 
 hunting, tilling, and war. Of war and arms I have already 
 written. This chapter and that which follows it are intended 
 to bring forward such of these records as have a literary 
 interest of their own, and will at the same time illustrate the 
 English settlement as well as the English life on the sea. 
 Most of them belong to a time when Christianity had been 
 thoroughly established, but the manner of life and the matters 
 mentioned in them were much the same in the sixth and 
 seventh as in the eighth and ninth century. The fresh gentle- 
 ness which Christianity added scarcely touches the things 
 which are here discussed. Being thus independent of date, it 
 is more convenient to bring these records together under such 
 a title as — The settlement of the English, in poetry. 
 
 These records are found in short poems, such as the Biddies of 
 Cynewulf, and in scattered lines in the midst of longer poems. 
 To turn aside and notice them in the midst of the general his- 
 tory of literature would confuse the main narration. To omit 
 them, on the other hand, would be to leave out some striking 
 pieces of early English poetry. But I hope my readers will 
 understand that these chapters are not intended to be a 
 treatise on the Settlement, or an attempt to discuss all that 
 pertains to the manners and customs of the English. Such a 
 treatise belongs to the historian and the antiquarian, and has 
 been admirably done by others. My object is to set in this 
 framework the descriptions of the early English life, of its 
 habits and way of thinking which are to be found in the 
 poetry of Northumbria, and I shall not travel beyond this 
 aim. I say the poetry of Northumbria, because I believe it 
 was in that part of England that poets chiefly wrote ; and the 
 scenery, the manners, the spirit of the people described in 
 such records as the Biddies, belong rather to the Angles than 
 to the Jutes or Saxons. 
 
 Inland, then, in the seventh century, the Angles were 
 settled along the rivers, on the plains overlooked by moor and 
 down, by the sea, and among the fens. Their hamlets rose on 
 the site of the Eoman villas, on either side of the Roman 
 roads, wherever the Eomans had drained the marshes, in 
 every fertile vale or plain where the provincials had cultivated 
 the land. The masses of forest country, the moors and 
 mountains were left unoccupied by this agricultural people 
 and were haunted by giant and elf and monster. But when 
 
IX THE SETTLEMENT IN POETRY 135 
 
 the better sites were filled, the land, as the English pushed 
 their advance by the water-paths, was cultivated up to the 
 edge of the forest-waste, and day by day the axe and the 
 plough wore their way into it and reclaimed it. The poorer and 
 the more outcast set up their solitary huts on the banks 
 and islands of the fens, and made a precarious living by fishing 
 and trapping. They were, in fact, squatters ; and it was only 
 afterwards when pieces of the folk-land were allotted to the 
 king's comrades and others that these men might come into 
 employment on an estate.^ 
 
 Of the kind of scenery among which these settlers in the 
 fens lived we have a slight sketch in the sixty-first riddle of 
 Cynewulf . It tells of a desert place near the shore, traversed 
 by a channel up which the tide flowed, and where the reeds 
 grew which were made into the Reed-Flute, which is the 
 answer to the riddle. I translate the whole. The picture, at 
 the end, of the lover talking in music to his sweetheart, music 
 that none understood but she, is full of human feeling, but the 
 point on which I dwell is the scenery. It is that of a settle- 
 ment where only a few scattered huts stood amid the desolate 
 marsh. Siich, at first, were the homes of the Gyrwas among 
 the fens. It is the Eeed that speaks — 
 
 On the sand I stayed, by the sea-wall near, 
 
 All beside the surge-inflowing I Eirm I sojourned there, 
 
 Where I first was fastened. Only few of men 
 
 Watched among the waste where I wonned on the earth. 
 
 But the brown-backed billow, at each break of day. 
 
 With its water-arms enwrapt me ! Little weened I then, 
 
 That I ere should speak, in the after days, 
 
 Mouthless o'er the mead-bench. . . . 
 
 Only for us two, utter boldly there. 
 
 Message in my speech, so that other men 
 
 Would not be aware ^ of my words to thee. 
 
 There is another passing sketch of the same kind of scenery 
 in the twenty-third riddle, when men come riding to the sear 
 channels on war-horses. The flood is too deep, and the press 
 of the tide between the steep banks too strong for their passage. 
 They mount a strange wain, proudly carrying their spears on 
 
 1 Kemble quotes a passage from a translation of St. Augustine's Soliloguia, 
 which illustrates the text: "But it pleaseth every man, when he hath built 
 himself some cottage on his lord's laen, with his assistance, for a while to take 
 up his rest thereon, and hunt and fowl and fish, and in divers ways provide for 
 himself upon the laen, both by sea and land, until the time when, by his lord's 
 compassion, he can earn a bocland and eternal inheritance." —Kemble, Tol.i. 
 p. 312. 
 
 ^ Literally, " Should not repeat our words." 
 
136 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 their gray -war-stallions. The answer to the riddle is obscure 
 (Prehn thinks it to be the Month), but the scenery is clear. It 
 is of a broad, deep-ditched channel, the stream of which in the 
 fen-lands meets the rough incoming of the tide.^ Near such a 
 place on the shore where it fell to the sea Cynewulf would see 
 the sight he describes in another riddle, " wood enrotten, heaps 
 of weed, lying, flung together, vilely on the earth " ; and more 
 inland, in the hollows of the earth, " the black-faced fen that 
 smelt so evilly of filth, where the fen-frogs swiftly leaped into 
 the dark water," where the Elk-sedge, as the Bune Song sings, 
 "waxed in the water, wounding and burning" every man who 
 touched it. We are brought into another part of the country, 
 probably the borders of Cumbria, where in riddle Ixxi. the Ox 
 speaks, and tells how weary he was among the rough paths of 
 the border moorland. " I was silent," the Ox says (and it is 
 in Cynewulf's manner to sympathise in this fashion with the 
 suffering and joy of animals) ; " I never told any man when 
 the point of the goad was bitter to me, but I was 
 
 " "With the swart herdsman. Farther I journeyed, 
 Wended Welsh marches, wandered the moors 
 Bound 'neath a yoke-beam." 
 
 The swart herdsman is a Welsh slave. Swart is the usual 
 epithet of the Welsh as against the fairer Englishman. In 
 another riddle (xiii.) a "black-haired Welshwoman presses and 
 shakes the ox-hide." Also in riddle liii. the " Welshwoman of 
 dark tresses " carries to and fro the buckets from the well, and 
 in another we hear of the " swart thegn with the dusky face " 
 who works with the student in the monastery. Evidently in 
 Northumbria there was a crowd of Welsh used as servants in 
 the farmhouses and the convents of the eighth century. 
 
 A great part of the country was forest, that is, wood and wild 
 land, heath and moor, and a supernatural terror brooded over 
 it. In the moor-pools dwelt the water-elves, and in the wreath- 
 ing mists and driving snow on the fells men saw mighty moor- 
 gangers stalking, fiends of the lonely places, such as their fathers 
 saw in the land from which they came. Grendelsmere was not 
 a name given without reason. "The Thyrs " — that is the giant 
 — " dwells alone in the fen," that is, in the morasses of the 
 mountains. Dark elves haunted also the hills and moors. We 
 hear of beorg-aelfen, dun-aelfen, muntaelfen. The howling of the 
 wolves filled these waste hills at night, and many a wanderer, 
 
 iThe stream shall in the waves, in the sea-floods mingle. — Gnomic Verses. 
 
IX THE SETTLEMENT IN POETRY 137 
 
 lost on them, was devoured. " Him shall the -wolf eat," says 
 the poem on the Pates of men, "the grizzly heath-tramper ; his 
 mother shall wail his death." In the caves of the moor-cliffs 
 the outlaw lurked, as Grettir did in Iceland, and the British 
 who fled from the sacking of the towns took refuge in them, 
 and miserably starved and died. Sometimes in Christian times 
 the hermit seeking a religious solitude exiled himself among 
 these solitudes. The demons, who have taken the place of the 
 giant and the elf, contend with him for the possession of these 
 green hills which they grieve to leave, and reproach him bitterly 
 for depriving them of their homes, as Caliban reproaches Pros- 
 pero. In the same wild solitudes lived the Dragon of our fore- 
 fathers' imagination, couched over his hoard of gold, terrible in 
 the dreadful recesses of the cave — 
 
 Horridus horrif eras speluncoa cumbo latebras — 
 
 a phrase of Eusebius which is not apart from the lines in the 
 Gnomic Verses : " The Dragon will dwell in the barrow on the 
 hill, old, and proud of his treasures." Even down to Shak- 
 spere ran the tradition — 
 
 Like to a lonely dragon, tliat Ms fen 
 Makes fear'd, and talk'd of more than seen. 
 
 Coriolanus, Act iv. So. i. 
 
 The pathless woodland was, however, nearer to the life of 
 the English than the moor. A great number of the settlements 
 were on the outskirts of the wood forest. It was covered with 
 beech ^ and oak, ash and maple, linden and birch. Alders clung 
 to the banks of its streams and pools. A thick undergrowth 
 of thorn and holly blocked it up and climbed the ledges of the 
 cliffs within it, where the great birds of prey had their home. 
 The English likened this vast covering of forests to curly locks 
 upon the head and shoulders of Earth. In the Eiddle on Cre- 
 ation Earth has no need of wunple or cape — 
 
 Eor upon me wonderfully wazeth on my head, 
 So that on my shoulders they may shimmer bright, 
 Curly locks full curiously. 
 
 This is paralleled by the Icelandic imagery, and we ourselves 
 may compare Keats' lovely phrase of the pines — 
 
 1 Earle shows very good reason for his belief, not only that the beech 
 existed in these times, but also the fir, though Csesar had denied both these 
 trees to Britain. Geologists would not agree with Caesar, who must have been 
 misinformed. — Land Charters, p. 474. 
 
138 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 Those dark clustered trees 
 Fledge the wild-ridg6d mountains steep by steep. 
 
 The Yew, " an unsmooth tree, holding fast to the earth, a 
 herd of the fire," grew in the wood and on the ridges of the 
 hills. The oak woods fed men as well as swine, and the Eng- 
 lish saw in them the future ship — " the strength that would 
 resist the sea." Wherever the birch grew, the English admired 
 it. Even though it was fruitless it was beautiful. " High is its 
 helm — 'tis decked out with beauty — laden with leaves — in 
 touch with the air." ' But the chief feeling with regard to the 
 woods was dread. These were desperate solitudes where the 
 "bitter worm-wood stood pale gray" (Cynewulf, E. xli.), and 
 the "hoar stones lay thick." The horror of their sunless and 
 murky depths was a superstitious horror. Giants also dwelt 
 in them, and black elves. These claimed the forestland as 
 their own and hated the spread of agriculture, as Grendel hated 
 the sound of the harp and the joy of men in Heorot. There too 
 at times were seen the light elves, in contrast with the black, 
 and of exceeding beauty. Caedmon, describing the loveliness 
 of Sarah, says she was " sheen as an elf " — but, light or dark, 
 they were the natural foes of men. There were water-elves, who 
 were, I presume, impersonations of the disease-striking powers 
 of the forest-fen and marsh.^ Most diseases were thought to be 
 
 1 These phrases are from the Sune Song. 
 
 2 I daresay the "water-elf disease," a leechdom for which I quote, for it 
 contains an old verse-charm, was a boil and blain plague such as the elves of 
 stagnant waters smite on men. Grimm thinks it a burning fever, and Fever is 
 thought to be an elf who rides the man with whip and spur. " If a man" 
 (here is the charm) " is in the water-eU disease, then are the nails of his hand 
 livid and his eyes tearful, and he will look downwards. Give him for this a 
 leechdom" (and many herbs are mentioned), "to be soaked in ale and holy 
 water," and sing this charm over them thrice — 
 
 I have wreathed round the wounds, 
 The best of healing wreaths; 
 That the bane-aores may 
 Neither burn nor burst, 
 Nor find their way further. 
 Nor turn foul and fallow. 
 Nor thump and throb on. 
 
 Nor be wicked wounds. 
 Nor dig deeply down ! 
 But he himself may hold 
 In a way unto health ! 
 Let it ache thee no more 
 Than ear in earth acheth I 
 
 Say also this many times — ' ' May Earth bear on thee with all her might and 
 main." These charms a man may sing over a wound. Cockayne, whose trans- 
 lation is here given, conjectures that the phrase "May Earth," etc., " is meant 
 to quell the Elf." IJiseases, and no doubt the Elf that caused them, were fre- 
 quently—in folk-tales — buried iu the ground. One of the leechdoms, trans- 
 lated from Sextus Placidus, holds in it a remnant of tlie Teutonic belief in 
 dwarfs as the cause of sickness. "To do away a Dwarf" (i.e. convulsions or 
 ague caused by a Dwarf's possession). "Give the man the dung of a white 
 hound pounded to dust, and baked into a cake, ere the hour of the dwarfs 
 arrival, whether by day or night it be. His access is terribly strong, and after 
 that it departeth." I may add to this note on elves and dwarfs that Ariel may 
 
IX THE SETTLEMENT IN POETKY 139 
 
 demoniac possessions, and tHs meant to the Christianised Eng- 
 lishman dwarf or elf -begotten. Other elves rode in the air and 
 shot deadly arrows ; and the Scotch phrases, " elf -arrows," " elf- 
 bolt," " elf -flint," are survivals of the English dread. We might 
 perhaps imagine that elves lived in the trees, for an English 
 gloss translates Dryads by wudu-aelfenne ; and in order to divert 
 their capricious anger whole groves were sometimes dedicated 
 to the elves. We hear, moreover, of the wudu-maer, the. "wood 
 nymph," " a record of the time," thinks Tylor, " when English- 
 men believed, as barbarians do still, that the Echo is the voice 
 of an answering spirit " ; and the word mare for Spirit appears 
 in an Anglo-Saxon charm as the Mare which harms a man. I 
 conjecture also that the wild, hairy wood-sprites which we find 
 in German and Norse legends were also part of our forefathers' 
 forest-superstition, and that it was strengthened by the appari- 
 tion now and again of a Welshman who had fled into the woods 
 to dwell. The lines in the Andreas may refer to the poet's 
 memory of a time when the woodland was as yet haunted by 
 unsubdued bands of Welshmen, — " All the markland (i.e. the 
 forestland) was with death surrounded, the snares of the foe." 
 We certainly find in Solomon and Saturn, in a passage which 
 Kemble thinks is redolent of heathenism, that the fiends "haunt 
 unclean trees," and, " changing themselves into a worm's like- 
 ness, sting the neat and destroy the cattle going about the fields, 
 and hew down the horses with horns " — verses which are a 
 remnant of the way in which a farmer, living on the outskirts 
 of the wood, would think, when any misfortune befell his cattle. 
 A far fiercer inmate of the wild wood was the Wolf-man, the 
 outlaw — the companion of the wolf of the wood. In these 
 terrible solitudes he met his fate by starvation, by the wolves, 
 
 be compared with the sheen, the glittering elf of our forefathers. Ariel is the 
 free wind of Heaven, whether in storm, or in play with the flowers or the sand 
 of the seashore ; and his music is the wind-music. A shoal of elves are his 
 companions; and he has some power over the elements, over fire and air. 
 Indeed his life is the life of the air. Such a life, rudely conceived, belonged 
 to the Old English bright Elf. Ariel is not, as an Anglo-Saxon would have 
 made him, a natural mischief-doer to man, but he does take pleasure in mis- 
 chief and in plaguing men at Prospero's command ; and though he is subdued 
 by Prospero's magic to serve him, he is "not human," and has no sympathy 
 with men. He is of the pure element alone. Even his desire for freedom is 
 not human, but elemental — the desire to be wholly the unchartered air. The 
 whole conception is more in harmony with Old English than with Celtic or 
 French ideas of the elves. Indeed I may hazard the opinion that the fairies 
 and elves of later England, of Shakspere and Milton and Shelley and many 
 others, are not merely romantic but genuine English descendants of the sheen- 
 bright elves of the Angles. 
 
 iThe gallows is called in a Riddle of Cynewulf 's the wolf-head's tree ; and 
 in the Middle Ages the outlaw was said to bear a wolf's head — Caput lupinum. 
 
140 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 by losing himself, and by the " dark weather" in which English 
 verse places the thief. There is a description of him in the 
 Gnomic Verses — (Exeter MS.) 
 
 147. Friendless, doth a woeful man take him wolves for comrades ; 
 Often does that comrade tear him, very crafty is the beast ! 
 Of that gray one, dead-man' s-grave, grisly fear shall be. 
 .... Never truly doth the gray wolf for his slaughtering weep, 
 Eor the murdering of men ; but the more of it he wishes. 
 
 Sometimes the outlaw climbed a high tree to see his way or 
 to escape the wolves, like the adventurous youth in the folk 
 tales ; and feeble, fell headlong. Caught in the boughs, he 
 hung between heaven and earth till he died. Here is such a 
 one sketched in the Fates of Men — 
 
 21. In the holt shall many a one from the high-topped tree 
 Featherless fall down ; yet in flight shall he 
 In the lift still hover, till no longer he is held 
 Like a fruit upon the tree. Then to the root-stock 
 Sinks he, slowly dying, of his soul bereft ; 
 Ealleth on the field of earth ! On a faring is his spirit. 
 
 At times he was seized, as he roamed the wood, by the out- 
 lying shepherds of some township, judged, and hung on the 
 gallows, which seems, by some at least of the English families, 
 to have been kept up at a little distance from the village in 
 the forest. There he became the proper prey of the raven. 
 " One shall on the wide-stretched gallows ride," sings the Fates 
 of Men, "till his bloody corse shall be all broken up. Then 
 shall the dark-coated raven take his eyes, nor shall his hands 
 guard him from that thievery. Wan on the tree, he waits his 
 weird, o'ershrouded with a death-mist. Outlaw is his name." 
 Now and then, even a woman, driven from her home by her 
 enemies, was forced to take refuge in the forest ; and we have 
 a picture of a wild place where such a one takes refuge, in the 
 Wife's Complaint — 
 
 Men have garred me dwell in a grove of woodland, 
 
 Under an oak tree, hidden in an earth-cave. 
 
 Old is this earth-hall : I am all outwearied I 
 
 Dark are all the dens, high the duns above, 
 
 Bitter my burg-hedges, with the briars over waxen, 
 
 A delightless dwelling .... 
 
 When in early dawn, all alone I go 
 
 L^ndemeath the oak, round my earthly lair. 
 
 There I sit and weep all the summer -lengthened day. 1. 27. 
 
 In the woods also were hosts of wild animals. Herds of 
 wolves roamed through them, and so long did they last, and so 
 
IX THE SETTLEMENT IN POETRY 141 
 
 formidable was their increase, that they were not killed out in 
 England till the end of the fourteenth century. The bear, the 
 Teutonic king of beasts, was perhaps an unfrequent inmate of 
 the caves, and was met upon the moor. " The bear will be on 
 the heath old and terrible," says an early English verse.^ The 
 wild cat was numerous and formidable in the woods. The wild 
 boar " strong with the strength of his tusk," wandered through 
 the undergrowth and grew fat upon the acorn and the mast. 
 In Cynewulf's Eiddle on Creation he paints the beast in a few 
 lines (Eid. xli.) 
 
 And I am everywhere than a boar more daring, 
 When he stands at bay, furiously enraging ; 
 
 Than a well-stufied Swine am I stronger, am I fatter ; 
 Than a boar that grunts him in the beeohen woods, 
 Black, and rooting up — one that lived in joys. 
 
 Great herds of wild cattle also roamed the forest, and their 
 huge horns were used for drinking cups, for blowing notes in 
 battle, and for warning of approaching war. The loud roar of 
 these horns, warning of the approach of a foe, was heard from 
 village to village of the kinsfolk on the skirts of the forest. 
 Some of the dark Celtic shorthorns probably lingered in the 
 woods after the expulsion of their masters. They were the 
 only domestic cattle known to Roman Britain. The large 
 cattle with red ears, white bodies, and great horns, now repre- 
 sented by the Chillingham breed, were brought over in their 
 ships by the English, and soon got into the woods. It is also 
 possible that in the wilder woods there lingered scattered 
 descendants of the Urus of the prehistoric period. Then, across 
 the streams which traversed the woodland, the beaver built its 
 dam and was trapped for its fur — we find them trapped even 
 as late as the twelfth century. Concerning the stag, another 
 wild dweller of the woods, we have two elaborate Eiddles from 
 Cynewulf (Ixxxv., Ixxxviii.). They are really concerning the 
 stag-horns which were used to adorn the gables of the halls, 
 and for the insertion into them of stone and iron weapons. 
 Cynewulf makes one of the horns speak, and bestows upon it, 
 
 i"The Bear," says Boyd Dawkins (Early Man in Sritain, p. iSS) , "has 
 left no traces of his existence of a later date than the Roman occupation." 
 Unless the passage quoted above and the other one in the Gnomic Verses be 
 remnants of verses made on the continent — the bear was still in England dur- 
 ing the early English occupation. The Gnomic Verses, 175, after describing 
 how ill it is to live alone, illustrates this by saying how much better it is' to 
 have a brother if " they should meet a boar, or when together a bear." " That," 
 he adds, as if he had known of it, — " that is a savage wild beast." 
 
142 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 in his vivid manner, human pleasure and pegret. "Full oft 
 the holt covered us; the helm of forest trees shielded us 
 against storms in the gloomy nights. Now I stand on wood 
 at the end of a beam" (that is, at the end of the roof -ridge of 
 a hall). " Brotherless, I keep my place at the end of the roof- 
 board ; my brother is not here. Where he is, who once beside 
 me dwelt, I know not, in what region of the earth, in posses- 
 sion of what men ? " The other Eiddle (Ixxxviii.) incidentally 
 describes the forest life of the stag. " At whiles I climbed the 
 steep hillsides, mounting to my dwelling. Then again I went 
 into the deep dales to seek my food — my strengthening, strong 
 in step. I dug through the stony pastures when they were 
 hard with frost, then, as I shook myself and tossed my head, 
 the rime, the gray frost, flew from my hair." Scott himself 
 could scarcely say it better — 
 
 But ere his fleet career he took 
 
 The dewdrops from Ms flanks he shook. 
 
 It may be that when the English first came over, the rein- 
 deer was still to be found in the north of England ; but this is 
 mere conjecture, founded solely on the story, in the Orkney- 
 inga Saga, which relates that the jarls of Orkney hunted the 
 reindeer in the north of Caithness in the middle of the twelfth 
 century. Once more, on this beast life in the literature of the 
 woods, we are placed on the edges of the hills where the 
 badger has his hole, and Cynewulf throws himself as fuUy 
 into the life and passions of the animal for his home and 
 children as he does into the eagerness of the hunter. The 
 Badger speaks 
 
 White of throat I am, fallow gray my head ; 
 Tallow are my flanks, and my feet are swift : 
 Battle-weapons hear I ! Bristles on my hack, 
 Like a sow's, stand up : from my cheeks two ears 
 O'er mine eyes prick up. With my pointed toes 
 Through the green grass step I ! Great is then the grief 
 Eated to me if a fighter, i fierce as death in battle, 
 Eindeth me concealed where I keep the house, — 
 With my bairns the building . ' . 
 
 When he comes, that deadly guest, 
 (Digging) to my doors, death is doomed to them. 
 
 So full stoutly must I, with my f oreclaws working, 
 Through the mountain steep make myself a street. 
 By a hidden way, through the hole of the hillside 
 
 1 The hunter whom he afterwards calls the Death-whelp. In this riddle I 
 have left out several lines. 
 
IX THE SETTLEMENT IN POETRY 143 
 
 Lead my precious ones, my children. Then I shall no more 
 Fear in anywise war with the Death-whelp. 
 
 If the greedy battle-scather in the straitened way 
 Seeks me on my gang-slot ; then he shall not miss 
 War-mote on the (mark)-path where the fighters meet. 
 When I rise at last, through the roofing of the hills, 
 And I furiously deal strokes • with my darts of war 
 On the loathly foes whom I long had fled 1 Rid. xvi. 
 
 The darts of war are the badger's teeth, and Cynewulf paints 
 him as a hero. It is in these short poems — in this sympa- 
 thetic treatment of the beasts of the wood, as afterwards of 
 the birds ; in this transference to them of human passions and 
 of the interest awakened by their suffering and pleasure — 
 that the English poetry of animals begins. Of course, the 
 temper of mind shown towards them here is connected "with the 
 beast-epics and beast-stories, and with the humanising of the 
 beasts in the folk-tales, and in such short poems as the Cock 
 and Fox of Chaucer and the fables of Henryson. But the 
 difference between the beast-poems of this class and those of 
 CynewTilf will be felt at once. In the one the beasts talk and 
 act like men and women, in the other the poet feels from above 
 with their life itself, — pitying or loving them. His sympathy 
 is even more than that of Shakspere in his outside description 
 of the horse or the hare. The note is rather the note of Burns 
 and Coleridge, Cowper and Wordsworth, and is strangely 
 modern in feeling. T 
 
 Such is the forest and its indwell'ers in English literature. 
 Along its outskirts lay the hamlets of those settlers who had 
 pushed their way into it from either side of the river, or who 
 had from the plains arrived at its edge. By slow degrees the 
 circling scoop they cut into it grew larger, till at last enough 
 land was cleared for all the kinsfolk and their slaves. If we 
 wish to picture to ourselves the aspect of such a settlement, 
 let us imagine a wandering singer coming through the untilled 
 woodland to one of the villages, to sing his songs, and to pass 
 on to another. He would blow his horn and shout as he walked 
 to show that his aims were honest and peaceful, otherwise he 
 might be slain as an outlaw and lie unavenged. And he would 
 have to do this at the distance it may be of some miles from 
 the village, for he might meet the slaves and the poor freemen 
 of the village lords in the distant glades or on the uplands in 
 the forest, tending the sheep, cows, oxen, and mares near the 
 folds, lying out during the gloomy winter nights from Martin- 
 mas to Easter. Close by he might pass in some dark recess 
 
144 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 the tree which, served the village for the gallows — the wolf's- 
 head tree — and startle the ravens at their feast. Nearer still 
 he would meet in the more open glades, under the shade of 
 the great beeches and oaks, the watchers of the swine, the 
 huge herds that devoured the acorn and the mast, and the lean 
 dogs that were with the watchmen ; woodmen also, gathering 
 wood for the fires, or cutting down the young trees to repair 
 with them house and plough and hedge. Yet closer still, on 
 the very skirts of the wood; where he began to see the light of 
 the open space beyond, he might chance upon the remains of 
 the sacred grove once dedicated to the dwelling and the wor- 
 ship of a god ; or if the settlement were still heathen, as it 
 might have been in Mercia under Penda, catch through the 
 trees a glimpse of the rude temple — a hall within a wooden 
 fence — and of a householder going up to do the worship of 
 his house ; or if the settlement were in some still earlier time, 
 hear the song of the woman who kept the temple. But if it 
 were a large hamlet, after Christianity had come, our wander- 
 ing poet might hear the chanting of the priest in the church ; 
 or if a small forest village, such as we have chosen here to de- 
 scribe, he would see no church, but the cross set up beside one 
 of the trees of the forest, chosen of old for its great size and 
 splendour, and still retaining, it might be, the carved figures of 
 birds or beasts, or even runes such as would tell him that in his 
 father's days the gods of heathendom were worshipped beneath 
 its shade. After the Danish occupation, such a wandering 
 singer would most frequently find these dedicated trees. We 
 have traces of such names in the charters. Kemble translates 
 the Wonac and the Wonstoc, as Woden's oak and Woden's post; 
 Teowes])om, Frige daeges treow, as Tiw's thorn, Frea's tree. 
 Such a tree would also be the limiting tree, the mark-tree, and 
 would tell him that all beyond it was village land. 
 
 Or he might, near at hand, set up also to define the edge of 
 the clearing, see a cluster of rude, hoary stones, remnants of 
 the old indwellers, past which at night the thrall or the poor 
 freeman passed in fear of the spirits that haunted them. 
 There too, and certainly if there were no river near, he might 
 drink and rest, where, under the eaves of the mark {gemearco- 
 dan aefsan — "the branches that dripped their rain on the 
 skirts of the clearing"),^ the native spring or well which 
 
 1 The mark was properly a sign, a line of division ; hence a boundary line 
 and also the belt of wild land round the cultivated area of a village : after- 
 wards the march, or the width of neutral land between two communities. — 
 Earle, Land Charters, p. 454. 
 
IX THE SETTLEMENT IN POETRY 145 
 
 served the township bubbled up, and which, lived in by a 
 deity, was even yet worshipped. As he drank of its waters, 
 he would see the whole clearing before him, the wide pasture 
 lands, common to all, the undivided possession of fine grass, 
 fed over by the horses, cows, goats, sheep, geese of the village ; 
 short, sweet sward, such as Cynewulf called the noble green 
 floor of the earth; and beyond that, the arable land of the 
 town, fenced into fields, and the fields divided into long fur- 
 long strips, subdivided into acres and half-acres — the allot- 
 ments of the cultivators. The wide balks between were 
 covered with grass or brake, and scattered over the whole 
 were the men at work, dyking and delving, ploughing and 
 clodding. Beyond that, and nearer to the town, was the home 
 pasture where the folds of the lambs and calves and foals were 
 set, and this ran up to the mound and the wattled fence on its 
 top — which enclosed the " town " itself, and from which the 
 "tun" derived its name, — the place which was tyned or 
 girded with a fence of rods. At the other side from where 
 he stood, the river, instead of the forest (in the village we 
 conceive), formed the boundary of the occupied land. In it 
 the " salmon roved and darted in the pools," and higher tip, in 
 the thick of the wood, the beaver built his dam across this 
 stream. Then, our wandering singer (whom I will now call 
 Cynewulf, because all the illustrations of village life which I 
 shall quote are from his riddles), listening, heard the rushing 
 of the water past the wattled weirs built out from its sides for 
 the fishing, and saw the bridge of wood that crossed it, and 
 perhaps mills by its side that ground the corn of the settle- 
 ment, and thinking of the millstone made it the subject of his 
 fifth riddle. 
 
 It might be, when he arrived, that the leading men had 
 determined to take into the plough-land a portion of the 
 common-pasture, and to extend the pasture in proportion by 
 clearing more of the bounding wood; and then Cynewulf 
 would see exactly what he described in his riddle of the 
 Plough, where he calls the plougher (whom we see as if he 
 stood before us) "the gray-haired enemy of the wood" 
 (Rid. xxii.) 
 
 Netherward my neb is set, deep inclined I fare ; 
 
 And along the ground I grub, going as he giiideth me 
 
 "Who the hoary foe of holt is, and the Head of me. 
 
 Forward bent he walks, he, the warden at my tail ; 
 
 Through the meadows pushes me, moves me on and presses me, 
 
 Sows upon my spoor. I myself in haste am then. 
 
146 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 Green upon one side is my ganging on ; 
 Swart upon the other surely is my path. 
 
 It is a vivid picture of an old English farmer labouring on 
 the skirts of the woodland, leaving behind him the furrow, 
 black where the earth is upturned, green where the share has 
 not yet cut the meadow. Then on the tilled land Cynewulf 
 saw the gardeners wielding the rake, tending the vegetables 
 which the little colony enjoyed, beans and onions and the rest, 
 or dragging out the hurtful weeds from the pasture. " It is a 
 thing" — riddles Cynewulf of the Eake — "that feedeth the 
 cattle. Well does it plunder and bring home its plunder " — 
 as if it were a forager. The riddle is dull, but it ends with 
 the poet's pleasure in the meadows — " The Eake leaves firm 
 the good plants " (Eid. xxxv.) 
 
 Still to stand fast in their stead in the field, 
 Brightly to Wicker, to Wow and to grow. 
 
 While he lingered, watching, he saw, perhaps on this very 
 day, a common incident which he made into a riddle. Among 
 the cattle on the pasture, the young bull was tethered. With 
 his close sympathy with animals the poet paints him as re- 
 joicing in his turbulent youth, and fed with the four fountains 
 of his mother. Suddenly he saw the beast dash loose and rush 
 from the pasture into the tilled land. Then Cynewulf let 
 his imagination loose also, and pictured the bull breaking up 
 the clods of earth left by the plough, as a monster might 
 break up the hills. 
 
 Of the kind that is weaponed a creature I saw, 
 Of the gladness of youth was he greedy ; for a gift unto him 
 The Defender of Being let four welling fountains 
 Glittering, spring. .... 
 
 Then spoke a man, who said unto me — 
 " If the heast should escape, it will break up the hills, 
 If itself be up-broken, 'twill bind up the living." ' Rid. xxxix. 
 
 Then all the clearing was full of birds. He had heard as 
 he came along the pleasant noise of the vast multitudes of the 
 wood-birds which were then in England, and the cries of 
 the water-fowl in the forest pools and streams; but now in 
 the open he would see them. He saw the eagle, the raven, 
 and the hawk, floating in the open air above the clearing. 
 They had come from their homes in the "Nesses of the 
 woods " — the steep cliffs in the forest, or the rocky banks of 
 
 >■ That is, its hide will form leather strips lor binding captives. 
 
IX THE SETTLEMENT IN POETRY 147 
 
 the stream — and Cynewulf would think of the last battle in 
 which he had fought, and of these fierce followers of the 
 slaughter. Among them, but not of them, he watched the 
 falcon, the most noble of all birds to an Englishman, soaring 
 to overtop the crane or the heron that built on the islands in 
 the river.' And then, on the meadows near the stream where 
 the fishers plied their craft from pool to pool, he saw the 
 chief of the family of the township riding with the gray bird 
 on his fist. And he remembered the riddle (Ixxviii.) he had 
 made, in which he had marked the aristocracy of the bird — 
 
 I an ^theling's arm-companion am ; 
 
 Am a wanderer with tlie warrior ; well-beloved of my lord, 
 
 Of a king the comrade. Oft a queenly woman — 
 
 One of golden locks — lays her hand on me, 
 
 Daughter of an JStheling, if she be right noble. 
 
 On my breast I bear that which blossomed in the grove. 
 
 On a stately battle-steed sometimes I may ride 
 
 "With the host, at head of it ! Hardened is my tongue. 
 
 Often to a singing seer, when he hath sung well, 
 
 Do I give a word-reward.^ Good is then my guise ! 
 
 I myself am sallow-hued. Say what I am called ! 
 
 The English lord, like the Norman knight, had in his 
 household those who tamed the falcon; and in the poem on 
 the Fates of Men there is a description of this which has some 
 poetical feeling. To call the falcon a Welsh, a stranger bird 
 (JoAco peregrinus), makes one imagine that the best kinds were 
 brought from the northern cliffs, where the Menologium says 
 that the " hawk in the sea-cliff lived wild," 
 
 One shall the wild bird make tame on his wrist, 
 The proud-hearted hawk, till this prey-thirsty swallow 
 Gentle become ; then girds he on varvels,^ 
 And in fetters so feeds the feather-proud fowl, 
 With little morsels this Litt-ispeeder weakens. 
 That at last the Welsh bird, in weeds and in deeds 
 To its food-giver is friendly become. 
 
 But if the noble used the falcon, all the freemen, even of 
 the poorer sort, made use of the ordinary hawk for hiinting 
 birds. The hawks were so numerous, long after the time of 
 which we are speaking, that in a late Anglo-Saxon dialogue 
 
 1 The falcon is never represented, like the eagle, as haunting the battlefield, 
 as a devom-er of the dead. In contrast to the eagle, who is the dark the 
 demoniac bird, it is brilliant and divine, the bird of heroes, nobles, and the 
 happy gods. 
 
 2 Reward, i.e. for song. I suppose the falcon is made a present to the smger. 
 " Silver rings round the foot. 
 
148 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 ■we hear that they were let loose in the spring, and young ones 
 freshly caught and tamed in the autumn. During the winter 
 these winged servants pulled down the numberless water-fowl 
 that nested in the river banks. One of the noblest of these, 
 no prey indeed for the hawk, but the food of the eagle, was 
 the swan ; and once on a time Cynewulf, who may now have 
 seen it flying over the forest to some inland pool or fen, de- 
 scribed it in one of the finest of his riddles — marking especially 
 that old tradition of its song, not before its death, but when it 
 left the village to fly over the great world. Nor did it sing 
 with its throat. Its feathers sounded melodiously as the wind 
 went through them, a form of the myth which might easily 
 arise among a people who knew of swan-maidens whose robe 
 of feathers had a magical existence of its own and could be 
 done off or on at pleasure. Cynewulf may have had, when he 
 wrote this riddle (viii.), some form of the heathen myth in his 
 head. 
 
 Voiceless is my robe when in villages I dwell, 
 "When I fare the fields, or drive the flood along. 
 Whiles, my glorious garments and this lofty Lift 
 Heave me high above the housing place of heroes ! 
 When the Craft of clouds carries me away 
 Par the folk above, then my fretted i feathers 
 Loudly-rustling sound, lulling hum along, 
 Sing a sunbright song, when stayed to earth no more, 
 Over flood and field ■ I'm a spirit faring far. 
 
 That has the modern quality. Phrases, like " the strength of 
 the clouds," " the spirit that fares over flood and field " {Jldds 
 and foldan flrende gaest), the melodious rustling of the fretted 
 feather-robe, the sense of a conscious life and personality in 
 the bird and its pleasure in its own beauty, are all more like 
 nineteenth century poetry in England than anything which 
 follows Cynewulf for a thousand years. But It is not only the 
 greater birds that are drawn with a vigorous pencil by the 
 early English poets. Cj'newulf, as he stood at the edge of the 
 clearing, heard the Cuckoo shouting, and he sketched the bird 
 in one of his riddles. But the sketch has no poetry in it ; it 
 is only when speaking of the Starling and the Nightingale 
 that he feels the gentle influences of the singmg fowl. He 
 saw the Starlings,^ as we suppose, upon this day, rising and 
 
 ^ Fraetvie is originally carved, fretted things; hence an ornament — any- 
 thing costly; here, then, " my rich garment of feathers." Craft is, of course, 
 power. 
 
 2 Starling ; at least so Prehn dissolves the Riddle. I am not sure he is right. 
 The stare is not particularly a little bird, nor is its note sweet. Does it call its 
 own name ? The bird seems to answer best to the Martin ; others say that 
 Gnats is the solution, but this seems out of the question. 
 
IX THE SETTLEMENT IN POETRY 149 
 
 falling in flocks over the hills and cliffs, above the stream 
 where the trees stood thick, and over the roofs of the village, 
 and the verse tells how happy he was in their joyousness, their 
 glossy, colour, and their song (Riddle Ivi-ii.) 
 
 Here the Lift beareth wights that are little, 
 
 O'er the hill-summits ; and deep black are they, 
 
 Swart, sallow- coated ! Sweet is their song ! 
 
 Flocking they fare on, shrilly they sing, 
 
 Koam the wood-uesses, and whiles, the burg-halls 
 
 Of the children of men. Let them call their own name ! 
 
 And now the evening falls, and as the traveller enters the 
 town a flood of song bursts from the woods, and the English 
 " earls " stop to listen, or sit silent in the doorways, while the 
 "ancient evening singer," as Cynewulf calls the nightingale, 
 pours forth his song. The bird himself speaks, proud of his 
 power over men, and the whole thought of the riddle is the 
 same as Wordsworth's — 
 
 Over his own sweet voice the Stock-dove broods. 
 
 Many varied voices voice I through my mouth. 
 Cunning are the notes I sing, and incessantly I change them. 
 Clear I cry and loud ; with the chant within my head ; 
 Holding to my tones, hiding not their sweetness. 
 I, the Evening-singer old, unto earls I bring 
 Bliss within the burgs, when I burst along 
 With a cadenced song. Silent in their dwellings 
 They are sitting, bending' forwards.^ Say what is my name. 
 
 Riddle ix. 
 
 Making this song our supposed Cynewulf passed through 
 the gate in the hedge and entered the village. The main road 
 was probably paved, and led straight to the hall of the kins- 
 folk set in the midst and surrounded by a piece of meadow- 
 
 1 1 quote here the whole of Ealdhelm's riddle De Luscinia in order to con- 
 found those who say that Cynewulf in his Riddles is a mere Imitator of the 
 Latin. In the Latin there is not a trace of Imagination, of creation. In the 
 English both are clear. In the one a scholar is at play, in the other a poet Is 
 making. 
 
 Vox mea diversis variatur pulcra figuris, 
 . Raucisonis nunquam modnlabor carmina rostris, 
 
 Spreta colore tamen, sed non sum spreta canendo. 
 
 Sic non cesso canens, fato terrente futuro : 
 
 Nam me bruma fugat, sed mox aestate redibo. 
 
 Almost every riddle, the subject of which Cynewulf took from Ealdhelm, 
 Symphosius, or Eusebins, is as little really imitated as that. Even the Riddle 
 De Oreatura, the most closely followed of them all, is continually altered 
 towards imaginative work. 
 
150 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 land. Many narrow paths, on either side of the main-way, 
 ■went to the separate houses of the freemen, each with its 
 farm buildings, each surrounded by its own hedge, and 
 within the hedge, its orchard, or vineyard ; perhaps fig-trees, 
 or mulberry from which the morat was made ; and many bee- 
 hives. These stood under the apple-trees, or leaning against 
 the out-houses of the farmer's home ; and in the garth Cyne- 
 wulf watched with pleasure, and afterwards described, the 
 draw-well and the water-bucket rising into the air, then the 
 black-haired Welsh woman carrying on her shoulders the yoke 
 from which the water-buckets hung, " two hardy bondsmen," 
 as he calls them in his fanciful fashion, "fast fettered 
 together," which she bears under the roof of the hall (liii.). 
 He saw the women spinning at the doors (xxvi.), or feeding 
 the dogs and hens (li.). He saw the cobbler lay by his tools 
 (xiii.), and the smith cease to labour at the sword (xxi. 6) and 
 the war-shirt, and the jeweller at the ornamenting of the horn 
 and the cup, the collar and the bracelet ; he saw the carpenter 
 leave the half-finished house, and the hedger lay aside his bill, 
 and he made verses on them all. The paths were full of the 
 men returning from work, the swineherd and the woodward, and 
 the hewers of wood from the forest, and the hunter with his 
 spoil ; the watchers of the cattle from the common pasture 
 next to the wood, the plougher and sower and gardeners from 
 the arable land, the tenders of the lambs and colts and calves 
 from the meadows nearest to the town, the miller and the eel- 
 fishers, the weir-wards and the fowlers from the river-side. 
 The town was full. He moved with the crowd, and soon saw 
 shining in the red light of evening the high, horned gables 
 of the hall of the kin, standing in the midst of the central 
 meadow, and near it the moot-mound, or the two or three 
 huge trees left to mark the place of assembly when the town 
 was planned. All the freemen we picture now, were there, 
 perhaps in their armour, their long hair floating on their 
 shoulders, hearing and judging causes, making their own laws, 
 taking counsel for war or peace, commanding and forbidding. 
 The chosen head of the kinsfolk, with his comrades and the 
 chief freemen, stood on the top of the mound as the wander- 
 ing singer came through the crowd. When the moot was over 
 and the evening star shone (the star the English called the 
 "star of the swains"), and the loud horn "called with its 
 voice the warriors to the wine-feast," the hall was opened, the 
 torches were lit, the smoke rose from the great fires in the 
 midst. The men sat down to eat and drink, and as Cynewulf 
 
IX THE SETTLEMENT IN POETRY 151 
 
 took his place, one of the women, had finished a great web at 
 the loom and brought it to the head of the kin into the hall, 
 and Cynewulf, seeing this, made a riddle about the loom, 
 which, to please his hearers, he likened to a noble warrior 
 making and enduring a hard fight. Now his fancy paints the 
 bed of the loom smitten by the restless and wrathful beam, 
 " the fighting warrior " ; now he sympathises with that part 
 on which the web is stretched, and which is pierced by spears 
 — perhaps, too, he thinks of the dartings of the shuttle, — 
 then we see at last the " leavings of the battle," the finished 
 web, borne into the hall. This is the riddle, but it is very 
 difficult to translate, and many are its renderings — 
 
 I was then within, where a thing I saw ; 
 
 'Twas a wight that warred, wounded by a beam, 
 
 By a wood that worked about : and of battle-wounds it took 
 
 Gashes great and deep ! "Very grievous were 
 
 To this wight the darts ; and the wood with war-gear 
 
 Fast was bound about. Of its feet 
 
 One was fastened down, but the other active toiled, 
 
 Leaping through the lift, then the land anear ! 
 
 And a tree was touching it, where it towered in light, 
 
 All behung with leaves. Then I saw the leavings 
 
 Of the Doing of the darts to the dwelling borne 
 
 Where men met a-drihking ; where my master is. 
 
 Riddle Ivii. 
 
 When Cynewulf had sung this riddle (if I may continue 
 presentation of him as a wandering singer), he would be 
 offered mead and ale, borne to him from the small table at the 
 end of the hall where the drink was placed. Inspired with 
 the draught, we may well fancy him making two other riddles 
 to make gay the feast. The first, on the mead, begins with 
 the bees bringing honey from the hills and dells, and then 
 draws a vivid picture of the drunkard. 
 
 Par and wide I'm found, and of worth to men ; 
 
 Carried from the copses, from the city's heights. 
 
 Prom the dells and from the downs. Feathers daily bore me 
 
 All along the air. Artfully they bore me on, 
 
 Under Heaven's high roof. Then the heroes (took me) 
 
 In a butt they bathed me ! Now I am a binder,^ 
 
 And a scourger then : soon I'm an o'erthrower ! 
 
 Oft an ancient churl on the earth I fling, 
 
 And he finds at once if he fight with me, 
 
 iln a riddle concerning the Ox hide, it is said, speaking of its use as a 
 leathern jug— a " black jack " — "I give the heroes drink from my bosom, I 
 bind the swart Welshman and many a worthier man," i.e. the liquor binds 
 them into slavery. 
 
152 
 
 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 That with back (and shoulders) he must seek the ground ! 
 
 If from that unrede he escape him not, 
 
 He's bestolen of his strength, in his speech is strong, 
 
 Of his mood not master, of his might bereft, 
 
 Powerless in feet and hands. Pind out what I'm called. 
 
 I who thus to earth bind the hireling down, 
 
 Dullard by my dinting, even in the day ! Riddle sxviil. 
 
 The solution of the next riddle (xxix,) is, according to 
 Prehn, a wine vat. The better answer has occurred to many. 
 It celebrates " Old John Barleycorn." The things said, even 
 to the very order of their saying, are so curiously like those 
 said in the old ballad, that I am induced to conjecture that 
 this impersonation is extremely old, and that Cynewulfs 
 riddle and the ballad are both forms of a much older original. 
 I translate the riddle, and a vigorous thing it is ; and I give 
 below ^ the version which Burns made of the ballad — 
 
 There's a portion of the earth, prankt most gloriously 
 With the very hardest and the very sharpest 
 
 1 John Barleycobn. 
 
 There were three kings into the east. 
 Three kings both great and high, 
 
 And they hac swore a solemn oath 
 John Barleycorn should die. 
 
 They took u plough and plough'd him 
 down, 
 
 Put clods upon his head. 
 And they hae swore a solemn oath 
 
 John Barleycorn was dead. 
 
 But the cheerf u' Spring came kindly on 
 
 And show'rs hegau to fall; 
 John Barleycorn got up again, 
 
 And sore surprised them all. 
 
 The sultry suna of Summer came, 
 And he grew thick and strong, 
 
 His head weel arm'd wi' pointed spears. 
 That no one should him wrong. 
 
 The eoher Autumn enter'd mild, 
 
 When he grew wan and pale; 
 His bending joints and drooping head 
 
 Show'd he began to fail. 
 
 Hie colour sicken'd more and more. 
 
 He faded into age; 
 And then his enemies began 
 
 To show their deadly rage. 
 
 They've ta'en a weapon, long and sharp. 
 
 And cut him by the knee; 
 Then tied him fast upon a cart, 
 
 Like a rogue for forgerie. 
 
 They Inid him down upon his back, 
 And cudgell'd him full sore; 
 
 They hung him up before the storm. 
 And turn'd him o'er and o'er. 
 
 They filled up a darksome pit 
 
 with water to the brim, 
 They heaved in John Barleycorn, 
 
 There let him sink or swim. 
 
 They laid hira out upon the floor. 
 
 To work him farther woe. 
 And still, as signs of life appear'd. 
 
 They toss'd him to and fro. 
 
 They wasted, o*er a scorching flame. 
 
 The marrow of his bones; 
 But a miller us'd him worst of all, 
 
 For he crush'd him between two stones. 
 
 And 
 
 his 
 
 very 
 
 heart's 
 
 they hae 
 blood. 
 
 And drank it round and round; 
 And still the more and more they- drank, 
 Their joy did more abound. 
 
 John Barleycorn was a hero bold. 
 
 Of noble enterprise, 
 For if you do but taste his blood, 
 
 'Twill make your courage rise. 
 
 •Twill make a man forget his woe; 
 
 'Twill heighten all hia joy; 
 'Twill make the widow's heart to sing, 
 
 Tho' the tear were in her eye. 
 
 Then let us toast John Barleycorn, 
 
 Each man a glass in hand ; 
 And may his great posterity 
 
 Ne'er fail in old Scotland! 
 
IX THE SETTLEMENT IN POETRY 153 
 
 And the very grimmest of the goods of men ! 
 
 Cut and rubbed about, rolled around and dried, 
 
 Bound and twisted, bleached and softened. 
 
 High-adorned, bedecked, dragged along from far 
 
 To the doors of men ! Dear delight is in it 
 
 For each living creature. It increases jollity i 
 
 In the aged who, living long, have of old enjoyed 
 
 Each the bliss he wished for— and abuse it not. 
 
 Then it, after dying, to declaim begins. 
 
 Things to tell in many ways ! Mickle food for thinking 
 
 To a wise man is, what this wight may be ! ^ 
 
 Kiddle xxix. 
 
 Many things took place as tlie feast wore on. We know its 
 general customs from Beowulf. But we hear other matters 
 from the Biddies. Sometimes a messenger came in, bringing 
 tidings. Sometimes the lord called for his ancient sword and 
 displayed its hilt and sheath and told of its great deeds. 
 Sometimes he drew -.ai:^ old-time cup out of his treasures. 
 "Often shall I," cries sutih a cup, "serve with joy in the joy- 
 ous hall, when, glittering with gold, I am borne into the house 
 where heroes are drinking." Sometimes bitter quarrels rose, 
 men mocked and stabbed as in the Icelandic tales. Sometimes 
 the boaster broke out into tales of his own, while the women 
 poured out the ale. When the eating was over, the warriors, 
 sitting blithely in the beer-hall, played at games or at throw- 
 ing the dice, and so excited did they become that they forgot 
 all the pain and sorrow of life. " They twain," say the Gnomic 
 Verses, " shall sit o'er the dice while their misery glideth away 
 
 1 Clenge^ Is here taken as a substantive. 
 
 2 1 have already mentioned the drinking habits of our early ancestors, and 
 mocked at the accusation of a special barbarism levelled against them on this 
 account — as if they were not in the eighth century the most cultivated people 
 in Europe. In all Anglo-Saxon poetry, in these Biddies written by a wandering 
 Bohemian, there is a tone of contempt for the drunkard. He is a captive, a 
 degraded freeman: and the delight and inspiration which Cynewulf places in 
 " ioUy good ale and old " only makes his reproof of excess seem the stronger. 
 It is the same in other Anglo-Saxon poetry. The most vigoEOUs description of 
 drunkenness is in the Judith. But it is the Pagan Holofernes and his thegns 
 who drink themselves into the brutality which the poet scorns. Ihere is 
 another passage in the Fates of Men which sketches the view the ordinary 
 Englishman (for I do not believe a monk wrote it) took of heavy drinking. 
 
 From another on the mead-bcDch shall the edge of sword 
 
 Take his life away ! "With the ale made wrathful, 
 
 With the wine besotten, far too hasty was his word J 
 
 Another at the beer, through the beer-out-pourer s hand, 
 
 Is a man mead-mad. Then he may not mete 
 
 Any measure to his mouth, by his mind's (discreetness). 
 
 But his life shall lose in a loathly fashion; 
 
 From delight disparted, suflFer dreadful ill 
 
 And the men in talking of the mead-enmaddened s drinking 
 
 With their mouth shall say— " Murderer of himself. 
 
 Fates of men, 11. 48-57. 
 
154 EARLY ENGLISH LiTEEATtlEE cflAl>. 
 
 from them. They forget their sad fate. They have their 
 pleasure on the board." Often enough, when the drinking 
 was hard, as it was likely to be after a battle, but not in the 
 peaceful assembly of everyday life, the evening ended tumult- 
 uously. There is a vigorous description of such a feast in a 
 poem {"Bt manna mdde," 11. 13-20), where a contest arises 
 among the warriors as to who stood firmest in the battle. 
 "Many a one," it says, "is full of talking and praises; prideful 
 war-smiths who in their wine-burgs sit at the feast and tell 
 sooth stories, to and fro barter their words, and set their mind 
 to know who of the warriors, on the spear-stead, holds out the 
 best. Then the wine whets the breast-thoughts of fighters, 
 and midst of the throng wild shouting arises, a varied tumult- 
 uous outcry." But chiefly it was playing and song which 
 lightened the evening. Cynewulf, who we suppose was in our 
 imagined hall this night, may have heard other instruments 
 than the harp, for he has riddles on the reedflute which the 
 lover plays for his mistress, and on the bagpipe and the psal- 
 tery. The bagpipe sits at the banquet, waiting till it can make 
 known its skill. " Pleasant speech is in its foot and a sweet 
 voice. Ornaments enrich its neck, and it is proud of its rings " ; 
 but the psaltery " sings through its side, and is haughty, and 
 of a bright countenance, rejoicing in the use of men." 
 
 At last the feast is over, the men go to their homes, the 
 " helm of night " covers the village, but the house is not yet 
 still. Cynewulf hears the men and maid-servants chattering, 
 and household work being done, before the fires, and sketches 
 the master of the home seeking his treasure-press at midnight, 
 either to lay by some new booty, or to look at the goods which 
 he had of old won in battle. Then there was silence ; but as 
 the poet lay down to rest a new riddle came into his head. He 
 had seen, before he had gone into the hall, the new moon with 
 the old moon in her arms in the "broad Burg" of Heaven, 
 above the clearing. And his imagination likened the moon to 
 a young warrior returning with his spoil between his horns, 
 who would build his hall in the very citadel of Heaven. But 
 another and a greater warrior — the sun — was at hand, who, 
 rising over the horizon's wall, would take the booty of the 
 moon and drive him homewards with great wrath. Then the 
 sun also would hasten westwards, and the night would come 
 again with mist like dust and falling dew. So he made the 
 30th riddle. 
 
 It is characteristic of Cynewulf, who probably derived his 
 first idea of this riddle from that of Eusebius on the same 
 
IX THE SETTLEMENT IN POETRY 155 
 
 subject, that he departs altogether from the way Eusebius 
 treats the subject. In Eusebius, sun and .moon are friendly. 
 Here they are enemies, — their strife is renewed each night and 
 day. Defeat and victory and pursuit are incessantly inter- 
 changed. The little poem is a true piece of imaginative and 
 mythical Nature-poetry, and the end is as terse and rapid as it 
 would be in the hands of Tennyson — 
 
 I have seen a wight wonderfully shapen. 
 
 Bearing up a booty, in between his horns, 
 
 A Litt-Vessel flashing light, and with loveliness i bedecked ; 
 
 Bearing home this booty, (brought) from his war-marching ! 
 
 He would in the burg build himself a bower, 
 
 Set it skilfully, if it so might be. — 
 
 Then there came a wondrous wight o'er the world-wall's roof — 
 
 Known to all he is of the earth's indwellers — 
 
 Snatched away his war-spoil, and his will against. 
 
 Homeward drove the wandering wretch ! Thence he westward went, 
 
 With a vengeance faring, hastened further on ! 
 Dust arose to Heaven, dew fell on the earth. 
 Onward went the night. And not one of men 
 Of the wandering of that wight ever wotted more. 
 
 Early in the morning he rose and went on his way. Now 
 as he passed through the town it chanced that in one of the 
 garths the household were gathered together and were troubled, 
 for the hive was empty ; the bees had swarmed, and they knew 
 not where they were. Then Cynewulf, who knew the old songs 
 and charms, leant over the hedge and said to them, " I will do 
 this thing for you, take some earth and, throwing it with your 
 right hand under your right foot, say — 
 
 " So I take it under foot — I would find (the swarm) ! — 
 
 (he sees the swarm) 
 Lo ! this earth be strong 'gainst all wights whatever, 
 And against all grudging, and against f orgetfulness, 
 And against the miokle tongue of the (mighty) man." = 
 
 And then the folk saw the place where the bees hung, and 
 Cynewulf cried to them, "And now throw gravel over the bees 
 as they swarm, and say this verse of the old time which our 
 kin sang of old " — 
 
 1 Skilfully, iisJ«m; therefore "beautifully." ^ , . ^v.- 
 
 2 All these Charms which I treat of now, and m the Note at the end ot tms 
 volume, will be found In Cockayne's Leechdoms, and in "Wiilker's edition of 
 the Anglo-Saxon poetry, under the title of Zauberspriiche. They are full of 
 Folk-lore interest, but they are also well worthy of a place m English litera^ 
 ture. They have a childlike ancientry which is delightful. They smell of the 
 earth and the woodland and the village life. Now and then the natural imagi- 
 nation works finely in them, without consciousness of itself, as in the charm 
 
156 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 Sit ye, Victory-women, sink ye to the earth ! 
 Never to the wood fly ye wildly more ! 
 May ye be as mindful of my good to me 
 As is every man of his meat and home.i 
 
 And the ■women smiled, and when they had sung the old lay, 
 the bees sv^armed. Then Cynewulf laughed with pleasure, 
 and, as the folk thanked him, said, " Take veneria ^ and hang 
 it to the hive, then the bees will not fly away, and if you wish 
 to keep them safely, lay a plant of madder on the hive, so will 
 no man be able to lure away the bees, nor can they be stolen 
 the while the plant is on the hive." 
 
 So he walked on, thinking of the old days and the many 
 strange charms which still prevailed in the land, though the 
 Christian priests were hard on them ; and now he had passed 
 through the gate and saw a farmer who was giving a herd of 
 cattle into the charge of one of his servants ; and he was recit- 
 ing a kind of spell to prevent them, from being stolen from the 
 forest pastures. Cynewulf stayed to listen, and this is what 
 he heard. Part of it, chiefly the part in verse, was very old, 
 but it had been Christianised. 
 
 "Neither stolen nor hidden be aught of what I own, any 
 more than Herod might (steal or hide) our Lord. I thought 
 on Saint Helena, and I thought on Christ hung on the rood ; so 
 I think to find these beeves again, not to have them wandering 
 far, and to know (their fold), not to have them mischieved, or 
 led astray, but tenderly eared for." ^ Then the farmer began 
 to sing a spell, putting in the name of God into the old 
 verse — 
 
 Garmund, of God the thegn, 
 Eind the cattle and fare out the cattle. 
 And have the cattle and hold the cattle. 
 And bring hack the beeves to their home. 
 
 against the shooting elves. No history of poetry can afford to neglect them 
 any more than it can neglect the Ballad of which things of this kind were one 
 of the ori^ns. 
 
 1 This IS plainly a heathen charm. When it says, " Let this Earth be strong 
 against all wights," it goes back to that most ancient time when Mother Earth 
 was perhaps the sole goddess of Angle-worship — the strong and faithful pro- 
 tector of men, and of all their agricultural work. The " Sigewif," the Victory- 
 women, Grimm mixed up in some way or other with the Valkyrie ; but the 
 phrase belongs, I think, to a world which did not know the Valkyrie, but did 
 put a living spirit into beasts, birds, and into those insects which were bound 
 up, like bees, with the daily life of men. " Sigewif " here seems to me to be a 
 term of flattering endearment, such as we find in our nursery song, " Lady 
 Bird, Lady Bird, fly away home." 
 
 2 These are fragments of old Charms. 
 
 3 This is not literal ; but it is, I think, the meaning. 
 
IX THE SETTLEMENT IN POETRY 157 
 
 The rest has no value. It is a spell against a reaver of cattle, 
 and ends — " Let him be all wary as wood is wary of the fire, 
 as the thigh of bramble, of or thistle, who may think him to mis- 
 lead or to drive away this cattle." 
 
 When he had heard this, Cynewulf went onwards, and now 
 he had gotten among the acres, where, near at hand, he saw a 
 little knot of men upon a piece of plough-land of a hungry look ; 
 and drawing near he heard them reciting the spell for bewitched 
 land, to which he had listened when he was a boy, and which 
 he was told had come with the Angle out of their fatherland 
 beyond the sea. But now it was mingled up with Christian 
 words and rites, and with Christian names, and it sounded very 
 old and curious ; and so old it was that the meaning of Erce, 
 one of the heathen names, was even then unknown. They had 
 just begun as he came up. The night before, ere the day- 
 dawning, they had taken four turfs in four parts of the acre,' 
 and dropped thrice into their place oil and honey and barm, 
 and milk from each kind of cattle that fed on the land, and a 
 piece of each kind of tree, except the hard trees (oak and 
 beech), and a piece of every well-known wort except buck-bean ; 
 and scattered holy water on them, and had said these words, 
 " Wax and grow, and fill this earth " ; and they had taken the 
 turfs then to church and let a mass priest sing four masses over 
 them and turned the green side to the altar ; and afterwards, 
 before the down-going of the sun, had taken the turfs to where 
 they were before. And they wrote on each end of four crosses, 
 " Matthew and Mark, Luke and John," and laid the cross of 
 Christ on the lower part of the pit and said, " Cross ! Matthew," 
 etc. etc. Then they took the turfs and set them down therein 
 and said nine times as before " Wax and increase, and fill this 
 earth," and the Paternoster as often, and then turned eastward, 
 and louted down nine times humbly and said — 
 
 To the East I stand, for the gifts-of-use I hid me ; 
 
 So Tpray the mighty One, so I pray the mickle Lord, 
 
 So I pray the Holy One, Ward of Heaven's Kingdom. 
 
 Earth I also pray and the Heaven above 
 
 And the sacred sooth Maria, 
 
 And the might of Heaven and its high-built Hall, 
 
 1 It is plain that we have here a heathen ceremony with Christian rites and 
 names added to it. The turfs were taken to the shrine ol the god, and the 
 green side turned to his symhol, and runes written on bast, and a song, of 
 which we have a portion in the verse, sung to Earth and Heaven. These are 
 the old sacrificial rites of the ploughing, and there are many similar observ- 
 ances, some of which will be found In the chapter on Charms in Grimm's TeiL- 
 tonic Mythology. 
 
158 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATUEE chap. 
 
 Tliat I may this magic spell, by the favour of the Lord, 
 
 Open from my teeth through a thought flrm-grasped ; 
 
 Waken up the swelling crops for our worldly need; 
 
 Fill the fielded earth by my fast belief. 
 
 Prank the turfed plain with fairness, as the Prophet quoth — 
 
 That he had on earth his honour whoso had praiseworthily, 
 
 By the grace of God, given out his alms.^ 
 
 And now they were met to fulfil the charm. And the owner 
 of the land stood and turned himself round three sun-courses, 
 and stretched himself out longways and said many litanies and 
 Christian hymns and prayers; but the last song- he sang was 
 to Mother Earth, for himself and for all who were under him. 
 Then he brought unknown seed which he had got from beggar- 
 men, and for which he had given them twice as much as he 
 had taken, and gathered all his plough-tackle together. And 
 he bored a hole in the plough-beam and put into it (stor-) 
 styrax, and fennel, and soap, and salt which had been hal- 
 lowed, but the seed he set upon the body of the plough. Then 
 Cynewulf listened to the ancient lay ■ — ■ 
 
 Eroe, Erce, Erce — Mother of Earth ! [or, Earth, our Mother] 
 
 May the AU-Wielder, Ever-Lord grant thee 
 
 Acres a^waxing, upwards a-growing, 
 
 Pregnant (with corn) and plenteous in strength ; 
 
 Hosts of (grain) sliaf ts '^ and of glittering plants I 
 
 Of broad barley the blossoms. 
 
 And of white wheat ears waxing, 
 
 Of the whole earth the harvest ! 
 
 Let be guarded the grain against all the ills 
 
 That are sown o'er the land by the sorcery-men, 
 
 Nor let cunning woman change it nor a crafty man.^ 
 
 1 This is the least heathen of all the poetic fragments in this charm ; but I 
 have Italicised, ia the translation, the verses which seem to have formed part 
 of the ancient Earth and Heaven worship. 
 
 2 A very long note on this will be found In Wiilker. 
 
 8 These last three lines have been shortened. Cunning woman might be 
 better translated "talkative woman," and crafty is of course "powerful." 
 This is nearly altogether a very old heathen invocation, used, I daresay, from 
 century to century, and from far prehistoric times, by all the Teutonic farmers. 
 Who Erce is remains obscure. But the Mother of Earth seems to be here 
 meant, and she is a person who greatly kindles our curiosity. To touch her 
 is lilce touching empty space, so far away is she. At any rate some godhead 
 or other seems here set forth under her proper name. In the Northern Cosmog- 
 ony, Night is the mother of Earth. But Erce cannot be Night. She is (if 
 Erce be a proper name) bound up in this song with agriculture. Grimm sug- 
 gests Eorce, connected with the Old High German erchan = " simplex." He 
 also makes a bold guess that she may be the same as a divine dame in Low 
 Saxon districts called Herke or Harke, who dispenses earthly goods in abun- 
 dance, and acts in the same way as Berhta and Holda — an earth-goddess then, 
 the Lady of the plougher and sower and reaper. In the Mark she is called 
 frau Harke. Montanus draws attention to the appearance of this Charm in a 
 
IX, THE SETTLEMENT IN POETRY 159 
 
 And when lie had thus sung he pushed on the plough and 
 cut the first furrow ; and then he stayed himself and, looking 
 on the upturned earth, he sang again a very ancient verse — 
 
 Hale be thou, Earth, Mother of men ! 
 In the lap of the god toe thou ar-growing ! 
 Be filled with fodder for fare-need of men ! 
 
 Then the farmer took of each kind of meal and let knead a 
 broad loaf with milk, and laid it under the first furrow and 
 sang again — 
 
 Acre, full fed, torlng forth fodder for men ! 
 
 Blossoming torightly, blessed become ! 
 
 And the God who wrought the ground grant us gift of growing, 
 
 That the corn, all the corn, may come into our need. 
 
 And when he had so sung, the work was done, and he drove 
 the plough on through his acre. But Cynewulf walked on, 
 nor was he fated to leave the place till he had heard some- 
 thing more heathen still. 'For now a little way in the wood 
 he came to a hill whence the trees had been cleared, and he 
 saw a man crouching doubled up upon the ground in sudden 
 pain of a stitch caused by witchcraft ; and another, who stood 
 by, held a shining linden shield over him as if to guard him 
 from weapons shot at him, and was anointing him with a salve 
 made of fever-few and the red-nettle, which had grown through 
 
 convent at Corvei, in which this line begins " Eostar, Eostar, eordhan modor." 
 Nothing seems to follow from this clerical error. The name remains mysteri- 
 ous, and I am glad of it. As to the rest of the song, it breathes the pleasure 
 and worship of ancient tillers of the soil in the labours of the earth and in the 
 goods the Mother gave. It has grown, it seems, out of the breast of Earth 
 herself. Nor are the next four lines less remarkable and less heathen. Earth 
 is here the mother of men. The surface of Earth is the lap of the goddess ; in 
 her womb let all growth be plentiful. Food is in her for the needs of men. 
 "Hale be thou. Earth ! " I daresay this hymn was sung, ten thousand years 
 ago, by the early Aryans on the Baltic coasts. The next four lines— Acre 
 full-fed — are partly heathen, partly Christian. 
 
 On the whole, we are placed in these songs in that early time, after settled 
 agriculture had begun, when the " Cornfield," as Professor Rhys says, " is the 
 chosen battlefield where the powers favourable to man make war on those 
 other powers that would blast the fruits of his labour." And if we wish to 
 bind up this ancient English Earth Religion with Northern names of gods, we 
 may think of Frigg, Woden's wife, who Is the Earth goddess, and of Thor her 
 son, the god of husbandry, " the farmer's friend," whose bolt cleaves the storm- 
 clouds that threaten the grain and disperses the blighting mLsts, who marries 
 Sif , the yellow-haired goddess of the cornfield. Beyond this there is a literary 
 quality in this old song, and in the Stitch-Charm that follows it, which, from 
 its delightful naturalness, from its close clinging to the subject, and from its 
 contrast to the conventional Christian poetry, pleases the ear and the imagi- 
 nation. 
 
160 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 a fence/ and way broad (plantago), which it was his habit, for 
 he was a witch-doctor, to keep by him, having first boiled it in 
 butter, that he might heal those whom the fierce elves shot 
 with their spears. So Cynewul-f drew near to listen, hiding in 
 the fringe ^f the wood, and he heard the man singing this 
 pagan song, which told of fierce witch-wives riding over the 
 hill and flinging spears.^ 
 
 Loud were they, lo, loud, as over the land they rode ; 
 
 Fierce of heart were they, as over the hill they rode. 
 
 Shield thee now thyself ; from this spite thou mayst escape thee ! 
 
 Out little spear if herein thou he ! ^ 
 Underneath the linden stood he, underneath the shining shield, 
 While the mighty women mustered up their strength ; 
 And the spears they sent screaming through the air ! 
 Back again to them will I send another 
 Arrow forth a-flying from the front against them ; 
 
 Out little spear if herein thou be ! 
 Sat the smith thereat, smote a little seax out ; 
 
 Out little spear if herein thou be ! 
 Six the smiths that sat there — ■ making slaughter-spears : 
 
 Out little spear, in be not, spear ! 
 If herein there hide flake of iron hard, 
 Of a witch the work, it shall melt away. 
 Wert thou shot into the skin, or shot into the flesh, 
 Wert thou shot into the blood, (or shot into the bone), 
 Wert thou shot into the limb — never more thy life be teased ! 
 If it were the shot of Esa, or it were of elves the shot, 
 Or it were of hags the shot ; help I bring to thee. 
 This to boot for Esa-shot, this to boot for elfin shot. 
 This to boot for shot of hags ! Help I bring to thee. 
 
 1 Through a sieve. The Romans had this custom. They laid a sieve in the 
 road, and used the stalks of grass that grew through it for medical purposes. 
 — Grimm, Chapter on Herbs. 
 
 2 El(-shooting, etc., is a common superstition in England. Indeed, it ranges 
 from Shetland to Cornwall. Here is a Scandinavian instance: "That same 
 autumn Hermund gathered a party and went on his way to Borg, intending to 
 burn down the house with Egil in it. Now as they came out under Valfell, 
 they heard the chime ol a bowstring up in the fell, and at the moment Hermund 
 felt ill, and a .sharp pain under his arms, and the sickness gained on him." 
 
 8 "In dock^out nettle. — Nettle in, dock out."— r)-oi7«.'! and Cressida. 
 
 In Sussex a poor woman is cured of a scald on a Sunday evening by an old 
 wife who bows her head over the wound, crosses two of her fingers over It and 
 breathes upon it, repeating these words — 
 
 There came two angels from the north. 
 
 One was Fire and one was Frost, 
 
 Out Fire, in Frost, 
 
 In the name of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. 
 
 Folk-Lore: Northern Counhes (Henderson), p. 171. 
 
IX THE SETTLEMENT IN POETRY 161 
 
 Flee, witch, to the wild hilltop .... 
 But thou — be thou hale, and help thee the Lord ! i 
 
 Then the strange chant ended, the -witch-doctor bid the man 
 take the seax and dip it into water ; but Cynewulf had heard 
 enough, and we bid him farewell as he entered the forest 
 paths. 
 
 1 1 have taken Sweet's reading. 
 
CHAPTEE X 
 
 THE SEA 
 
 The English, at least in the north of England, were close 
 observers not only of the natural aspect of the Earth, but also 
 of the Sky and the Sea ; and the proof of this lies in the num- 
 ber of words they invented to express the different appear- 
 ances of these two great creatures. The changes of the Dawn 
 from the first gray tinge of the heaven to the upward leap of 
 the Sun ; the changes of the Evening from the light left by 
 the setting sun to the last glimmer of it before dead night, 
 have each their own specialised words. The fiercer phases 
 of natural phenomena were also watched and described with 
 minuteness by the poets. Cynewulf dedicates eighty lines 
 to the story, hour by hour, of the birth, the growth, and 
 dying of the Tempest. But no natural object engaged them 
 so much as the Sea, and for no object have they so many 
 names. Their treatment of it in verse deserves a chapter in 
 a history of English poetry. Such a chapter will bring to- 
 gether a number of descriptive passages, so varied in form and 
 in imaginative sentiment that we shall be able to estimate the 
 range of the natural description of the Angles, its limits and 
 its excellence. No critical analysis of mine could make this 
 estimate or give this insight into the way in which the Eng- 
 lish saw nature, half as well as the series of examples which I 
 shall translate, and which describe the doings of the great 
 Being who of all the living things- of the world awakened in 
 them the most profound emotion. 
 
 A shoal of simple terms express in Beowulf the earliest sea- 
 thoughts of the English. But, still uncontent, the singers 
 compounded these simple terms with other words, in order 
 more fully to image forth the manifold impressions they had 
 received of the doing of the great waters. Double, sometimes 
 treble words were used to picture, if possible, the waves in 
 storm and the ships that rushed through them. Many more 
 than those in Beowulf were invented by Cynewulf, whose 
 162 
 
THE SEA 163 
 
 imagination wrought like the surges he described; but at 
 present our task is confined to the sea and the seamen as they 
 appear in Beowulf. 
 
 The simplest term is Sae, our sea, and it has the general 
 meaning which we attach to the word. To this they added 
 Waeter, the great wet world beyond the land, which, when the 
 adjectives deep and wide were prefixed to it, meant, it seems, 
 the ocean. Then came Flod, our flood. This was the out- 
 poured sea which flowed into and filled the hollows of the 
 earth. The same word expressed anything that flowed — the 
 tide, a river, the rush of an inundation. Correlative with this 
 was Stream, which, when used of the Sea, probably meant the 
 ocean river that went round the world, then the general flow- 
 ing of the deep, and especially the apparent movement of the 
 whole body of the sea in waves to the coast. Again, the term 
 Lagu belonged to the Sea, as to all waters. The Sea was the 
 great Pool, and considered as lying in a hollow ; this word for 
 it seems to express in poetry the sea at peace. There are cer- 
 tainly no words compounded with it in Anglo-Saxon poetry 
 which suggest water in great disturbance.^ Mere, another 
 ancient term for the Sea, is of frequent occurrence, and means 
 the desert waste of waters. Another word is Holm. As men 
 stood on the beach or on the ship's prow they saw the wide 
 waters raised up, as it were, around them, or lifted into a 
 mound on the horizon, and this common aspect of the Sea they 
 called Holm. It was the up-mounding of the Ocean ; and Hun- 
 ferth exactly expresses this when he says that the Holm bore 
 Brecaup on the strand. Hence it came to mean the high waves, 
 each wave like a rounded height, and then the whole high going 
 of the waves, and further the deep ocean itself, which was con- 
 ceived as heaved upwards, like the coil of a great serpent, 
 from the abyss below. This abysmal bottom of the deep was 
 Cfrund, a word which, in connection with certain other words, 
 is mixed up with a sense of dread, with that which was un- 
 fathomably unknown — the great cavernous bed of ocean, the 
 hiding-place of primaeval and deadly creatures, born of the 
 slime, the grounded-dust that covered the foundation rock of 
 the world. One giant line in Lycidas gives me this ancient 
 impression — 
 
 Visitest tlie Tjottom of the monstrous world. 
 
 ^Lagu-flod and lagu-stream are, however, two components, and these may 
 be instances of that use ot lagu for flowing water on which Earle dwells in his 
 notes to the Anglo-Saxon charters, though I do not understand how lagu can 
 ever come to mean a flowing thing. Compounded with flod and stream, it 
 means, I think, the flowing sea in its peace. 
 
164 EARLY ENGLISH LITEEATUEE chap. 
 
 Another name for the Sea, heaSu, may also embody the con- 
 ception of the high mass of water, the deep ocean, and then 
 pass on to express the high tossing of the waves. 
 
 Sund used for the Sea is representative of another thought. 
 We say a Sound of the Sea, but the earlier English who lived 
 on the inlets and among the islands knew only the short 
 stretches of sea which a man could swim across. Afterwards, 
 when they knew the greater water, they transferred the name 
 of the part to the whole. Perhaps they thought of it as the 
 great swimming-place for their ships. Brim is another word, 
 and if I may judge from Brimi, the serf-hall of the giants in 
 Volospa, it is the Sea when it breaks in raging surf upon the 
 margin of the shore, or the Sea breaking in foam on the deep. 
 The Sanskrit word hhram ("to agitate ") is compared with it; 
 and in Dorsetshire I have found that the surf-borne sea sand 
 is called Brim-sand. Generally then it means, I think, the 
 rough sea furiously tumbling into foam, either far out on 
 ocean or on the beach. 
 
 Garsecg, a frequent term in Beowulf and afterwards, is a 
 very ancient name of the Ocean ; the great encompassing sea 
 that embraces the world. "Our forefathers," said .(Elf red, 
 translating and adding to Orosius, "divided into three parts 
 all the globe of this mid-earth which the Ocean that we call 
 Garsecg surrounds." Sweet says that it means the Eager' 
 and this — the stormy-tempered giant of the Ocean — is close 
 to the Northern thought. There are two words used for the 
 sea in Beowulf which seem to belong to traditionary concep- 
 tions of the Ocean as the dwelling-place of a living Being. 
 These are Eagor, compounded with Stream, and Geofon. 
 MgiT, who in Norse mythology has by Ean, the net-wieldiug 
 goddess who weaves destruction for sailors, nine daughters 
 who are the waves, and whose song is the roaring of the surf, 
 is, according to Grimm, an older god of the giant-kin, not one 
 of the ^sir ; and his name signiiies the Terrible One. The word 
 means, in Scandinavian poetry, the Sea itself ; and the Anglo- 
 Saxon term Eagor may be related to ege (awe), and egesa 
 (horror). Eagor-stream might then possibly be translated the 
 stream of Eagor, the awful terror-striking stormy sea in which 
 the terrible giant dwelt, and through which he acted.^ 
 
 I Garsecg, by transposition of r and s is the same as gasric, and gas = gais. 
 OH Norse, gezsa, to chafe, to rage {Ung. Stud. vol. ii. 315). This is indeed 
 far better than deriving it from gar, a spear, and secg, a man, and connecting 
 it with Poseidon and his trident ! 
 
 '^ The English term £agre still survives in provincial dialect for the tide- 
 
THE SEA 165 
 
 Fifel is perhaps, Grimm thinks, another and obsolete name 
 of Eagor. But Fifel seems to mean nothing more than a giant 
 or monster, and it would be to push personification too far to 
 make Fifel a personage because an Anglo-Saxon called the sea 
 fifel-stream or fifel-waeg. There is more to be said of Oeofon. 
 The word does seem to gather personality round it in Anglo- 
 Saxon poetry. It is used independently for the sea in Beowulf: 
 "Geofon boiled with waves" (1. 515); as afterwards in the 
 Exodus (1. 447) : "Geofon threatened death." It may have 
 some relation to the fierce sea of winter, and Geofon be the 
 same as Gefion, the ocean-goddess whom we meet in the LoTcor 
 Senna, who, like Odinn, knows the fates of all men. At any 
 rate we have in these names the conception of the Sea as an 
 awe-producing, wrathful living thing. "Then Terror rose 
 from the deep " is a frequent phrase used in describing storms 
 at sea, as if a great giant pushed his head out of the billows. 
 There is a half line in ^eowwZ/ which seems to speak of a fierce 
 being who makes an onset on those who tempt the depth of the 
 sea. When the hero is borne into the cave by Grendel's mother, 
 it is said that the " sudden treacherous grip of the Flood can 
 no longer reach him." When Caedmon describes the deluge 
 he says : "The sea gripped fiercely on the fated folk," as if it 
 were a giant that choked them. 
 
 These are the main names of the sea in Beowulf, and each of 
 them describes some thought concerning it, or some one of 
 its aspects." They are more than words, they are pictures. 
 A number of them are indifferently used together in one pas- 
 .sage in Beowulf, with no distinction of meaning. They have 
 become, it seems, mere poetic interchanges. It is too much 
 the fate of words originally individual and noble. But the 
 passage is sufficiently interesting to translate — 
 
 Art thou that Beowulf who hattled with Breoa 
 Swimming a match on the far spreading sea 
 When in pride of your hearts ye proved the vast fords 
 And on the deep water in a vaunting, like fools, 
 Rislied each your lives ? . . . . 
 
 There ye swam on the Sund, 
 Arm after arm over Eagor'-stream laid ; 
 
 wave or bore on rivers. Dryden uses it in his Threnod. August. " But like an 
 Eagre rode in triumph o'er the tide; " and Camden uses it when he speaks ol 
 the bore on the Severn. Yet we must be cautious in dwelling on any relation 
 of these words to the Anglo-Saxon Eagor. 
 
 2 I need scarcely mention the metaphorical names for the sea used in Beowulf. 
 ' It is the Hron^-ad, the swan-rad, the segl-rad, the ganotes-bae'S — tiie " whale- 
 road," the " swan-road," the " sail-road," the " gannet's-bath." 
 
100 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 Measured the mere-streets, moved your hands to and fro, 
 Glode o'er the Qarsecg ! Tossed Q-eofon in waves, 
 A Welter of Winter. In Water^s vast power 
 Seven nights ye strove. In swimming he heat thee, 
 More was his might ! Him then at mom-tide. 
 Heaved up the Holm on the Heathoremes' land. 
 
 Beowulf, 1. 506. 
 
 Compounded with, these single terms are other words such 
 asfaro^, which itself sometimes means the sea, but is in composi- 
 tion the moving of the sea and is used now and then for the racing 
 of the waves towards the coast. The chief of these secondary 
 words is wylm, the upwelling, the tossing of the billows. Its 
 most remarkable use in Beowulf is in conjunction with ice to 
 express the tumbling of broken ice and sea together in a roar- 
 ing welter ; and in symbolism (so much had the tormented sea 
 entered into Anglo-Saxon thought) it is compounded with care 
 and sorrow. Lastly, the word y'd (wave) is combined with 
 others to image the various passions and actions of the sea in 
 storm. We have yd-gehlond, the confused blending of the 
 waves ; y'3-gewealc, their tossing to and fro ; atol y'da geswing, 
 their dreadful swinging ; and y&-gewin, their tumultuous bat- 
 tling and onset like armies. Nor are "more detailed descriptions 
 of searscenery wanting in Beowulf. There is the hithe at the 
 beginning of the poem and the ship waiting for the body of 
 Scyld ; the two voyages of Beowulf to Heorot and back again ; 
 the sea seen from the great cape where he is buried — the misty 
 sea and the ships sailing in it. These I have already given. 
 A few more remain which are worth quoting. The first de- 
 scribes in Beowulf's own words an adventure on the Northern 
 Sea, night and fierce weather, and the peace of the morning on 
 the waves — 
 
 When we swam on the Sound our sword was laid bare, 
 Hard-edged in our hands ; and against the Hron-fishes i 
 We meant to defend us ; nor might Breca from me 
 Far o'er the flood-waves at all float away, 
 Smarter on ocean ; nor would I from him — . 
 There we two together, were (tossed) on the sea, 
 Five nights in all, till the flood apart drove us : 
 Swoln were the surges, of storms 'twas the coldest, 
 Dark grew the night, and northern the wind. 
 Rattling and roaring,^ rough were the billows. 
 Then was the mood of the mere-flshes roused. 
 
 Beowulf, 1. 539. 
 
 1 Whales? 
 
 ^ Hea&ogrim and hwearf. If we put and on to hwearf-we must translate 
 " fierce Wew in our faces," and so I have translated in a previous page. 
 
THE SEA 167 
 
 There is also a light sketch of another kind of coast, not of 
 cliffs, but of a wide flat of sandy shore, when Beowulf arrives 
 at home. He " went with his following " — 
 
 All along the sand, treading the searplain, 
 
 Seabanks stretching far ! Shone the candle of the world, 
 
 Sloped the sun was from the south .1 
 
 Beowulf, 1. 1964. 
 
 One more description tells of the longing of an exiled seaman 
 for his home, while he waited for summer, held from his sail- 
 ing by the fierce winds of winter and the ice-fettered sea. 
 Hengest was mindful of his land, though he could not drive 
 o'er the sea his ring-equipped bark — 
 
 Surged the sea in storms, 
 "Wrestled 'gainst the wind. Winter locked the waves 
 In an icy bondage, till another year 
 
 Came unto the garths 
 
 "Weather glorious-bright. Then was winter gone. 
 Lovely was the lap of Earth. 
 
 Beowulf, 1. 1131. 
 
 Such is the strong and stormy sea {mere-strengo, " strength 
 of the sea," or "strength of the warriors on the sea," Beowulf, 
 1. 533) which is heard breaking in the background all through 
 the action of the poem of Beowulf; and those who first sung 
 its verse were masters of the Ocean and its lovers. The sea 
 was their patrimony, as it was the whale's. The young men 
 went out on adventure from every settlement on the coast to 
 fight and to plunder, and when they amused themselves with 
 trading it was in reality the exchange of plunder for plunder. 
 "When they were not fighting they were hunting the sword- 
 fish, the walrus, the seal, and the whale in the icy seas, or 
 struggling for wagers to excel one another in the battle with 
 the elements. The Ocean was itself a mighty monster with 
 whom they fought for life ; and in it, as we see, were ores and 
 tusked terrors and witches of the waves, and wolves of the 
 deep, hideous half-human brutes like Grendel and his dam, 
 shapeless fish-like things which attacked man, wrathful at 
 their home being invaded ; and memories of these superstitious 
 creatures lasted on into the Christian poetry. But the sea- 
 rovers of Beowulf's time cared for none of these things. They 
 were true sea-dogs, the forerunners of the men who sailed in 
 wasp-like ships- from the southern harbours of England to the 
 Spanish main. They were probably a separate class, not to 
 
 1 That is, it was near mid-day. 
 
168 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 be mingled up with the farmers, the thegns and the lord, who 
 dwelt in burgs like Heorot or in the cultivated lands ; but most 
 of the young men of spirit seemed to have joined for a time at 
 least the ships of the sea-harriers. Beowulf talks of his class 
 as distinct from those to whom he spoke in Heorot : " We sail- 
 ers of the sea," he says. Ongentheow retires to his fort " that 
 he might be able there to withstand the seamen, and shield his 
 hoard from the seafarers." It is a phrase which a Spanish 
 Don might have used when he heard that the ships -of that 
 devil, Drake, were seen in the offing. They are called "trav- 
 ellers of the wave" and "dwellers of the deep." There is no 
 trace in Beowulf of any dread of the sea, even in its worst 
 moods, nor do the men complain of the labours of the ocean, or 
 its icy weathers. They are rather comrades of its storms, and 
 it is their glory to sing their daring while they overcome its 
 anger. What Sidonius said of the pirate Saxons would have 
 been true of Beowulf and his sea-crafty men : " They know 
 the dangers of the ocean as men who are every day in touch 
 with them. In the midst of tempests, and skirting the sea- 
 beaten rocks, they risk their attack with joy, hoping to make 
 profit out of the very storm." And this is all the plainer from 
 the number of names given to the ship — names which speak 
 their pride and their affection. It is the ^theling's vessel, 
 the Moater, the Wave-swimmer, the Eing-stemmed, the Keel, 
 the Well-bound wood, the Sea-wood, the Sea^ganger, the Sea^ 
 broad ship, the Wide-bosomed, the Prow-curved, the Wood of 
 the curved neck, the Foam-throated floater that flew like a 
 bird. 
 
 This fearlessness, this friendship with the waves, this love 
 of their vessel as of a mistress, passed away with their settle- 
 ment in our England. Such, at least, seems the evidence of 
 Anglo-Saxon poetry. The first arrivals on the coasts of 
 Southern and Northern Britain were the roving pirates, the 
 young searheroes and their bands. These went inland and be- 
 came great land-warriors. Those who came after them and 
 those who settled on the coasts, were probably the agricultural 
 freemen and warriors of Engle, or Saxons from the inland who 
 were unaccustomed to the sea. The South Saxons did not 
 even know how to fish when Wilfrid came among them; and 
 we know the difficulty that .Alfred had in working up a fleet 
 (he was probably his own shipbuilder), and how ignorant of 
 naval war Englishmen had become in his days. The temper 
 in which the ordinary Northumbrian seaman looked upon the 
 sea was not at all the sea-dog temper, but that of the common 
 
THE SEA 169 
 
 merchant sailor -who, while he sailed the waves, dreaded their 
 dangers and complained of their hardships. There is not a 
 trace of that audacious sense of lordship over the sea which 
 the sea-rover possessed. The passage in the Gnomic Verses, 
 though it seems to speak of a Friesland home, may well have 
 arisen concerning one of the Frisian band which seems to have 
 settled to the north of the Tweed, and at least the collector of 
 these scattered -verselets adapted it to the case of those for 
 whom he edited the lines. It is plain that the true home of 
 this man and his type is on shore and not on sea — 
 
 Dear the welcomed one 
 To the ^Frisian wife, when the Floater 's drawn on shore, 
 When his keel comes hack, and her churl returns to home, 
 Her's, her own food-giver. And she prays him in, 
 Washes then his weedy coat, and new weeds puts on him, 
 lythe 1 it is on land to him, whom his love constrains. 
 
 Fearlessness and peace are found on the land, but on the 
 ocean terror and disquiet. The beginning of the Seafarer is full 
 of this temper. The old man must tell, he says, of his voyages, 
 how often he outlived hours of pain, bitter care in his breast, 
 sailing in his ship through seas of sorrow, amid the frightful 
 whirling of the waves, keeping the anxious night-watch on the 
 prow, his feet pinched with the frost, his beard hung with icicles, 
 hunger in the heart of him, searwearied, far from his beloved, 
 hearing only the scream of the sea-mew and the high flood 
 thunder on the cliffs. No man on land can think what woes 
 he suffers who fares far forth upon the wanderings of the sea. 
 Yet even in that poem, which I keep for separate treatment, 
 the attraction also of the sea appears, the longing of the 
 young sailor to go on voyage, the pull of the ocean life upon the 
 heart. But for all that, nothing of the Viking spirit is found 
 in it ; mourning and fear, not joy and daring, fill its lines. 
 Again in the Andreas the shipmaster tells Andrew that he who 
 tries a sea-journey has a hard life, and the comrades of St. 
 Andrew are terrified when the storm begins. It is only the 
 overmastering duty of the thegn to his lord which prevents 
 them from asking to be set on shore. The " Water Terror " 
 which rises from the waves is made much more of in these 
 later poems than it is in Beowulf. In the great riddle on the 
 Hurricane there is a picture of a ship with its crew aghast for 
 fear, almost unable to work in the horror of the tempest. 
 The sailor in the Gnomic Verses, "who rows against the wind 
 is weary." When the timid sailor is threatened of the captain, 
 
 1 Pleasant, soft. 
 
170 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 "he loses his courage, and his oar drieth on board." Every- 
 where it is the merchant sailor and not the sea-warrior who 
 speaks. Nevertheless, in Cynewulf's poem of Elene, one of 
 the last he wrote, another note is struck, a reversion to the 
 old heroic strain concerning the sea ; and the voyage of Helena 
 is described as if it were a Viking expedition. I cannot do' 
 better than illustrate these remarks by passages from the 
 Andreas and the Elene, and all the more because, in these pas- 
 sages, I think that the scenery of the Northumbrian coast is 
 represented. 
 
 God appears in a vision to Andrew, and bids him set sail 
 for Mermedonia to deliver Matthew from prison, and Andrew 
 answers that God's angel would do the business better ; for he 
 knows the going of the seas and ocean's salt streams, and the 
 swan-road, and the war of the waves on the shore, and the 
 water-terror. 
 
 But to me the war-ship's streets i 
 O'er the water cold are not known at all. And. 1. 200. 
 
 "Alas, Andrew," answers God, "that ever thou shouldest be 
 slow to this journey !" 
 
 Yet thou Shalt assuredly, at the early dawn, 
 
 Even at to-morrow, at the ocean's ending, 
 
 Climb upon thy keel, and o'er water cold 
 
 Break along the bathway. And. 1. 220. 
 
 Andrew, now steadfast, sets forth with the rising of the day, 
 and the description of his path to the sea has often recalled 
 to me the approach to the seashore, over the dunes of sand 
 near Bamborough — 
 
 Then he went him at the dawning, at the earliest day, 
 O'er the sandy hillocks, to the sea's inflowing, 
 Daring in his thinking ; and his thegns, beside him, 
 Trampled o'er the shingle. Thundered loud the ocean, 
 Beat the surges of the sea. And. 1. 2-35. 
 
 When they come to the shore they see a boat drawn up, 
 amid the breaking of the surf, and the shipmaster seated on 
 the bulwark, and two sailors with him. They are Christ and 
 two angels, and the dialogue, which I shall speak of after- 
 wards, ends in the embarkation of Andrew and his comrades. 
 The waves are high and whirling and the storm begins to rise. 
 
 1 Herestrata would mean, on land, the military roads; hence the "main 
 streets." Andrew means that he did not know what every seaman knew, the 
 well-known routes across the sea. 
 
THE .SEA 171 
 
 111 short, vigorous lines the poet describes it, and the terror of 
 
 Andrew's companions — 
 
 Then was sorely troubled, 
 Sorely wrought the whale-mere. Wallowed there the Horn-fish, 
 Glode the great deep through ; and the gray-backed gull 
 Slaughter-greedy wheeled. Dark the storm-sun grew, 
 Waxed the winds up, grinded waves ; 
 Stirred the surges, groaned the cordage, 
 Wet with breaking sea. Water-horror rose 
 With the might of troops.i Then the thegns 
 Cold with terror grew, nor thought any one 
 That alive he should win at last the land. And. 1. 369. 
 
 A fine passage follows in which the thegns of Andrew re- 
 fuse to leave him, and the steersman bids him break the length 
 of the journey by telling how Christ acted in the gale that so 
 the young men may be comforted. " Long is our journey still 
 over the fallow flood, very far the land we seek," and now " the 
 sand is upblended, the ocean bed with the shingle," a phrase 
 which puts us in mind of the lines in the first book of the 
 ^neid.^ Whereat Andrew strengthens them with words. 
 " The Water Terror shall become gentle, as of old it was with 
 us upon the Lake of Galilee ; " and he tells the story of Christ's 
 calming of the sea. Cynewulf paints it from nature, and the 
 sea he describes is not that of Gennesaret, but of the German 
 Ocean — 
 
 So of yore it fell that on sea-boat we, 
 
 O'er the war of waves, ventured (ocean's) fords, 
 
 Riding on the flood. Perilous and dread 
 
 Seemed the sea paths then. Eagor's streamings now 
 
 Beat upon the bulwarks ; ^ billow answered billow, 
 
 Wave replied to wave ! And at whiles uprose, 
 
 From the bosom of the foam to the bosom of the boat, 
 
 Terror o'er the Wave-ship. Andreas, 1. 438. 
 
 Meanwhile the Almighty slept in his brightness on "the 
 Eusher through the sea," but when the fearful called, arose and 
 stilled the weltering waters — 
 
 He rebuked the winds ; 
 Sank the sea to rest. Strength of ocean-streams 
 
 ^preata lirySum (" with the strength of armies"); This seems an imper- 
 sonation almost too fine for so early a time. It is quite in the manner of the 
 modern imagination. It is Kemble's translation, and Grain's is more probable, 
 though I do not like to surrender the other — Mdchtig durch die Massen. 
 
 2 " His unda deliiscens 
 Terram inter fluctus aperit; furit aestus arenis." — ^n. i. 106, 107. 
 
 8 Bord-stae'Su means, I think, the bulwarks of the ship. Compare here 
 " Deep calleth unto deep, because of the noise of the water floods," etc. 
 
172 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 Soon did smooth 136001116 ! Then our spirit laughed 
 Whenso we had se6n, underneath the skiey path, 
 All the winds and waves and the Water-Fear 
 Full of fear become for the fear of God the Lord. 
 
 Andreas, 1. 451. 
 
 Therefore, he says (almost quoting a passage from Beowulf, 
 save that God is substituted for Wyrd), "the living God will 
 never forlet a man if his courage avail." And when they heard 
 this tale, Andrew's comrades fell asleep, and "the sea grew 
 calm, the rush of the waves, the rough rage of the deep re- 
 turned," like a giant who had been roused from the depths, 
 " whence it had come." 
 
 Now Andrew and the steersman, whom he does not know to 
 be Christ, are alone left awake. " I would," says Andrew, who 
 is amazed at the skill of this divine sailor, "thou wouldest teach 
 me how thou guidest the swimming of this wave-floater, foamed 
 over by the ocean, of this stallion of the sea." Then, either 
 because the poet wishes to give local colour and invents voyages 
 for Andrew, or, as I would fain believe, introduces his own 
 personal experience of the deep and imputes it to Andrew, he 
 tells how he has been sixteen times at sea, and contrasts these 
 old journeys with his present one — 
 
 'Twas of old and now fate of mine to be 
 
 In a ship at sea, for sixteen of times ; 
 
 Frozen were my hands which the floods were moving, 
 
 Ocean's streaming tides ! 
 
 Never have I seen any hero like to thee 
 
 Steer so o'er the stern 1 Roars the swirling sea ; 
 
 Foaming Ocean beats our stead ; full of speed this boat is ; 
 
 Fares along foam-throated, flieth on the wave, 
 
 Likest to a bird. 
 
 Almost like it is, as if in a landlocked bay i 
 
 Still it stood at rest ; where the storm may move It not. 
 
 Nor yet wind at all, nor the water-floods 
 
 Break its beamy prow — yet o'er breaking seas it mshes, 
 
 Snell beneath its sail. Andreas, 1. 489. 
 
 "Answer me, thou hast the answer of a sea-playing earl." 
 And the steersman replies with a touch of the old Viking 
 spirit, but also with the more modern fear of the sea — 
 
 Oft it doth befall, that on ocean's pathways we. 
 
 In our ships with seamen, when the squall comes up, 
 
 1 Landsceap cannot mean our landscape ; but some place where ships were 
 drawn to shore ; some land-edge, or as I have put it above. 
 
THE SEA 173 
 
 Scour the bathway o'er with our stallions of the foam. 
 
 But at whiles on waves wretched is our fate 
 
 On the (weary) sea ; though we win the voyage through, 
 
 Comrades courageful. And. 1. 511. 
 
 But the flood tossing cannot let us against the will of the Lord, 
 who bindeth the brown waves, and now because thou art a 
 messenger of God, terror has been stilled for thee ; the wide- 
 bosomed wave and all the fords have sunk to rest. 
 
 In all this passage concerning the sea, we do not catch, as I 
 said, the note of Beowulf. The spirit of the merchant sailor 
 and not of the warrior is shown in its verse. We hear a dif- 
 ferent note in a later poem, in the description of the expedition 
 of the Empress Helena to find the True Cross — 
 
 Quickly then began all the crowd of earls 
 For the sea to ready. Then the stallions of the flood 
 Stood alert for going on the ocean-strand, 
 Hawsered steeds of sea in the Sund at anchor. 
 
 Many a warrior proud, there at Wendelsea, 
 
 Stood upon the shore. Over the sea marges 
 
 Hourly urged they on, one troop after other. 
 
 And they stored up there — with the sarks of battle, 
 
 With the shields and spears, with mail-shirted fighters. 
 
 With the warriors and the women — the wave-riding horses. 
 
 Then they let o'er Fifel's wave foaming stride along 
 
 Steep-stemmed 1 rushers of the sea. Oft withstood the bulwark. 
 
 O'er the surging of the waters, swinging strokes of waves ; 
 
 Humming ^ hurried on the sea ! Never heard I ere or since, 
 
 Or of old, that any lady led a fairer power 
 
 O'er the street of sea, on the stream of ocean ! 
 
 There a man might see (who should mark the fleet' 
 
 Break along the bathway) — rush the Billows'-wood along. 
 
 Play the Horse of flood, plunge the Floater of the wave, 
 
 'Neath the swelling sails. Blithe the sea-dogs were. 
 
 Courage in their heart. Glad the Queen was of her journey. 
 
 When at last to hithe, o'er the lake fast-rooted. 
 
 They had sailed their ships, set with rings on prow, 
 
 1 1 take this to mean the steep sides, or the up-curved and lofty prow of the 
 ships. It curved back from the sea-level, steep as a hillside. The Anglo- 
 Saxon hrant or bront, and the Swedish brant are to be found in Northern England 
 (brant and brent) to signify the steep (side of a hill). The Icelandic is brattr 
 (steep). Brandr, a fire-brand, or the blade of a sword, also means the raised 
 prow, the beak of a ship, and may be connected with the adjective brattr. — 
 Icelandic Diet., G. Vigfusson. Wendelsea is the Mediterranean. 
 
 2 /Sae swinsade — 
 
 The humming water shall o'erwhelm thy corse 
 Lying 'mid simple shells. 
 
 ' Literally, the voyage, the path ; hence, as I think, the voyaging fleet, the 
 whole expedition. 
 
174 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 To the land of Greece. Then they let the keels 
 Stand the sea-marge by, driven on the sandy shore, 
 Ancient houses of the wave. Elene, 1. 226. 
 
 In. these two sets of passages from the Andreas and the 
 Elene, we hear the double note of which I have spoken. The 
 last is, I suppose, the work of the imagination only ; it is not 
 likely that the poet ever joined a war-fleet ; the first is imag- 
 ination backed up by personal experience. But a man who 
 loved the sea wrote them both. And this love, in which 
 Caedmon, to a certain slight extent, seems to have shared, is 
 confirmed by the new terms which Cynewulf invented or used 
 for the sea, and by the new compounds he and his school 
 added to those we find in Beowulf. Some of these are fuU of 
 that poetry which grows up into expression when generation 
 after generation live in constant vision of a vast natural power 
 like the Sea. Sund-helm is used for the Ocean, the great 
 covering helmet of the earth. Arwela is another name for the 
 Sea, and its meaning — "the realm of the oar" — has come 
 down to modern English poetry. Hop is the ocean seen, 
 perhaps, as the vast Ring or hoop which embraces the world.' 
 Then the adjective sea-still {mere-smylte) is used in compari- 
 son. A thing is said to be as quiet as the broad calm of the 
 sea. Sea-bright (mere-torht) , the burning sheen of the sunlit 
 sea, is also used. A very cold thing is sea-cold (brim-ceald). 
 A vast expanse or a broad-beamed thing like a ship is called 
 sae-geap (sea-broad) . Holmeg means, perhaps, stormy as the 
 sea. Then as we had in Beowulf, mere-strengo (the strength of 
 the sea), so now we hear of the might of the sea (holm-maegen) 
 or, as it may be translated, the vast fulness of the deep; 
 and with a similar meaning, Lagu-faesten the fastness of the 
 deep, the fortressed sea, or the firm-set sea. 
 
 With the exception of seorcalm and sea-bright used as 
 adjectives, there is no record of any fair and beautiful impres- 
 sion. The sea is always the dark and troubled waters of the 
 German Ocean. It is never warm ; a common phrase for it 
 is the ice-cold sea. Its colour is never blue or green. It 
 is always wan, black, or murky. The waves are brown or 
 flood-gray. It is a flint-gray flood which in the gale hurls 
 itself upon the cliffs (Eiddle iv.). This gray colour of waters 
 when they foam in flood dwelt in the eyes of the English. 
 
 1 1 fear, however, that this is quite unauthorised. See Grein's Diet. "Hop." 
 New metaphorical words are now used for the sea. It is called hwales-&Sel 
 (the patrimony of the whale), ^sces bae1S (the fish's batb), seolh-wadu (the 
 seals'-path). 
 
THE SEA 175 
 
 They settle on it as the hue of mountain streams in spate. 
 "Water," the Gnomic Verses say, "shall rush gray in flood from 
 the hills." In the same Verses, and in the Wanderer, the 
 waves are fallow, dun-yellow, like withered ghosts of leaves, 
 the frequent colour of the sea after storm as seen from the 
 Northumbrian coasts. Indeed, as in Beowulf, what most 
 the English felt was the impression of the wild turmoil of the 
 billows, and they added words for this to those already used. 
 Hop-gehnaest expresses the crashing of the spreading waves on 
 the cliffs ; waro^faruH the surge as it breaks on the shelving 
 beach; waro^a geweorp is the dashing of the waves themselves 
 upon the shore; holm-]>racu the tossing and beating together 
 of the tormented sea far from shore. Sundrgebland and earh- 
 gebland are other forms of the same thought — the blending of 
 wave with wave in the gale, — and stream-gewin, the warring 
 of the waves with each other, is another word for this terrible 
 surging. 
 
 Then there are a few more words compounded with ^5 a 
 wave ; ySa gearing is the crushing together of the billows ; y¥ia 
 geyraec the thronging of the waves ; y^a-ongin the onset of the 
 waves on the shore, or on a ship. It may be also that sae-beorg 
 signifies the whole mountainous advance of the billows of the 
 sea, or any one mountain of water. The same image, with a 
 different word {dUn ofer d'^pe), is used in the Middle of the 
 hurricane. 
 
 The whole mass of the onward rushing waves — as in the 
 deluge — is called the host of Eagor. "I shall never lead 
 again," answers God to Noah, " Ocean's army {Egor-here) over 
 the wide land" {Gen. 1. 1637). Eor the whole expanse of the 
 sea, the word LagvrfaeUm is used, the embrace of ocean, the 
 bosom of the deep ; and out of it rises waeter-stefn, the voice 
 of waters. Then there are new words in which the old 
 mythological conceptions are contained — waeg-prea, terror on 
 or of the sea; waeter-broga, waeter-egesa, the water-horror, 
 which rises from the depths when storm is on the surface. 
 Through this went the ships, and a new name for them is 
 waeter-yisa the rusher through the water. So also they are 
 called sae-hengest, sae-mearh, sea-stallion, searhorse ; sae-flota, 
 sae-genga, sae-wudu, sea-floater, sea-goer, sea-wood. Brante 
 ceole, hea hornscipe, " with the steep-sided keel, the high-homed 
 ship," describes the ships as they plunge through the deep, 
 dipping their lofty figure-head in" the waves. Geofon-hus and 
 mere-hus, ocean and sea house, are other words for them, and 
 are used of the ark in Caedmon. A passage in the Guthlac 
 
176 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 brings a number of these ship names together. It is the 
 description of the voyage of Guthlac's disciple to tell his 
 sister of her brother's death. He climbs on board the boat, 
 and then — 
 
 Urged the Stallion of the wave, and the Water-rusher ran 
 
 Snell beneath the sorrow-laden. Shone the blazing sky, 
 
 Bliokering o'er the Burg-halls. Fled the Billow-wood along 
 
 Gay and gleaming on the path ! Laden, to the hithe. 
 
 Flew at speed the Flood-horse, till the Floater of the tide. 
 
 After the Sea-playing, surged upon the sea-land. 
 
 Ground against the shingle-grit. Guth. 1. 1303. 
 
 "Whence come ye," says one in the Andreas, "solitary 
 floaters on the wave, on your Searrusher ? " And another 
 passage uses this imaginative phrase : " The high-stemmed 
 boat, the snell sea-horse, woven round with speed, bore us 
 hither with the flood over the road of the whale." 
 
 There are other new words for all these matters, but let 
 these suffice, while we turn to the direct things said concerning 
 the sea in the later English poetry. Caedmon — I use the 
 word for the poems under his name — has nothing like the 
 range of treatment of the sea which is so characteristic of 
 Cynewulf. His allusions to the great Element, in those parts 
 of the poem which may have been really composed by him, 
 are very much those which a quiet monk who saw the gray 
 northern sea from the heights of Whitby in calm and in storm, 
 would be likely to make out of an impression weighty from its 
 continuance. It is only when he describes the Elood that we 
 find the sea in presence, for the description of the vast water 
 of Chaos may be drawn from ancient sources. That vast 
 water is called Garsecg. " Garsecg o'er covered, swart in the 
 endless night, far and wide the gloomy waves." In the tale 
 of the deluge he speaks of the smiting and pushing of the 
 black sea streams, of their warring or mounting on the shores, 
 of the dusky waves, of the thunder noise of the whole deluging 
 deep, of the Water-Terror that dared not lay his hand upon 
 the Ark, of the hosted waves of Ocean, of the ebbing, of the 
 foaming Wave-stream, until we seem to be standing with him 
 in a north-east gale upon the cliff of Whitby. One other 
 touch in the poem, perhaps from Caedmon's hand, is where 
 God Speaks to Abraham and tells him that his seed shall be 
 like the stars for multitude. Caedmon makes these stars 
 shine on the wide calm bosom of the deep, as, when peace was 
 on that stormy northern sea, he may have watched them on a 
 summer night from the edge of the lofty headland where hia 
 monastery stood — 
 
THE SEA 177 
 
 On the Heaven gaze, count its glorious gems, 
 Count the stars of JEther, that, in space, so pure,' 
 Ever-glorious fairness, now so far are dealing ! 
 O'er the billows broad, see, they brightly glimmer. 
 
 Genesis, 1. 2189. 
 
 These are from the Genesis. In the Exodus, a poem which 
 seems to have none of Caedmon's work in it, there is of 
 course a great deal about the sea, but it is the sea treated 
 miraculously. The phenomena described have no relation to 
 reality, and, indeed, I seem to detect in it that the writer had 
 not much personal acquaintance with the ocean. It is quite 
 another matter when we look into the Andreas, the Gfuthlac, 
 and the Elene, and into such poems as the Seafarer and 
 Wanderer. These were written by poets in Northumbria who 
 were well acquainted with the Deep. We have already told, 
 in the lines from the Andreas, what the writer saw upon the 
 mid sea as the ship ran over the surges, and the personal touch 
 in it is as unmistakable as its vigour ; but it has often occurred 
 to 'me, though I only give it as a vague conjecture, that the 
 passage which describes the awaking of Andrew on the 
 land near the coast and the first sight of the town, may be 
 also a record of a personal experience. It is just the sight a 
 sailor, coming towards land in the morning, near Bamborough 
 for instance, would have seen from the sea, — the plain, the 
 city gates, the steep rock, the glittering tiles, the wind-swept 
 walls. Andrew lies sleeping on the highway — 
 
 Until, now, the Lord let the lamp of day 
 
 Sheerly bright to shine, and the shadows sank away. 
 
 Wan below the welkin. Then there came the Weather-torch, 
 
 And the light of Heaven serene o'er the houses blickered ! 
 
 Then awoke the war-hard man, looked upon the wide-spread plain, 
 
 Lying 'fore the Town gates. Towered there the steep hills 
 
 With high-hanging cliffs.^ O'er the hoary rock 
 
 Stood the gay -tiled houses, stood the towers up, 
 
 And the wind-swept walls. _ And. 1. 835. 
 
 It may have been also in one of these conjectured voyages 
 that it occurred to Cynewulf to imitate, but with many a 
 change, the riddle of Symphosius on the Ship. This is "a 
 work of skill that grinds into the gravel and yelling fares 
 along ; which has neither face nor hands, shoulders nor arms, 
 but moves on a single foot (its keel) over the fields of ocean 
 and has many ribs and a mouth in its midst." Nor is this a 
 war-ship as a Norseman would have described, but a merchant- 
 
 1 "Spaciously gentle," perhaps. 
 
 ' X have punctuated these two lines in a new fashion, 
 
178 EAELY ENGLISH LITEEATURE chap. 
 
 man. It brings " food and gifts that rich and poor desire, every 
 year, to men." When it enters the bay, the anchor is let go ; 
 and the vigour and fire with which Cynewulf makes another 
 riddle on the Anchor has all the spirit of a sailor in it. The 
 Anchor is a strong and warring hero, following in this Sympho- 
 sius from whom the idea of the riddle is taken. But Cyne- 
 wulf's Anchor-hero is more feelingly impersonated than that 
 of Symphosius. A touch of sorrow, as Prehn thinks, of a sad 
 weird laid upon him, belongs to a phrase like this which tells 
 how the Anchor felt in the solitude of the ocean-bed — " Strange 
 is that home to me." Here are the first lines (Eid. xvii.) — 
 
 Oft shall I with waves be warring, and with winds he fighting. 
 
 And against sea-tangle ^ — whensoe'er I plunge to seek 
 
 Earth with surges over-shrouded. Strange such homeland is to me ! 
 
 These are the doings on the Sea, but there are also a number of 
 passages which might have been written by a settler on the 
 coast who looked on the Sea from the shore. One, the descrip- 
 tion of Andrew passing over the sand-dunes to the beach, has 
 already been quoted. There is another in the Wanderer (1. 46), 
 where the lonely man wakens from his dream of joy and beholds 
 the image of his own sorrow in the wintry waters — 
 
 And he sees before him [heave] the fallow waves, 
 
 And the sesr-birds bathing, broadening out their feathers, 
 
 And the hoar sleet hurtle down, snow with hail commingled. 
 
 Care is then renewed 
 Eor the man who many times must with passion send 
 All his spirit sorrow-laden o'er the sea-floods interchaining.^ 
 
 The birds of the sea, as in this passage, are not neglected. 
 The tern, the " sea-swallow icy feathered," the " sea-eagle, dewy 
 feathered and barking among the cliffs," the " swan as it sang 
 its song " in flight over the waves, and the gannet and the sea- 
 mew shrieking in the storm, are all brought together in the 
 Seafarer. In the Andreas there' is a vision of sea-eagles — 
 
 1 Or " I contend against both of them." 
 * " O'er the binding of waters." 
 
 When the midnight moon is weaving 
 Her bright chain o'er the deep. 
 
 Byron means that the moonlight on the faintly-rippled sea makes, as it were, 
 a silver coat of mail — chain-mail — over the deep. But the poet of the Wan- 
 derer means, I think, the interlocking of the waves, their knitting together 
 into a net which weaves together all the waves of all the oceans. That it 
 should mean, as some think, the bond of the ice sheet over the sea, does not 
 accord with the context. 
 
THE SEA 179 
 
 Us sea-weary sleep o'erwent ; 
 
 Then on came earns, o'er tossing waves, 
 
 Fast in flight, in wings exulting. And. 1. 862. 
 
 The llth riddle of Cynewulf describes, as I believe, the Bar- 
 nacle goose, and only a man who was well acquainted with the 
 sea and its dwellers could have done the thing as well. It is 
 so interesting, even from an historical point of view — since it 
 puts back old Gerarde's tradition so far — that I give it entire^ — 
 
 In a narrow was my neb, and beneath the wave I lived ; 
 Underflowen by the flood ; in the mountain-billows 
 Low was I besunken ; in the sea I waxed 
 Over-covered with the waves, clinging with my body 
 
 To a wandering wood . 
 
 Quick the life I had, when I from the clasping came 
 Of the billows, of the beam-wood, in my black array ; 
 White in part were then my pranked garments fair, 
 When the Lift upheaved me, me a living creature. 
 Wind from wave upblowing ; and as wide as far 
 Bore me o'er the bath of seals — Say, what is my name ! 
 
 1 The answer Prehn gives to this riddle is See-furche, and he connects it with 
 the 13th Riddle of Symphosius, and with Ealdhelm's, iv. 11. The reasons he 
 gives for this answer are not sufficient to induce me to give up my own answer, 
 which seems to fit at every point. One would scarcely talk of the neb of a seci- 
 furrow. The clinging with the body to a drifting wood is not one of the habits 
 of the hollow between two waves. When the loam flies from the wave it is not 
 a living creature, nor is it clothed in fine ornaments {hyrste, a word used for 
 the feathered robe of the swan). The furrow of the wave may be black and 
 white, but in that condition it is not borne into the air, nor far and wide over 
 the sea. But the Barnacle is almost altogether in black and white. " The bill 
 is black, the head as far as the crown, together with cheeks and throat is 
 white —the rest of the head and neck to the breast and shoulders black. The 
 upper plumage is marbled with blue-gray, black and white. The feathers of 
 back and wings are black edged with white, the underparts are white, the tail 
 black." Then the rest of the Eiddle agrees with the old account given in 
 Gerarde's Herball, which I quote here : " There is a small Ilande in Lancashire 
 called the Pile of Foulders, wherein are found the broken peeces of old and 
 brused ships, some whereof have been cast thither by shipwracke, and also the 
 trunks or bodies with the branches of old and rotten trees, cast up there like- 
 wise; whereon is found a certaine spume or froth, that in time breedeth unto 
 certaine shels, in shape like those of the muskle but sharper pointed, and of a 
 whitish colour, wherein is conteined a thing in form like a lace of silke finely 
 woven, as it were, together of a whitish colour; one end whereof is fastened 
 unto the inside of the shell, even as the fish of Oisters and Muskles are; the 
 other end is made faste unto the belly of a rude masse or lump, which m time 
 commeth to the shape and forme of a Bird. When it is perfectly formed, the 
 shel gapeth open, and the first thing that appeareth is the foresaid lace or 
 string ; next come the legs of the Birde hanging out, and as it giweth greater, 
 it openeth the shell by degrees, till at length it is all come foorth, and hangeth 
 onlv bv the bill, in short space after it commeth to full maturitie, and lalleth 
 into the sea, where it gathereth feathers, and groweth to a foule, bigger than a 
 Mallard, and lesser than a Goose; having blacke legs and bill or beake, and 
 feathers blacke and white, and spotted in such a manner as in our Magge-Pie. 
 — Gerarde's Herball, p. 1391 [pub. 1597]. 
 
180 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 But the chief thing which engaged the dwellers in the 
 stormy north was the tierce weather on the sea. The whole 
 of the descriptions which follow make me almost certain that 
 Cynewulf lived for a great part of his life on the sea coast. 
 It seems quite impossible that an inland person — and there 
 are those who hint at his being a Mercian — could have de- 
 scribed the doings of the deep so accurately. Descriptions 
 of this close quality — all the right things said and the un- 
 necessary details left out — are only made after long ex- 
 perience. 
 
 In the Andreas the weather of Northumbria is described, 
 and it is as wild and hard as that of which we hear in Beo- 
 wulf, and are told of in the Seafarer. It is the description, 
 as will be seen, of one who dwelt near the sea — 
 
 Snow did bind the earth 
 With the whirling winter-flakes ; and the weathers grew 
 Cold with savage scours of hail ; while the sleet and frost — 
 Gangers gray of war were they — locked the granges up 
 Of the heroes, and folk-hamlets ! Frozen hard were lands 
 With the chilly icicles ; Shrunk the courage of the water ; 
 O'er the running rivers ice upraised a bridge ; 
 And the Sea-road shone. Andreas, 1. 1255. 
 
 The same kind of weather is spoken of in the Wanderer 
 and the Seafarer. " The storms lash the overhanging cliffs, 
 the falling sleet binds up the fields, the wan terror of the 
 winter comes, the shadow of night comes darkling on, and 
 out of the north sends the fierce hailstorm for the troubling 
 of men." So says the Wanderer, and the Seafarer mourns 
 the like upon his ship. His feet are bound with the bands of 
 frost, he is hung with icicles, the hail flies round him in 
 showers, the sea is icy cold. All the poetry is full of the 
 fury of the hail. Even in the liune Song the poet, when he 
 has called it, conventionally, the " whitest of corns," passes 
 on, thrilled by what he has seen, to describe how when the 
 tempest is at its height, the hail is whirled through the lift, 
 as if it were snow — mingled and tossed by the squalls of 
 ■w^ind, — so I must translate windes scura, showers of wind. 
 A similar passage in the Gnomic Verses speaks of the 
 shower coming up the sky blended into one with the wind. 
 Midst of this weather, were the desperate tempests of the 
 ISTorthern coast, and a short passage in the same Verses brings 
 together with some force the universal disturbance of sea and 
 sky and waters of the earth in the fierce gale. " The salt sea 
 shall toss in waves, and the helm of the air, and the water- 
 
THE SEA 181 
 
 floods ; and o'er every land rush down the mountain streams." 
 But it is Cynewulf who chiefly loves the tempests. He 
 paints, with all the vigour of the North, the ice-floe plunging 
 and roaring through the foaming sea, and shouting out, like a 
 Viking, his coming to the land, singing and laughing terribly. 
 Sharp are the swords he uses in the battle (the knife-edges of 
 the ice), grim is his hate, he is greedy for the battle.^ He 
 breaks into the shield walls (the sides of the ships ranged 
 along with shields), binds, like a wizard, runes of slaughter. 
 " Such a hero," says Prehn, to whom I ref er,^ " may well boast 
 of his ancestors." " My mother," he cries, "is of the maiden- 
 kin ; my daughter is waxen strong." His mother was the 
 water, and his daughter was also the water — mother and 
 daughter the same. Symphosius and Tatwine dwell on this 
 fancy with regard to snow and ice. In the u^nigmata veterum 
 poetarum we meet it — " Mater me genuit, eadem mox gigni- 
 tur ex me." And again " Quam mater genuit, generavit filia 
 matrem." But Cynewulf only brings in this fancy at the end 
 of his riddle. The rest — the audacious Ice Viking, victo- 
 riously dashing through the sea, with all his ship ringing as it 
 goes, and he himself shouting on the prow, — that is Cyne- 
 wulf's alone, and it is another illustration of the absurdity of 
 those who pass over these riddles of his as a mere imitation 
 of the Latin. Here is the Eiddle (xxxiv.) — 
 
 Came a wondrous wight o'er the waves a-farlng ; 
 
 Comely from his keel called he to the land. 
 
 Loudly did he shout, and his laughter dreadful was, 
 
 FuU of terror to the Earth ! Sharp the edges of his swords, 
 
 Grim was then his hate. He was greedy for the slaughter, 
 
 Bitter in the battle worli ; broke into the shield walls ; 
 
 Rough and ravaging his way ; and a rune of hate he bound. 
 
 Then, all-skilled in craft, he said, about himself, his nature — 
 
 " Of the maiden kin is my mother known ; 
 
 Of them all the dearest, so that now my daughter is 
 
 Waxen up to mightiness." .... 
 
 That is a particular aspect of storm, but Cynewulf draws the 
 storms themselves, with all their characteristics on land and 
 sea, and with such extraordinary force and fire that it seems 
 as if these three short poems concentrated into their space all 
 
 1 Grein translates, Zum Kampfe geneigt. " Sluggish to the battle " seems 
 the literal meaning, but Grein evidently felt that this was not in harmony with 
 the text, though I do not understand what reading he coniectures. It might, 
 however, mean slow in beginning the war, but when engaged, bitter in battle- 
 work, and the phrase might well apply to an iceberg. 
 
 2 Komposition und Quellen der Hdtsel des lUxeterbuches, p. 205. 
 
182 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 the storms lie had seen in his life. The first describes the storm 
 on land, the second at sea, and the third the universal tempest 
 — the living Being who rises from his caverns under earth, and 
 does his great business, first on the sea, then on the cliffs and 
 ships, then on the land, and then among the clouds, till he sinks 
 to rest again. They are all worth translating, chiefly for their 
 poetry, but also because they are full of remnants of heathenism, 
 of mythical images of natural phenomena, of phrases which 
 those who care for natural folk-lore would have pleasure in 
 illustrating. Here is the first — A Storm on land (Eid. ii.) — 
 
 Who so wary and so wise of the warriors lives, 
 
 That he dare declare who doth drive me on my way, 
 
 When I start up in my strength ! Oft in stormy wrath, 
 
 Hugely then I thunder, tear along in gusts, 
 
 Eare i above the floor of earth, bum the folk-halls down, 
 
 Ravage all the rooms ! Then the reek ariseth 
 
 Gray above the gables ? Great on earth the din. 
 
 And the slaughter- qualm of men. Then I shake the woodland. 
 
 Forests rich in fruits ; then I fell the trees ; — 
 
 I with water over- vaulted — by the wondrous Powers 
 
 Sent upon my way, far and wide to drive along ! 
 
 On my back I carry that which covered once 
 
 All the tribes of Earth's indwellers, spirits and all ilesh. 
 
 In the sand together 1 2 Say who shuts me in, 
 
 Or what is my name — I who bear this burden ! 
 
 The next (Eiddle iii.) is the Sea-storm — 
 
 Whiles, my way I take, how men ween it not, 
 
 Under seething ' of the surges, seeking out the earth, 
 
 Ocean's deep abyss : all a-stirred the sea is. 
 
 Urged the flood is then, whirled the foam on high ; 
 
 Fiercely wails the whale-mere, wrathful roars aloud ; 
 
 Beat the sea-streams on the shore shooting momently on high, 
 
 On the soaring cliffs with the sand and stones, 
 
 With the weed and wave.* But I, warring on, 
 
 Shrouded with the ocean's mass, stir into the earth 
 
 1 Fere may be " terribly." 2 xhe water of the Flood. 
 
 8 Ge\>raec is "thronging," the fierce crowding together of the waves. I 
 have put " seething," for the sake of alliteration. 
 
 * A similar passage occurs in the Christ describing the cliffs withstanding 
 the waves. The fire of judgment has passed over the earth, and while the 
 cliffs melt in the heat CynewuU recalls how he had seen them of old — 
 
 Tumble down in ruin 
 All the broken burg-walls, and the mountains melt. 
 And the high cliffs that of old, 'gainst the heaving sea, 
 'Gainst the floods fast rooted, guarded all the field of earth ; 
 Strong and steadfast stood, bulwarks 'gainst the surges, 
 'Gainst the war of waters. Christ, 1. 977. 
 
THE SEA 183 
 
 Into vasty sea-grounds ! From the water's helm 
 
 I may not on journey loose me, ere he let me go 
 
 Who my master is. — i Say, O Man of thought, 
 
 Who may draw me (like a sword) from the bosomed depths of ocean, 
 
 When the streams again on the sea are still. 
 
 And the surges silent that shrouded me before ? 
 
 The next Eiddle (iv.) is yet finer than these. Cynewulf 
 was not one of those small poets whom a single effort on one 
 subject exhausts- Moreover, he has not yet treated the work 
 of the wind among the clouds and sky, and this he will now 
 do, combining it with entirely new descriptions of the storm 
 as it traverses the land and upraises the ocean. We scarcely 
 expect that unconscious art, which is often the highest, in an 
 early Anglo-Saxon poem, but the, order and unity of this poem 
 is admirable. The imaginative logic of its arrangement is like 
 that which prevails in the " Ode to the West Wind," to which, 
 indeed, it presents many points of- resemblance, even to iso- 
 lated phrases. Shelley tells us of his wind — which, as- in 
 Cynewulf's poem, is a living being — first, as flying through 
 the forests and the land,' then of its work among the clouds, 
 then on and in the sea, then on his own soul. Cynewulf 
 tells of his storm-giant rising from his lair, rushing over 
 the sea, then over the land, and then in the sky, but not of the 
 storm in his own breast. That is the one modern quality we 
 do not find in this poem of Cynewulf. It was natural for him 
 — being closer to Nature-worship than Shelley — to imper- 
 sonate his Hurricane, to make the clouds into stalking phan- 
 toms, to make them pour water from their womb and to sweat 
 forth fire ; and his work in this is noble. Shelley, who was 
 himself an ancient Nature-worshipper born out of due time, 
 a maker of Nature-myths, and as innocent as a young ■ Aryan 
 in doing so, is on that account very like Cynewulf when both 
 are writing about natural phenomena. Both of them write as 
 the people talked in old time about the Wind, and the Clouds, 
 and the Sea; and in Cynewulf's case this is all the plainer 
 when we compare his work with the riddles on the same sub- 
 ject which Ealdhelm and Eusebius put forth, which use the 
 classical conventions, and which gave to Cynewulf nothing but 
 the theme of his poem — 
 
 1. Oftenwhiles my Wielder weighs me firmly down, 
 Then again he urges my immeasurable breast 
 Underneath the fruitful fields, forces me to rest. 
 
 1 Or, " Who my master is on every journey." 
 
184 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATUBB chap. 
 
 Drives me down to darkness, me, the doughty warrior, 
 Pins 1 me down in prison, where upon my back 
 Sits the Earth, my jailor. No escape have I 
 Erom that savage sorrow — but I mightily shake then 
 Heirships old of heroes 1 Totter then the hornfed halls, 
 Village-steads of men ; all the walls are rocking 
 High above the house- wards. 
 
 This is the introduction ; the great giant power, clamped, 
 like Enceladus, below the earth in the prison of dark caverns, 
 the Earth seated on his back. Like Enceladus too, ■whom 
 Cynewulf seems to have in mind, the giant turns and heaves 
 in his sorrow, and then the earthquake is among the homes 
 of men. Now his master lets him loose, but before he comes, 
 air and sea are still — 
 10. Calm abideth 
 
 O'er the land, the lift ; lullfed is the sea ; 
 
 Till that I from thraldom outwards thrust my way, 
 
 Howsoe'er He leads me on, who of old had laid 
 
 At creation's dawning wreathen chains on me, 
 
 With their braces, with their bands, that I might not bend me 
 
 Out of his great Power who points me out my paths. 
 
 The Storm now begins to work upon the sea, and Cynewulf 
 introduces human interest in the ship — 
 
 17. Sometimes shall I, from above, make the surges seethe. 
 Stir up the sea-streamings, and to shore crush on 
 Gray as flint, the flood ; foaming fighteth then 
 'Gainst the wall of rock, the wave ! Wan ariseth now 
 O'er the deep a mountain-down ; 2 darkening on its track 
 Follows on another with all ocean blended. 
 Till they (now commingled), near the mark of land and sea 
 Meet the lofty linches.' Loud is then the Sea-wood, 
 
 1 " Pins me down " is, literally, " dashes, and presses me down." Compare 
 with these lines, and with 13-16 — 
 
 In a cavern mider is fettered the thunder. 
 It struggles and howls at fits. The Cloud. 
 
 Also — 
 
 Hie vasto rex .ffiolus antro 
 
 Luctantes ventos tempestatesque sonoras 
 
 Imperio premit ao vinclis et careere frenat. 
 
 Illi indignantes magnd cum murmure mentis 
 
 Circum claustra fremunt. . . . 
 
 Sed Pater omnipotens speluncis abdidlt atris 
 
 Hoc metuens, molemque et montes insuper altos 
 
 Imposuit. . . . ^neid, i. 56. 
 
 There are many phrases in Cynewulf 's poetry which lead me to think that 
 he was not unacquainted with Virgil. See the next note. 
 
 ' Insequitur cumulo praeruptus aquae mons. Wan is of course " black." 
 ' Hlincas (" linches, i.e. the cliffs"). See Halliwell and Skeat. Diction- 
 aries. 
 
THE SEA 186 
 
 Loud the seamen's shout.i But tlie stony cliffs, 
 Rising steep, in stillness wait of the sea the lanset ; 
 Battle-whirl of billows, when the high upbreak of water 
 Crashes on the cliffs. In the keel is dread expecting ^ 
 With despairing strivings lest the sea should bear it 
 Full of living ghosts on to that grim hour (of death) ; ' 
 So that of its steering power * it should be beref^ ; 
 And of living crew forfoughten,^ foaming drift away 
 On the shoulders of the surges. Then is shown to men 
 Many of the terrors there of Those I must obey — 
 I upon the storm-patE strong ! — Who mak:fes that be stUl ? 
 
 Now follows the way of the tempest in the air, the war of 
 the clouds, and then the terror upon earth — 
 
 36. Whiles I rush along thorough that which rides my back, 
 Vats of water black : wide asunder do I thrust them 
 Full of lakes of rain ; then again I let them 
 Glide together. Greatest that is of all sounds, 
 Of aU tumults over towns, and of thunderings the loudest. 
 When one stormy shower rattles sharp against another, 
 Sword against a sword. See, the swarthy shapes. 
 Forward pressing o'er the peoples, sweat their fire forth ; 
 Flaring is the flashing ! Onward fare the thunders. 
 Gloomed, above the multitudes, with a mickle din ; 
 Fighting fling along ; and let fall adown 
 Swarthy sap of showers sounding ^ from their breast. 
 Waters from their womb. Waging war they go. 
 Grisly troop on troop ; Terror rises up ! 
 MiokJe is the misery 'mid the kin of men ; 
 In the burgs is panic when the phantom pale 
 Shoots with his sharp weapons, stalking (through the sky). 
 Then the dullard does not dread him of the deadly spears ; 
 Nathless 'shall he surely die, if the soothfast Lord 
 Right against him, through the rain-cloud, y 
 From the upper thunder, let the arrow fly — 
 Dart that fareth fast ! Few are they that 'scape 
 
 1 Insequitur clamorque virum stridorque rudentum. 
 
 2 This is an extremely difficult passage, and I have varied considerably from 
 other translators. Sli^re saecce — "with slippery (Grein makes it dangerous ), 
 with feeble striving " — may, I think, mean what I make it, with a napless, lU- 
 fortuned, and therefore a despairing strife against the elements. Some are 
 paralysed in expectation, some struggle; that is, I think, the meaning. _ 
 
 » On i>a grimman tid may, of course, mean " in that grim hour ; dot l 
 think it alludes to the moment in which the ship would be driven on the chSs. 
 
 'tis Sice from ricu ("direction")? Did Cynewulf see the steering oar 
 whirled from the hands of the steersman, or does he mean that tne snip was 
 driven out of its true course ? . T,„j!„i,i 
 
 « Sifohten. The verb bi-feohtan means to deprive one of anything by ngnt- 
 ing. The ship was deprived of its living souls by the war of the wind and sea 
 
 ^« I'siiould like to have in English the German word mmmen, which answers 
 here to sumsend, and translate this summing. " Sounding does not give the 
 humming hiss of the rain. 
 
186 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 Whom the spear doth strike of the Spirit of the rain. 
 
 I beginning make of this gruesome war 
 When I rush on high 'mid the roaring shook of clouds, 
 Through their thundering throng to press with a triumph great, 
 O'er the breast of torrents ! i Bursts out with a roar 
 The high congregated cloud-band. ^ 
 
 Then my crest again I bow. 
 Low the Lift-helm under, to the land anearer ; 
 And I heap upon my back that I have to bear, 
 By the might commanded of my mastering Lord. 
 
 And now he ends with a passage which, with a fine art, collects 
 together all the action of the Tempest, and brings it back to 
 its cavern, having had a great joy, in obedient quiet — 
 
 67. So do I, a strongful servant, often strive in war ! 
 Sometimes under earth am I ; then again I must 
 Stoop beneath the surges deep ; then above the surface-sea 
 Stir to storm its streams. Then I soar on high, 
 Whirl the wind-drift of the clouds. Far and wide I go. 
 Swift and strong (for joy). Say what I am called. 
 Or who lifts me up to life,- when I may no longer rest ; 
 Or who it is that stays me, when I'm still again. 
 
 Such was the way a great Northern gale impressed a Northern 
 poet who had dwelt by the sea, and who himself, as I .believe, 
 had gone down into the sea in ships and battled with the 
 storm. 
 
 The passages, out of the Elene and the Christ, with which 
 I close this chapter, and which we are certain Cynewulf wrote, 
 not only go far to prove that their writer was the writer of 
 
 iThe word I here translate torrents is byrnan ("of burns or brooks"). 
 Torrents Is quite fair, for the word is connected with byrnan ("to burn"). 
 The upsurging and boiling of fire Is attributed to the fountain and stream. 
 Cynewulf is not thinking of the quiet brooks of the land, but of the furious 
 leaping rivers which he conceives as hidden in the storm clouds over vrhich the 
 storm giant passes on his way. 
 
 ^ JBlod-gecrod, Hlod is the name given to a " band of robbers from seven 
 to thirty-five," hence any troop or band of men. Gecrod is " a crowd," 
 " a multitude." Thus compounded the word means, I think, a crowd made up 
 of troops ; of troops of clouds ! Then the word "high " put with hlod-gecrod 
 and the context prove sufficiently that Cynewulf was thinking of the piled-up 
 clouds of the storm ; and no doubt the notion of ravaging and slaughter con- 
 nected with Hlod pleased his imagination, for his Tempest is a Destroyer. 
 
 I quote the line from Shelley which suggested my use of the word " congre- 
 gated." The two lines which follow may also be compared with the previous 
 passage (11. 42-48) — 
 
 Vaulted with all thy congregated might 
 Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere 
 Black rain, and fire and hail will burst. O, hear ! 
 Compare also — 
 
 The triumphal arch through which I march 
 With hurricane, fire, and snow. 
 
THE SEA 187 
 
 this fourth riddle, so closely do they parallel it, but are also 
 esamples of the symbolic use of the sea and the storm in 
 Christian illustration ; of the use by the poet in his old age of 
 the wonderful things he had observed when young.^ The first, 
 like the passage in the Riddle, thinks of the giant wind pressed 
 down in his cavern, and perhaps of the mythic wild-hunt in 
 the clouds — 
 
 Wealth below the sky shall fail ; all the splendour of the land 
 
 'Neath the welkin vanisheth ; to the Wind most like 
 
 When he, over heroes, high and loudly mounts the sky ; 
 
 Through the clouds he hunts, hurries, raging on ; 
 
 Then, upon a sudden, silent is again, 
 
 In his prison cave narrowly pressed down, 
 
 Overwhelmed with woes. Ulene, 1. 1269. 
 
 The last I give is full of personal interest, of an old man's 
 remembrance of his sea-voyages ; of his troubles like the 
 troubles of the world's stormy sea, of gratitude to God who 
 piloted his bark to the haven where he would be, of longing 
 such as age may have for the fulness of his rest — 
 
 Mickle is our need 
 That in this unfruitful time, ere that fearful Dread, 
 On our spirits' fairness we should studiously bethink us ! 
 Now most like it is as if we on lake of ocean. 
 O'er the water cold in our keels are sailing. 
 And through spacious sea, with our stallions of the Sound, 
 Forward drive the flood-wood. Fearful is the stream 
 Of immeasurable surges that we sail on here. 
 Through this wavering world, through these windy oceans. 
 O'er the path profound. Perilous our state of life 
 Ere that we had sailed (our ship) to the shore (at last). 
 O'er the rough sea-ridges. Then there reached us help, 
 That to hithe of Healing homeward led us on — 
 He the Spirit-Son of God ! And he dealt us grace, 
 So that we should be aware, from the vessel's deck, 
 Where our stallions of the sea we might stay with ropes, 
 Fast a-riding by their anchors — ancient horses of the waves ! 
 Let us in that haven then all our hope establish, 
 
 1 It has been said that elaborate similes are not to be found in Anglo-Saxon 
 poetry. It should be understood that the remark only apphes to the earher 
 poetry. CynewuU uses a number, of which the two above are examples. 
 There are many more in his work. There is one also in the Pencils, but its 
 age is doubtful. I give here another which belongs to the subject of this chap- 
 ter, and which is to be found in the Gnomic Verses. I daresay it is of the 
 ninth century — 
 
 As the sea is smooth, 
 When the wind waketh it not, 
 So are the people at peace, when they have settled their strife ! 
 In happy state they sit, and then, with comrades, hold. 
 Brave men, their native land. On. V. (Exon.) 1. 55. 
 
188 , EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap, x 
 
 Which the ruler of the jEther there has roomed for us, 
 When He climbed to Heaven — Holy in the Highest ! 
 
 Christ, 1. 848. 
 
 To compare these lines, written -when Cynewvilf was advanced 
 in years, with the poem of the Hurricane, written when he was 
 young, has more than a transient interest. And no artist can 
 read both at the same time without having a higher pleasure 
 than the ordinary reader. He will feel the same personality 
 in both, but working, with how different a life behind the 
 poetry, with how different an impulse; in how different a 
 fashion and from how changed a character ! Youth, moved 
 out of itself by Nature, and looking neither before nor after, is 
 in the earlier poem. The passion in it is untouched by the 
 weight of the sorrows or duties of manhood, or by the sense of 
 sin and the cry for redemption. These pains and burdens, on 
 the contrary, as well as the soul wrapt in self-consciousness, 
 are present in the later verses. Such a contrast makes Cyne- 
 wulf real to us ; and the change — I will not call it artistic prog- 
 ress, though at certain points it is so — does at least enable 
 us to say, This man was an artist. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND LITEKATUKE 
 
 The matters of which we have treated in the three previous 
 chapters do not belong especially either to heathenism or 
 Christianity. They may rather be called secular. All that 
 had to do with the affairs of arms was as much heathen as 
 Christian ; and the same may be said with regard to the greater 
 part of the poetry quoted to illustrate the daily life of our fore- 
 fathers. We cannot altogether say this when we consider the^ 
 poetry of natural description. I do not think that the remark- 
 able descriptions of the sea and its storms and of various 
 ■aspects of nature could have been written by the heathen 
 English. The temper of these poems is not at all the old Teu- 
 tonic temper. They are too contemplative for English heathen-j 
 dom. Nevertheless some of their spirit goes back to other 
 heathendoms than the Teutonic, and goes back through the 
 advent of Christianity. It was the Celtic missionaries wh(f| 
 evangelised Northumbria, and through them the Celtic feeling 
 for nature was imported into English poetry. Along with this, > 
 Latin Christianity brought with it Roman poetry, and Virgil ( 
 and Ovid gave to the Northumbrian poets a fresh and kindlingj 
 impulse to the observation and love of Nature. 
 
 Beyond these impulses, however, the coming of Christianity 
 poured into the river of the English imagination a multitude 
 of new tributary streams, enlarged its waters, enriched its con- 
 stituents, purified, mellowed, and deepened it. It did more ; 
 these new streams were of various elements, and though, at 
 first, they did not isolate themselves into distinct currents, yet, 
 as time went on, and they assimilated what was necessary for 
 their separate existence, they became self-conscious streams of 
 poetry within the general stream. What Christianity thus did 
 for literature, what it modified of the past, what it originated 
 for the future, what powers it added to that emotional life from 
 which poetry urges itself upwards into form, what it weakened 
 
 189 
 
190 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 and. strengthened, restricted and enlarged, is the subject of this 
 and the following chapter. 
 
 When we consider Christianity in contact with those heathen 
 elements, so many of which, as pregnant motives of poetry, have 
 continued in our literature, the first thing to be said is that, 
 owing to the manner in which Christianity was propagated in 
 England, it did not root out heathen ideas so much as change 
 them. Its growth was left to the will of the people ; to per- 
 suasion and not to force. The sword had no part, as on the 
 Continent, as among the Northmen, in the evangelising of 
 England. In no modern land that Jesus won was his conquest 
 so gentle, so marked by tolerance and good sense. Hence 
 Christianity was subject for a long time to interruptions and 
 reactions. For nearly eighty years the heathen and Christian 
 faiths were in close contact, and each preserved its freedom of 
 development. The old battle songs were sung side by side 
 with the Christian hymns, the sagas of the English heroes with 
 the saga of Christ ; the Christian Church, on the hill or by the 
 river, saw during a varying term of years, and without any 
 fierce religious fury, the heathen temple in the neighbouring 
 grove. There was a long mingling then, in a peaceful fashion, 
 of Christian and heathen thought ; and through the mingling 
 ran a special temper of tolerance and wisdom and good-breed- 
 ing. These two things, both of which were vital influences on 
 English literature, are best illustrated by a brief but necessary 
 account of the various changes which marked the conversion of 
 England. 
 
 It was in the year 597 that Augustine brought the gospel 
 to Kent, and King JSthelberht (partly prepared by his wife) 
 listened to it graciously. A speech of his, which Erasmus 
 might have fathered, strikes the key-note of the manner in 
 which Christianity was spread in England by the kings, and 
 indeed by the bishops.^ "Your words," said ^thelberht, "and 
 promises sound very good to me, but they are new to us, and of 
 uncertain meaning ; I cannot so far yieid to them as to abandon 
 all that I and the whole English people have for so long observed. 
 
 ' There were but few exceptions. Episcopal violence seems to have been 
 retained between Christian and Christian, not between Christian and heathen. 
 Angustine was gentle enough, though he was a vain man, with .^thelberht and 
 the Kentish heathen, but his manners with the Welsh monks were not of the 
 same type. But then the Welsh were Christians, not heathen, and they were 
 not in harmony with Rome. It would not have been politic for Augustine to 
 have anything to do with the Welsh. It was more easy for Rome to be tolerant 
 to ignorant heathen than to Christians who differed from her formulae. And 
 the keeping of Easter at a different date from Rome was a very serious thing; 
 it touched the headship of Rome. Even Baeda seems to lose his temper over it. 
 
XI CHRISTIANITY AND LITEEATURE 191 
 
 But since you are strangers and have come from a far land, and 
 desire to tell us what you hold to be true and good, we will do 
 you no harm, but will give you food and a place to dwell in, 
 and you may speak to my people and win over as many as you 
 can to your belief;" which things he did, and was himself 
 shortly afterwards, with many of his people, baptized. But 
 he " compelled none to embrace the faith," so that many still 
 remained heathen. 
 
 In 604 the East Saxons, under Saeberht, .Slthelberht's nephew, 
 were converted, and JSthelberht founded St. Paul's in London 
 for his nephew. Eadbald, son of .^thelberht, became King 
 of the Kentishmen in 616. He had refused to receive the 
 faith of Christ. Even when he became Christian, he was 
 unable to take any strong measures against idolatry (E. H., 
 ii. 6) ; and I think it possible that Kent in a large measure 
 relapsed. It is plain that London went back into heathendom 
 when Saeberht died. His three sons were all pagans, and the 
 wild disturbance they made in the church — crying out to the 
 bishop who was administering the Eucharist, " Why not give 
 us the white bread you gave to our father ? " — illustrates how 
 close the English world was then to Paganism, how little the 
 fear of Rome was in their hearts. 
 
 When we travel North we find much the same wavering 
 state of things. Eadwine of Deira was baptized, 12th April 
 627, with all his people, by Paullinus. When he died in 633, 
 a whole year passed by before Oswald came to the throne and 
 Northumbria slipped back into heathenism, but after Oswald's 
 accession the conversion of the country went on steadily. 
 Paullinus, it is true, had fled, but Oswald sent messengers 
 to the elders of the Scots who had baptized him when in 
 exile, and Aidan descended from lona to teach Northumbria. 
 At Lindisfarne his bishop's seat was set, and from that deso- 
 late rock he and his successors evangelised ISTorthumbria ; ^ 
 but in all the wilder and more inaccessible parts the people 
 long continued heathen. Meanwhile the half-and-half condi- 
 tion of England can be further illustrated by the story of 
 Eaedwald. Eaedwald, who was King of East Anglia till 
 about 627, had become a Christian in Kent, but on his re- 
 turn home his wife seduced him back to heathenism. Nev- 
 ertheless he made the best of both worlds ; for he set up 
 
 1 They went also through other parts of England before the Synod of 
 Whitby, but their chief work was in the North ; and it must always he remem- 
 bered, as one of the causes of certain elements in the Anglo-Saxon poetry of 
 Northumbria, that the religion of the North — that is, the greatest source of 
 popular emotion— came to the people through the Celtic character. 
 
192 EARLY ENGLISH LITEltATURE chap. 
 
 two altars in the same temple, one to Christ and another to 
 his gods. One of Baeda's contemporaries had seen these 
 altars when he was a boy. His son Eorpwald became a Chris- 
 tian, but was slain by a pagan,'tinder whom the province was 
 again heathen for three years. Then Sigeberht came to the 
 throne, who, having embraced the Christian faith in Gaul and 
 become a man of learning, made all East Anglia Christian in 
 the years between 631-634. 
 
 In 635 the West Saxons, who were confirmed pagans, re- 
 ceived the faith in the person of Cynegils their king, under the 
 influence and in the presence of Oswald, who took the West 
 Saxon " to son " at Dorchester, a town which for about forty 
 years was the ecclesiastical centre of Wessex. His son Coen- 
 walch was still a heathen on his accession in 643, but three 
 years later was baptized. He is the traditionary founder of 
 the great church at Winchester, a town which in after years 
 was the cradle of English prose ; and he secured Glastonbury 
 for England with all its venerable traditions and its names so 
 dear to after literature. In the meantime, Kent, under Ear- 
 comberht, son of Eadbald, had become altogether Christian. 
 This king, succeeding his father in 640, uprooted heathenism. 
 It took then forty-three years to make Kent, where the faith 
 was first preached, completely Christian. 
 
 In 653 the East Saxons, who had relapsed under those three 
 stormy young men, were brought back to the faith by Sigeberht 
 and by the preaching of Cedda ; but a pestilence breaking out 
 among them in 665, a great number of them restored the old 
 temples, but were reconverted — an unstable and fierce folk — 
 within the year. Five years, then, before Caedmon wrote, 
 heathenism had not been forgotten. This becomes still plainer 
 when we think of the state of Mercia during this time. Penda, 
 king of that province, came into lordship over it in 626. From 
 that date till 655, when he was slain, he fought with stern con- 
 sistency for the faith of his fathers — the terror and the admi- 
 ration of Middle and Northern England. The wars he urged 
 were, however, more political than religious. No persuasion 
 could change his faith, but he ceased to persecute the Chris- 
 tians. He did not even prevent the preaching of their faith. 
 He contented himself with sneering at those Christians who 
 did not live up to the commandments of -their God. His son 
 Peada, whom he made viceroy of the Sliddle Angles, became 
 Christian in 653 and introduced four Northumbrian priests into 
 his province. Penda did not stand in the way, but I cannot 
 help feeling that the old heathen suffered sorely when he felt 
 
XI CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE 193 
 
 his strife had been in vain. Two years after he was slain near 
 Winwaed, and on his death all Mercia became Chi-istian. Nine 
 years later (664) — a date always to be remembered — the 
 whole of Christian England came, after the Synod of Whitby, 
 into the Roman observance of Easter. The short career of 
 Celtic Christianity closed. It had lasted from 635 — a period 
 of twenty -nine years — and its spirit continued a little longer 
 in the persons of those bishops and priests of its race who, 
 choosing to stay when the others went back to Scotland, re- 
 tained their charges and conformed to the Roman custom. 
 Five years later (in 669-671) Theodore of Tarsus and Hadrian 
 of Africa came from Rome to England, the first to be Arch- 
 bishop of Canterbury, the second as his sub-deacon. These two 
 not only brought Greek learning to England ; they also began 
 Latin-Englilsh literature in the south, and we shall discuss 
 their work in its proper place. All we have to say here is that 
 with the arrival of Roman and Greek literature in England 
 any future development of purely heathen poetry received its 
 deathblow ; and that this blow was given over the whole of 
 England — for Theodore, before he died in 690, had welded all 
 England into one spiritual kingdom, in one National Church, 
 under one form of belief and practice. Now, when the Church 
 was one, one spirit began to pervade all literature. Yet it was 
 not till within four years of his death that we can say that all 
 England was Christian. In 681 the South Saxons were still 
 heathen to the number of seven thousand families, though their 
 king and some of his comrades had been baptized. These were 
 now delivered by the preaching of Wilfrid from the " wretched- 
 ness of eternal damnation." One small space of land yet ex- 
 isted in darkness — the Isle of Wight, a colony of Jutes. It 
 was conquered in 686 by Caedwalla of Wessex, and he handed 
 the place over to Wilfrid for evangelisation. That, then, is 
 the date in which the long strife, which had begun in 597, 
 between Christianity and heathenism, finally closed iu Eng- 
 land. It closed among all the upper classes, but among the 
 small farmers an.d labourers in the remote parts of the country, 
 in hamlets of the woods and moors, heathenism for a long time 
 retained its influence.^ For a still longer time heathenism and 
 
 iBaeda tells, in his Life of Cvthbert, chap, iii., how, when the boats bring- 
 ing wood to the monastery near the mouth of the Tyne were swept out to sea, 
 and the monks tried in vain to rescue them, the multitude of country folk who 
 stood on the shore mocked the servants of God, — they deserved, they said, to 
 suffer tliis loss, since they had left off the old ways of life. Cuthhert reproved 
 them, and they answered angrily, " Nobody shall pray for them ; may God 
 spare none of them ; they have taken away from men the ancient rites and 
 
194 EARLY ENGLISH LITEEATTJRE chap. 
 
 Christianity intermingled. Many men, like the bards, lived, 
 I think, in both worlds ; the rights and beliefs of either relig- 
 ion took one another's clothing ; the people reverted to heathen 
 practices and then back again to Christian in times of trouble ; 
 the laws right up to the time of Cnut are still " forbidding 
 heathendom, the worship of heathen gods, of sun and moon, 
 rivers and wells, fire, stones, and trees." 
 
 This account fully confirms the long contemporary existence 
 of Christian and heathen elements ; and during their mutual 
 ebb and flow there was a continual miagling and interpene 
 tration of Christian and heathen legend, of Christian and 
 heathen poetry which had its influence on literature. The 
 two worlds of song met and knew one another. Heathen 
 ideas and expressions entered into Christian poetry, and it is 
 possible that the heathen sagas and lays were penetrated by 
 some of the Christian gentleness. We cannot say how much 
 of this interpenetration was left behind in the whole body of 
 popular poetry of which we have no record, nor how much 
 has flltered down to us. At least, aS I shall proceed to show, 
 the whole body of popular thought and feeling, out of which 
 the unwritten poetry of the emotions arises before it is shaped 
 into a written form, was filled with the interwoven ideas of 
 Christianity and heathendom. 
 
 It would have been a pity, in the interests of Literature, if 
 the romantic elements of the old heathendom, especially those 
 which arose out of the personification of the savage or gentle ' 
 forms of the life of Nature, had been blotted out by Chris- 
 tianity. To have wholly lost the image of the dark, relentless, 
 and all-compelling Wyrd would have weakened the root of 
 imaginative poetry. To be no longer able to see the sun ' 
 hasting up the sky like an eager youth, or the moon building 
 her treasure-house in the topmost Burg of Heaven, to hear 
 no more the rustling sound — daegred-woma, — the " thrill of 
 Nature which precedes the dawn," to fear or cajole no more 
 the beings who moved in the storm cloud or drove the waves, 
 the creatures who dwelt in streams or trees, in wells, among 
 the gray stones of the moor, in the mist, and the secret places 
 of the waters — would have drained dry the river of the love 
 and awe of living Nature, which, long flowing only among the 
 uneducated people, has, at last, in these later days, risen to 
 the surface even of society, and still moves forward a fuller 
 
 customs, and how the new ones are to be attended to, nobody knows." If this 
 could be said at Tynemouth, what must have been said far inland in the 
 wilder parts? 
 
XI CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE 195 
 
 and a fuller stream in the Poetry of England. Our modern 
 passion for a soul in Nature is a recurrence to the original 
 heathen type. Myth incessantly revives in the poetry of 
 Nature, and the greater its recurrence the better is that kind 
 of poetry. In England these romantic, mythical elements 
 were, I think, preserved in better form than elsewhere. Tha' 
 long intermingling, the soft interchange of heathenism and 
 Christianity did not exile the captured deities, or utterly de-\ 
 stroy the old habits of worship, but took them into service, 
 gave them new names, and clothed them in Christian 
 garments. The great Nature-festivals of the heathen, Yule 
 and Eostra-tide, were now bound up with the birth and resur- 
 rection of Jesus Christ. The festival of Midsvimmer lasts 
 in many Christian observances. New Christian feasts were 
 made to fall on heathen holidays. A great part, then, of the 
 emotions of the past, of the pleasant rustic joy, of the ancient 
 poetic imaginations was retained in the new religion, and 
 made more permanent by the Celtic spirit in that religion. 
 Being retained, it became a continuous power in national sen- 
 timent, and therefore in all our literature. Nor did the new 
 Christianity let slip away the associations which belonged to 
 the time-honoured religious customs. The Church was built 
 where the heathen temple had been, and the people walked to 
 the shrine of Christ by the same well-worn path by which 
 they had sought the sacred enclosure of the god. Where 
 the consecrated tree had stood rose now the Holy Eood. The 
 groves, devoted to the Nature-god, became the groves of the 
 convent. The hills, the clear wells, the eyots in the river 
 which had been dedicated to heathen deities of flood .and field, 
 were now called after the saints and martyrs ; ' and the old i, 
 emotions were retained unimpaired, though the names were 
 changed. The minor gods and heroes which the various 
 wants of men had created to preside over and to satisfy those 
 wants were replaced by saints who did precisely the same 
 work. The personages were different, but the Polytheism, 
 with all its romance, remained. Even the nature myths were 
 often continued in the legends of the saints. Moreover, "laws 
 and usages," says Grimm, " ordeals and oath-takings, beating 
 of bounds, consecrations, image processions, spells and for- 
 mulas were clothed in Christian forms, but their heathen 
 character endured. The old was interwoven with the new." 
 Thus Christian stuff was heathenised, heathen stuff was 
 Christianised. 
 Again, what was gracious and beneficent in the doings of the 
 
196 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 heathen gods was kept in the Christian thought, but it was 
 now done, not by Frea (if the earliest English worshipped 
 Frea), or by goddesses who were kind to men, but by Jesus 
 Christ and the Virgin. On the other hand, the dark and dread- 
 ful elements of Nature, personified in giant and monster, were 
 not lost as poetry, but added to the conceptions of the devil and 
 i his harmful host, among whom were now included the Elves, 
 ' the wood creatures, and the dwarfs ; even all the gentle beings 
 \who, in old days, wished well to man, and who afterwards 
 emerged from this devilish connection into the kindly and trick- 
 some fairies. The Church grew sharper against the gentlehood 
 of heathendom as time went on. Up to about 800' aTd. piety 
 was, however, not importunate. But after that time the ancient 
 and nobler ancestor deities, in order to destroy their moral char- 
 acter, were all, by means of the transference of their attributes 
 to the devil, made hideous or absurd. Yet, though their moral 
 character was destroyed, what was poetic in their history lived 
 on in legends, or, in a better way, in a number of fantastic 
 words and images in common use among the people. 
 
 Another form of transference is seen in the case of the most 
 wjidespread of the heathen myths. The war of Day and Mght, 
 the still greater war of Summer and Winter, of the radiant 
 Sunny-Gods and the Erost-Giants, of the healing and harmful 
 powers of Nature — that war, which is one of the ever-endur- 
 ing roots of poetry, became now, in varied forms, the war be- 
 jween Christ and Satan, between eternal Light and eternal . 
 Darkness, between the Church and Heathenism, between the 
 Saint and his Tempter, between God in the Universe and the 
 'old Dragon who claimed the dominion over Earth and Air, — 
 but whatever shape the changes took, the original spirit of the 
 myth is preserved. Its poetry — the poetry of a fierce, advent- 
 urous, unending war, various as are the fates and characters of 
 men, shared in by all the spiritual powers beyond our world, a 
 battle in which Earth, Heaven and Hell were mingled, — the 
 mightiest Epic the wit and passion of men have ever conceived 
 — was not made less but-m««©-imiaginative by Christianity; 
 and the range of theMbjectwas exteMed. In this world-wide 
 war which transcended tiieTSGat^vafs-of tribe with tribe and 
 kingdom with kingdom, Jesus was the King, his Apostles were 
 the King's thegns, and so Were all the saints and martyrs, nay, 
 every one who fought against the Dragon. Satan is the great 
 foe whose seat is in the North before he falls into Hell. Hell 
 is the dark-Burg which Christ attacks. Heaven the light-Burg 
 to which he returns in victory. The supper of the Lamb is 
 
XI CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE 197 
 
 laid for his warriors in the great hall, amid the singing of the 
 Angels who are the poets of the battle. When the Apostles j 
 are celebrated, as they are in a poem in the Vercelli book, they 
 are heroes who go forth to war, and their work is told as if it | 
 were a Viking expedition. " Great proof of valour gave these ' 
 j3Ethelings ; far spread the might and glory of the King's ' 
 thegns over the earth. Bold in war was Andreas ; not tardy 
 was James, nor a laggard on the journey. Daring was the ad- 
 venture of Thomas in India ; he endured the rush of swords." 
 Simon and Thaddeus, "warriors brave in battle, valiantly 
 sought the Persian land ; not slow were they in the fight, in the 
 play of shields." Andrew in the Andreas is " the hero stout in 
 battle, the steadfast champion," even the "beast of battle" 
 (hilde-deor) , "the hero hard in war." These are a few expres- 
 sions out of many in which the heathen terms of war are trans- 
 ferred to the apostolic soldiers of Jesus. Eound about them 
 are collected their thegns, those who accompany them on mis- 
 sions ; and all the devotion which tied the thegn to his lord in v 
 heathen war, all the disgrace which befell the thegn who 
 was unfaithful, are transferred to the relation of the Apostles 
 to Christ, and of their followers to the Apostle and the Saint. 
 Nor was the war only in the present or the future, nor only 
 since the time of Christ. All the past since the beginning of 
 the world was filled with it. David, Moses, Noah, Adam 
 replaced the English demigods, and were their national heroes. 
 A trace of this is found in the genealogy of ^thelwulf as given 
 in the Chronicle. He is brought back from Woden to Sceaf, 
 and Sceaf is the son of Noah, born in the Ark, and Noah car- 
 ries the line back to Adam ; that is, the patriarchs become one 
 with the ancestral heroes. Even before time, when man was 
 not, this war that filled their imagination had prevailed, and 
 the battle in Heaven of Christ with Satan is described in Caed- 
 monic poems in much the same terms as the contest of Beowulf 
 with Grendel. Thus little of the imaginative passion of war 
 was lost to the Christian Englishman, and nothing of the wor- 
 ship of heroic and divine ancestors. The field open to their 
 warlike imagination was doubly expanded ; nor was it only the 
 , noble or the freeman who could join in this fight and find fame 
 in it, but all men and all women, no matter how common their 
 position or enslaved their work. \ 
 
 The central point of the war was the victory of Jesus, and : 
 round this, as well as the final finish of the war in the second | 
 coming of the King, the force of the poetry collected. Only J 
 one other point was as poetical. It was the beginning of the 
 
198 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 war in Heaven, at the time of the creation of man. That be- 
 ginning is treated, as we shall see, in the Genesis. The victory 
 of Christ and the Judgment are best done by Cynewulf. The 
 Incarnation and the Crucifixion are fully treated, but the Resur- 
 rection is scarcely touched in Anglo-Saxon poetry. That which 
 more attracted English imagination was the Harrowing of Hell, 
 the legendary event that followed the Resurrection, — and this, 
 with the return in triumph to the heavenly home, is described 
 in images such as belonged to heathen war and victory. In a 
 similar saga fashion the end of the war is described — the 
 Doomsday — the final overthrow of evil, the final victory of 
 righteousness. 
 
 The change, then, retained a good deal of the old poetic 
 elements. Nevertheless there was also a loss ; much perished 
 which we would gladly have kept. While, however, we mourn 
 the loss, there was also an equivalent gain. The poetry of the 
 past drew its elements only from war, Nature-myths and an- 
 cestral heroism. The new poetry or the new poetic feeling 
 drew its elements from the whole of human life, entered into 
 all the outgoings of the human heart, found its subjects in the 
 common doings of daily life. Christianity made all the life of 
 every man and woman interesting and impassioned from the 
 cradle to the grave. No one can read the Ecclesiastical History 
 of Baeda without seeing the truth of this statement. The book, 
 in all its stories, is steeped in poetic feeling. Religion, with 
 its ideals, laid its hands of awe or of love on men from the king 
 to the slave, and on all their relations one to another. It made 
 a country of which all were citizens by right ; it made a society 
 which knit together all classes into a union in which the various 
 kingdoms of England dissolved their differences and their wars. 
 It brought together all men in one relation; it filled those 
 doings of life which were common to all with one spirit. In 
 this fashion it expanded the whole world of feeling, and though 
 I cannot say that all these new elements were actually worked 
 out in Anglo-Saxon literature, yet the new acre of poetic work 
 was ploughed and sown, and the seed was afterwards to grow 
 into a great harvest. 
 
 The Cross was, at first, set up in every village, on every 
 noble's estate. At its foot the missionary stood — the preacher 
 from the Bishop's house or from the monastery — and said 
 mass and baptized and married and recited prayers for the 
 dead. Later on, when Theodore had established a priest in 
 every township or bundle of townships,* each of these had its 
 
 1 See Stubbs' Constit. Hist. vol. 1. p. 227. 
 
XI CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE 199 
 
 Church, and around it clustered all the main interests and 
 emotions of humanity. The dead were no longer burned, but 
 laid together in the acre of God. The wife and the husband 
 began their mutual life within the walls of the Church ; the 
 children were baptized inside its porch. The people maintained 
 it by their offerings, the affairs of the township were discussed 
 and ordered in its yard, at least wherever the Church occupied 
 the place where the folk-moot had been held. Thus that asso- 
 ciation of religion with all that was peaceful, with all the 
 beloved emotions of common human life, began, which has I 
 formed one of the great motives of poetry. Peace and its 
 powers were made poetical. We have seen how Cynewulf was 
 not ashamed to sing of all the doings of the farm, of the mer- 
 chant's life upon the sea, of the green grass and the singing birds. 
 Other subjects were also disclosed. The solitary life of the 
 hermit, the victory of the martyr over earthly force, the triumph 
 over temptation, the abjuring of revenge, the sacrifice of this 
 world for the world to come, the conquest won by faith and not 
 by arms, the little children who died for Jesus, the virgin life, 
 the surrender of wealth and fame for the sake of civilising men 
 — all these were a new world ; and it was the larger humanity 
 in Christianity which opened it to those who sang, and to those 
 who listened to and loved the singing. The range of poetry 
 was indefinitely extended. 
 
 Other figures also than those of men now passed over the 
 scene, and they were not only great queens or stormy-hearted 
 women, but lowlier and gentler creatures of the imagination. 
 Woman took an equal place with man in poetry, and the attri- '^ 
 butes which ennobled her were changed, at least were modified. 
 The sweet and tender grace, the humility and loving-kindness 
 of the Virgin, her maidenhood, her motherhood, became the 
 most vivid and beautiful image that filled the minds of men 
 after the image of Christ. More than half of the beginning of 
 Cynewulf's Christ is dedicated to her exalting. The saintly 
 women who in the days of martyrdom kept their chastity 
 against the tyranny of men and the threats of the Demon, like 
 Juliana whom Cynewulf sang, passed, like the ancient god- 
 desses who brought peace and protection to the faithful wife 
 and the good spinner, from land to land and became dear to 
 every household. When the shepherd, Eoves, in Bishop Ec- 
 gwine's legend, told that he saw in a forest glade fair women 
 singing a magic song and thought them, perhaps, heathen 
 haunters of the forest land, the Bishop saw in them a vision 
 of the Virgin Mother and angels, and in the spot where they 
 
200 EAELY ENGLISH LlTEEATtlRE cSap. 
 
 had sung rose the Abbey of Evesham. It was no longer 
 Choosers of the slaughter or Elf-women that rode in the-air 
 and shot deadly spears ; but figures of excelling beauty, clothed 
 in light, singing softly, took their place — the Angels of God, 
 whom Caedmon exalts and Cynewulf is unwearied in praising, 
 who brighten the pages of Baeda from legend to legend, whose 
 songs are not of war but of spiritual peace, and who recei\re the 
 warriors of Christ into the heavenly Hall and to the heavenly 
 banquet. The relations of women to men, which we have 
 seen honoured in Beowulf, and which played so large a part 
 in English policy and war while England was yet heathen, 
 received a fresh dignity in Christianity ; and this new source '■■ 
 of emotion produced many a poetic story. It increased the 
 material of literature. The double monasteries which after- 
 wards became the cause of scandal, were, while they kept their 
 first purity, the cause of tender and beautiful friendships 
 between grave men and holy women. The relations of Hild 
 and Aidan, of Ciithbert and iElfleda, of Cuthbert and Verca, of 
 Ealdhelm and the virgins whose praise he wrote and to whom 
 his letters are so gay, of Boniface and the nuns who wrote 
 to him so lovingly, were charming, full of grace and poetry, 
 though when the men were not Cuthbert and Aidan similar 
 relationships soon degenerated. The great Abbesses were great 
 folk in Northumbria. Heiu, who founded Hartlepool, was 
 noble, so was "Verca of Tynemouth. Hild, whom we know, 
 and Ebba, whose monastery at Coldingham, seated on its lofty 
 cape, rivalled its sister of Whitby ; ^theldreda who, amidst 
 the rushy fens, founded Ely on its emerald isle ; jElfleda, as 
 patriotic as religious, who finally brought peace to Wilfrid,^ — 
 were all princesses, powers in the state, with whom kings and 
 bishops had to count, whose advice was taken in great move- 
 ments, and whose lives, and all the legends which the emotion 
 of the people for noble womanhood collected round them, 
 became for centuries the material for ballad and song; but 
 more especially for that silent literature which is, as it were, 
 the background of the literature which is written — the popu- 
 lar emotion, the feelings of the mother and father and child 
 in hamlet and town, the memories and prayers in times of 
 distress and joy, which come together, like doves to their 
 
 1 There were many other of these royal and noble abbesses in Mercia and 
 Wessex, as well as in Northumbria, and those who would like to read their 
 legends, and to judge of the far-spread influence these had on the imagina- 
 tive material of literature, will find an enthusiastic account of them, written 
 with a strong monastic bias, in the fifth volume of Montalembert's Monks of 
 the West. 
 
xt CHKlSTlANlTY AUtb LITER ATtJEE 201 
 
 dwelling, to the names of the women who have consoled or 
 exalted the world. 
 
 These are the main lines of the changes wrought by Chris- 
 tianity in that inner life of imagination and sentiment which 
 collected round the gods and their worship. Other changes 
 which we may allot to the realm of history, rather than to 
 that of literature, will be found in other books. I turn now to 
 changes of another kind, to those which belong to that grave 
 and moral view of life which was as steady in the English 
 character in the days before, as in the days after Christianity. 
 There is a picture of this temper of mind in Baeda as well as 
 of the more worldly and gayer temper which in contrast it 
 often creates — even in the same person, a point continually 
 made in Hamlet — and the picture belongs to the heathen 
 time and heathen men. This picture is well known, but, even 
 if I did not need it as an illustration of literary matters, it is 
 in itself worth quoting as a piece of noble literature, done with 
 simplicity of touch and delicacy of outline. Each character 
 stands clear, and indeed there were men alive when Baeda 
 wrote it who had seen Paullinus and Eadwine ; and were, 
 likely enough, at the meeting he describes. 
 
 When, then, we read this story of the year 627, we look, 
 almost with the eyes of one present in the hall, into the judi- 
 cial thoughtfulness and dignified seriousness of our heathen 
 fathers. In the long-continued consideration Eadwine gave to 
 the question of a change of religion we have that very temper 
 ' which, in our poets, prevented English verse from being over- 
 whelmed by the esprit gaulois. When we listen to the speech 
 of the ealdorman, we have in it one of the motives of that 
 graver poetry which, amid war -lays and stories, existed among 
 the English before Christianity. On the other hand, the scene 
 contains some new elements which were soon to influence Eng- 
 lish literature. When we look on the aspect of Paullinus and 
 listen to his solemn question to the king, the religious awe 
 which accompanied Rome, the dignity of her great age and yet 
 her undiminished power, the emotion which grew solemn and 
 enthusiastic round the Church as the Voice of God on earth, 
 are placed before us; and we are compelled to estimate the 
 immense force these new feelings were destined to have in 
 literature. The very aspect of Paullinus is representative of 
 the keenness and power of the intellect of Rome. A personal 
 description, taken by Baeda from the lips of one who had seen 
 him face to face, brings the Latin monk before us. He was 
 "tall of stature, stooping, however, a little. His hair was 
 
202 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 black, his eyes vivid, his face thin, his nose slender and aqui- 
 line, and his air majestic and venerable." It was he who had 
 initiated the scene we are about to describe ; for one day he 
 entered the room where Eadwine sat alone, seriously ponder- 
 ing what religion he was to follow, as was his custom for hours 
 together — and, laying his hand on the head of the king, asked 
 him if he knew that sign. Then Eadwine, remembering a 
 vision which had come to him {Eccle.s. Hist. bk. ii. ch. xii.), 
 trembled, and said he would confer with his friends and redes- 
 men. Whereat he called them together in his hall with the 
 doors open east and west. To complete the scenery of the 
 event, we must remember that it takes place in the country, in 
 some rural seat of the king, near a knoll where stood a sacred 
 grove enclosed with a low hedge, and in the shady centre of 
 which was the tree round or near which the wattled Temple 
 was built, and on which was fastened the symbol of the gods 
 to whom the place was dedicated. 
 
 Near this grove, in the spring-time, the witenagemdt was held 
 by Eadwine which made Northumbria Christian, and two well- 
 marked types of Englishmen are vividly drawn for us in the 
 narrative. The first is that of the grave and experienced 
 Thegn — like the old warrior in Hrothgar's hall who remem- 
 bered the many questions he had asked in life, — and his 
 speech is entirely contradictory of the traditional notion of a 
 heathen Englishman. " The present life of man," he said, 
 ", seems to me, king, when we put it side by side in thought 
 with the life which is unknown to us, like the quick flight of 
 a sparrow through the hall when you sit at supper in the 
 winter-tide, with your Aldermen and Thegns, when a good fire 
 is burning in the midst upon the hearth, but without are the 
 storms of rain and snow. Then the sparrow, flying in at one 
 door and immediately out at another, is safe from the wintry 
 tempest as long as he is within ; but after this short tide of 
 pleasant weather he vanishes out of your sight into the dark 
 winter whence he had come. So is it with the life of man. 
 It is seen only for a moment, but of what went before it and 
 of what Cometh after it we know nothing at all. If, therefore, 
 this new teaching tells us anything more sure concerning it, it 
 seems to be right to follow its law." No Roman or Greek of 
 the dignified time could have expressed himself better or with 
 a milder wisdom, and Baeda thinks it was by a divine inspirar 
 tion that he and the others spoke on this matter. 
 
 This king then who sits wrapt up in musing for hours to- 
 gether at a crisis — as much political as religious in the history 
 
XI CHEISTIANITY AND LITERATURE 203 
 
 of his people — this grave assembly of warriors, considering 
 and speaking with poetic and anxious thought concerning the 
 change of their religion — are heathens of the seventh century 
 — and bear no resemblance whatever to the conventional por- 
 trait of the English chieftain and his folk that some historians 
 are so fond of painting. 
 
 As interesting, and just as modern as the Ealdorman, is the \ 
 character of the priest Goifi — a type of man who was sure to \ 
 have made in hall many bold songs. Baeda's sketch of him is 
 itself a piece of English literature. Coifi is the chief of the / 
 king's priests. He is the sceptic who has always had his I 
 doubts about the gods, who, if he serve them well, demands / 
 return from them like Jacob; who has no fear of them and I 
 counts his own individuality, like many a Norseman, to be as / 
 strong as any god. A rough gay humour, which we scarcely/ 
 ever find among the English Christians, a sturdy eye, also like/ 
 Jacob, to the main chance, belong to his character. He also is 
 a clear-hewn type ; but he, too, is a gentleman. He is asked, 
 first of all, what he thinks of changing the religion of the 
 kingdom. "0 king," he answers, "the religion we have had 
 up to this time has no virtue in it. Not one of your folk has 
 been more diligent than I in the worship of our gods, and yet 
 there are many who receive greater favours from you, and are 
 better off than I. Now, if the gods were good for anything, 
 they would rather forward me who have been so careful to 
 serve them. It remains, therefore, if the new doctrine be 
 likely to do more for us, that we immediately take it up." 
 
 Then, after listening to the old warrior's speech about life, 
 he changes from this tone, which is that of the humorous man 
 of the world, to a graver one. " I should like," he says, " to 
 hear Paullinus ; " and when he had heard him, he said, " I have 
 long thought that all we worshipped was naught, for the more 
 I sought for truth in that religion the less I found of it. But 
 in this preaching I find the gift of life and happiness for ever. 
 So my counsel is that we burn down those temples and altars 
 which we hallowed of old, but out of which we have got no 
 good." And when this bold speech was accepted, he declared 
 that he himself would profane the temple, and seizing a spear 
 and sword, and mounting a stallion — things unlawful for a 
 priest to do — he rode straight to the sacred grove, and, cast- 
 ing his spear into the temple till it stuck in the opposite wall, 
 commanded it to be burned with fire.^ In place of the temple 
 
 1 O nimlum tanti felix audacia facti, 
 PoUuit ante alios, quas ipse sacraverat, aras. 
 
 Alcuin, V. 186, De Pont. Ebor. 
 
204 EARLY ElifCtLlSS LITERATURE chap. 
 
 grew up, as usual, the Christian Church — the church of God- 
 mundingham — and tradition said that in it was preserved the 
 font in which Paullinus baptized Coifi. 
 
 iThe story illustrates the meeting of two faiths and the meet- 
 ng of two literatures. It is plain that men like the king, the 
 laldorman and Coifi, would hold it their duty to propagate the 
 new faith by the spreading of its hymns, but would not neg- 
 lect their own ancient songs when they dealt with heroes, not 
 with gods. The war-song then would last, but the worship- 
 song would perish. Bishop and priest would not interfere 
 with the first, but would passionately expunge the second. 
 They would be helped by the remarkable, almost unique 
 enthusiasm which, as we see from many a story in Baeda, the 
 English kings and nobles showed for Christianity ; and the re- 
 sult is that in no literature are the heathen gods so completely 
 cleaned out as they are in Old English literature. But the 
 other type — the heroic tales — continued. Ealdhelm may 
 have sung them on the bridge, Alfred had perhaps a book of 
 them, and the story goes that his mother sang them. Part 
 died, part survived, and when Christianity was securely estab- 
 lished in England, an effort was made, I believe, in Northum- 
 bria, to recover a great deal of what had been lost. While the 
 victory of the new over the old is still doubtful, the old is 
 hunted down; but when the kingdom of the new is firmly 
 fixed, then the new rediscovers what was excellent in the old 
 and often falls in love with it. I should not be surprised if that 
 was the case in Northumbria in the eighth century, and that 
 we owe to it the preservation of the heroic lays contained in 
 Beowulf. 
 
 Now I use this scene, full as it is of the grave and serious 
 temper of which I speak, to introduce and illustrate what I 
 have now to say concerning the elements which, making that 
 temper, appear in English literature, and of the change wrought 
 in them by Christianity. 
 
 There was first the belief in the Wyrd — the goddess wh6 
 presided over the fates of men, and who, as Englishmen 
 thought, was mostly against them, so that their life was a 
 heavy-weighted battle, and sorrow and weariness its chief 
 companions. The Gallic lightness, the Italian contentment, 
 were unattainable in the " welter of care " in which they lived. 
 Wyrd was hard upon them, but her work nourished a steady 
 fortitude in which they found a grim contentment. When 
 England became Christian, this deep-rooted faith, though 
 changed in form, continued. The very name of the goddess • 
 
XI CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE 205 
 
 was kept. But God was now put above destiny. " The Wyrds ' 
 change not God," says the Gnomic Verses. But for the most/ 
 part Wyrd passed into God and was used to express the Deity.j 
 " The Wyrd is stronger, the Lord mightier, than any man's 
 thought," is a phrase used in the Seafarer, and it might be 
 matched in many of the Anglo-Saxon poems. Then the con- 
 test with the ills which Wyrd allots to man, in the noble 
 doing and enduring of which honour was won, changes also its 
 aspect. We have seen the spirit which met the Wyrd in 
 Beowulf. 
 
 So shall eacli of us, e very-one abide the end 
 Of the worldly life ; let him win who may 
 Honour ere he die ! To the helmed warriors, 
 When their days are done, dearest afterwards is that. 
 
 Beowulf, 1. 1386. 
 
 A different note fills a parallel passage in the Seafarer — 
 
 So to every earl this the laud from after speakers, 
 
 This the laud from all the living, this the best of last words — 
 
 " That he worked and wrought, ere he went his way 
 
 On this earth with bold endeavour 'gainst the onset of the fiends 
 
 With his deeds of daring, right down upon the devil." 
 
 So his laud shall ever live among the angels. Seafarer, 1. 72. 
 
 The sadness, then, of destiny still remains, but it is now met 
 by the noble consolation of eternal holiness and peace in the 
 world to come ; and the temper of the best men and women, as 
 represented in early English poetry, is that of Eadwine and the 
 Ealdorman, careful, sorrowful, of quiet thoughtfulness, but no 
 longer grim. It is now mingled with faith and with a certain 
 triumph of joy. 
 
 Again, among the old sorrows which continued in Christi- 
 anity to brood over the English mind, none was deeper than 
 the passing away of the splendour and mirth and fame of men. 
 
 The note which we hear in the Prince's lay in Beoivulf is 
 repeated over and over again. It fills the Rime Song in later 
 times ; it is the subject of the Wanderer; it is imported into 
 the Seafarer; it is the subject of many moral verses ; it is the 
 frequent wail of Cynewulf in the personal' passages in his 
 poems. Even j3Elfred, full of work as he was, stays his practi- 
 cal advice to make this cry. But it is deepest in the North. It 
 has intensity in the poems of the Seafarer, the Wanderer. In 
 the later poems of Cynewulf, its greater intensity is' due, I con- 
 jecture, to their being written during the decay or the anarchy 
 of JSTorthumbria. At both periods men looked back on a time 
 of splendour and peace from a time of disorder and destruc- 
 
206 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 tion. Moreover, these passages are almost always put in the 
 mouth of one who either suffers or has suffered exile ; and the 
 personal sorrows of a man who has lost his home and his 
 country deepen the general regret.^ 
 
 Mingled with this sorrow there was the common regret for| 
 the loss of youth, for the death of old companions, and for thei 
 solitude of an old man's life. The Wanderer, in a poem ■whichi 
 is almost altogether heathen, thinks that he sees the troops of 
 his ancient friends coming to meet him, and he welcomes them 
 with joy ; but they are but phantoms and they fleet away, and 
 sorrow is renewed. 
 
 Then his mood goes moving on through remembrance of his kinsmen, 
 
 Greets them with glee-staves — gazes on them eagerly ; 
 
 These societies of souls swim away again. 1. 51. 
 
 All these heathen elements of grave sorrow were now changed 
 or modified by the Christian hopes. Cynewulf, for example, 
 feels, as he mourns for a ruined world, the same comfort which 
 a Christian hand has added to the poem of the Wanderer. Cry- 
 ing to the Cross for help, he says with all the pathos of Vaughan 
 and with much of his spirit, that few were the friends he had 
 left on earth ; that all the rest had gone from the joy of the 
 world to live with the High Father in his dwelling ; but he 
 waited the call from this fleeting life to unite himself to their 
 pleasure. 
 
 It was this consolation which changed the whole tone with j 
 which the English, in their grave and serious hours, spoke of 
 life, of its fates and sorrows, and it developed round it a new | 
 region of literature. Midst alt the passing of the world, the 
 changes and turbulence of war and fortune, one thing was 
 steady. " Well is it for him," says the later epilogue to the 
 Wanderer, " who seeks for the Father's grace, for comfort with 
 the Father in Heaven, where the Fortress for us all stands 
 sure." Nor was this the conclusion only of the monk. Baeda 
 gives instance after instance of kings and nobles, weary of wars 
 and change and policy, entering the monastic life to prepare 
 for the better light. The legend of Ine and his queen does not 
 stand alone, and it has enough truth in it to prove how deeply 
 this new sense of the eternal strength and splendour of the 
 world to come, in contrast with the passing of this world, had 
 settled into the English mind. In that high land also were 
 
 1 It ia remarkable that the Caedmonio poems are wholly free from this wail- 
 ing note. Those portions of them, if any, which belong to the seventh century 
 were written in a time of national pride ; those of them which were written 
 afterwards are supposed to belong to the time when Alfred had won his day. 
 
XI CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE 207 
 
 now dwelling all whom in life they had loved and whom they 
 longed to rejoin. The tie between monk and monk, between 
 anchorite and anchorite, between those who were soldiers in 
 the service of Christ, had all the closeness and honour of the 
 ancient bond of war-comradeship, and withal a deeper friend- 
 ship. A passionate eternity was in it, and the dying looked 
 to be received by those who had entered before them into the 
 other life. Cuthbert, living in his rocky nest at Fame, alone / 
 amid the wild sea, thought every day of Herbert his friend, 
 who in equal solitude lived on his isle in Derwentwater ; and 
 Herbert, who loved him as disciple loved his master, prayed 
 always that he might die on the same day as Cuthbert. Every 
 year they met for one day, and the last time, at Carlisle, Her- 
 bert asked that his constant prayer should be granted; and 
 the gracious legend, which Wordsworth has touched, records 
 that the friends passed away together. When Ceadda died in 
 672 the natural piety of the time made his brother Cedda 
 descend from heaven to meet and welcome him. " I know a 
 man," said Ecgberht (who had been in Ireland with Ceadda), 
 "who is still in the flesh, and who, when that bishop died, 
 saw the spirit of his brother Cedda descending from heaven 
 with a company of angels, and they took his soul with them 
 and returned back again to heaven," and Baeda, who tells the 
 tale (Book iv. 3), moved by the sweetness of the thing, believes 
 its truth. When Guthlac is dying, as Cynewulf writes, he 
 tells his disciple, " for the sake of the fellowship that they of 
 old had proved together, and lest he should after his death be 
 over-sorrowful," — the great secret of his life — his converse 
 at morn and even with a " glorious angel " ; and bids him seek 
 his sister, most beloved, and call on her to come and deck his 
 body with earth. " I saw her not," he says, " in life, not for 
 lack of love but for greatness of love — that we might see one 
 another in eternal joy when our love should be faithful for 
 ever." 
 
 These were new feelings to the English, and I do not think \ 
 that any one could have predicted that their tenderness and ; 
 grace were latent in the nature of our warlike forefathers. | 
 It is a wholly unexpected vein of feeling, added on to and 1 
 modifying the serious sorrow of their fatalism. Yet it is one 
 of the foundations of our literature. It is the ground tone of 
 a class of religious poetry which never quite failed in England, 
 and which has continued with its gentle, half joyful, half sor- 
 rowing sentiment to the present day. Now and then it was 
 traversed — so modern is early England — by troubled ques- 
 
 ^l 
 
208 EAELY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 tioning. " Mirk and mysterious is that other world. No one 
 returns from it to tell us of its secret ; " and the greedy way 
 in which the dreams of monks and laymen were seized on to 
 prove what was to be found beyond the earth is but the vulgar 
 form of the metaphysical doubt and trouble concerning that 
 undiscovered country which Cynewulf felt, and of which Ham- 
 let is the type in literature. 
 
 The sorrows of which I have spoken were common to heathen 
 and Christian times, but there was one sorrow which was en- 
 tirely new, and which created a new world of poetry. It was[ 
 the sorrow for sin, for a violent, sensual, or wasted life. Therel 
 is a well-known passage of Cynewulf's in which he laments his ' 
 Ipast, and which is the first utterance of that poetry of the , 
 regretful soul so much of which belongs to England, and in 
 which so many poets have represented their inmost personality ' 
 with a vividness which has endeared them to our imagination. 
 It is not so much the religion of it for which we care, nor in ; 
 which lies the poetry. It is the personal cry which has beenj 
 wrung out of them by their religion. The source of human; 
 love lies deep in our nature. But the source of this religious 
 passion lies deeper still, more profound than any plummet 
 sounds ; and when we hear its voice, we hear that which 
 lies at the very bottom of the abySs of personality. Here is 
 the cry of Cynewulf, and it is repeated in three or four differ- 
 ent places of his poetry with varying intensity. This, which 
 is the least poetical, is from the end of the Juliana, and I 
 translate it loosely ; the others I leave aside for a time, because 
 they belong more distinctly to his biography. The single let- 
 ters (they are runes in the original) are the letters of his name, 
 and it was his habit thus to riddle on his name. 
 
 Much need have I that this holy One should help me . . . when out of 
 my body my soul fares on its journey, I know not whither, to that undis- 
 covered shore. Mourning wander then C. Y. and N. Stern is then the 
 King, the Victory Giver ; and flecked with sins E. W. and U. await, with 
 anguish filled, the doom He shall allot to them according to their deeds. 
 L. and F. tremble ; troubled with cares they linger on. I think of all the 
 sorrow, all the wounds of sin that I in earlier and later life have wrought 
 within the world. Crying "Woe, woe," I shall bewail it all with tears. 
 Ear, far too late it was ere I shamed me of my evil deeds. . . . There- 
 fore I pray of every man, whoso may sing this song, that he may earnestly 
 bear my very name in mind, and ask of God that the Helm of heaven bring 
 me help, the King of Mights, on that great day ; the Father, the Spirit of 
 all comfort, in that awful tide. 
 
 When this personal voice is not heard in the religious 
 poetry, that poetry is extraordinarily dull, and the imaginar 
 
XI CHRISTIANITY AND LITEUATUEE 209 
 
 tion, if the pangs of hell are the subject, is paralysed. When- 
 ever that menacing subject arises, it chokes the literary 
 faculty, except the writer be one of those imperial creatures, 
 like Milton or Dante, who are able to make human passion 
 greater than human pain.^ Even Baeda, when he relates, and 
 with some gusto, the dreams of those who had visited hell, 
 seems to me to lose his style. 
 
 But it was different when triumph over sin and the lovely 
 world of heaven were described; and as the sorrow for sin 
 made a new world of poetry, so also did the rapture that fol- 
 lowed the conviction of redemption. Most of the images and 
 legends used to express this were common to Christendom. But 
 the English, like the Saxon writer of the Heliand, made this 
 triumphant joy national ; first, by using concerning it phrases 
 and thoughts borrowed from their heathen customs ; and sec- 
 ondly, by filling it with a distinctive English rapture, as dis- 
 tinctive as the English melancholy. And it became all the 
 more distinctive since it was expressed by Englishmen in their 
 native tongue. Elsewhere, being only expressed in Latin, it 
 had always, whatever the nation, a Koman note, a classic twang. 
 Elsewhere also this triumph and heavenly joy were sung by 
 monks, but the best of the poems of this class were written in 
 England by Oynewulf, who, as I think, never became a monk. 
 
 The triumph over sin was poetically concentrated into the 
 victory of Christ over Satan, and we shall meet hereafter many 
 examples of the delight and excitement with which the poets 
 celebrated it, and of the high and exultant Saga-form which 
 they gave to it.^ I content myself here with one passage from 
 the Christ in which Cynewulf concentrates the victoriousness 
 of Jesus, and which illustrates the early mediaeval love of sym- 
 bolism. T presume, but I do not know, that the six leaps of 
 Christ were a common homiletic explanation of a phrase in 
 the Smig of Solomon.'^ But the exultation of the poetry, the 
 applause of the Victor, appear in every line. He quotes the 
 text in this fashion — 
 
 '715. Known shall this become that the King of angels, 
 
 He of mights the very master, on the mount shall spring, 
 
 1 Ed ei s'ergea col petto e colla fronts, 
 Come avesse lo inferno in gran dispitto. — Inf. x. 
 
 So it was with Farinata, quell' altro magnanimo ; and so it is throughout the 
 hell of Milton. 
 
 2 See the Temptation in the Christ and Satan, the Descent into Hell, the 
 Christ, the Dream of the Rood. 
 
 3 " The voice of my beloved ! behold, he cometh leaping upon the mountains, 
 skipping upon the hills." — Canticleg ii, 3, 
 
210 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 O'er the lofty dunes shall leap ! Lo, the hills and knolls 
 Girdles He with glory of Him ; gives redemption to the world, 
 Unto all the earth-indwellers, through that leap exceeding praise. 
 
 The first leap was when he entered the spotless Virgin and 
 took the form of man. The second leap "was his birth when in 
 the bin he lay, of all majesties the majesty." The third leap 
 was the mounting of the Eood. The fourth was into the 
 rocky grave, when he left the tree for the earth-house. The 
 fifth was when he bowed the multitude of the dwellers in Hell, 
 and in quick torment bound their king. The sixth leap was 
 the Holy One's enraptured play when he stept up into Heaven, 
 to his ancient home, to his house of glittering light ; and the 
 angel bands were blithe with laughter and with joy upon that 
 holy tide. The glory of this Conquest, which became the 
 dowry of all sinners who, like Cynewulf, repented and loved 
 the Lord, was as consistent an element in Anglo-Saxon poetry 
 as the personal sorrow for sin. 
 
 Prayer and Praise became then two of the vital elements of 
 Early English literature. The piteousness of prayer does not 
 produce fine poetry except when it is exceedingly personal. But 
 praise can create poetry of a high quality. The very first up- 
 welling of English song, after Christianity had come, the dream- 
 beginning of our poetry, was an outburst of praise, and the same 
 note is sounded again and again in the Caedmonic poems. As to 
 Cynewulf, he excels in rushing praise, and the adjective is not 
 too strong to use for many of the passages in the Christ. Ea, 
 la ! he begins the soaring laudations with that double interjec- 
 tion, the sound of which lured his poetic ear. It was like the 
 shout of praise with which he could fancy the warriors of 
 the Lord went into battle. Indeed, this trumpet voice of the 
 heart belongs to the English nature, and the lofty music of 
 Milton's praise came down to him in legitimate descent from 
 the earliest exultation of English psalm. 
 
 Their loud, uplifted, angel trumpets blow 
 
 is a line which might have been written by Cynewulf. It was 
 first God as Creator whom they praised ; then, as I have said, 
 the victory of Jesus Christ; but with the tendency of the 
 Northern poets towards Nature, they often turned to praise 
 the creation of God and its beauty, and one of the favourite 
 forms of this was in the shape of a riddle. Ealdhelm, follow- 
 ing his original, had made a long riddle in Latin — I)e Greor 
 tura. This Cynewulf translates with his usual freedom and 
 
XI CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE 211 
 
 imagination.^ But, weary with a succession of phrases which 
 did not hit the point, and like a poet sick for finer form, he 
 flings all the force of his thought into another riddle, and con- 
 centrates into its ten original lines the meaning of the one 
 hundred and seven lines of his imitation of Ealdhelm. It is 
 a noble piece of praise. The Creation is supposed to speak — 
 
 Than this Garth of Earth I am greater far, 
 
 Than the hand- worm am I less, more wide-flashing than the moon, 
 
 Than tlie suh I'm swifter I All the sea-floods are 
 
 Folded in my arms, and the fields so green, 
 
 And the breast of earth ! Down to the abyss I cling ; 
 
 Under Hell I bow myself ; and the Heavens I overtop, — 
 
 Glory's Fatherland ! Far and wide I reach 
 
 O'er the Angels' own estate ; and the Earth I fill, 
 
 And the ancient Mid-Garth, and the ocean streams, 
 
 Spacious, with my Self. Say what I am called. Rid. Ixvii. 
 
 This is the universal grasp of the poet, and we may compare 
 with it lines written some thousand years later to express the 
 same conception — 
 
 A motion and a spirit which impels 
 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
 
 And rolls through all things. 
 
 But there was another poetic element introduced into the 
 North by Christianity which had far-reaching effects, and in 
 Northern England (helped as it was there by the instinct of 
 the Celtic blood for natural beauty) it stimulated a love of 
 fair scenery, and especially of quiet, gentle, summer-tempered 
 scenery. I have spoken of the desperate weather the North- 
 ern Englishman endured, and how, when the Viking temper les- 
 sened, he suffered from it and expressed his sufferings. He 
 had no escape from it in heathendom. He looked forward, if 
 he looked forward at all, to a world of deeper gloom, of darker 
 weather, than he endured on earth. The realm of Hel, the 
 death-goddess, was a world of sunless mists. The pain and 
 weariness of the fierce climate he bore upon earth was ex- 
 pressed in his poetry; it was expressed in a sadder fashion 
 when Christianity added to his hatred of it a more sentimental 
 
 1 1 give one Instance. Ealdhelm has one line concerning the Whale— 
 
 Grandior in glauois quam ballena fluctibus atra. 
 
 Cynewulf touches this with fire — 
 
 I am stronger, I am greater than the mighty whale, 
 Who upon the ground abyss of the grisly ocean 
 Looks with his black eye. 
 
212 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 way of looking upon life; and this cry against the wintry 
 world and the sutfering it brought, became one of the poetic 
 elements, as it is now, of English feeling. But it had naturally 
 another side. The pain created the desire to be free from it ; 
 the evil climate caused men to picture the fairer world. The 
 Jlignon feeling — that of the southern child lost in the bitter 
 north — who sings her own longing for the shores where 
 
 Ein sanfter Wind, vom blauen Himmel weht, — 
 
 that she may wake the same longing, and with it, love, in the 
 heart of him she loves — arose among the English, but with 
 a religious note in it, immediately after the introduction of 
 Christianity. 
 
 This desire, stirred by the iron climate of the North, for the 
 soft wind and blue sky, and warm sunlight, has also been a 
 fruitful source of English poetry. It appears first, but scantily, 
 as a pleasant delight in green grass and sunny streams and 
 flowers — a delight the origin of which we need not seek in 
 Christianity, for we may find it in the old Northern joy in the 
 coming of summer. But there is a contemplative quiet of 
 
 , pleasure, a note of differentiated tenderness in the following 
 passage of Caedmon which separates his poetic pleasure from 
 
 ' the mere exultation of heathendom in the coming of summer, 
 and which is much more marked in the Anglo-Saxon than it 
 can be in any translation. The words are soft, and softly 
 linked together. He is describing Paradise — 
 
 Winsomely the running water, all wellsprings that be, 
 Washed the happy lands ; nor as yet the welkin 
 Bore above the roomy ground all the rains that are 
 Wan-gloomed with the gale ; yet with growing blooms 
 Was the Earth made fair. Genesis, 1. 210. 
 
 Again, in the Song of the Three Children, the original text is 
 expanded to describe the pleasure the translator had in the 
 waters that fell from the pure rock — 
 
 Lord Eternal, all the river springs, 
 
 Laud Thee high exalted ! Often lettest Thou 
 
 Pall the pleasant waters, for rejoicing of the world, 
 
 Lucid from the hiU-clifts clean. Amrias, 1. 134. 
 
 Nor did Cynewulf think less of streams than the writers of 
 the Caedmon poems. The Phoenix finds its happiness "in 
 the bubbling streams that run through the woods," in the. 
 " fountains that well upwards in the glades through the soft 
 gward," 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE 213 
 
 This love of the gentler aspect of Nature, though nurtured 
 by Christianity or by the temper of mind that Christianity 
 created, does not seem in England to have wholly arisen in 
 mouasticism. The Irish preferred to establish their monasteries 
 in the savage lands, or built them near the lonely caves or huts 
 which the anchorite hollowed for his retreat in the most deso- 
 late places he could discover. Columba sought, when he reached 
 Scotland, a lonelier and yet lonelier isle. He handed on this 
 feeling for savage places to the English of Northumbria. 
 Nothing could well be more wild than the height of Whitby 
 or the rocks of Lindisfarne. Cedda chose to place the monas- 
 tery where he died " among craggy and far-off mountains, re- 
 treats as of robbers and wild beasts." It is then in spite of 
 this Celtic severity that we find the love of quiet and gentle 
 nature among the English. Baeda's history has a few touches 
 which suggest and confirm this statement. The traveller who, 
 passing over the battlefield at Maserfeld, observed one spot 
 greener and more beautiful than any other, and justly concluded 
 that this arose from some person of unusual holiness being 
 buried there, was one who had a wise and seeing eye. There 
 Oswald's blood was shed, and the gentleness of his dying cry 
 was well symbolised by the softer, greener grass. This is but 
 a slight touch, and perhaps to use it in this fashion is to over- 
 strain the passage, but there are enough phrases in Anglo- 
 Saxon poetry to prove what I say. f Serene," cries Cynewulf, 
 describing the view from the hill where Guthlac lived in her- 
 mitage, and forgetting the desolation of the lonely island, "was 
 the glorious plain, fresh his dwelling-place, sweet the song of 
 birds, blossoming the earth, and the cuckoos announced the 
 year. In guard of God stood the green plain, for God loved 
 all that He had shaped under the Heaven." "All the birds," 
 for Guthlac was, like Francis, tender to the fowl, "rejoiced in 
 the food he gave them," flitting to his hand for refuge, singing 
 praises to him in their song ; and when he dies, Cynewulf can 
 find no better image of the sweet odours that came from his 
 mouth than this : " Such fragrance as in summer's tide blos- 
 soming plants, honey-flowing and rejoicing, send forth over 
 the wide plains." The fragrance of the woods was one of the 
 common pleasures of the English poets. The perfume of the 
 panther's breath — the panther is here the symbol of Christ — 
 " is sweeter and stronger than the blooms of plants, and than 
 the flowers of the trees." 
 
 The same delight in the tenderer offices of Nature is seen in 
 the translation of the passage in the Song of the Three Children, 
 
214 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 where the coming of the angel of the Lord into the oven is thus 
 translated in our version : "He smote the flame of the fire out of 
 the oven, and made the midst of the furnace as it had been a 
 moist whistling wind." The Anglo-Saxon poet turns it thus — 
 
 Then 'twas in the oven when the angel came 
 Windy cool and winsome, to the weather likest 
 When is sent to earth in the summer tide. 
 Dropping down of dew-rain at the dawn of day. 
 
 Azarias, 1. 61. 
 
 In the Daniel the same passage is translated, but another 
 aspect of Nature is added to it. The angel's coming makes 
 the fire like a "warm shower from the clouds." But this is 
 not all. The original comparison charmed the English poet, 
 and he has inserted it elsewhere, but again he changes it, and 
 makes it still more poetical. It was within the fire for them, 
 as when — 
 
 In the summer tide shining is the sun, 
 
 And the elf -enchanted i dew, at the dawning of the day, 
 
 Winnowed is by wind. Daniel, 1. 276. 
 
 These are passages full of a mild savour of contemplative 
 pleasure in Nature, such as we neither find in the heathen 
 poems, nor in Icelandic verse. They have a quality of their 
 own, like Jacques' melancholy, and they lead us on, like many 
 other elements in Anglo-Saxon poetry, to the feeling of the 
 nineteenth century, to the sentiment of Wordsworth and 
 Tennyson. 
 
 As to the longing their fierce climate gave them for a warmer 
 and brighter land, it appears most fully in the delight of the 
 poets in the Christian conception of Paradise. Nowhere is 
 this clearer than in the famous passage in the Phoenix. There 
 Cynewulf, if it was he who wrote that poem, has let loo^e all 
 his pleasure in soft air and lovely scenery. The thirty Latin 
 lines on which he worked are cold in comparison with the 
 eighty-four verses into which he e.xpands them. It seems as 
 if he could not stay his hand till he had wholly forgotten in 
 his dream the icy seas and the fierce storms, the misery' and 
 might of which he has also told so well. The Elysian fields of 
 Homer and Virgil, the Sicily of Theocritus, the Earthly Para- 
 
 1 And deSw-drias on daege weor'Se'S 
 Winde geonds§.vveu. 
 
 I was so pleased with "elf-enchanted dew," which is Dietrich's suggestion, 
 that I put it into the translation; but dedw-drias really means, I imaeine. 
 nothmg more than " the dew-fall." 
 
XI CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE 215 
 
 dise of Dante, the Eden of Milton, the lovely country where 
 in Shelley's poem Asia and Prometheus wander, are not ill- 
 paralleled by this English poem of tbfe eighth century. Chris-- 
 tia,nity created it in the English heart, and as such I give it in 
 this chapter. But it is a parallel only in its enjoyment of its 
 subject. Its poetry does not approach that of these masters of 
 song. The man who wrote it sought by repetition, not by con-, 
 centration, to express what he saw in his soul, and this is the 
 weakness of all Art at its origins, as in its decay. This is 
 the passage — 
 
 1. Ear away from hence, I have heard it told — 
 Of all lands the nohlest is, in the Eastern parts ; 
 Known to folk by fame ; yet that fold i of^arth 
 Unto few of the folk-owners faring over Midgard, 
 Easyof access IS ; but is far withdrawn 
 From the men who mischief make by the might of God I 
 All the land is lovely ;• with. delights made happy, ' 
 With the very sweetest of the scents of earth. 
 Onely 2 is that island, setheling its maker, 
 Mighty and majestic, who its mbuld has set ! 
 To its blest indwellers oft the door of heaven 
 
 10. There is clear disclosed, clear the joy of hymns ! 
 
 Winsome is the wold 3 there ; ', there the wealds are green, 
 Spacious spread below the ski^s ; there may neither snow nor rain. 
 Nor the furious air of frost, nor the flare of fire, 
 Nor the headlong squall of hail, nor the hoar-frost's fall, 
 Nor the burning of the sun, nor the bitter cold. 
 Nor the weather over-warm, nor the winter shower, 
 Do their wrong to any wight — but the wold abides 
 Ever happy, healthful there. Honoured is that land. 
 All ablown with blossoms. Not abrupt the mountains : 
 Steep the hills stand not, and the stony cliffs 
 Are not high upheaved, such as here with us they are I 
 Nought there is of dells and dales, nor of deep rook-gorges, 
 Heights or hillocks rough ; nor hangs over there 
 Any unsmooth thing, but the noble land 
 
 27. 'Neath the welkin waxes with its winsome joys ablown. 
 
 33. Calm and fair this glorious field, flashes there the sunny grove ; 
 Happy is the holt of trees, never withers fruitage there. 
 Bright are there the blossoms ; and the (bearing trees 
 Stand forth ever green in it, as ordainfed God to them. 
 
 J Sceat, that which is folded over, as we say, a lap of the land. 
 
 " Sidney uses this word " onely" (aereh'c), and I use the word setheling here 
 as an adjective — that is, nohle. 
 
 3 Wong is the word I have translated " Wold." " Wold " has nothing ^hilo- 
 logically to do with it, but it means much the same. Had not wong been too 
 obscure to be introduced into modern English I would have used it, for it still 
 exists in English dialects. In Lincolnshire it means a marsh, a lowland. Else- 
 where it has its Anglo-Saxon meaning of a meadow, a plain, an open space. 
 
216 EARLY ENGLISH LITEKATURE chap. 
 
 In the winter, in the summer, is the wood alike 
 Hung with blossomed boughs. Never breaks away 
 Leaf below the lift, nor shall low of fire scathe them 
 Through the ages ever till the end shall be 
 40. For the world accomplishM. . . . 
 
 50. In that home the hating foe houses not at all. 
 
 Nought of vengeance nor of wailing, no woe-token ever. 
 Nor the narrow death, misery nor Eld, 
 Nor the loss of life, nor of loathly ill the coming ; 
 Nought of strife or sin, nought of sorrow-soreness, 
 
 Nor the wretohlessness of want, nor of wealth the needing ; 
 Neither sleep nor sadness, nor the sickman's weary bed, 
 Nor tie winter-whirling snow, nor the wax and wane of tem- 
 pests — 
 Roughly storming under skies — nor the savage frost, 
 With his chill cold icicles, crushes down the folk 1 
 There no hail or hrime hurtleth down to earth ; 
 Never vapours full of wind, nor rain-water falleth, 
 Lashed the lift about i — but the liquid streamlets. 
 Wonderfully beautiful, from their wells upspringing, 
 Softly lap the land with their lovely floods. 
 Winsome are the waters from the woodlands' middle 
 Which, at every moon, through the mossy turf of earth, 
 Surge up cold as sea-foam; seek their path around the trees 
 Gloriously, from time to time ; — for 'tis God's behest 
 That the mirth of river floods, every month that goes, 
 All about the fame- fast land should o'erflow in play! 
 There with gladsome growths all the groves are hung, 
 With the (wildwood) blossoms. Never wither there, 
 Hallowed under heaven, of the holt the lovelinesses ! 
 Never there the fallow foliage falls upon the earth, 
 Paimess it of forest trees ; full of beauty are 
 Evermore the branches, bent adown upon the trees. 
 With a fruitage always fresh, fadeless day by day ! 
 On the grassy plain, stands in green array 
 Brightest-gleaming of all groves, gloriously enclad, 
 Through the craft ^ of Holy God ! Never change is there 
 In the beauty of the holt ; there its holy fragrance 
 Wons above the winsome land ; nor is waning known 
 Ever through the ages, till the end He brings 
 To the ancient work of old who erst its making had. 
 
 Phoenix, 11. 1-84. 
 
 The writer of these verses had lost his youthful unconscious- 
 ness in art, and, in endeavouring after his Latin original, was 
 not himself quite free; yet his natural originality breaks 
 through his convention. His work is scattered, but he has tried 
 to give it some unity by the use of a refrain. It is also full of 
 
 1 Or lashed by the air, by the wind. 
 
 2 I use cra/t in all these translations with its old meaning of power. 
 
XI CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE 217 
 
 repetition, but the repetition is but another instance of the pleas- 
 ure with which the Northumbrian poet dwelt on that aspect of 
 natural scenery and soft air which the Christian vision of Eden 
 afforded him when the bitter weather froze his bones. More- 
 over, though the thoughts are repeated, the words used in the 
 repetition are different; and different words, I have already 
 said, for various phases of the same natural phenomenon are a 
 proof that the people and the poet who use them are close and 
 affectionate observers of Nature. I repeat the statement in 
 connection with the subject of this chapter. The poetry of 
 natural description, already slightly touched in Beowulf, was 
 developed to a much greater fulness under the influence of 
 Christianity. It is a very remarkable and uncommon thing 
 that, at this early time, such a poetry should have existed at 
 all ; that the doings of Nature should have been made, by delib- 
 erate choice, a separate subject of song. This owes its origin, 
 I think, partly to a special strain in the nature of the Northern 
 English, the cause of which I cannot render definite ; partly, I 
 believe, to the reading of Virgil. It was, no doubt, strength- 
 ened by an admixture of Celtic blood. "Whatever its origins, it 
 is of extraordinary interest when we consider that in the Euro- 
 pean poetry of the last 150 years there has been no growth of the 
 poetry of natural description so varied or so complete as that 
 which arose into flower in Great Britain. In Germany that 
 poetry was fairly wrought, but it was not, at the beginnings of 
 this century, as full or of so great a range as ours, nor is it now. 
 In France, that poetry has been, of late years, extensive, tender, 
 and minute, but in the fulness of this we preceded France ; and 
 I may perhaps he allowed to trace our quicker seizure and 
 more finished development of the subject to the fact that the 
 root of the matter was in us more than a thousand years ago. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 MONASTICISM AND LITEKATUEB 
 
 The monastic life, so largely developed in England both by- 
 Celtic and Latin Christianity, increased the force of some of 
 the literary elements on whieh I have dwelt in the last chap- 
 ter, added others, and brought to the help and adornment of 
 literature new arts, and new forms of human life. Moreover, 
 it enlarged the material of literature by producing a literary 
 class and by the collection into libraries of the literature of 
 the past. It founded the literature of History, Ehetoric, and 
 Philosophy. It established schools. Laymen attended them, 
 and it actually created in this fashion, and for a time, a small 
 literary class of laymen in Northumbria. By means of the 
 unity, which, independent of diverse nationalities, knit to- 
 gether the monasteries, monasticism opened to Englishmen 
 Rome, Ireland, and the Continent. New thoughts, new scenes, 
 new views thus entered into the life of thought in England. 
 The pilgrimages which it encouraged did the same kind of 
 work ; and the movement to and fro of the missionaries whom 
 England sent out to the Teutonic lands brought her into con- 
 tact again with the original spirit which informed her poetry, 
 and strengthened that spirit. It is worth while to briefly 
 develop these various points, and to bring them, however di- 
 verse they may be, into as united a form as possible. 
 
 First, those emotional habits of daily life, of custom and 
 I thought on which I have dwelt in the last chapter, and which 
 form, as it were, the ground-ooze of poetic literature, grew into 
 a special charm in English monastic life. There was added to 
 them a religious tenderness, a fuller love of quiet beauty, an 
 imaginative heavenliness, which our sacred poetry has never 
 lost. That charm is seen most clearly in the writings of Baeda. 
 It runs like a sweet clear stream through the stories he tells of 
 holy men and women who, while yet alive, heard celestial 
 sounds and saw their convent gardens, the woods and moors 
 218 
 
CHAP. XH MONASTICISM AND LITERATURE 219 
 
 and starry heavens irradiated by the " solemn troops and sweet 
 societies " of the angels. A history of literature is bound to 
 quote one of these tales,' itself a lovely illustration of the tem- 
 per I am describing, and told with an ideal grace and innocent 
 simplicity which arise out of Baeda's own delight in that of 
 which he speaks, i 
 
 When Ceadda, bishop of the Mercians, was near the hour of 
 his death, it happened that a monk, whose name was Owini, 
 was employed in the garden of the monastery at Lichfield, and 
 became aware of a strange thing. The bishop was alone, read- 
 ing or praying in his oratory, when on a sudden Owini " heard 
 the voice of persons singing most sweetly and rejoicing, 
 and the sound seemed to come down from heaven. And he 
 heard the voice moving from the southeast, but afterwards it 
 drew near to him, till, coming to the roof of the oratory where 
 the bishop was, it entered therein and filled it. Owini listened, 
 all attent, and after the space of half an hour the same song 
 of joy ascended from the roof and returned to heaven with an 
 inexpressible sweetness. While he stood astonished, turning 
 seriously in his mind what this might be, the bishop opened 
 the window of the oratory, and clapping with his hand as he 
 was wont to do, bade him come in. ' Make haste to the church,' 
 he said, ' and cause.the seven brothers to come hither, and do 
 you come with them.' When they were at hand he admonished 
 them to keep the virtue of peace among themselves and towards 
 all, and to be careful to practise the rules of regular discipline." 
 ..." And then he said, ' The time of my death is at hand, 
 for that amiable guest who was wont to visit our brothers has 
 vouchsafed also to come to me this day and to call me from 
 the world. Return, therefore, to the church and speak to the 
 brethren, that they recommend in their prayers my journey to 
 the Lord ; and be careful also (for the hour is uncertain) to 
 provide for their own, by watching and prayer and good works.' 
 When he had spoken thus much and more, and they, having 
 received his blessing, had gone away in sorrow, he who had 
 heard the heavenly song came back alone, and, kneeling on the 
 ground, said, 'I beseech you, Father, that I may ask a question 
 
 1 No history of poetic literature would be in any sense complete which did 
 not draw special attention to the stories contained in the Ecclesiastical History 
 and in the Biographies of Baeda. I have quoted one of them above, in order 
 to ask those who care for fine literature to read them all. I wish they were col- 
 lected separately. I think it would be an admirable thing if some Anglo-Saxon 
 professor were to put them into Anglo-Saxon and make a little reading-book 
 out of them; or were to isolate them in their original Latin, and give them to 
 the Class to reproduce in the manner of the later Anglo-Saxon of the Chronicle. 
 
220 EAELY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 of you.' — ' Ask what you -will,' answered the bishop. Then 
 he added, ' I entreat you to tell me what song of joy was that 
 which I heard coming upou this oratory, and after some time 
 returning to heaven ? ' The bishop answered, ' If you heard 
 the singing, and know of the descent of the heavenly company, 
 I command you, in the name of our Lord, that you tell it not 
 to any before my death. These were angelic spirits who came 
 to call me to my heavenly reward, for the which I have always 
 longed ; moreover, they promised to return seven days hence 
 and take me with them.' " 
 
 This is but one of many tales, full of so heartfelt a har- 
 mony of feeling and style, that it is impossible to ignore them 
 as one of the original sources of English religious poetry. 
 This sweet and well-bred gentleness, this religious fervour, 
 with its tender supernaturalism, its natural dignity, its grave 
 seriousness of life, and its quietude in death, added new and 
 special elements to the Sacred Song of England, which, con- 
 tinued up to the present day, is not excelled in the world for 
 its variety and depth, for the passion of its sadness and joy. 
 
 The romantic tone added to it by the Celtic missionaries 
 
 ministered still further to its endurance. Our island religion 
 
 — at least in the home of poetry in the North — was first 
 
 made by the Irish, and was deeply tinged by their nature. 
 
 Owing to their influence, a more changing colour was given to 
 
 the religious life, a greater spirit of adventure pervaded it, a 
 
 freer and more passionate daily life entered into it. More- 
 
 I over, the life the Irish missionaries led and the spirit they 
 
 I imposed on religion were alike romantic. These things have 
 
 ] been one of the powers of our literature — one of the fires 
 
 ' which have burnt in it down to the present day. 
 
 We can trace these romantic roots of poetry and the sub- 
 jects of poetry in the lives of the evangelisers of Northumbria. 
 They were the eager bringers into life of an imaginative, 
 richly-coloured, natural music. They filled with poetry pop- 
 • ular religious emotion. Aidan, with his gentleness and fire 
 thrilled the land he converted. We may even claim the life 
 of Columba as another influence in the same direction, for 
 after his death his romantic soul touches from afar the hearts 
 of English kings. Oswald, who had been in exile at lona, felt 
 all through his life the spirit of the founder of lona. The 
 legend runs that on the evening before the battle of Denises- 
 burn, Columba (now dead for thirty-six years) appeared to 
 him, and stretched his glittering robe over the little army, and 
 cried, " Be of good courage and play the man. Join battle at 
 
MONASTICISM AND LITERATURE 221 
 
 the dawn. I have won victoiy for yoii from God, and the death 
 of the tyrants." But the ideal example of this influence is 
 Cuthbert, and the best also to take, for he was not, like Aidan, 
 a Scot, but an Englishman. His very birthplace is one of the 
 homes of our romance, for he grew up on the Lammermoor, in 
 the country of Tweed and Teviot, and kept the flocks of his 
 master on the sheep walks of the Leader. He is bound up 
 with Aidan, as Elisha was with Elijah ; for as he was watch- 
 ing the sheep one night in the starry silence he saw Heaven 
 opened, and a host of angels descend on a stream of light, and 
 fly upwards again with a resplendent soul. And he knew 
 afterwards, it is said, that this was Aidan who had just died 
 at Lindisfarne. At fifteen years old, the story runs, he came 
 to Melrose on his horse, like a young warrior, spear in hand, 
 and with an attendant rider, and the picture is like a ballad. 
 No life could be wilder, more impassioned than the missionary 
 life he then undertook, roving from one lonely hamlet to 
 another among the pathless fells, living in the open air from 
 glen to glen, lighting the desolate country with "his angel 
 face," preaching to English and Celts, redeeming them from 
 the remnants of heathenism. For weeks, for months, he was 
 away from the. monastery, going from the Forth to the Sol way, 
 even piercing northward into the land of the Picts.' 
 
 Then the anchorite spirit seized him, and he prayed on the 
 dark nights beside the icy waves, and the otters or seals came 
 out of the water, moved with pity, to lie over and to warm his 
 feet, a story which clung to the popular memory. All through 
 his life he had pleasant doings with the animals, as many 
 others had among the early English saints. Cuthbert, in this 
 relation, is the St. Francis of England ; and it is agreeable to 
 -think, and may have more in it than mere fancy, that the love 
 of Walter Scott and Burns — lowlanders like Cuthbert — for 
 the poetry of animal life had a far-off origin in Cuthbert's 
 affectionate regard for birds and beasts — creatures who, he 
 thought, served 'God, and ought to love God's minister. To 
 the birds who wasted his barley on Fame he spoke, appealing 
 to their honesty not to injure that which belonged to another; 
 yet they might take the corn, he said, if God had given them 
 
 1 The wandering missionary bearing tlie Gospel from land to land carries on 
 into Christian times, and Is in full analogy with the wandering Scop bearing 
 his sagas from hall to hall. The bishops, like Ealdhelm, who preached from vil- 
 lage to village, brought to the people, by the stories and parables in their ser- 
 mons, even by the old songs they did not disdain to sing or to make in English, 
 something of what we may call literature. The sermon was often the success- 
 ful rival of the War Tale. 
 
222 EARLY ENGLISH LITEBATUEE chap. 
 
 leave. One day, hungry and in a waste place, an eagle killed 
 a fish for him. His boy brought him the food. But Cuthbert 
 reproved him. " What have you done, my son ; why have you 
 not given part to G-od's handmaid ? Cut the fish in two 
 pieces, and give her one, as her service well deserves." Two 
 ravens that lived on the rocks of Fame pulled out the 
 thatch of his hut to build therewith their nest. He reproved 
 them, and they fled away in sorrow. At the end of three days 
 one returned, and spread out his wings and bent his head most 
 piteously, asking pardon by his gestures of Cuthbert who was 
 digging in his field. And the man of God gave them leave to 
 return, the which both of them did, and brought a large piece 
 of hog's lard with them, with which Cuthbert always greased 
 the brethren's shoes ; and for many years in all humility, peni- 
 tence, and peace, the ravens dwelt with him in Fame. As 
 I write this, I think of the Spirit which fills the Ancient Mar- 
 iner of Coleridge. 
 
 But he was not as yet living in this lonely island. It was 
 after years passed at Melrose, at Eipon, at Lindisfarne and in 
 his frequent journeys, that, wearying for loneliness with God, he 
 came at last to Fame, an island opposite Bamborough, cease- 
 lessly swept by the winds and waves of the fierce sea. There 
 he lived a happy, and, when he was visited, a hospitable life 
 for nine years (676-684). Made bishop then of Lindisfarne, 
 he carried, as before, his poetic spirit and the peace of God 
 over the whole of his wild diocese in incessant journeys. 
 When, worn out, he went back, after two years to die at 
 Fame, his last breath was drawn in the midst of the quiet sea, 
 and the bells of Lindisfarne answered the waving candles of 
 Fame which told his brethren on the mainland that their mas- 
 ter had departed (687). This was a romantic life, and it sank 
 deep into the hearts of the English people. One beautiful 
 story after another is told of his tender, passionate, daring, 
 and childlike character. Women loved him well in all hon- 
 our and noble friendship. His life has been called unevent- 
 ful, but the spirit of it was more longlived than the memory 
 of all the wars and policy of his time. Northumbria chose 
 him for patron. Every valley and fell loved his memory. He 
 gathered round his bones a host of the relics of noble English- 
 men. The head of Oswald lay on his breast ; the bones of the 
 bishops Aidan, Eadberht, Eadfrith, ^thelwold, the head of the 
 most glorious Ceolwulf, and the relics of Baeda, rested with 
 him in his cofiin. The kings of England paid him homage. 
 He edged .^Elfred's falchion on the Dane, and the Norman 
 
xn MONASTICISM AND LITERATURE 223 
 
 Conqueror honoured him. The great rock of Durham, resting 
 on tiie curved arm of the Wear, received his bones ; the solemn 
 cathedral rose, and the vast bishopric grew into its power 
 under the protection of his name. The battle of the Standard 
 was not unconnected with the insult offered to his lands. It 
 was under his banner, " the holie corporax cloth " with which 
 he covered the chalice, that David II. was beaten at Neville's 
 Cross in 1346. It is said that Surrey carried the sacred talis- 
 man to riodden, and that the Northern earls upraised it in 
 the futile rising of 1569. That sad history drew the pen of 
 Wordsworth, so that Cuthbert, not only in the eighth, but in 
 the nineteenth century, not only in Baeda, but in Walter Scott 
 and Wordsworth, has been the subject or inspirer of literature. 
 Romance, intensity of character, variety of life, impulsive 
 change, a deep humanity, the resolute consistent force of a 
 man, the sentiment and tenderness of a woman, make up an 
 image which has sent its influence throughout English litera- 
 ture from his day unto our own. In lives like this of Cuth- 
 bert — how different from the ordered, but no less useful, lives 
 of the Eoman missionaries, — lies one of the chief impulses of 
 song in early times. Now the whole of Northern England, 
 which became the special home of poetry, was subject, and far 
 more than Mercia, to the quickening impulses of many men of 
 this kind, of whom Cuthbert is the type. They took the place 
 of the saga-heroes among the people, poetry collected round 
 them, and in their legends took a Christian form. Their lives 
 sent down the materials of poetry from century to century. 
 It would be well if English literature looked far more than it 
 has yet done to the primal rock from whence it was hewn. 
 
 On the other side from this wandering life was the retired 
 and workful stillness of the monastic scholar ; not the inspirer, 
 but the producer of literature. His was the quiet cell with 
 desk in the window, a single chair at the desk, with cupboard 
 and bed, and a chest full of manuscripts, where the- monk lived 
 and worked year after year, looking up now and then to hear 
 the bird sing on the sill, to see the flowers in the paved clois- 
 ter, or the fruit-trees blossom in the garden — a simple, silent, 
 happy life. 
 
 These cells were the nurseries of learned literature. Some- 
 times they were like that of Mailduf, an Irishman, who in the 
 midst of the untilled forest set up a hermitage, and then a 
 school, and then a monastery. Sometimes they were like 
 that of Theodore or Hadrian, from which a sun of learning 
 illuminated England ; and we see, with the eyes of Ealdhelm, 
 
224 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 Theodore, issuing from his cell, and walking to and fro in the 
 shade of the cloister, with his Irish scholars, arguing like a 
 wild boar surrounded by a snarling troop of Molossian dogs, 
 whom he repulsed with his sharp grammatic tooth. Sometimes 
 they were like that of Ealdhelm, Theodore's finest scholar, 
 ■where Greek, Latin, and Hebrew were studied and expounded ; 
 where first the Latin muse was wooed by an Englishman ; where 
 English songs were made, whence he wrote letters to kings 
 and chiefs and virgins on the joys of study. Sometimes, we 
 see, as at Whitby, the poet in his chilly cell, ruminating the 
 song he is to sing at night. At another time the cell is filled 
 with plans for building, with musical scores, with illuminated 
 manuscripts, such as were the daily care of Benedict of Wear- 
 mouth. Sometimes the little room holds one who writes a biog- 
 raphy of some stirring man like Wilfrid, or records a merchant's 
 tale of travel to the Holy Land. As we look at England, during 
 the eighth century, there was scarcely any monastery which had 
 not at least one literary man who was eager, not only for his 
 spiritual work, but for some special line of literature or of art. 
 The writing also of history, or rather the collection of the 
 materials for history now began, and in the monasteries. Most 
 of the great foundations jotted down short annals of their 
 growth and expansion, or any remarkable story which belonged 
 to their history. What they did was not literature, but it was 
 one of its infantine beginnings, and it rose rapidly into work 
 like the Ecclesiastical History of Baeda. Then books began to 
 be collected and libraries established. The kings and chieftains, 
 the rich earls who joined or founded monasteries, carried into 
 them as gifts the manuscripts they had received or purchased. 
 The monk returning from pilgrimage brought back some treatise 
 of a Roman bishop, some manuscript of a Latin father, some 
 copy of a classic poet. The warrior who wished to gift the monas- 
 tery which had baptized and educated him, the wandering mer- 
 chant who wished its custom or its support, the visitor from 
 Ireland or Gaul, brought with them, as their most precious offer- 
 ing, some book, which was received with joy, and cherished in 
 the library. ' We know, through a letter Of Alcuin's, the con- 
 tents of the library at York, and it gives us a notion of what 
 may have been in Jarrow, in Wearmouth,.at Hexham or Can- 
 terbury. A long list is given of the Latin and Greek fathers, 
 and among them were a few Hebrew manuscripts. Boethius, the 
 supposed Laotantius, Orosius, were also there, and these names 
 are of interest to us, for Alfred translated Orosius and Boe- 
 thius, and Cj^newulf must have had Lactantius in his ha,nd§ or 
 
XII MONASTICISM AND LITERATURE 225 
 
 heard it translated to him. Among the ancients were Aris- 
 totle, Cicero, Virgil, Pliny, Statins, and Lucan. Donatus, Pris- 
 cian, and other grammarians rested also in the chests of that 
 famous library. 
 
 When we read Baeda's account of his own works, and know 
 that he spent all his life at Wearmouth and Jarrow, we know 
 also how large his library must have been. Indeed, the found- 
 ing of that library illustrates the literary excitement of the 
 monasteries of the seventh century. In 671 the Abbot Bene- 
 dict, whose surname was Biscop, went for the third time to 
 Rome, and passing by Vienne, bought in that ancient capital a 
 number of books which he stored there till his return. On his 
 way back from Home, with a large cargo of manuscripts and 
 relics, he took up the books he had left at Vienne, with others 
 collected for him by friends, and returned in triumph to Eng- 
 land. It was then that he built the monastery of St. Peter's, 
 Wearmouth, in 674, and, moved by the passion of the collector, 
 went a fourth time to Kome, and brought back books, images, 
 relics, and pictures. After his return from this voyage in 679, 
 he founded Jarrow in 682, and made a fifth journey to Rome 
 in order to establish in Jarrow a library as large as that at 
 Wearmouth. He loved his collection like a child, and his love 
 was strong in death. One of his last recommendations to his 
 monks was to keep it carefully, to take care it should not be 
 either injured or dispersed. His influence did not close with 
 his death. It is to his libraries that we owe Baeda, the School 
 of York, Alcuin, and all the continental learning that flowed 
 from the work of Alcuin.^ His friend and successor, Ceolfrid, 
 was as eager as he in collecting, and still further enriched the 
 two libraries. A pleasant story proves that not only monks 
 but kings were lovers of books in this century. There was a 
 cosmographorum codex of marvellous workmanship in the li- 
 brary of Jarrow, and King Aldfrith was keenly desirous of 
 possessing it. Ceolfrid sold it to the king for a land of 
 eight families, and later on sold this land for a larger territory 
 close to Jarrow. Baeda then, owing to the work of these two 
 predecessors of his, had two large libraries at his command 
 when he began, to write. 
 
 Nor were the women in the monasteries without their books. 
 Barking and Wimbourne were celebrated at the beginning of 
 the eighth (jentury for their literary, even their classic, studies. 
 Ealdhelm, writing to the nuns of Barking, quotes to them Vir- 
 
 1 See Bp. Stubbs' article on Benedict in the Dictionary of Christian Bi- 
 ography, 
 
226 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 gil and Ovid. It lias been held that some of his phrases pre- 
 suppose that a few of them knew Greek. The nuns who wrote 
 to Boniface write in an impetuous, incorrect Latin. They send 
 him books and receive them from him. They quote Virgil to 
 him. They make Latin verse for him, " in order to exercise 
 the little intellect that God has given them." ^ 
 
 Thus, as Eoman writing, replacing the runic characters, 
 trebled the creation of literature, so also the collections of 
 books refined and impelled it. For the books were not only 
 manuals of devotion, but some of the masterpieces of the 
 world. The delicate, pellucid style of Virgil, the finished 
 rhetoric^of Cicero were unattainable by the English monk, but 
 they supplied him with a model and an inspiration. Nor were 
 Greek books altogether absent. Plato seems to have been 
 ' quoted by Ceolfrid in a letter to a Scot king, but I suppose 
 Ceolfrid found the passage in some Latin writer. Aristotle 
 was one of the books in the library at York. The story of 
 Andrew and the Mermedonians, the foundation of the Andreas, 
 only exists in Greek ; and I try, remembering an allusion here 
 and there, and that Theodore studied at Athens, to persuade 
 myself that Theodore or Hadrian brought with them a man- 
 uscript of Homer. At least, some of the great models, which 
 whosoever reads has seen the stars, wrought upon the litera- 
 ture of the seventh and eighth centuries. 
 
 1 Along with Eoman literature came also through the monas- 
 teries the Roman arts ; and the arts dance with, inspire, and 
 are inspired by literature. The method of Eoman singing 
 taught by James the Deacon filled, we are told by Baeda, with 
 its respondent chants the ancient church at York ; and then 
 spreading from Kent in the time of Theodore was soon taught 
 in all the English churches. John, Abbot of St. Martin's at 
 Eome, whom Benedict Biscop set up as teacher of singing at 
 Wearmouth, not only taught the method of singing through- 
 out the year as it was practised at St. Peter's in Eome, but 
 also the reading aloud of the ritual, the writing down of all 
 that was needful for the yearly celebration of all the festivals ; 
 and monks, from the greater number of the monasteries of the 
 Northern province, flocked to hear him and to learn of him. 
 Wilfrid, the story ran, so filled Eichmondshire with the Latin 
 music Eddi and Eona taught, that the very peasants mingled 
 the Gregorian chants with their daily work. Bishop Acca, 
 himself a " heavenly singer," who succeeded Wilfrid at Hex- 
 ham in 709, having "diligently gathered a numerous and noble 
 library together," invited Maban a celebrated singer from 
 
XII MONASTICISM AND LITEEATUEE 227 
 
 Kent to the North, and kept him for twelve years by his side 
 to teach such ecclesiastical songs as were unknown, and to re- 
 store others corrupted by neglect." '■ 
 
 Not only music but architecture, sculpture and painting 
 ministered to literature and kindled it, and those forms of 
 them which were brought from Rome soon drove out the ruder 
 forms which had come from Ireland and lona. ^'' " Churches of 
 stone, expoUto lapide, in the Eoman style " rose at Wearmouth, 
 Hexham, Eipon and other places. Wilfrid brought with him 
 from Gaul "builders and teachers of every art." It was he 
 that covered the roof of the church at York with lead, glazed 
 the windows, and whitewashed the walls. The basilica he 
 built at Eipon astonished the Northumbrian world by the 
 height of its porches and its polished stone columns,^ and on 
 the day of its dedication, standing before the altar, he laid 
 upon it a cross of gold and a splendid Evangeliarium covered 
 with plates of gold and precious stones, and written in letters 
 of gold on purple parchment. Hexham, another foundation of 
 Wilfrid's, was still more magnificent. Its deep and immense 
 foundations, its crypt, its numerous aisles and stories, galleries 
 and high-hung bells, made it for two centuries, till it was 
 destroyed in 875 by the Danes, the finest church on this side 
 of the Alps; extolled, Eddius declares, even by those who 
 came from Eome. The Archbishops of Canterbury had set up 
 a cathedral of stone on the plan of a Roman basilica. The 
 great church of stone at Crowland, built on piles in the 
 marshes of the hollow land of Lincolnshire, is said to have 
 been set up by ^thelbald of Mercia in the eighth century, and 
 it was only one out of many. Ealdhelm placed side by side 
 with Mailduf's small church a great minster, one of the finest 
 in England, which William of Malmesbury saw. At Prome 
 also, and at Wareham; he built churches of stone. Architect- 
 ure had advanced farther than we think. The common notion 
 was that the parish churches of the seventh and eighth cen- 
 turies were, like those Baeda describes as built by the Celtic 
 monks, of wood and thatched with reeds. On the contrary, 
 the Roman method was established by the end of the seventh 
 century, the masonry of squared stone was good ; carved figures 
 adorned the buildings. They have nave, chancel, and north 
 
 1 These things will he found in the Ecclesiastical History. Musical instru- 
 ments, the horn, flute, harp, and trumpet — were used, and Ealdhelm describes 
 in his Praises of Virginity the mighty organ, with its blasts and tones, its 
 windy bellows, and golden pipes; and since this instrument came from the 
 Greeks, it was probably introduced into England by Theodore. 
 
 2 Its vault, called " St. Wilfrid's Needle,'^ still remains. 
 
228 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 porch. The style was primitive Eomanesque, not Norman. 
 At least, this is the case with St. Laurence at Bradford-by-Avon, 
 which William of Malmesbury believed to be the genuine work 
 of Ealdhelm, and whose continued existence to the present day 
 enabled Mr. Freeman to make the assertions I have here de- 
 rived from him concerning the architecture of the late seventh 
 and eighth centuries. This little building, at Bradford, this 
 eoclesiola (it is less than forty feet long), is as precious as a 
 gem. " It is the one perfect surviving Old-English church in 
 the land. The ground plan is absolutely untouched, and there 
 are no mediaeval insertions at all. So perfect a specimen of Prim- 
 itive Eomanesque is certainly unique in England, we should 
 not be surprised if it is unique of its own kind in Europe." ^ 
 
 As to embroidery, it was developed to a high excellence in 
 the female monasteries, not only for the sacred vestments both 
 of altar and priest, but also by the womanly desire to make a 
 show of gorgeous garments. Baeda thought the divine wrath 
 would fall on the nuns of Coldingham, because "Texendis 
 subtilioribus indumentis operara dant"; Boniface denounced 
 this luxury ; Ealdhelm warned his sisters against it ; the coun- 
 cil of Clovesho in 747 prescribed that the nuns should revert 
 to the ancient and simple robes, and the monks give up the 
 fashionable gartering of their legs.^ 
 
 The art of glass-making, of glazing the windows of churches, 
 the Eoman and Galilean arts of gold embroidery and of gold 
 work in lofty rood and chalice, pyx, missal, and crosier, were 
 soon established in England, and added their fresh impulse to 
 that ancient English art of gold web and golden smithery 
 which, influenced by Celtic art as well as by Roman, neverthe- 
 less kept its own spirit and worked from its own invention. 
 Gregory's Bible at St. Augustine's, Canterbury, had leaves 
 inserted in it at the beginning, " some of a purple, others of a 
 rose colour, which, held against the light, showed a wonderful 
 reflection. There is also a Psalter, having on its exterior the 
 
 1 See English Towns, E. A. Freeman, pp. 134, etc. 
 
 2 This Synod discloses the other side of the monastic life. It was not all 
 glittering gold. Pagan observances still prevailed in the country places ; the 
 clergy are warned against obscene conversation and drunkenness ; the monas- 
 teries were to be looked after lest they become full of ludicrous arts, versifiers, 
 harpers, and buffoons; the nunneries not places of junketing and luxury. 
 Baeda, Alcuin, Wilfrid, all protest to the same tune. In fact, many of the 
 monasteries, with lay priors, were like pleasant country-houses, and ended by 
 becoming mere resorts of idleness and dissipation (Hook's Archbishops of Can- 
 terbury, vol. i. p. 276) . And no one can read the scattered allusions to the 
 courts of .SIthelbald and Offa, which no doubt had many parallels, without 
 knowing how much morality and simplicity suffered at the courts of kings. 
 
XII MONASTICISM AND LITERATURE 229 
 
 figure of Christ in silver, with the four evangelists. Another 
 book, placed on the high altar, has on it a figure of Christ in 
 silver, erect and blessing with His right hand. Another is 
 ornamented with the rays of the Divine Majesty in silver gilt, 
 set round with crystals and beryls. Another has on its cover 
 a single large beryl, set round on all sides with crystals." 
 This Eoman work started work of the same kind i9 England, 
 and was soon equalled, if not excelled. The binding and illu- 
 mination of books soon became of national importance. The 
 cover of the Lindisfwi-ne Gospels is entirely English design and 
 work, and it is only one example out of many. Even paint- 
 ing, perhaps mosaic, followed Benedict Biscop from Eome ; 
 and Wearmouth, apse and walls, shone with the precise ascetic 
 figures of the Virgin, the apostles and prophets, with the stories 
 of the Gospel and the imagery of the book of Revelation. 
 
 ' This quiet monastic life, with its musical services, its liter- 
 ature, its gold-embroidered work, its rich ecclesiastical furni- 
 ture, its books, is not quite unrecorded in English literature. 
 There are passages in the poems of Cynewulf which bring 
 portions of it vividly before our eyes. In his riddles on the 
 sacramental paten or the chalice and the pyx, we are placed 
 in the church ; we see the priest " turning and changing the 
 golden ring (perhaps the wafer) round and round ; " and the 
 people, "wise in spirit, watching it in mind; praying and 
 naming it the saviour of those who do well ; also the ring has 
 glorious wounds in it which speak aloud to men " (Kiddle Ix.). 
 We see the pyx of red gold held up before the congrega- 
 tion, and though tongueless, it spoke well and cried for men, 
 " Save me, helper of souls ! " Mysterious was its speech, its 
 charm; let men bethink them of it (Eiddle xlix.). Then we 
 are brought into the monastery. There, in the cell, is the 
 book-chest (Riddle 1.) " standing firm on the ground, deaf 
 itself and dumb and witless, that swallows things more costly 
 than gold." We watch the "dark and swarthy-faced thegn 
 (some Celtic noble) stowing away under its lid manuscripts 
 that kings and queens desire." There, too, we see the missal 
 or a Bible codex in the library, and trace the parchment from 
 the skin to its illumination and its binding. It is " dipped in 
 water, set in the sun, stripped -of its hairs, cut with a knife, 
 ground down with cinders, folded with fingers. Then the de- 
 light of the bird (the wing feather — the pen) wandered o'er 
 my dusky surface when it had sprinkled me with healing water 
 
 (this refers to the illuminations which preceded the writing). 
 Then the wing swallowed the dye of a tree mixed with water 
 
230 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 (the ink) and stepped over me, leaving black marks behind. 
 Afterwards men covered me with protecting boards, drew a 
 skin round me, decked me with gold, adorned me with the fair 
 work of smiths, encased me with (gold and silver) wire ; and 
 my ornaments and my red purple, and the glorious possessions 
 in me are famous far and wide. Shield I am to nations, if the 
 children if men will use me. I helpful to men ; great is my 
 name ; healing to heroes and I myself holy ! " And lastly, 
 we see the monk wonder-stricken to find the moth eating his 
 books. "'Tis a marvellous wyrd," he thinks, "that a worm 
 should devour the speech of men, and that this thief in the 
 dark, this robber-guest, should be no whit the wiser for his 
 eating." 
 
 " When we pass from the arts as ministers of literature in the 
 monasteries, andJreturn to the influence of monasticism upon 
 literature, we find that its indirect influence was very great on 
 the variety and the development of letters. The great exten- 
 sion of the seventh and eighth century monachism and its 
 corporate union spread the literature of each monastery to the 
 others. Books and unique manuscripts were naturally ex- 
 changed between connected monasteries, and the copying of 
 these was part of the employment of the monks and of the 
 literary hacks at the court of kings. That which belonged to 
 one, it was felt, ought to belong to all. Irish monks borrow 
 books from Ealdhelm ; he himself sends his treatise on Versi- 
 fication to Aldfrith, the King of Northumbria, and dedicates 
 his Praise of Virginity to the learned nuns of Barking. Baeda 
 and Acca, Boniface and Ecgberht interchanged books, and these 
 are only two instances out of a multitude which might be 
 given. Even between the nunneries and scholars there was, 
 as we have seen, an interchange of literature, of manuscripts, 
 of criticism."' 
 
 Baeda's friendship with Trumbert and Sigfrid, with Acca 
 and Benedict Biscop, with the men of Canterbury, enabled him 
 to master the learning of the Irish, the Eoman, the Galilean, 
 and the Canterbury Schools. The account he gives of the 
 authorities he used for his Ecclesiastical History illustrates this 
 literary interchange still further. It was Albinus the abbot, 
 educated by Theodore and Hadrian at Canterbury, who per- 
 suaded him to write the book, and who sent him through 
 Nothelm (who also gathered materials for him in the archives 
 of Eome) all his information about the Church in Kent and 
 the adjacent parts. He speaks of consulting all the writings 
 of his predecessors. Daniel, Bishop of the West Saxons, sent 
 
xn MONASTICISM AND LITERATURE 231 
 
 him materials for the history of the West and South Saxons 
 and of the Isle of Wight. His story of Christianity in the 
 province of Mercia and among the East Saxons was gained 
 from the brethren of Lastingham. The writings and traditions 
 of " our ancestors," and the relation of Abbot Esius informed 
 him concerning the East Angles, and letters from Gunibert, 
 Bishop of Sidnacester in Lincoln, told him of the sacerdotal 
 succession in the province of Lindsey. All he wrote about 
 Cuthbert was taken from the records kept at Lindisfarne. It 
 is plain there was a literary intercommunion over the whole of 
 England at the time of Baeda, and this was due to the corpo- 
 rate brotherhood of the monasteries. 
 
 Kor did this interchange of learning and discussion exist 
 only within the bounds of England. One of the chief advan- 
 tages which Eoman monasticism brought to literature was that 
 it opened out communication with the Continent, and increased 
 thereby the means of literature. England extended its arms 
 beyond itself. Every one has heard of the incessant move- 
 ment to and fro of English and Irish scholars in the seventh 
 century, and I need not dwell upon it. In the first half of the 
 same century we know from Baeda that the intercommunion 
 between Gaul and England was frequent; "Many fared, since 
 few monasteries were as yet established among the Angles, to 
 the monasteries of the Gauls, and they also sent their daughters 
 to be there instructed ; " and the story of the schools set up by 
 Sigeberht of East Anglia on the model of those he had seen in 
 Gaul, goes to prove this intercommunion. This was still fur- 
 ther developed when the voyaging to Rome through Gaul 
 began. Ireland then and Gaul, two different nations of dis- 
 tinct types, added at least some of their elements to the rise 
 of literature in England, and did this through monasticism. 
 Then also, through the same channel, the mighty influence of 
 Rome — so many traces of whose ancient greatness the English 
 saw in their own land with awe and curiosity — bore not only 
 on the bishops who felt themselves in union with a greater 
 tradition than that of their own nation, and members of a 
 universal power; but also on the whole crowd of English 
 clergy, secular and regular ; on the women of rank and the nuns 
 who cared for letters ; on the kings and nobles, who, weary 
 of war and turmoil, sought the monastic shades in England or 
 in Rome. 
 
 > This communication with the Continent, with the new ideas 
 it brought into all the spheres of intellectual labour, was largely 
 increased by the craze for pilgrimage which seized on England. 
 
232 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 Kings shared in it ; Caedwalla, Coenred, the East Saxon Off a, 
 Ine and others took their journey to Eome. "Noble and 
 ignoble," says Baeda, " laymen and clerics, men and women, 
 outdid one another" in eagerness. Through Gaul, over the 
 Alps, down through Italy, and over divert paths and provinces, 
 the pilgrims went, enlarging that knowledge and quickness of 
 reception which give men interest in literature and desire to 
 make it; seeing men and cities different from their own, having 
 adventures, touching many divers peoples and manners, be- 
 coming conscious of a larger world — things which add new 
 materials to the feelings and thoughts, which are the roots of 
 literature. The English missionaries, on the other hand, under 
 Willibrord at the end of the seventh century, and under Boni- 
 face in the beginning of the eighth, converted Friesland and 
 Germany, brought Englishmen into touch with folk related to 
 themselves, re-animated and strengthened in this way their 
 original temper of soul ; and carried the fresh rough impulse 
 and the new interests of the Franks into England. 
 
 The conversion of Eriesland and the Saxon realms by Eng- 
 lishmen had, it is believed, a much larger influence on our lit- 
 erature than was till lately suspected, and there are theories 
 which connect portions of the " Caedmon poems " with old 
 Saxony. The closer bond with the Eranks which arose from 
 Charles Martel's sympathy with the mission work of Boniface 
 continued after his death, and the literary connections between 
 England and the great kingdom which was growing into the 
 empire became extensive and important. This was one reason 
 of the far-reaching influence of the School of York. Nor 
 must we forget, though it is not directly connected with 
 monasticism, that Charles the Great was in constant corre- 
 spondence with English kings and with the seat of learning in 
 York, at a time when he was collecting into a series, now 
 unfortunately lost, the old war-sagas and the adventurous 
 tales of the Germanic nations. 
 
 Monasticism, out of which many of these missions grew, 
 and in extending which many of them ended, was thus one of 
 the roots of the closer connection of England with Eome, 
 Germany, and Gaul; and this connection added no slight 
 impulse in various ways to the literary development of Eng- 
 land in the eighth century. It was unfortunate that this 
 impulse tended to weaken or to destroy vernacular literature, 
 and to replace it by Latin ; and it was characteristic of the 
 national genius of .Alfred that he felt this misfortune, and 
 strove to remedy it. It was still more unfortunate, if anything 
 
XII MONASTICISM AND LITERATURE 233 
 
 in history can be called unfortunate, that just as England 
 reached this point, and under the supremacy of Ecgberht 
 might have won the peace which literature requires for her 
 steady growth, the Danes broke in and swept away a harvest 
 which might have ripened to a full ear. ^ 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 THE RISE OP LITEBATUEB 
 
 Wessex and Mercia 
 
 The previous chapters have discussed the way of life of 
 the English so far as it is represented in their literature before 
 800. A good deal of their poetry has been used in illustration, 
 and has left, I trust, on the minds of the readers of this book, 
 a distinct impression of their manner of thought when under 
 those manifold emotions received from man and nature the 
 shaping of which in musical words, when it is done lawfully 
 and beautifully, is poetry. 
 
 These discussions have been general, and the quotations 
 takeu from poems which were written as far as we know dur- 
 ing the seventh and eighth centuries. It will be fitting now, 
 even at the risk of some repetition, to give a clear account, in 
 order, of the rising of literature in our land after the coming 
 of Christianity, and of the circumstances which surrounded and 
 influenced its youth. This naturally falls into two distinct 
 parts — literature in the South and literature in the North. 
 The former may be more briefly dismissed than the latter. It 
 rose rapidly with the arrival at Canterbury of Theodore and 
 Hadrian ; it decayed as rapidly after the death of Ealdhelm in 
 709. Moreover, it can scarcely be called English literature. 
 What remains to us is wholly Latin, and might be left alto- 
 gether aside in this history were it not that it has a certain 
 bearing on the vernacular literature of Northumbria. In the 
 North, on the contrary, our chief interest is in the vernacular 
 poetry, and it ran, we may roughly say, a course of a hundred 
 years. Caedmon began to write about the year 670, one year 
 later than the coming of Theodore to Canterbury. The prob- 
 able date of Cynewulf's last poem lies somewhere between 
 770 and 790. 
 
 The two literatures then began together, but their course 
 was very different. The vernacular literature of the North 
 234 
 
CHAP. XIII THE RISE OP LITERATURE IN KENT 235 
 
 grew into a flourishing manhood ; the Latin literature of the 
 South perished in its youth. Literature in the South was an 
 exotic, and it died because it was an alien. Literature in the 
 North was of native growth ; and it died from an alien blow. 
 Its murderers were the Danes. In the ninth century, then, 
 literature, north and south, had perished. The time came 
 when below and above the Humber England's voice was as 
 silent as the grave. Then the South again took up the pen it 
 had dropped, and jElfred restored not only the native, but the 
 Latin literature of England. As yet, however, the time of 
 .Alfred is far away, and I turn to the history of literature in 
 Wessex and Mercia, from the coming of Augustine to its 
 silence — from 597 to the death (if I have to choose a date) 
 of .iEthelhard of Canterbury in 805. After that I shall tell 
 the history, in order, of Northumbrian literature till its over- 
 throw by the Danes. 
 
 The books Augustine brought to England were a Bible in 
 two volumes, a Testament, a Psalter, an exposition of the 
 Gospels and Epistles, a book of martyrs and some apocryphal 
 lives of the Apostles. Eresh books arrived in 601, and it is 
 said that two of these MSS. of the Gospels still exist — one at 
 Corpus, Cambridge, the other at the Bodleian.^ Shortly after 
 the baptism of 10,000 (?) persons in the Swale on Christmas 
 Day 597, the place where the cathedral rose was occupied, 
 and the abbey of SS. Peter and Paul (St. Augustine's) was 
 founded. It became the seat of the first learning and literature 
 that Rome carried to this land, and the books Augustine 
 brought over were enshrined in it. The first, library was 
 begun, and with it the first schools. We cannot, however, 
 say for certain that the Latin Mission at once founded schools 
 in Kent, though Baeda says, speaking of thirty years later, 
 that the wish of Sigeberht to have schools in East Anglia, such 
 as he had seen in Gaul, was carried into effect by Bishop 
 Eelix, after the pattern of the schools in Kent. What is inter- 
 esting is a conjecture of Earle's that there may have been 
 Roman schools of grammar still existing i:i Canterbury when 
 Augustine arrived. If Canterbury was not wholly destroyed 
 
 1 If the illuminated MS. of the Gospels in Latin now in C.C. College be in 
 reality that sent by Gregory to Augustine, as Wanley thought, it is a great 
 treasure. Professor Westwood thinks that the drawings are the oldest remains 
 of Roman pictorial art in this country, and, with the exception of a fourth 
 century MS. at "Vienna, the oldest he can discover anywhere. 
 
 The MS. of the Gospels in the Bodleian, which Westwood also declares is 
 one of the oldest Roman MSS. in this country, is rubricated, but is without 
 miniatures. 
 
236 EAKLY ENGLISH LITEEATUEE chap. 
 
 by the invaders, it is just possible that the Eoman schools 
 may have been spared. 
 
 It is still more interesting to know that not long after 
 Augustine came, in 597, the Witan was held which enacted 
 the first code of ancient laws that we possess written in our 
 mother tongue. The title of this code runs thus : " This be 
 the dooms that j3Ethelbriht, King, ordained in Augustine's 
 days." They were written in Eoman letters, and this is what 
 Baeda means when he says that they were " according to the 
 Eoman precedent" (juxta exempla Momanorum). They are 
 the first piece of written English of which we hear.^ We do 
 not, however, possess them in the original Kentish dialect, but 
 in a West Saxon translation, and in a register that dates ifrom 
 the twelfth century. This Kentish dialect ^ is, then, the first 
 vehicle of English prose, and the schools of Kent were the 
 rude cradle of English learning. However, there was very- 
 little care for English. All the archbishops up to the death 
 of Honorius in 653 were Italian ; and neither understood the 
 English character nor could sympathise with any vernacular 
 poetry. A certain amount of Art was, however, introduced in 
 these first fifty years. Architecture, after the Eoman model, 
 began. Canterbury Cathedral was built of stone, in imitation 
 of the Basilica of St. Peter, and Honorius introduced the 
 Eoman music. He was succeeded by Erithona (Deus Dedit), 
 an Englishman, after whose death no archbishop was elected 
 for four years. Then the election was put into the hands of 
 Pope Vitalian, who sent Theodore of Tarsus, and Hadrian, an 
 African monk of the Nisidan monastery, the first as archbishop, 
 the second as his deacon, to England. Both were admirable 
 scholars, and with them left an English scholar then staying 
 
 1 In 673 the next Kentish code appeared. " Hlothhaere and Eadric, kings 
 ol the men of Kent, enlarged the laws their predecessors had made," etc. ; and 
 in 696 King Withred (691-725) se mildesta cyning Cantwara — " set forth more 
 dooms." 
 
 ^ It is thought that the Epinal Glossary best represents the Kentish dialect. 
 It is of the seventh century ; an English-Latin Dictionary. There are also six 
 documents of the first half of the ninth century which are written in this dia^ 
 leot (Codex Dipl. 226, 228, 229, 231, 235, 238.— Kemhle). There is, too, a 
 Psalter, with a gloss, now supposed to be a Kentish gloss. The Pateographieal 
 Society declares that this Psalter is of the year 700, and the gloss late m the 
 ninth or at the beginning of the tenth century. Professor Westwood called it 
 the Psalter of St. Augustine. It is plainly written in England and not in Rome, 
 and is sometimes called the Surtees Psalter. It is worth while to record these 
 remains of the Kentish dialect, because " from this dialect the West Saxon was 
 developed ; in other words, it is the earliest form of that imperial dialect in 
 which the great body of extant Old English literature is preserved. Neverthe- 
 less, the Kentish did not ripen into the maturer outlines of the West Saxon 
 dialect without the intervention of a third dialect, etc. etc." — Earle, A.-S. 
 Literature, p. 97. 
 
xm THE KISE OF LITERATUKE IN KENT 237 
 
 in Eome, Benedict Biscop. In May 669 Theodore was en- 
 throned at Canterbury. Immediately after his enthronement 
 he visited the English kingdoms, and he began to make English 
 the tongue of Christianity by commanding that every father 
 should take care that his children be taught to say the Creed 
 and the Lord's Prayer in the vulgar tongue.' At the same 
 time he took possession of St. Augustine's monastery, made it 
 a school of learning, and set over it, till Hadrian's arrival in 
 671, Benedict Biscop. When Hadrian came, Theodore deter- 
 mined to make the English clergy a body of scholars. Day by 
 day a greater number of disciples gathered into Canterbury 
 from Ireland as well as England. " Streams of knowledge," 
 says Baeda, "daily flowed from Theodore and Hadrian to 
 water the hearts of their hearers." This was the true begin- 
 ning of literature in the south of England. 
 
 There were classes for ecclesiastical music, arithmetic, and 
 astronomy ; for caligraphy and illuminating books ; for medi- 
 cal subjects, for composition, especially for the making of 
 Latin verse. Greek and Hebrew formed part of the instruc- 
 tion; the Latin writers were read. Rhetoric, theology, and the 
 related subjects were taught ; and Theodore's reputation for 
 ecclesiastical learning and canon law extended over Europe. 
 Some record of this learning soon appeared, and was stored in 
 the library. This was the Penitential of Theodore, drawn up . / 
 by some priest from Theodore's oral answers to questions con- 
 cerning discipline; the first book of the kind published by 
 authority in the Western Church, and " the foundation," Hook 
 says, "of all the other 'libelli penitentiales ' in England." Thus 
 Canterbury became not only a centre of scholarship but a pro- 
 ducer of books ; and from this time there was no need to seek 
 for learned foreigners to fill the bishops' chairs in the English 
 kingdoms, or to instruct the people. The land had its own 
 scholars, and soon taught its teachers. 
 
 Brihtwald, the" next archbishop, is only interesting to us 
 because he studied his own tongue. "He was a man," says 
 Baeda, "whose knowledge of the Greek, Latin, and Saxon 
 learning and language was manifold and thorough." Tatwine, 
 who succeeded him in 731, was a scholar of Theodore, and was 
 "splendidly versed in Holy writ." A few cenigmata in Latin 
 
 1 Nor do I like to omit, as having some relation at least to English literature, 
 the Ten Articles which Theodore drew up for signature by the bishops at the 
 Council of Hertford in 673. This is " the first constitutional measure of the 
 collective English race : no act of secular legislation can be produced parallel 
 to it before the reign of .Elf red or rather of his son Edward." — Stubbs' Diet. 
 Christ. Biog., Art. Theodorus. 
 
238 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATUKE chap. 
 
 verse exist under Ms name, and it is said that he, like Eald- 
 helm, wrote some poems in Anglo-Saxon. Daniel, who assisted 
 at Tatwine's consecration, Bishop of Winchester from 705-744, 
 was perhaps the most learned bishop of this time. He helped 
 Baeda in the Ecclesiastical History; he was closely bound up 
 with Boniface, and corresponded with him; and the growth of 
 the missions and of the West Saxon Church and schools was 
 largely indebted to his work. But the scholar of the Canter- 
 bury school who gathered into himself all the lea;rning of the 
 time was Ealdhelm. 
 
 He was born about the middle of the seventh century, and 
 was related to the royal family of Wessex. Being excited from 
 his youth by the new learning, he joined himself to a school 
 which had suddenly sprung up in his native province. A wan- 
 dering Scot, one of the numerous scholars who in that age 
 passed to and fro between England and Ireland,' Mailduf by 
 name, set up a hermitage near the castle, called in Saxon Ingel- 
 borne Castle, built by Dunwallo Mulmutius, not far from the 
 royal seat of Brokenborough. The folk in the castle gave him 
 leave to build a hut, and he set up a school in it. This infor- 
 mation, which may be authentic, is in a history of Malmesbury 
 ascribed to William of Malmesbury, but which is not extant. 
 Leland quotes it ; but Stubbs says that we may infer from the 
 mention of Dunwallo Mulmutius that the account cannot be 
 earlier than the twelfth century. From William of Malmes- 
 bury's acknowledged writings we understand that Ealdhelm 
 received his monastic habit at Malmesbury, and that there 
 was a Mailduf, a Scot and herniit, who taught a school, and 
 set up a small basilica. After a time, scholars crowded round 
 him so eagerly, that the hut became the kernel of a monas- 
 tery, and Ealdhelm who had taught there for many years 
 was made, after Mailduf s death, the Abbot of Malmesbury 
 (Maildulfi Burgus). 
 
 He had been a student at Canterbury with Theodore ; with 
 Hadrian whom he loved and honoured to the end. "My 
 Eather," he writes, "most beloved, venerable teacher of my 
 rude infancy, I embrace you with a rush of pure tenderness ; 
 
 1 In one of Ealdhelm's letters, written to a friend of Ills who, after six years 
 of study, had returned from "dark and rainy Ireland," he describes the host 
 of English students who filled whole fleets, in going to and fro between Eng- 
 land and Ireland that they might discover in Ireland the secrets of learning, 
 " as if there were no masters in England of Greek and Latin who could unfold 
 to them the problems of the celestial library." Then he describes with vigour 
 the Canterbury schools, and the bands of Irish disciples who used to flock round 
 Theodore. There was then a constant interchange at this time in the South, 
 as there was also in the North, of English and Irish learning. 
 
XIII THE RISE OE LITERATURE IN WESSEX 239 
 
 I long to see you again." The heart of Ealdhelm, below his 
 pedantry, was so eager and natural that he won the love he 
 gave. When he was made Bishop of Sherborne he wished 
 his monks at Malmesbury to elect a new abbot. " While you 
 live," they answered, " we desire to live with you and under 
 your rule." It is said that when he returned from his voyages, 
 not only did his monks meet him with hymns and songs and 
 censers, but a crowd of the people danced befote him with joy 
 and gestures of delight. He possessed the sense of honour 
 which was the natural heritage of his war-like race. In a 
 letter to the clergy of Wilfrid he recalls the ancient devotion 
 of thegn to chief, and challenges them to be as faithful to 
 their head, as a warrior was to his lord. "What," he cries, 
 " would be said of laymen who should abandon in his misfor- 
 tune the master they served in good fortune ; what of those 
 who loved peace at home rather than exile with their prince ? " 
 He travelled continually through his diocese, preaching by 
 day and night, and he died (709), on one of his journeys, in a 
 Somersetshire village called Dulting near a church of wood 
 which he was building. He set up monasteries, two especially, 
 at Bradford on the Avon and at Frome ; ^ and he advised Ine 
 when that King undertook the restoration of Glastonbury. 
 When he was made Bishop of the western division of the dio- 
 cese of Wessex he carried still farther, in conjunction with 
 Bishop Daniel, his educational work, filling Dorset and Somer- 
 set with monastic schools, and training, we may well think, 
 men like Boniface and his comrades for their missionary work. 
 He was an architect as well as a preacher, and when the 
 Norman architects saw his churches at Sherborne and Malmes- 
 bury, they owned their excellence and left them standing. 
 Other arts were also his. If we may trust Faricius, he 
 played on all kinds of instruments — as eager a musician as 
 Dunstan. He is the first Englishman whose literary writings 
 remain to us, and whose classical knowledge was famous. He 
 wrote Latin verse with ease, and boasted that he was the first 
 of his race who studied the Latin metres. He wrote a long 
 treatise on Latin Prosody, and he showed what he could do in 
 this way by the treatment in Latin hexameters of the stories 
 told in his prose treatise De laudibus Virginitatis. He knew 
 
 1 Sjierborne, where his See was afterwards fixed, and Wareham, near Poole, 
 were probably founded by him. We may fancy him wandering down from 
 Wareham to look on the sea from that headland in Dorsetshire which first bore 
 his name (St. Ealdhelm's Head), but which, overlaid with the name of an elder 
 saint, is now St. Alban's Head. 
 
240 EAKLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 and quoted Horace, Lucan, Juvenal, Persius, Terence, and 
 others which might seem strange to his monkish habit. He 
 read, according to his biographers, the Old Testament in 
 Hebrew ; he spoke Greek ; he taught the usual course of 
 learning and it is supposed he wrote on Roman Law. Among 
 these severer studies, he played at making riddles in the 
 manner of Symphosius, and as these riddles went to the North 
 with his treatise on Prosody, they gave afterwards to Cynewulf 
 the impulse to compose similar enigmas. The Acircius to 
 whom he sent this treatise was Aldfrith, King of Northumbria, 
 a friend of his boyhood, whom he begs with great natveti to 
 read through the whole of his book. "It would be absurd," 
 he says, " if you did not take the trouble to chew and re-chew 
 that which I have taken so mach pains to grind and knead 
 for you." I doubt whether Aldfrith took the trouble, for the 
 style, like that of all Ealdhelm's work, is always fantastic, 
 pompous and full of rhetorical tricks. He writes Latin as 
 Lyly wrote English in his Euphues, and his fancifulness often 
 degenerates into a fastidious pedantry. He is keen and gay, 
 but without humour. Perhaps no better specimen of his " pre- 
 cious " way of writing can be given than his letter about The- 
 odore and his Irish scholars, the whole of which is written to 
 display his gamesome and alliterative use of Latin. "Graeci 
 involute, Eomani splendide, Angli pompatice dictare solent," 
 says William of Malmesbury, and Ealdhelm, he thinks, did 
 well in all these styles. Amid this literary play he knew how 
 to be an ascetic, as rigid and stern with himself as the Benedict 
 whom he so much admired. The man we see reading Virgil 
 and Terence in his cell, or writing a letter of alliterative Latin 
 prose for his own entertainment, or making a riddle, is seen a few 
 hours after, at least in the pages of William of Malmesbury, 
 standing up to his neck in a well near the monastery, and 
 reciting, in this primitive manner, on a wintry night, the 
 Psalms of the Day. But that which makes us most happy 
 to think of, is that he did not neglect the songs of his native 
 tongue.^ There is a well-known story told of him, how, as he 
 went from town to town, and found that the buyers and sellers 
 at the fairs did not come to church, he used, like a gleeman, 
 to stand on the bridge or in the public way and sing songs to 
 them in the English tongue, and by the sweetness of his 
 speech lead them to come with him to hear the word of God. 
 These songs which he had composed for the people lasted when 
 his Latin work had passed from remembrance. .Alfred had 
 
 1 Bishop Stubbs calls them hymns. 
 
xiii THE RISE OF LITERATURE IN WESSEX 241 
 
 one, it seems, in his handbook, a carmen triviale, as vain a song, 
 perhaps as heathen a legend, as Dunstan sang to his harp when 
 he was a youth. Nor did the song die. Malmesbury says, 
 in the twelfth century, that it was still commonly sung in 
 England — quod adhuc vulgo cantitatur. 
 
 The variety and the contrasts in Ealdhelm were the result 
 of an active intelligence, half intoxicated by the new wine 
 of literature. Whatever we may say of his false taste in 
 style, there is no doubt of the impulse he gave to literary 
 activity and education in all directions. He had correspon- 
 dence with Ireland, with Gaul, with Eome ; Northumbria was 
 influenced by his writings ; and he wrote a letter on the 
 schism between the British and English Church to Gerontius, 
 King of the Damnonian Britons, which converted that King 
 and his folk to the Roman usage concerning Easter. Among 
 his many distractions he did not neglect the education of the 
 more delightful sex. Osgitha, whom he urges to a deeper 
 study of the Scriptures, is his " most beloved sister." " Most 
 beloved" is not enough to express his affection. "Vale," 
 he says in an outburst of tenderness, " decies dilectissima, imo 
 centies et millies." To Hildelida, Abbess of Barking, he 
 dedicated his Praises of Virginity, and with her he names, as 
 bound to him by intimate friendship, Aldgida and Scholastica, 
 Hidburga and Burngida, Eulalia and others. These knew, it 
 seems, the classic poets ; he quotes to them Ovid and Virgil, 
 and bids them farewell with his own brightness and affection : 
 " Valete, o flores ecclesiae, sorores monasticae, alumnae scholas- 
 ticae, Christi margaritae, paradisi gemmae, et coelestis Patriae 
 participes. Amen." This is, indeed, to make learning charm- 
 ing, and it was one of the reasons he did so much for contem- 
 porary, and so little for after learning. 
 
 When he died in 709 this literary life was in full stream. 
 Not of it, but still, as we look back, not apart from it, was one 
 ancient monument of English thought made under the guid- 
 ance of Ealdhelm's faithful friend, Ine, King of Wessex. 
 This is the Laws of Ine, the oldest West Saxon laws. Their 
 date is about 690, and we have them in an appendix to the 
 LaiBs of Alfred} They have this much literary interest, that 
 as " the foundation of the Laws of Wessex, they were also the 
 foundation of the Laws of all England." I quote one of them 
 (taking Earle's translation, A.-S. Lit. p. 153), because it seems 
 to skirt the edge of literature. It quotes two proverbs : " In 
 
 1 This noble parchment of the Laws of Alfred is, along with the oldest Saxon 
 Chronicle, in Benet College (Corpus Christi), Cambridge. 
 
242 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 case any one burn a tree in a ■wood, and it come to light wlio 
 did it, let him pay the full penalty and give sixty shillings, 
 because fire is a thief. If one fell in a -wood ever so many 
 trees, and it be found out afterwards, let him pay for three 
 trees, each with thirty shillings. He is not required to pay 
 for more of them, however many they might be, because the axe 
 is a reporter and not a thief." ^ 
 
 With Ealdhelm as Ine's friend and kinsman, and as co-worker 
 with Bishop Daniel, we may fairly think that learning grew 
 in Wessex, and extended with the extension of the kingdom. 
 Indeed, we know that Ine was especially active in estab- 
 lishing monasteries and in the work of education. He found 
 at Glastonbury the ancient church of wood, enriched it with 
 treasures, and set up close beside it a church of stone which 
 Dunstan rebuilt. It is the sole British church in England 
 " which passed on unhurt into the hands of the Englishman." ' 
 He took part in the founding of Malmesbury and endowing of 
 Abingdon. Sherborne and Bradford, Wimborne, Nursling, 
 Tisbury, Waltham, Frome, rose under his care, and he may 
 have had something to do with Wells. There is also a tror 
 dition which at least illustrates his reputation, that he, rather 
 than Offa, set up the Saxon quarter at Rome. Meanwhile 
 some light is thrown on the continuance of literary activity in 
 the South by the things already told concerning the assistance 
 given to Baeda in his history by the bishops and abbots of the 
 south of England. 
 
 Incessant wars followed the departure of Ine to Eome. 
 Wessex fell under the rule of Mercia in .ffithelheard's reign ; 
 but his successor Cuthred recovered the liberty of Wessex at 
 the battle of Burford. I mention this battle because it has a 
 certain relation to literature. In it ./Ethelhun, the Proud 
 Alderman, was the standard bearer of Cuthred. He bore the 
 Dragon of Wessex in the van, and his bravery decided the 
 fight. The account given by Henry of Huntingdon, part of 
 
 1 These laws provide for the new Welsh population added to the West Saxon 
 realm by the conquests of Ine. Ine had got as far as Taunton, which he founded 
 as a border fortress, and Exeter may have, either before or not long after, 
 become an English possession. At whatever date it became English, it did not 
 cease also to be Welsh. It was divided into an English and a Welsh city. It 
 is fitting again to draw attention to this mingling of the English and Welsh here 
 in the South, as on the March, and in the North. There must have been an inter- 
 change of poetry, au influence of Welsh on English verse, of English on Welsh. 
 The division of the two races, under Ine and his successors, had ceased to exist 
 in the days of .SlUred. No distinction is made between them in .Alfred's laws. 
 The Welsh were then absorbed into the English. 
 
 ^ Freeman, English Towns, p. 92. 
 
THE RISE or LITERATURE IN WESSEX 243 
 
 ■which I quote, is probably drawn from the ancient song made 
 after the victory. 
 
 "The armies being drawn up in battle array, and, rushing 
 forward, ^thelhun, who led the West Saxons, bearing the 
 royal standard, a golden dragon, pierced through the standard- 
 bearer of the enemy. Upon this, a shout arose, and the fol- 
 lowers of Cuthred being much encouraged, battle was joined 
 on both sides. Then the thunder of war, the clash of arms, 
 the clang of blows, and the cries of the wounded, resounded 
 terribly, and a desperate and most decisive battle began. . . . 
 The arrogance of their pride sustained the Mercians, the fear 
 of slavery kiudled the courage of the men of Wessex. But 
 wherever iEthelhun fell on the enemy's ranks he cleared a 
 way before him, his tremendous battle-axe cleaving, swift as 
 lightning, both arms and limbs. On the other hand, wherever 
 the brave king of Mercia turned, the enemy were slaughtered, 
 for his invincible sword rent armour as if it were a vestment, 
 and bones as if they were flesh. When, therefore, it happened 
 that the King and the chief met each other, it was as when 
 two fires from opposite quarters consume all that opposes 
 them." 
 
 Cynewulf replaced Sigeberht who at first succeeded Cuthred 
 in 755, and Cynewulf is also bound up with literature. The 
 account of his death (784) given in the Chronicle under the 
 year 765 is, as far as we know, the most ancient piece of con- 
 nected prose in the English tongue. It seems fitting that 
 Wessex, in which English prose and English history were de- 
 veloped by Alfred, should be the kingdom which gave us the 
 earliest piece of prose, and that this prose should be a piece 
 of history. The latter part of it — the story of the fight — 
 was probably in its original form a lay, reduced by some mo- 
 nastic annalist of Wessex to prose, and kept intact by the 
 compilers of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. And it is extremely 
 probable that it was put into prose at the very time, or a few 
 years later than the events of which it tells ; " it is, in short, 
 by far the oldest historical prose in any Teutonic language. 
 The style is of the rudest character, contrasting remarkably 
 with the polished language of the later portions of the 
 Chronicle." This is Mr. Sweet's opinion, who adds that 
 there are archaisms in it which escaped the eye of the ninth- 
 century reviser. The narrative is so vivid, rough, and simple, 
 and the things done so war-like and tragic, and the temper of 
 the warriors so English, that I give it as it stands ; — 
 
 / 
 
244 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 765 (784).' In this year Cynewulf and the tVest Saxon Witan took 
 from Sigebryht his kingdom, except Hamptonshire, for unrighteous deeds ; 
 and he had that, until he slew the alderman who had dwelt with him 
 longest. And him, then, Cynewulf drove into Andred, and he wonned 
 there until a herdsman stabbed him at Privet's-flood^ (and avenged the 
 alderman Cumbra). And this Cynewulf, in mickle fights, fought often 
 with the Brito- Welsh ; and, about 31 winters after he had the kingdom, 
 willed to drive away an setheling, who was hight Cyneheard (and this 
 Cyneheard was the brother of that Sigebryht). And then (Cyneheard) 
 heard of the king with a little band in a woman's company in Merton ; 
 and he beset him there, and surrounded the bower outside, before the 
 men who were with the king found out that he was there. 
 
 But when the king knew it, he went to the door and warded him man- 
 fully, until he saw the setheling, and then he outrushed upon him, and 
 sorely wounded him ; and they all ceased not to fight against the king until 
 they had slain him. 
 
 And now the king's thegns, hearing the cries of the woman, were 
 aware of the un-stillness, and they ran thither, whosoever then was ready 
 and rathest. And to each of them the setheling offered money and life, 
 and none of them would take it ; but they went on, always fighting, until 
 they all lay (dead), except one British hostage, and he was sorely wounded. 
 
 Then in the morning the thegns of the king who had been behind him 
 heard that the king was slain. Then they rode thither, even his alder- 
 man Osric, and Wiferth his thegn and the men which he erst had left 
 behind him, and came up with the setheling in the burg where the king 
 lay slain. Now the setheling's men had locked the gates against them, but 
 they went up to the gates. And then the setheling offered them their own 
 doom of money and land if they would grant him the kingdom ; and it was 
 made known to them that their kinsmen were with him, who would not 
 from him. And then said they — That no kinsman could be dearer to them 
 than their lord, and they never would follow his slayer. And then they 
 offered to their kinsmen that they should go forth sound ; and they said — 
 That had been offered to each of their comrades who erst were with the 
 king. Then said they that they no more minded it than your comrades who 
 were slain with the king. And they ceased not to fight about the gates 
 until they got inside, and they slew the setheling and the men who were 
 with him, all but one, who was the alderman's godson ; and he saved his life, 
 and yet he was oft wounded. 
 
 It remains to say that up to this date, 766, Latin literature, 
 written by Englishmen, is illustrated by the letters of Boni- 
 face. As Boniface was a Wessex man as well as Willibald, 
 this may be perhaps the best place to touch on the most 
 famous of English missionaries to the Continent, and to select 
 the points where the missions influence English literature. 
 
 The first of them was Willibrord,' a Northumbrian, the 
 Apostle of the Frisians, who was born in the year 657. The 
 
 1 See Note, Earle, Two of the Saxon Chronicles,^. 292 (1865). 
 
 2 Doubtfully ideutifled with Privet in Hants. — Sweet. 
 
 ' His father, Willigis, representative of a noble house, had founded a 
 monastic community in honour of St. Andrew, north of the Humber, on one of 
 the numerous promontories of that coast, a house probably Celtic, 
 
xin THE RISE OS" LITERATURE 245 
 
 story of his life is told by two English scholars of this time, 
 by Baeda and by Alcuin. He illustrates the literary intercom- 
 munion of the time between England and Ireland, for he left 
 the monastic house at Eipon to join Ecgberht's and Wigberht's 
 school in Ireland. After thirteen years of study he sailed 
 to the Ehine to convert the Frisians (690). For nearly fifty 
 years he laboured among the heathen, preaching in Friesland, 
 among the Old Saxons, and touching the Danes, in which visit 
 he landed on Heligoland, and saw the ancient shrine and foun- 
 tain of Fosite. Ko one can tell, and it engages the imagina^ 
 tion to think of it, how many Teutonic legends may have got 
 into England from such wanderings, or how much of English 
 sacred poetry, such as Caedmon's, may have been left behind 
 at Utrecht, where Willibrord founded his archbishopric, or at 
 Epternach, near Trier, where he set up a monastery ; and the 
 same suggestion may be made with regard to the missions both 
 of Boniface and Willibald. He was also the first who brought 
 the learning of England among the Franks, and, freeing it 
 from insxilarity, increased its range. His friendship with 
 Pippin, with Charles Martel, whose son, Pippin le Bref, he 
 baptized, was the beginning of an association between English 
 scholars and the Franks which — culminating with Alcuin and 
 Charles the Great — influenced the growth of literature at 
 home and abroad. The schools he founded at Utrecht were 
 one of the centres of European civilisation. 
 
 Winfrid, to whom Gregory II. gave the name of Boniface, 
 was much more connected with England than Willibrord, and 
 knit still more closely together the English, the Franks, and 
 the Teutonic nations the Franks subdued. Born at Crediton in 
 Devonshire about 680, he was educated at Wulfhard's monas- 
 tery in Exeter, transferred to Hampshire, and received priest- 
 hood when Ine was reigning in Wessex in 710. Eager to 
 convert the heathen, he landed in Friesland in 716, but failing 
 at that time to find success, returned to England and thence 
 went to Eome. In 719 he was sent by Gregory to convert Cen- 
 tral Europe. The Irish monks had preceded him in Thuringia. 
 Thqpe he stayed for a time, and after a visit to Friesland re- 
 turned to Thuringia. Many heathen remained in Thuringia 
 and the lands around it, and Boniface worked among a congeries 
 of German tribes in the great forests, amidst folk who spoke 
 almost the same language as his own, and were indeed of kin- 
 dred blood. He bound them and the other German tribes he 
 influenced up with England, for he set over the sees and monas- 
 tic houses he established English archbishops, bishops, abbots, 
 
246 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATtfRE CitAP. 
 
 and nuns, along with a crowd of helpers -whom he fetched out 
 of England. In all his diflaculties, and they were many, he 
 took the advice of the English bishops, and Bishop Daniel, 
 Baeda's correspondent, was his most trusted redesman. He en- 
 tertained a constant interchange of letters with English monks 
 and nuns, and the religious life of England was thus interested 
 in the Continent. There was a constant going to and fro be- 
 • tween England and Central Germany, and the influence of this 
 on the literary elements in England, though small, must have 
 been appreciable. His letters still interest us. They paint 
 the time and the manners of the German tribes. The many 
 schools he set on foot, especially the famous one at the monas- 
 tery of Eulda, enable us, with some pride, to point to England 
 as the mother of learning among the Teutonic tribes. He him- 
 self did not disdain the finer arts of literature. He wrote 
 verses for his friends ; he even composed a short poem for his 
 sister of ten senigmata, which is not wanting in grace and ele- 
 gance ; aenigmata not written for play, as those of Tatwine or 
 Symphosius, but on the Christian virtues. The MS. which 
 contains these pleasant Latin poems is in the British Museum. 
 He fell, a martyr, in his Master's service, white-haired and 
 bowed with age. 
 
 Eifty years or so before the death of Boniface in 755, Willi- 
 bald, whom some think his kinsman, was born in Wessex, prob- 
 ably in Hampshire. His name is famous in the history of travel. 
 So eager was the youth for voyaging that his father, his brother 
 Winnibald, and his sister Walpurgis, gathered their friends 
 together, broke up their English home, and went off, with this 
 youth of eighteen, to Kome. It is a good illustration of the 
 / passion for pilgrimage, which, in the eighth century seized on 
 Englishmen, and which enlarged, as I have said, their imagina- 
 tion and its shaping power. They left England about 718, and 
 after many difficulties reached Eome. Willibald left his 
 brother there, and travelled through Sicily, Ephesns, Cyprus, 
 Tortosa, Emessa, to Damascus. Thence he visited Palestine, 
 passing through all the sacred places near the Sea of Galilee to 
 Jordan, Jericho, and Jerusalem. Four times (journeying 
 meanwhile over the whole of Palestine, visiting Tyre and Sidon, 
 Libanus and Mount Carmel) he stayed at Jerusalem, and 
 reached Constantinople in 725, where he lived for two years. 
 In 727, ten years after his departure from England, at the age 
 of twenty-eight or thirty, he was received into the monastery 
 of Monte Cassino, and after some years went to Eome, whence 
 he was sent by Gregory III. to help his countryman, Boniface, 
 
XIII THE RISE OP LITERATURE 247 
 
 in the year 739. In 740 he met his brother, Winnibald, in 
 Thuringia, and next year was made Bishop of Eichstadt by 
 Boniface. The one literary interest of his life is his long and 
 dangerous travel through the East, which we may say was re- 
 corded by himself, and which increased the imaginative mate- 
 rials of English learning. The nun who wrote this Voyage is 
 said to have written it from his dictation. 
 
 Lullus, who succeeded Boniface as Bishop or Archbishop of 
 Mainz in 755, may also be mentioned in this connection. He 
 was a West Saxon by birth, and perhaps a kinsman of Boni- 
 face. Educated at Malmesbury, under Abbot Eaba, he left 
 England about the year 732. He was in correspondence with 
 England during his whole life. When he succeeded Boniface, 
 " letters," says Bishop Stubbs, " poured in upon him from the 
 ecclesiastics of his native land," in particular from the lords of 
 Canterbury, Worcester, and Winchester. Later on he is again 
 in communication, asking and giving advice, with Canterbury, 
 Rochester, and Winchester, and with the King of Kent ; and 
 further on with the Abbot of We&rmouth, with ^thelberht. 
 Archbishop of York — borrowing the books of Baeda and lend- 
 ing books on cosmography — with the Abbot of Eipon, with 
 the Kings of Wessex and ISTorthumbria. There is no better 
 example, not even that of Boniface, of the continual inter- 
 course between England and the Continent, than that afforded 
 by the life of Lullus. 
 
 As to Willehad, a Northumbrian, and the other famous name 
 among these English missionaries to Germany, whose appoint- 
 ment to Bremen was recommended by Lullus, there is nothing 
 in his life except his friendship with Alcuin and Charles the 
 Great, and the works he is said to have written but which re- 
 main unedited, to make him of any interest in a history of lit- 
 erature. He died, as Bishop of Bremen, and built, it is said, a 
 church of wonderful beauty. 
 
 As we return from this episode we find little more to say of 
 the history of literature in Wessex. Cuthbert ^ and Bregwin 
 
 1 Cuthbert, Archbishop of Canterbury from 740 to 758, did little or nothing 
 for literature, but he was known as a writer of Latin verse. There are two 
 things of his which, if they are genuine, have one an historical, and the other 
 an artistic interest. He succeeded Walhstod, Bishop of Hereford, and in the 
 epitaph which he wrote on Walhstod, he recorded the names of his predecessors 
 in the See. In the second piece of Latin verse he describes the completibn by 
 him of a great cross which Walhstod had begun — 
 
 " Argenti atque auri fabricare monilibus amplis." 
 
 These two small sets of verse, which are only to be found in William of 
 Malmesbury, "are, if genuine, two of the most interesting minor relics of 
 eiglith-century history in England, besides charters and councils." — Stubbs' 
 Diet. Christ. Miog., Art. Walhstod. 
 
248 KARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 were succeeded in the Archbishopric of Canterbury by Jaenbert 
 in 765, whose life ended in the midst of the struggle between 
 Canterbury and the new Metropolitan See which OfEa set up at 
 Lichfield, ^thelhard, his successor, became a fugitive, and a 
 letter sent to him by Alcuin allows us to see into how sad a con- 
 dition learning had been reduced in Kent, and if in Kent, in the 
 whole of the southern province. "Heturn," he says, " and bring 
 back to the house of God the youths who were studying there, 
 the choir of singers, and the penmen with their books. . . . 
 Above all, let it be your strictest care to restore the reading 
 of the Holy Scriptures." He won back, however, in 803 the 
 supremacy of Canterbury, but he did not win back, nor did his 
 successors, any of the learning which Theodore had originated. 
 Literature was now nearly at an end in Wessex. The monas- 
 teries had^ceased to be places of education, their abbots were 
 chiefly laymen ; reform, continually urged upon them, was as 
 continually neglected, and at last the priests ceased even to 
 be able to read their books. 
 
 It might have been expected that Ecgberht — who had passed 
 his youth at the court of Charles the Great, and must have 
 known Alcuin and been interested by him and by Charles' 
 incursions into education ; who must have heard of all that the 
 English missionaries had done in Germany and felt the power 
 Charles had gained through monasticism and Rome — would 
 have, on coming to the West Saxon throne in 802, taken some 
 interest in English learning and pushed it forwards, but there 
 is no trace of any steady effort on his part in this direction. 
 He was probably too much employed in bringing all England 
 under his sway. In 828 Mercia fell before him. Northumbria 
 submitted in 829 ; and the sole piece of literature belonging to 
 his reign is the single verse of the war-song which recorded his 
 victory over the Marchland — " EUandun's stream with slain 
 was choked ; 'twas foully stained with blood." ^ Nevertheless, 
 now that he was overlord of all England, and the country 
 wrought into one politically, as it had been long one ecclesias- 
 tically, we might have looked for a fresh development of liter- 
 ature. But fate was against this hope. The Vikings had 
 already made their first descent in 787 on the coast of Dorset- 
 shire ; and in 833 Ecgberht, warned by their ravaging of Ireland, 
 Erisia, Scotland, France, and the Northern Islands, held a 
 Witan to concert measures of defence against them. In 832 
 (4 ?) they descended on Sheppey, and the next year they came 
 
 ' Another war-verse belongs to the next reign, to the victory won over the 
 Danes at Ockley in 851— " Men like corn in mowing time fell in both these 
 Blighty hosts." 
 
xm THE RISE OE LlTERATtJEE 249 
 
 to Charmouth. Those who had allied themselves with the 
 Comishmen were defeated by Ecgberht at Hengestdun in 835. 
 They fell on London in 839, and plundered Eochester. 838 had 
 found them in Lindsey and East Anglia, and on the coast of 
 Kent. In 845 they were defeated on the Parret in Somerset- 
 shire. Up to this time the attacks had been desultory coast- 
 raids. But in 851 Eorik, with a fleet of 350 sail, entered the 
 mouth of the Thames, sailed up inside of Thanet, and up the 
 Stour to Canterbury which he sacked with furious slaughter, 
 and passed on to London, where he defeated Berhtwulf the 
 Mercian King and entered the lands north of the Thames. 
 Thence the Vikings went into Surrey, and were driven back in 
 a great battle by jEthelwulf, King of Wessex. Nevertheless, 
 in spite of English victories by land and sea, the Vikings win- 
 tered for the first time in England, in the year 851(?), and held 
 their place, till in 855 they transferred their winter camp to 
 Sheppey. In 860 Winchester, the capital of Wessex, was plun- 
 dered, and in 865, a great army wintered in Thanet, and 
 devastated Kent. Then came the Danes in 866 — Tlie Army, — 
 resolute to conquer and settle instead of merely raiding like the 
 Vikings. This Army wintered in East Anglia^ and conquered 
 Northumbria. When in 868 they marched towards Mercia and 
 wintered on the Trent, Wessex was called in to help Mercia. 
 Eor a time Mercia escaped, but soon after, all the great abbeys 
 of the marsh country were destroyed, and in 871 The Army 
 crossed the Thames into Wessex. It was met at Ashdown by 
 jEthelred and jElfred, and defeated with great carnage. 
 
 This is in brief the story of the final ruin of southern litera- 
 ture up to the days of Alfred. The unhappy tale began in the 
 days of Ecgberht. It is only too clear that he and his succes- 
 sors had something more important to do than cherishing 
 learning. They were forced to fight year by year for the very 
 existence of the country with these fierce sea^wolves, whose 
 bitterest attacks were made on the monasteries. When we 
 read that in 851 Canterbury had been sacked by the Danes, and 
 see in this an image of the storm which fell on all the centres 
 of education, we can understand how it was that jElfred in his 
 youth complained that he could not find a master to teach him 
 Latin. There is no more then to say of literature in Kent and 
 Wessex, till in the hands of jSllfred it arose again. 
 
 It would seem that we might now pass on to the history of 
 the rise of Northumbrian literature, wherein all our chief work 
 lies, but Mercia rose to great honour during the two hundred 
 
S50 BAKLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 years of which we have here written, and it is fitting to briefly 
 touch the points in Mercian history which belong to the inter- 
 ests of literature. We have seen that sometime after Penda's 
 death Mercia became Christian. Wulfhere, his son — 657-675, 
 in the very years, that is, that vernacular literature began so 
 bravely in Northumbria — founded a number of abbeys and 
 monasteries. Medeshamstede — in the fen-country then sub- 
 ject to Mercia — may claim him as one of its patrons, but the 
 whole story is mixed up with legend and forgery. Fable 
 gathers also round other foundations attributed to him ; but 
 the growth of fable proves, at least, that centres of learning 
 now arose in the heathen realm. Under jEthelred, who fol- 
 lowed Wulfhere, the Mercian Church was organised. It ceased 
 to have any Celtic elements. The King was a friend of Theo- 
 dore and Wilfrid, and monasteries, in large numbers, were 
 founded and endowed. With ^thelbald (716-767) his third 
 successor, we touch literature more closely. Among the mon- 
 asteries to which he was generous was that of Evesham, and 
 Evesham was founded by Ecgwin, Bishop of Worcester. It is 
 said, on the faith of two later biographies, that Ecgwin narrated 
 his own life, and he has been called our first autobiographer, 
 but, though it is right to record this, the thing is exceedingly 
 questionable, ^thelbald was certainly mixed up with scholars, 
 for Tatwine, ISTothelm, and Cuthbert, all Archbishops of Canter- 
 bury and of Theodore's school, were connected with Mercia 
 and perhaps appointed by the influence of the King. More- 
 over, Boniface and he were upon friendly terms, even though 
 ^thelbald's life was morally disgraceful. The council at 
 Clovesho, held in 747, was not only directed against the immo- 
 ralities of the monasteries which seem to have lost in luxury 
 all care for learning, but was also probably intended as a silent 
 reproach to the King. We may also connect with his reign 
 the story of Guthlac. The Life of Guthlac, written by Eelix 
 between the years 747 and 749, was contemporary with .^thel- 
 bald. We may, therefore, at least tend to accept the story 
 told in it that when iEthelbald was young and an exile he was 
 the friend and visited the hermitage of Guthlac, deep in the 
 fen-country, on the site of which in later years rose the great 
 Abbey of Crowland. This Life, however, is not a Mercian but 
 an East Anglian book. It is dedicated by its writer, Eelix, to 
 Alfwold of East Anglia, and continues, after Baeda, the liter- 
 ature of biography among the English. The book lived, and 
 was the cause of other literature. It was translated from 
 Latin into Anglo-Saxon in the tenth or eleventh century. It 
 
XIII THE EISE OE LiTERATtJEE IN MERCIA 251 
 
 formed the foundation of the second part of a poem attributed 
 to Cynewulf, which, if it be by him, supplies us with the sole 
 date which belongs to the life of that mysterious poet. The 
 story brings into vivid light not only the scenery of the fen- 
 country, biit the character of the young setheling of the time 
 when the influence of Christianity was still fresh, and acted 
 on a national type lately emerged from heathendom.^ The 
 book represents Guthlac in contact with a great number of 
 events important and unimportant, serious and ludicrous ; and 
 all of these, met in different ways by the saint, open out his 
 pleasant character. Various persons are, moreover, brought 
 into touch with him, and though the sketches of these persons 
 are slight, they are clear-cut. Were it only for these sketches 
 of our folk in the eighth century, the book ought to be more 
 read than it is. It illustrates also the tender and colour-full 
 
 ^ I give here the passage whicli describes the youth of Guthlac, his sudden 
 conversion, and his resolve to go into hermitage, and the description oi his 
 voyage. I have translated it from the Anglo-Saxon version that the English 
 colour may be felt. The historical value of the extract as a picture of the 
 character of a young Englishman is great, but its worth as a piece of good 
 literature is the main reason for which I quote it. The original Latin of the 
 eighth century is often florid, pompous, and rhetorical, hut the conception and 
 arrangement of the life is 'good. It represents work done more in the manner 
 of Ealdhelm than of Baeda. The Anglo-Saxon rendering is probably of the 
 tenth or eleventh century. It is agreeably written, with a natural and happy 
 turn of phrase, and represents very well the kind of work which a simple- 
 hearted monk of the new learning that started from Alfred was capable of 
 producing. The extracts then have the advantage of displaying something of 
 the literary quality of two different centuries separated by perhaps two hun- 
 dred years. But the events of the life described are of the eig;hth century. 
 
 "When his strength waxed and he grew to manhood, he minded him of the 
 strong deeds of the heroes and men of yore. Then, as though he had woke from 
 sleep, his mood was changed, and he got together a mickle troop and host of his 
 comrades and himself took to weapons. Then he wreaked his grudges on his 
 foes and burnt up their Burh, and ravaged their towns, and far and wide he 
 made a manifold slaughter, and slew and took from men their goods. . . . For 
 nine winters he carried on these raids, but it happened one night, on coming 
 back from an outfaring, as he rested his weary limbs, that he thought over 
 many things in his mind, and he was suddenly moved with the awe of God and 
 his heart was filled within with ghostly love ; and when he awoke, he thought 
 on the old kings that were of yore who, through mindfulness of wretched death 
 and the sore outgoing of a sinful life, forsook the world, and he saw of a sud- 
 den vanish away all the great wealth they had, and his own life hasten and 
 hurry to an end, and he vowed to God that he would be his servant, and aris- 
 ing when it was day signed himself with the sign of Christ's rood." So he 
 joined the monastery of Hrypadun, but after two years longed for the wilder- 
 ness and a hermitage, and departing, heard of a vast desolation and was minded 
 to dwell therein. The description of it is a clear picture of the watery places 
 where Crowland grew into its later splendour. "There is in Britain a fen of 
 unmeasured mickleness that begins from the river Granta, not far from the 
 city which is called Grantaceaster. There stretch out unmeasured marshes, 
 now a swart waterpool, now foul running streams, and eke many islands and 
 reeds, and hillocks, and thickets, and with manifold windings, wide and long, 
 it spreads out up to the northern sea." 
 
252 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 imagination with regard to the supernatural, of which Baeda 
 is so full. "At Guthlac's birth" — and I quote from the 
 Anglo-Saxon version of the Latin — " men saw a hand of the 
 fairest red hue coming out of the heavens, and it held a golden 
 rood, and showed itself clear to many men, and bent forwards 
 towards the door of the house wherein the child was born." 
 Again, when the evil spirits have borne Guthlac to the very 
 doors of hell and would fain push him in, the Apostle Bar- 
 tholomew comes down to help him: "Then suddenly came 
 down the indweller of heaven, the holy Apostle, with heavenly 
 brightness and glory shining, amidst the dim darkness of swart 
 hell; and the accursed ghosts could not abide there for the 
 fairness of the holy Comer, and hid themselves in the dark- 
 ness. But when Guthlac saw his faithful friend, he was very 
 blithe with ghostly bliss and heavenly delight." Then at the 
 command of the Apostle, the devils bear Guthlac back to 
 his hermitage with gentleness. "So they brought him back 
 with all mildness, and on their wings they bore him that he 
 could not have been borne more pleasantly in a ship. Now, 
 when they came in the midst of the highness of the lift, there 
 came towards him a heap of holy spirits, and they all sang and 
 said, 'Ibunt devirtute in virtutem,' et reliqua — that is, in Eng- 
 lish — ' Holy men shall go from strength to strength.' When 
 it began to dawn they set him down, and as he was about to 
 fulfil his morning-prayer-tide to God, he saw two of the cursed 
 spirits weeping and wailing greatly, and when he asked why, 
 they answered, ' We two weep because our power is all broken 
 through thee' . . . and they went off as smoke before his 
 face." Picture after picture; there is a savour of Dante in it! 
 
 The love of animals also appears, that frequent virtue of the 
 mediaeval saint, out of which has grown so much charming lit- 
 erature. The ravens of the fen are at his command, and the 
 fishes and the wild beasts. When Wilfrith, his friend, was talk- 
 ing to him of the spiritual life, two swallows came suddenly 
 flying in, and behold they upraised their song rejoicingly, and 
 after that, perched without fear on the shoulders of the holy 
 man, and again uplifted their song and often lit on his breast 
 and arms and knees. Now when Wilfrith, long wondering, 
 beheld the birds, he asked why the fowls of the wild waste sat 
 on him and were so tame. And Guthlac said, "Hast thou 
 never learnt, brother Wilfrith, in holy writ, that the wild deer 
 and the wild birds were the nearer to him who hath led his 
 life after the will of God ? " 
 
 In the place where Guthlac had lived, Crowland drew the 
 
XIII THE RISE OF LITEKATURE IN MERCIA 253 
 
 patronage of ^thelbald and after him. of OfEa, who, beginning 
 Ms reign (757) over Mercia in some obscurity, had become, 
 before his death in 796, the greatest king that England had as 
 yet seen ; but whose power went out, after his death, like a 
 dying candle. We might imagine that this great prince whose 
 charters are "more numerous than those of any other king of his 
 age," who was the friend of learned persons like Alcuin, who had 
 relations of close correspondence with the court of Charles at 
 a time when Charles was patronising and advancing learning, 
 would have created around him some kind of literature. This is 
 so natural a conjecture that some persons have either asserted 
 or suggested it. Professor Earle conjectures that Hygberht, 
 the sole Archbishop of Lichfield, whom OfEa set up as a rival 
 of Canterbury, was the writer of the existing poem of Beowulf. 
 Others seem to suggest that Cynewulf was a Mercian or of a 
 Mercian school. But there is no evidence of any literary 
 school, capable of producing poems like Beowulf and the Elene, 
 in the court or kingdom of Offa. The fabulous tales, however, 
 which had collected round the ancient hero of the continental 
 England, round Offa the son of Wermund — tales which were 
 part of a legend common to England and Scandinavia — were 
 mixed up with Offa of Mercia. They make him thus one of 
 the subjects of literature, but they obscure all his early his- 
 tory. His life was a life of wars and eager policy. His pat- 
 ronage of the Church was for his own ends, and St. Albans 
 was founded by him as a make-weight against an immoral life 
 which had, by the evil example it gave, a bad effect on the 
 monasteries and therefore upon their learning. At his death 
 Mercia lost all power, and in 828 it was swallowed up by Ecg- 
 berht. Not many years after Ecgberht's death, the whole of 
 Mercia was fought over by the heathen. All the monasteries 
 perished ; learning and the materials of learning were for the 
 most part destroyed. Middle as well as Southern England 
 was drowned in ignorance.^ Yet we must not forget that the 
 popular lays, the ballads, and the war-songs still continued. 
 The wandering minstrel still went from hamlet to hamlet ; the 
 Scop still made his verses in the camp, and the legend which 
 tells how iElfred sang to the harp in the tents of his foes, tells 
 us that when the Muse has been driven from the seats of 
 learning, she finds a shelter among the people. 
 
 1 The western part of Mercia was not, however, harried so mercilessly as the 
 rest of it. There seems to have lingered there some of the means for building 
 up, when peace came, a new home for learning. In 873 Werfrith was made 
 Bishop of Worcester, and he seems to have been able to establish a school in 
 that city, and to develop it after the peace of Wedmore. But this, and the 
 help he gave to jElfred, does not belong to the present history. 
 
CHAPTEE XIV 
 
 LITEEATUEE IN NOETHUMBEIA 
 
 It was in Northumbria that English literature, as distin- 
 guished from Latin literature in England, arose, and it reached 
 in that northern land a remarkable, and varied development. 
 It was also in the same region that Latin learning and literar 
 ture, written by English folk, attained its highest excellence. 
 The English literature began with Caedmon of Whitby, and he 
 created, as we hear from Baeda, a school of poetry, and this is 
 one of the earliest vernacular literatures of which we know in 
 modern Europe. The Latin literature is fully represented by 
 the work of Baeda, and his work was the greatest done in 
 Europe at the time, and may be said to be the foundation or 
 impulse of all mediaeval learning. Thus in the seventh cen- 
 tury, in our own land, the dance of the modern Muses began. 
 Those of them who recited their thoughts in the Latin tongue 
 — the Muse of History and of divine Philosophy — ceased in 
 England after a brief period their noble speech, but found 
 their voice afresh, when many centuries had passed, in our 
 native tongue. Those who sang in English, the Muses of 
 Poetry — of epic, tragic and lyric strains, — sang for too short 
 a time in the ears of all, then also ceased or seemed to 
 cease in England. Their song was still heard, but only on the 
 lips of warriors and wandering bards, in camp and village. 
 Lowlier and lowlier was its sound, but its hour came at last. 
 Again the Muses took up the English lyre for all the world to 
 hear, and their first strains were coincident with the time of 
 the Great Charter. As the people grew in freedom and in 
 power so swelled the Muses' voice, ever louder and sweeter 
 and in more varied music, from century to century, until the 
 present hour. 
 
 It is the beginning of this poetic life in our own England 
 which we have now to consider. Its early life in Northum- 
 bria lasted not much more than a century, from about 670 to 
 254 
 
CHAP. XIV LITERATUEE IN NORTHUMBRIA 255 
 
 about the year 800. The poetry is remarkable for two things 
 ■which do not generally characterise the earlier efforts of song I 
 — for a comparative excellence and for variety of range. The I 
 excellence is only comparative : we get more art in the poetry j 
 than we expect, more originality, more happy surprises, more 
 personal feeling well expressed than we should imagine possi- 
 ble in the childhood of a literature ; but when we look at the 
 poetry by itself alone, it is not, with a few exceptions, of a 
 high class. When we consider its variety of range, we can 
 speak with a less uncertain tone. From this point 6t view it 
 deserves high attention. During the short tijne it lasted, it 
 tried and touched, as if driven to extend its swelling life in all 
 directions, a great number of different modes of poetry. All 
 we have of it is contained in the MS. of Beowulf; in two \ 
 books, one kept at Exeter and another found at Vercelli; in j 
 the Chronicle and in a few other MSS. They are all of no » 
 great length : a man might read them through in a few days, 
 but in their narrow space there is an astonishing variety, — 
 and variety of methods and subjects prove a keen individuality 
 and an eager life in the poets of a people. Beowulf took its 
 shape, at least so- 1 believe, in ISTorthumbria, and Beowulf has 
 some relation to an epic. The three books of Judith that 
 remain to us out of twelve are, like an epic poem, freely in- 
 vented and imaginatively developed from existing legends. Out 
 of the paraphrasing of the Bible which Caedmon began, arose \ 
 a narrative poetry which treated episodes of the Bible as if 
 they were lays in a- Saga. Hymns, songs of praise and prayer 
 were certainly written by Caedmon, as well as poetic narrative. 
 The religious lyric was born. If we should dare to impute 
 to Caedmon or his school the long epsiode of the Fall in the 
 Genesis, or the Exodus, or the series of cantatas on the life 
 and triumph of Jesus over Satan, we should be able to refer to 
 JSTorthumbria three other types of poetry ; and for my part, I 
 hold that these, however later than Caedmon the critics may 
 put them, were written under the influence, the close influence, 
 of the Northujnbrian Master. This poetry is also full of a 
 dramatic manner, and this manner grew in Northumbria. The 
 story in the more ancient Caedmonic poems and in the Judith 
 is often told in dramatic conversations. The Christ of Cyne- 
 wulf possesses long passages which might be sung at a miracle 
 play. 
 
 ISTor does this exhaust the range of Northumbrian song. 
 The Riddles, of which there are a gathering of eighty-nine, are 
 full, as we have seen, of the poetry of natural description, of 
 
256 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 nature almost loved for her own sake. Biographies, such as 
 Guthlac's, were also made into poetry, and adorned by pleasant 
 flowers of rhetoric. The wild legends of the saints, as of St. 
 Andrew, were taken up, and woven into supernatuial stories ; 
 and a Saga subject, like that of the "Invention of the True 
 Cross," was seized, and treated in part like a heathen tale of 
 war and adventure. Allegorical poems, already touched with 
 mediaeval mysticism, such as the Phoenix, the Panther, and the 
 Whale, engaged, in an hour of leisure, the poet's hand. An 
 extraordinarily personal poem, of passionate religious autobi- 
 ography, is founded on a dream of the Holy Rood ; and there 
 exists a long threefold poem by Cynewulf, in boldly connected 
 ' divisions, on the whole of the mission and work of Jesus, which 
 I passes through the Incarnation and the Ascension, tUl it em- 
 / bodies, and with an original and noble treatment, the great 
 / subject of the Last Judgment. In the midst of these there are 
 ' poems concerning the works and fates of men and collections 
 of sententious verses which tell of the proverbial wisdom of 
 men, of their sorrows and their religion ; and lastly, there are 
 four elegies, two of which are of excellent quality. 
 
 This is a remarkable range of poetic methods, contained in a 
 small space, and it is, for its time, unique. It presents to us a 
 curious problem. How did it happen that this native poetry. 
 — poetry other than the war-song which was universal — arose 
 in Northumbria, and took there so wide and so imaginative a 
 range ? What were the elements which nursed this vernacular 
 growth, and did not exist, so far as we know, elsewhere than in 
 Northumbria ? ^ The reasons for such a flowering of song 
 ought to be found in the years preceding 670-700. Those that 
 
 1 1 assume that there was no early West Saxon or Mercian poetry of this 
 excellent and varied kind, and I think one has the right to assume it. It may 
 be said that there was such poetry in Wessex during the seventh century, and 
 we have lost it. It is possible, but then I think we should have had some allu- 
 sion to it made by Baeda, Ealdhelm, Alfred, or his biographers. At any rate, 
 we know nothing about such poetry, and our question remains. How did it 
 happen that English verse began in Northumbria? The question becomes 
 more important, if, as I think, Cynewulf and his school, who carried on the 
 work begun by Caedmon, were also Northumbrian, and if Beowulf, as I also 
 believe, was thrown into its present form in Northumbria. But these beliefs 
 are as yet open to discussion. What we can say, in general, is that we know 
 there was a school of vernacular poetry in the north during the latter half of 
 the seventh and the beginning of the eighth century ; that we do not know of 
 such a school at this date in the middle or the south of England, and that it is 
 much more probable that poetry should be further developed where it has 
 already existed, than in a country like Mercia where we never hear of poetry, 
 or in a country like Wessex where we ouly hear of Ealdhelm makinga light 
 song or two for singing in the streets. At present the question is. Why did 
 poetry in the seventh century arise in Northumbria? 
 
XIV LITEEATtJKE IN NOKTHUMBRIA 257 
 
 I here suggest can scarcely be called more than conjectures, 
 but at least they place before the mind the question which any 
 historian of Anglo-Saxon literature ought to consider one of the 
 most important questions he has to ask himself. 
 
 The first of these elements is the early greatness of Nor- i 
 thumbria, and the influence its tradition of national splendour ' 
 had on the minds of men. The pride of country which this ; 
 awakens has always been an impulse to poetry. The finest I 
 poetic times of England are coincident with the sense of i 
 national greatness and unity, which, following on an era of 
 splendour, uplifts the people to a high level of constant passion. 
 This was the case in the days of Edward III. ; it was still 
 more the case in the time of Elizabeth ; it has been the case in 
 our own century. Nor is the outburst of song, which began 
 with Burns, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and died out with 
 Keats, apart from this experience, though it may seem so. It 
 was not a special national glory which then fired the poets, but 
 the glory of the whole of the Nation of Humanity which seemed 
 to their minds to rise suddenly into splendour and unity and 
 brotherhood, and to be filled with immortal hopes. In such 
 times the past sends its impulse into the present and excites 
 it ; the present is full of its own eagferness and joy ; and the 
 future seems to thrill with expectation. Poetry is then bom 
 or if not actually born, the nation is then pregnant with it ; 
 and in the times of peace which follow this national triumph 
 the child opens its eyes to the light. 
 
 Such conditions prevailed in Northumbria in the seventh 
 century, ^thelfrith, who reigned from 693 to 617, raised his 
 country to great honour ; and his victory at Chester secured the 
 supremacy of the English in the North. He was followed by 
 his brother-in-law, Eadwine, whose supremacy was established 
 far beyond Northumbria. Almost the whole of England owned 
 his sway, and every Northumbrian must have felt the pride of 
 country. Then he set up his capital at York, and a touch of 
 the greatness of Eome, for York was the capital of Roman 
 Britain, was linked to his name. This new splendour was 
 imaged in the standard of purple embroidered with gold and in 
 the Eoman tufa, the feather tuft on the spear, which were 
 borne before him on his journeys. Added to these things was 
 the profound peace which Eadwine established, and the good 
 government which filled the peace. So widespread was justice 
 that the tradition ran and lasted that a woman with her babe 
 might walk scatheless from sea to sea. When he died then in 
 633 the sense of national splendour, peace, unity, and over- 
 
258 EAELY ENGLISH LITEEATURE chap. 
 
 lordship was keen in the heart of every Northumbrian, and it 
 lasted for more than a century. Oswald, his successor, strength- 
 ened this impression. He, too, was overlord of the greater 
 part of England, and he became also a centre of that spiritual 
 glory which saintship shed around him in his people's eyes. 
 He stood side by side, among his thegns, with Aidan the Apos- 
 tle of Northumbria, interpreting the message of Christ. Leg- 
 end made sacred his memory; a lovely story tells that the 
 hand which gave to the poor remained for ever undecayed ; a 
 pillar of light rose to heaven from his body ; a miracle found 
 his body. So eager was the Christianity of Northumbria un- 
 der Oswald that a great part of England was evangelised by 
 the King's missionaries ; and his name still abides in many 
 churches. Thus to the political splendour and leadership of 
 Northumbria was now added a spiritual splendour. Oswin, his 
 successor in Deira, was as closely linked to Aidan as Oswald ; 
 and when Oswiu, King of Bernicia, slew Oswin, and made 
 Northumbria one again, the political splendour was more than 
 maintained by this great King. Nor was the spiritual glory 
 less. The last heathen King of Mercia, Penda, who had made 
 the North tremble, fell before Oswiu, and Mercia became alto- 
 gether Christian under his missionary bishop Ceadda. In his 
 reign also the breach between Eome and the North was healed. 
 The Synod of Whitby (664) added all the emotional influence 
 of Rome as the great mother of the Christian world and the 
 power which went back to the apostles, to the spiritual grounds 
 of literature ; and this was followed by the ecclesiastical unity 
 of the whole of England. This was done from the south, but 
 Northumbria might fairly say, quorum pars magna fui. With 
 Ecgfrith, Oswiu's successor, the spiritual and political splen- 
 dour of Northumbria still lasted. His great friendship with 
 Cuthbert kept alive in the large number of monasteries which 
 were now spreading learning and civilisation far and wide the 
 sense that the spiritual nobility of Northumbria was as great 
 as its political splendour. It is true that when Ecgfrith fell 
 on the murky day of Nechtansmere the warlike supremacy of 
 Northumbria over England also fell, but this was for a time an 
 advantage rather than a disadvantage to Northumbria. The 
 internal condition of the' country had been sorely altered for 
 the worse by the incessant wars of Ecgfrith. Aldfrith, his 
 successor, was a lover of peace and, concentrating Northumbria 
 within her own borders, developed the kingdom. Within those 
 borders her greatness and happiness still endured. Her lord- 
 ship over others was lost ; her lordship over herself was not 
 
LITERATURE IN NORTHUMBRIA 259 
 
 lessened. Peace, while it is so close to warlike glory as still to 
 be thrilled with its excitement, begets new literature, and Aid- 
 frith himself was the image of the literary excitement which 
 the political and religious splendour of Northumbria awakened 
 and supported in the minds of men. Ecclesiastical purity had 
 begun to decay at his death (705), and he had lost some of his 
 dominions at the hand of the Picts, and both these circum- 
 stances diminished the glory of his kingdom. But literature 
 still lived on, even through the weak and immoral reigns of 
 Osred, Coenred, and Osric. Ceolwulf, Baeda's friend, suc- 
 ceeded them, and when he came to the throne in 729, the 
 ancient glory again shone brightly, but briefly, before it was 
 finally quenched in anarchy. We see, in the prologue and 
 epilogue of the Ecclesiastical History, and in the special care 
 which Baeda bestowed on the history of his own province, 
 how much the sense of Northumbria's greatness influenced her 
 chief writer. Long after Ceolwulf's death, when the land had 
 fallen into ruinous disorder, the memory of her glory still 
 lasted like a slumbering fire in the hearts of men, and pro- 
 duced a poeftry of regret for the passing away of that which 
 once had been so great, tinged, as it were, with the beauty of 
 the dying sun. Much of the poetry of Cynewulf preserves 
 this melancholy charm. 
 
 This, then, I suggest, was one of the elements which caused 
 a native poetry to rise in Northumbria. But this would not, 
 without an additional consideration, do much to explain the 
 problem. Mercia, it might be said, had its splendid time, and 
 so had Wessex, but they produced no English verse with which 
 we are acquainted. One reason they did not, was that when 
 their years of glory came, Eoman letters had seized on England, 
 and the influence of Bome was to make Latin alone the tongue 
 of learning and art. But this was not the case at the begin- 
 ning of the Northumbrian supremacy. It might have been the 
 case had Paullinus stayed in the North. But this Eoman monk 
 fled at Eadwine's death (633). Had he established a Latin 
 Christianity and a Latin learning, it is probable we should have 
 had no vernacular Christian poetry. AH who were emotional- 
 ised by Northumbria's political and religious greatness would 
 have expressed their emotion on their own subjects in Latin 
 verse, or not have cared to preserve any English verse.^ But, 
 
 1 Of course I do not mean that the early Northumbrian poets wrote poems 
 on the glory of Northumhria, but that the whole nation being excited, and with 
 them the poets, on this point, the poets could not help writing on their own 
 subjects under the sway of the national emotion. Heated, they used that heat 
 on matters other than the original source of their heat. 
 
260 EABLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 fortunately, at the beginnings of Christian and patriotic emo- 
 tion in Northumbria, Eome was almost unrepresented, and 
 Christianity was established in the North by Irish missionaries 
 ; — that is, by men who, feeling the passion of nationality 
 strongly and in opposition to the denationalising literature of 
 Rome, were in the habit of using their own language for poetry, 
 , not only on warlike subjects (on which every nation speaks in 
 its own tongue), but also on all sentimental,, imaginative, and 
 religious subjects. This habit became, I suggest, the habit also 
 of Northumbria. I do not think that it even occurred to the 
 Northumbrian monk, trained by Aidau and his followers, to 
 write his sacred poetry in Latin. Baeda, who was of the Latin 
 school, did write his poetry in Latin verse. But he also loved 
 English verse, and even wrote it. He was so far influenced by 
 the national feeling for English. But his practice illustrates 
 what would have happened if all the monasteries had been, 
 like Jarrow, linked to Eome. We should have had no English 
 school of poetry. As it was, there were many laymen writing 
 English verse, and the monk in a monastery founded by the 
 Irish wrote as naturally in English as an lona monk would write 
 in Irish. Not only did Caedmon, about fifteen years before the 
 : death of Eogfrith, sing the creation of the world and the Ee- 
 / demption in English, but it seemed natural and best to the 
 j heads of his monastery to encourage him in this vernacular 
 verse.' ■ It was just this fortunate turn, this happy temper in 
 I the heads of Whitby — a temper which was the product, I 
 think, of their Irish instead of their Eoman training — which 
 nourished Christian poetry in English. The impulse, once 
 given, continued. Honour, even a divine origin, was given to 
 vernacular verse. Scholars like Baeda admired and loved it, 
 princes and nobles adopted and supported it. When, then, the 
 influence of Eoman learning came in literary form to the North 
 with the writings of Ealdhelm, it was, fortunately, too late 
 for Eome to Latinise poetry — a vernacular poetry had been 
 established. In one word, the flight of Paullinus, which meant 
 
 1 He could not, probably, have sung it in Latin, and this was also a piece of 
 good luck ; but the point here is that the heads of his house were delighted with 
 this English versing of sacred subjects, thought it inspired, and encouraged the 
 poet to develop his powers in English. This would not, I think, have been the 
 case at Canterbury under Theodore, or at Malmesbury under Ealdhelm. They, 
 gripped by the Latin convention, would have looked coldly on English verse on 
 solemn subjects written by one who was not a scholar. Ealdhelm, for example, 
 did not, as far as we know, write on grave Christian themes in English verse. 
 His songs on the bridge, of which the story speaks, seem to have been curmina 
 trivialia. The Northumbrian scholar, on the contrary, trained by the Irish, 
 preferred to voice his religious emotions in his own tongue. 
 
xtv LITERATURE IN NORTHUMBRIA 261 
 
 the flight of Latin as the tongue of literature, enabled an Eng- 
 lish poetry to develop itself. 
 
 It is also probable that the Irish school who had evangelised 
 the North felt that there would be a struggle between them and 
 Eome for supremacy, and feared with good reason that they 
 would be beaten. Their tendency then would be to encourage 
 English as a vehicle for religious poetry rather than Latin. The 
 struggle did take place, and Home won the battle. But, again, 
 the victory was not finally gained till a vernacular poetry had 
 begun. The Synod of Whitby, though it settled the Easter 
 quarrel on the side of Rome, did not prevent the enthusiastic 
 reception of English poetry, six years afterwards, by the very 
 persons who had attended the Synod, and in the very place 
 where it was held. Even the coming of Theodore to Northum- 
 bria in 678 and 684, and the overthrow of the dominance of Irish 
 influence, did not replace English by Latin as the vehicle of 
 poetry, then or afterwards. Between these visits of Theodore, 
 Caedmon had fixed poetry, into English ; the whole country — 
 kings, nobles, people — had become accustomed to a national 
 poetry in the tongue of the nation. Having begun, it went on. 
 The beginning is half the deed in literature. 
 
 There is yet another probable reason for the prevalence of a 
 Christian poetry in English. The kings, and no doubt the 
 nobles of the seventh century were close friends of the 
 missionaries from lona, and many of them were brought up at 
 lona. They would not be likely to care exclusively for Eome 
 nor for Latin learning, and whatever influence they had would 
 more tend to support English than Latin poetry. Moreover, 
 Oswald, going about with Aidan on his missionary journeys, 
 and translating to his nobles and thegns Aidan's preaching 
 into English,! would be as much interested in English as a 
 means of sacred teaching of the people as iElfred afterwards 
 became in the South ; and had Caedmon risen in his time would 
 have rejoiced in his English poetry. Oswin was as much 
 bound up with Aidan as Oswald. Oswiu was baptized and 
 educated in lona, and would have, during the earlier part of 
 his reign, the same interesting English as a sacred literary tongue 
 as his predecessors. This conjecture is, however, founded on 
 but slender evidence. There is much plainer evidence to show 
 that the Northumbrian kings in the seventh century were 
 suspicious that the spiritual power of Eome might tend to 
 
 1 " It was the most charming of sights," says Baeda, " to see the King inter- 
 preting to his thegns and chiefs tlie discourses of Aidan wlio as yet spolce 
 imperfectly the tongue of the Angles, for in his long exile the king had 
 thoroughly learned the language of the Scots." — Encles. Hist. Bk. iii. 
 
262 EARLY ENGLISH LITEEATURE chap. 
 
 denationalise Northumbria. If this be the case, they would 
 encourage an English rather than a Latin literature, when such 
 a literature had once begun. Wessex and Mercia also in later 
 days stood out against the claim of Eome to sit above the 
 national feeling; but when this struggle of theirs arose Latin 
 was already the tongue of literature. But, at this time in 
 Northumbria, Latin was not the tongue of literature. When 
 Christian poetry began it began in English. Having begun, 
 the kings and nobles whose policy it was to keep up the 
 separate nationality of Northumbria would support it as one 
 of the elements which strengthened national feeling. 
 
 It is possible to put this conjecture into a connection with 
 known events. To establish Latin as the only tongue of 
 sacred literature would be a part of the struggle which Home 
 made. It seems to me very probable that Wilfrid, who was 
 at the head of the Roman party, would make that a part of his 
 programme, and, if so, English, as the tongue of sacred poetry, 
 would be in danger at his hands. His effort to romanise the 
 Church was at first supported by many high-placed Northum- 
 brians, by Alchfrith, Eanfleda, and others. Eor some years he 
 was apparent master of the Northumbrian Church. The great 
 monastic foundations of Hexham and Eipon may be said to 
 have been his. A multitude of monks obeyed him ; , kings 
 and nobles sent their children to be brought up by him. In 
 splendour of expenditure and in show he rivalled Ecgfrith 
 himself, and could he have kept his temper, and behaved 
 with less desire of power, with less intrigue, he might have 
 got the Northumbrian kings and monasteries into his hands 
 and the English seed of literature might never have grown 
 into a tree. This danger may have been increased by the 
 fact that his great friend, Benedict Biscop, had now made 
 Wearmouth and Jarrow a centre of Eoman literature and 
 art. It was then of importance, I conjecture, for the preva- 
 lence of English as the tongue of poetic literature that 
 Wilfrid's ascendency should suffer. His pride, perhaps his 
 interference with Ecgfrith's domestic relations and his quar- 
 rel with Theodore drove him from the country. It may 
 have been owing to this quarrel that Theodore, while de- 
 termined to bring Northumbria under the ecclesiastical order 
 of Rome, was not intolerant of the Celtic or the national 
 elements in Northumbria, and set over the new Sees into which 
 he divided Northumbria bishops who had been brought up in 
 Celtic monasteries — Eata' at Hexham, Bosa at York, while 
 
 1 Eata was one of the twelve Northumbrian boys whom Aidan trained at 
 Lindislarne. Ceadda or Chad was another ; and Theodore, after deposing him 
 
XIV LITERATURE IN NORTHUMBRIA 263 
 
 Cuthbert was settled at Lindisfarne. On all sides the eu- 
 eroaching and intolerant influence of Wilfred was set aside, 
 and the trouble he caused in Church and court may have been 
 one reason why the Northumbrian princes became more and 
 more determined to keep their national individuality clear of 
 Eome. One result of all this would be that English poetry 
 would escape from being crushed out by Latin verse. Even 
 Ecgfrith, while submitting to Theodore, kept the Church in 
 Northumbria national, and supported, especially by his friend- 
 ship for Cuthbert, the distinctly English school of monks, who, 
 though they had yielded to Rome, retained their individual 
 ways of thinking. We might even see in the fate which 
 caused Ecgfrith to be buried at lona a parable of this linger- 
 ing Celtic influence. 
 
 Aldfrith, who succeeded him, equally supported the nation- 
 ality of the Northumbrian Church ; and his education at lona, 
 and partly, it is said, in Ireland, as well as his training as 
 Ealdhelm's fellow-pupil, made him much more cosmopolitan in 
 learning than Eome may have wished him to be. At one with 
 Theodore's policy of comprehension, he had also strong Celtic 
 sympathies. I imagine that he was all the more Northum- 
 brian because Irish and Latin elements were mixed in him. 
 Between the individualism of the" Celt and the collectivism of 
 the Eomg.n, he found a middle point in a strollg Northum- 
 brianism. We may be certain then that a national English 
 poetry, especially Northumbrian, found favour in his eyes ; 
 and indeed at his death in 705 the whole of Caedmon's work 
 was afloat in Northumbria; those who formed themselves 
 upon Caedmon had established a school of English sacred 
 poetry, and another school had begun, not only of sacred but 
 of profane poetry. 
 
 These are the reasons why I think that English had in 
 Northumbria a chance as the tongue of poetry which it had 
 not elsewhere, and why, having begun at Whitby about 670, it 
 continued, in spite of the rapid and pafallel growth of Latin 
 literature. The school of Theodore and Ealdhelm did not 
 encourage English poetry to develop itself. The school of 
 Baedaand of York continue to admire and support English 
 poetry sixty years after its beginning. The contrast is re- 
 
 at York, made him Bishop of Lichfield. Bosa was brought up hy Hilda, and 
 Cuthbert was, of course, brought up among the Celtic missionaries. There was 
 then a parenthesis in Northumbria during which the Celtic influence was mixed 
 on equal terms with the Latin. It was during this parenthesis that English 
 poetry gathered strength and fixed itself. 
 
264 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap, 
 
 markable. We now turn to a different matter. What were 
 the influences which bore on Northumbria and not on Mercia 
 and Wessex, and which tended to make Northumbria a more 
 fruitful soil for poetry than Wessex or Mercia? We are 
 driven here, as before, to suggestions which may or may not 
 be of value. 
 
 The first suggestion is that the geographical position of 
 Northumbria brought it into connection with a greater mixture 
 of races than was the case elsewhere. The whole of Cumbria 
 or Strathclyde lay on the west and north-west of it, and in 
 Cumbria there was a mixed population ; of the Irish who 
 drifted down into it from the North beyond the Clyde, of the 
 Picts who lived in Galloway, and of its own Welsh indwellers, 
 all three speaking different dialects of the same tongue, and 
 in conversation more or less comprehending one another.^ 
 Each of these nations, if I use Baeda's term which does not 
 carry our meaning of the word,^ had their own poetry, both 
 warlike and Christian. Even the Picts in the North had, in 
 the seventh century, received enough of Christianity from 
 Columba to have sacred song among them in their own tongue, 
 and in Aldfrith's time the learned men of the Pictish king's 
 court translated Ceolfrid's letter about Easter into their own 
 literary language. The Northumbrian tongue came into con- 
 tact, both ii? war and peace, with these peoples, -^ with the 
 Welsh of Strathclyde, with the Irish of Dalriada, even with 
 the Pictish Gaels. During the various periods when they 
 lived under the overlordship of the Northumbrian kings of 
 the seventh century, intermarriages probably took place, and, 
 on the borders at least, something resembling a common 
 language arose, I conjecture, between the English and these 
 peoples. Moreover, under Eadwine, the British kingdom of 
 Elmet was subdued, and we have no proof that the inhabitants 
 were wholly driven away. All this contact of the Northum- 
 
 1 Columba conversed freely with the Picts from king to peasant without any 
 difficulty. It was only when he preached that he was forced to use an inter- 
 preter. So says Adamnan in the seventh century. (See also, Four Ancient 
 Books of Wales, Skene, p. 137, vol. 1.) It does not follow, however, that the 
 Welsh language of Cumbria was understood as easily by Picts or Irish, except 
 on the marches. 
 
 2 Baeda says of Oswald, "Denique omues nationea et provincias Britanniae, 
 quae in quatuor linguas, id est Brittonum, Pictorum, Scottornin, et Anglorum, 
 divisae sunt, in ditione aecepit." All these folks at the time of Baeda,' " culti- 
 vated, each in its own dialect, the suMime study of Divine truth, and Latin, by 
 the study of the sacred Scriptures, had become common to them " [En-leu. Hint. 
 ch. i.) It is plain that there was an interchange among them of their religious 
 thoughts, perhaps even of their literature. 
 
XIV LITERATURE IN NOETHUMBRIA 268 
 
 brians with these varied races, or with various growths of the 
 same original stock, had already begun at the beginning of the 
 seventh century, before, let us say, the death of Eadwine in 
 633, and, after that time, it continued and increased. Inter- 
 course with the Welsh existed in other parts of England, but 
 it was greater in Northumbria than elsewhere. Intercourse 
 with the Irish existed also in parts of England, but it was 
 only between wandering Irish scholars and English scholars. 
 In Northumbria it was more constant, and of an Irish people 
 with an English people. Intercourse with the Gael took place 
 nowhere else in England, but in Northumbria it had gone so 
 far that before Baeda died a Pictish king sent for architects 
 to England, and was in direct communication with the mon- 
 astery of Wearmouth. This interchange of the thought 
 and oral literature, accompanied by the occasional inter- 
 marriage, of English and Welsh and Irish and Picts was, 
 I think, one of the causes of a greater capacity in North- 
 umbria for producing good poetry than was likely to exist 
 in other parts of England, where the foreigners affected 
 the English stock only on the western edges of Mercia and 
 of Wessex. 
 
 One more suggestion I may make in this connection. If 
 Mr. Skene and others be right in their conjecture that in the 
 fifth century some of the continental English had settled south 
 of the Eorth, this mixture of the English, Welsh, and, it may 
 be, of the Picts north of the Eorth had here already taken 
 place, and Eadwine, when he drove his way to the Forth, came 
 into touch with the descendants of an English tribe who had 
 added to their own oral poetry the poetry of the Gael and the 
 Welsh. This old English stock would harmonise in time with 
 the Angles, and bring them into closer touch with the foreigners 
 and their literature. 
 
 We have good grounds for thinking that such a literature 
 did exist among the Cumbrian Welsh at this time. The 
 scenery and events of some of the historical poems in the 
 Four Ancient Books of Wales lie, Mr. Skene says, in the north ; 
 the poems are due to Welsh laards of the North, and are 
 older than the tenth century. They are, in fact, the literature 
 of the dwellers in Cumbria, before the subjugation of Strath- 
 clyde in 946. He supposes then that the wars of the Britons 
 against the Picts and Scots, and then against the Angles of 
 Bernicia, produced a body of Welsh popular poetry, which was 
 brought into shape in the seventh century (the century we are 
 dealing with), and that the earliest consistent shape of the 
 
266 EAELY ENGLISH LITEBATUEE chap. 
 
 historical poems we have was of that century.^ This took 
 place in the reign of Cadwallon, during his brief success 
 against the Angles. Even after his defeat, the national 
 spirit, Skene supposes, was kept alive by these popular lays, 
 and by prophetic strains as to the future of the Cymry. In 
 later years, the emigration of the Cymry to Wales brought 
 these poems down from the North to South Wales, where, in 
 still later times, the Arthurian Eomance was added to them 
 from Armorica.^ From the days of Ida, then (to say nothing 
 of earlier poetry), lays of battle, of joy and sorrow, of fates 
 and legends, were being sung all over the ■ country where the 
 Cymry and the Northumbrian-English fought to and fro with 
 varying success, lived together in the days of peace, and 
 learned one another's language ; ^ and I maintain that this 
 body of popular Welsh poetry, with its peculiar poetic senti- 
 ment — its passion, colour, pathos, and surprise — had some 
 influence, and perhaps a powerful one, on the English of 
 Northumbria, and all the more, if the races were mingled, 
 here and there at least, in marriage. 
 
 It was not only, however, with the Welsh, but with the 
 
 1 During the sixth century the historical Artliur, according to Mr. Skene, 
 fought against the Northern Saxons, who had settled in the district of the Forth 
 and Clyde, the most of his twelve battles, the last of which was in 516. Poems 
 and lays were made of these battles, and took a legendary shape In the seventh 
 century. Taliessin, Aneurin, Llywarch Hen and a fourth poet "simul uno 
 tempore in poemate Britanuico claruerunt." They flourished then in the sixth 
 century. Ida died in 559, and other wars were waged against his sons. Skene 
 also declares that the great poem of the Gododin describes the terrible slaughter 
 which took place in the wars between Oswiu and Peuda, when thirty British 
 kings fought on the side of Penda against Northumbria. He mentions other 
 poems made in the seventh century concerning other battles between the Scots 
 and Welsh. There was a great body of poetry, then, already built up among 
 the Northern Welsh. (See Skene, Four Ancient BooJcs of Wales.) If this be 
 true, the English have no right to claim in Caedmon the first vernacular poet. 
 
 2 Four Ancient Books of Wales, cbs. xiii. xiv. 
 
 8 The contact of the two races, both in war and peace, was continuous from 
 the middle of the sixth century, and in war, as well as in peace, conterminous 
 peoples learn to understand one another. Four kings of the North are described 
 by the author of tlie Genealogia as warring against Hussa, son of Ida, King of 
 Bernicia, who reignedfrom 567 to 574. Again against Theodric, who reigned 
 over Bernicia from 580 to 587, and was also a son of Ida, Urien with his 
 sous fought valiantly, and with varying fortune. It was these wars, Skene 
 thinks, which were celebrated by Aneurin. In 603 the Soots and Welsh united 
 to crush Bernicia, but ^thelfrith met them at Dawston in Liddesdale, and 
 almost destroyed the whole army. It was after this, and owing to it, that 
 Eadwine pushed his power up to the shores of the Firth of Forth. Oswald and 
 Oswiu drove their conquests farther, and were overlords of Strathclyde. Ecg- 
 frith continued this overlordship and subdued Cumberland, North Lancashire 
 and Galloway. He increased then the Welsh admixture till he fell at Nech- 
 tansmere in 685. For nearly a hundred years then, we may say that there was 
 a mingling in war and peace of the Cymry and the English, sufficient, at least, 
 to enable the bards of both peoples to interchange their poetry. 
 
XIV LITERATURE IN NORTHUMBRIA 267 
 
 Irish also that the Northumbrians were mingled. The Scots, 
 as the Irish were called, had, in the fourth century, made 
 a settlement in our Scotland, but returned to Ireland. Later 
 on they came back and established themselves in the year 
 503 in Da,lriada (Argyll). The first time we find them of im- 
 portance in history is under Aedan, whom Columba crowned 
 as King of Dalriada in lona, and who, in 603, led the whole 
 of the Celtic forces of the country against ^thelfrith. There 
 is no need here to follow the fortunes of the Scot-kingdom. 
 It was not till the middle of the ninth century that it took 
 the lead again in the person of Kenneth MacAlpin ; and not 
 until fifty years afterwards that Pictland became Scotland. 
 
 The real Irish invasion which influenced English literature 
 began with the landing of St. Columba in 563 on some 
 islands off the west coast of Scotland, and his final choice 
 of Hii, or lona, for the site of a monastery, from which he 
 evangelised the Picts of the mainland. He died in 697, the 
 very year in which Augustine landed in the south of Britain, 
 but he handed on to his followers his passionate and poetic 
 temper. All those brought up in his monastery seem to have 
 caught something of the mingled tire and tenderness of its 
 founder,^ and something also of his love for a free and wan- 
 dering life ; and the English who came for education to lona, 
 and those, too, who were taught in Northumbria their Chris- 
 tianity by missionaries from Zona, were influenced more or 
 less deeply by the elements of Columba's character, especially 
 those whose blood was at all mixed with Gaelic or Cymric 
 families. Columba was, even in his faults, eminently Irish, 
 and in no people, save the Jews, are race qualities so persist- 
 ently continued from generation to generation, and so power- 
 ful in admixture with other peoples, as they are in the Irish. 
 In no people, also, is the descent of character, independent of 
 the descent through blood, more close and masterful than it is 
 among the Irish. If it had not been so in their history, if 
 they had oftener broken the tradition, they had been a wiser 
 and a better folk. Columba, however, handed down to his 
 successors, through the mastery of his character, his loves, 
 
 1 These two elements united in Columba, and each tempering the other, were 
 often divided in his spiritual descendants. The fire of Columba, without his 
 tenderness, became fierceness in Corman, as he is called, who was so hard on 
 the heathen Northumbrians that he returned to lona ; and somewhat petulant 
 wrath in Colman, who, having lost his cause at Wliitby, went back to lona and 
 then to Ireland. The tenderness of Columba was.pre-eminent in Aidan, who 
 also had eagerness enough. Both fire and gentleness were again united in 
 Cathbert, who of them all is most like Columba. 
 
268 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 his likings, his temperament, his manner of life ; and these, 
 full of poetic and passionate feeling, were transferred to the 
 English whom his monks evangelised. Cuthbert, who may- 
 have had Gael or Irish blood in him,' is a good example of 
 the reproduction of Columba's manner of life and poetic feel- 
 ing, of his love of solitude alternating with vagrant missions, 
 but not of his power of versing or of his hot and passionate 
 temper. Columba was himself a poet. Irish poems of his are 
 believed to still exist, and if the song of regret for his exile 
 from Ireland be really his, it makes it clear that he was a true 
 lyrist. He loved well his own national poetry, and the story 
 goes that one of the reasons of a certain visit he paid to Ire- 
 land was to defend the bardic order from a threatened exile 
 from their country. We may be sure, then, that the love of 
 poetry continued to be a tradition in the monastery, and the 
 Irish poems of battle and law, and the great stories, like that 
 of Lir and the children of Tuireann, were known and loved 
 at lona. Columba was not the man to throw away poetry 
 which Baeda would, no doubt, have called profane. One of 
 his greatest friends, Dalian Forgaill, who made a poem upon 
 him, which is still preserved — the Amhra Choluimcille, Co- 
 lumba's Praises — was the chief of all the Irish bards. With 
 all this poetry the English educated at lona were likely to be 
 acquainted. 
 
 Columba was equally fond of literary matters. His love for 
 fine MSS. is said to have produced a civil war in Ireland ; and 
 the battle of the Psalter is still kept in mind by the shrine in 
 which the Psalter is said to have been placed, and which is in 
 the museum of the Eoyal Irish Academy. Not otily, then, 
 from Rome, but also from lona, Northumbrian nobles learned 
 to love a fine library. Aldfrith is much more likely to have 
 derived his eagerness for collecting from lona than from 
 Wearmouth. 
 
 The passion for wandering at will, which carried the Irish 
 missionaries over Europe, and which was reproduced in the 
 Northumbrian pupils of Aidan; the love of country and the 
 pathos of exile; the affection for animals, as if they were 
 human beings, but needing more pity than men and women, 
 were, all three, deep in the character of Columba, and are all 
 
 1 It is my contention, tliat all over the country we call the Lowlands and 
 the Border, English were mixed with Pict and Scot and Cymry, and that a 
 Teutonic people, when mixed, are more lilcely to have the poetic temperament 
 than when unmixed. The legend that Cuthhert's mother was an Irish slave — 
 a princess, of course — may possibly contain the fact that he was of mixed 
 blood. 
 
XIV LITERATURE IN NORTHUMBRIA 269 
 
 represented in Anglo-Saxon poetry. The first is as much Teu- 
 tonic as Celtic, but among the Teuton tribes it is more the 
 characteristic of warriors than of monks. It was, however, 
 a special mark of the Irish evangelisation of Northumbria; 
 and the wandering gipsy life that Aidan and Cedda and Ceadda 
 and Cuthbert led, roving, as fancy led them, from hamlet to 
 hamlet over the wild country, was much more provocative of a 
 poetic way of looking at nature and man than the systematic 
 visitation of parishes, which the bishop, under the Roman rule, 
 made of his diocese. The one was directed by impulse, the 
 other by rule. The one was a life of adventure, the other was 
 not. 
 
 The love of country and the passionate pain of exile belong 
 also to all peoples, but thej^ were felt by the Irish with peculiar 
 intensity, certainly with far greater intensity than by the Teu- 
 tonic tribes. I do not say that the frequent recurrence of 
 this poetic subject in Northumbrian poetry was caused by the 
 influence of the Irish, but I think that it was deepened and 
 made more passionate by it. 
 
 The love of animals is a common element in monasticism, 
 both Celtic and Koman, from Columba to Francis of Assisi. 
 Pity, which lay at the root of the nature of Jesus, was extended 
 to beasts and birds as well as men. This was not a special 
 mark of the Teutonic genius under Christianity. It appears, 
 but not often, in Northumbrian poetry. It has always been 
 one of the marks, up to the present century, of English poetry 
 in the North rather than of poetry in the South, and I venture 
 to suggest that it grew among the Northumbrians and has con- 
 tinued in the Lowland poetry owing to the impulse, stronger 
 and more poetic than elsewhere, which it received from Columba, 
 and his pupils, and which they handed on to the English whom 
 they evangelised. The pretty legend which Adamnan tells of 
 Columba and the Crane illustrates alike the passionate sorrow 
 of exile and the love of animals of which I write, and the 
 poetic intensity and charm with which the Celt surrounded 
 them. 
 
 One morning Columba called to his side one of his monks, 
 and said, " Go, seat yourself on the marge of the sea, on the 
 western shore of our isle ; and there you will see, coming from 
 the north of Ireland, a voyaging crane, very weary and beaten 
 by the storms, which will fall at your feet upon the beach. 
 Lift it up with pity and carry it to the neighbouring hut, nourish 
 it for three days of rest, and when it is refreshed and strong 
 again, it will care no more to stay with us in exile, but will fly 
 
270 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATTJEE chap. 
 
 back again to sweet Ireland, its dear country where it was 
 born. I charge you thus with its care, for it comes from the 
 land where I was born myself." So when the monk returned, 
 having done as he was commanded, Columba said, "May God 
 bless you, my son, since you have well cared for our exiled 
 guest; you will see it return to its country in three days." 
 And so it was. On the day named it rose from the earth, and 
 when it had a moment sought its path through the sky, took 
 its flight on a steady wing, straight for Ireland. 
 
 This temperament, combined with the emotions of Christian- 
 ity, and acting on hearts in the first glow of conversion, came 
 into Northumbria, and came attended by all the prestige which 
 a royal friendship gave to the Irish missionaries, and with the 
 support of the king's family and thegns. Oswald, with twelve 
 companions, had taken refuge at lona in 617. All the twelve, 
 among whom were his brothers, were baptized and educated 
 there, and shared, as they grew older, in the manner of life 
 and in all the interests of the Irish monastery. Oswald, dur- 
 ing seventeen years, from the age of thirteen, was steeped in 
 the spirit which Columba had left behind. He learned Irish, 
 and it is fair to infer that he heard and perhaps loved the 
 great Irish po6ms. All his twelve companions had the same 
 opportunities, and as they belonged to the royal family,^ Irish 
 poetry was not unknown to the .^thelings of Northumbria. 
 When Oswald, in 634, came to the throne, he summoned his 
 friends at lona to send him missionaries. Aidan was soon by 
 his side, and as Bishop of Lindisfarne' converted Bernicia to 
 the Christian faith, and restored Deira to the Christianity it 
 had abandoned during the one shameless year of Osric's reign. 
 The whole of Northumbria was united in the Christian faith 
 by lona. This was the bloodless invasion of the English by 
 the Irish nature, and though its outward power departed in 
 664, its inward power lasted long. Oswin in Deira, Oswiu, 
 when he made Northumbria into one kingdom, carried on the 
 Irish influence.^ The latter great king had been baptized and 
 educated at lona, and his earlier reign was marked, especially 
 after the battle of Winwaed, by an increasing union of the 
 Northumbrians with Irish life, literature, and learning. As 
 Oswald had set up Lindisfarne and its subject monasteries 
 on the model of lona, so Oswiu set up Whitby on the same 
 model. Whitby became the great educational centre of the 
 
 1 Seven of them, including Oswald, were sons of jEthelfrith. 
 ^ I am sorry to seem to tell the same story over again. But the connection 
 IS difierent, and the repetition, I think, necessary for clearness. 
 
XIV LITERATUKB IN NORTHUMBEIA 271 
 
 southern part of Northumbria, and from its root sprang a 
 number of related monasteries, all more or less directed by 
 men wlio had received an Irish training and carried with them 
 some Irish literature. From point to point of the coast, from 
 Dunbar to Coldingham on St. Abb's Head, through Lindisfarne 
 to Whitby, the Celtic monasteries civilised the folkland inward 
 from the seashore. Over the interior, and indeed down into 
 those provinces below Northumbria which were evangelised by 
 the bishops trained at Lindisfarne and Whitby, and by mis- 
 sionaries like Fursey from Ireland, the monasteries were 
 chiefly set up with the religious customs of lona. It is said 
 that forty-four monasteries were founded by Irishmen in Eng- 
 land. But I am here only speaking of Northumbria and of 
 the seventh century. In that century, and chiefly before the 
 death of Caedmon, these were the chief monasteries influenced 
 or founded by the Irish Church. 
 
 The first was at lAndisfarne, where Aidan set up his 
 Bishop's seat, close to Bamborough, the royal castle of Oswald. 
 It was the mother-church of the North — "the lona," as 
 Montalembert calls it, " of the Angles." South of it at the 
 mouth of the Tyne, arose, over the murdered body of Oswin, 
 the double monastery of Tynemouth. The nuns who came 
 to pray at his tomb arrived from Wliitby, which had already 
 been established at the mouth of the Esk by Hild ; and some 
 years after Oswin's death, and at the place where he was slain, 
 Oswiu's wife, Eanfleda, built a monastery at Oilling, near to 
 Eichmond in Yorkshire. Its abbot was Trumhere, an Angle, 
 but educated and ordained, says Baeda, by the Scots. Before 
 this time, and during the life of Aidan, Hartlepool, the first of 
 the monasteries presided over by an abbess in Northumbria, 
 occupied a site on the coast between Tynemouth and Whitby. 
 Inland, between York and Whitby, the son of Oswald, desiring 
 to found a monastery where he might pray and be buried, 
 called Cedda from Lindisfarne to choose its site. Cedda 
 chose it in the roughest and wildest place among the hills, and 
 set up Lastingham in accordance with the customs of Lindis- 
 farne. North of Lindisfarne, other Irish monasteries had 
 grown up. Old Melrose, an annex of Lindisfarne where young 
 missionaries were educated, was built on a jutting arm of 
 rock, round which swept the Tweed, about a league away from 
 the Melrose we know so well. Still farther north, on a lonely 
 cape in which the range of the Lammermuir ends, nearly 
 five hundred feet above the sea, rose Coldingham, a double 
 monastery. Ebba, sister of Oswald, was its founder; and 
 
272 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 Aidan's successor, Finan of Lindisfarne, consecrated her. She 
 had previously founded another monastery, Ehbchester, on the 
 Derwent. 
 
 These all belonged to the Irish family of Lindisfarne. The 
 greater part of Northumbria learnt through men whose 
 spiritual centre was at lona, the arts of life and industry, the 
 reclaiming of the waste lands, agriculture, road and bridge 
 making, the pleasures of social life, education, and literary 
 culture, and learnt this new and exciting life through the Irish 
 temper.* At the same time there was an incessant crossing 
 and recrossing of Northumbrians to Ireland itself, and of Irish 
 to Northumbria, for the purposes of leamiiig and culture. 
 The two countries drank in one another. The English found 
 in Ireland a learning not to be found elsewhere in Europe, 
 Not only religious, but literary and classic studies were 
 pursued with eagerness, and developed. They kept historical 
 annals in the monasteries. The arts were practised — archi- 
 tecture, graving, chiselling, embroidery, music, and poetry. 
 Not only then from lona, but also from Ireland itself, the 
 Celtic influence poured into Northumbria in the seventh cen- 
 tury. 
 
 It lessened, as we have seen, in the later years of Oswiu 
 and under Ecgfrith; and after the Synod of Whitby it was 
 doomed. When Aldfrith died in 705 we may say that the 
 
 iWe must not, however, forget that the monastic power of the Roman 
 Church was, after the first thirty years of Irish Christianity, growing up along- 
 side of the Irish monasteries in the latter years of tlie seventh century. Nor- 
 tliumbria was civilised by monks who derived their impulse from Rome as well 
 as by monks who derived their impulse from lona. Twenty-six years after 
 Aidan took root at Lindisfarne, Kipon began the rivalry of the Latin with 
 the Celtic monasticism. Its early history illustrates the struggle. It was 
 founded by Alchfrith, son of Oswiu, and its first monks and its Abbot Eata 
 came from the Irish monastery of Old Melrose. Alchfrith, under Wilfrid's 
 influence, asked them in fi61 to adopt the Roman mode of celebrating Easter. 
 They refused and returned to Melrose. "Wilfrid then took up the war which he 
 carried to a successful issue at Whitby. He introduced the Benedictine rule at 
 Eipon. Some years later he built, with great splendour, the Priory of Hexham, 
 at the foot of the Roman wall, a little below the junction of the two branches 
 of the Tyne, and not far from the place where Oswald planted the cross on the 
 soil of Northumbria. Two other great monasteries were founded in the seventh 
 century, and became, more than all the others, centres of learnin'g. These were 
 the united houses of Wearmouth and Jarrow, established close to the mouth 
 of the Tyne by Benedict Biscop. Their chief glory, as nurseries of literature, 
 belongs to the next century, but Wearmouth was founded when Caedmon was 
 singing at Whitby, and Jarrow only two years after his death. These Latin 
 monasteries lived on terras of mutual respect and tolerance with the Celtic. 
 When the question of Easter was settled they remained in harmony, inter- 
 changing devotional thought and feeling. We must not forget this monastic 
 mingling of Celtic and Latin influences in estimating the forces which, in the 
 seventh-century, started the literature of Northumbria. 
 
XIV LITERATURE IN NORTHUMBRIA 273 
 
 Irish, influence, which had lasted in full power from the ad- 
 vent of Aidan to the Sy.iod of Whitby, from 635 to 664, began 
 to die. It still continued for forty years, till all who had been 
 trained by Lindisfarne and Whitby had passed away. It ran 
 a career, then, of about seventy years. During that time the 
 Irish character, the passion, impulsiveness and tenderness of 
 Columba ; some at least of the Irish poetry, with its elements 
 of colour, romance, invention, and charm, penetrated the 
 Northumbrians, and we can scarcely avoid thinking that this 
 was one of the causes which made Northumbria more creative 
 of poetry than the rest of England, especially when we remem- 
 ber that the Celtic impulse came to the English charged with 
 all the new emotions of Christianity.' 
 
 One other influence, creative of poetry, or fostering a poetic 
 temper, was the natural scenery of Northumbria. It was of a 
 wilder, more romantic type than any that existed below the 
 Humber. The wood and wild-land of Mercia and Wessex, 
 even the fens, or the great downs which looked on the Chan- 
 nel, are not to us so instinct with that natural mystery which 
 troubles the imagination of those who make and love poetry 
 as the lonely, rolling moors which stretch, desolate even to 
 this day, from Cumberland to the Tweed in rig and flow. 
 There is scarcely a valley in their deep recesses which has not 
 its own personality, which does not make its own impression ; 
 and the rivers which are born in their mosses, and which 
 cleave their way to the sea, are fierce and tawny as a tiger. 
 The hills, becoming softer as they pass northward, make the 
 view seen by one who stands on the ridge of the Eoman wall, 
 mysteriously wide and far, and the vast but low roof of sky 
 which broods above them is fruitful of 'swirling mists, of wild 
 sunsets, and wilder storms. This land has always been the 
 
 1 1 place only in a note another conjecture which may have a little weight. 
 We need to remember, in estimating the influences which here upon Nor- 
 thumbria before Caedmon, that during the whole reign of Penda, from 626 
 to 655, a heathen influence poured into the Northern kingdoiji from Mercia, 
 and kept up, among those who clung to the old ways, the thoughts and cus- 
 toms and war-songs of the heathen forefathers of the English. It is prob- 
 able that the Teutonic poetry was the better preserved in Northumbria from 
 its having associated for a long time with Englishmen who remained Pagans 
 after the Northumbrians had become Christian, and whom they themselves 
 evangelised. Of course this suggestion would have but little value if there had 
 not existed in Northumbria a literary class who loved poetry, and who did not 
 think that profane poetry of war, adventure, and legend was wrong for a 
 Christian man to hear and sing. But such a class did exist, I think, in the Irish 
 monks and in those trained by them. They had their own legends, lays, and 
 adventures ; and they would cherish lays similar to those out of which Beowulf 
 was composed. They would not reduce them to writing, but they would sin^ 
 them and keep them, and give them vogue. 
 
274 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 home of rude and pathetic ballads of love and war and super- 
 stition ; and in the seventh century there was not an inch of 
 the ground which had not been fought over by Cymry and 
 Angle, by Scots and Picts. Battle lays had been sung over it 
 from Carlisle to Bamborough, monastic chants from Tyne- 
 mouth to Lindisfarne and Coldingham ; and Walter Scott, 
 when he made the whole of it, and Liddesdale in particular, 
 the native land of romance, but revived that which had filled 
 it more than a thousand years before. The impression the 
 whole country made — with the ruined wall of the Eomans, 
 that "work of giants," added to create a new element of 
 awe — must have stirred the poetic temperament in that 
 mixed people. It stirs it now in us, and such impressions 
 have no time. 
 
 But the actual poetry which we have in Caedmon, in the 
 books of Exeter and Vercelli, and, perhaps, in Beowulf, also, 
 does not belong, I think, to the inland moorland, but to the 
 coast. The sea, as I have already shown, is the one constant 
 natural object in these poems ; and a large number of the 
 monastic centres of the seventh century were situated on the 
 sea. Each sat on its promontory "stern and wild," 
 
 Meet nurse for a poetic child. 
 
 They looked alike on the solemn moorland and on the roaring 
 sea. Erom Coldingham, from Lindisfarne, from Tynemouth 
 and Whitby, the moors, divided by brown and rushing streams, 
 stretched inland league after league, and filled with their mys- 
 tery the hearts of Angle and of Scot. On the other side was 
 their daily companion, the changing sea. The dwellers at 
 Coldingham heard its fierce billows roar more than 400 feet 
 below their gray and lofty cape. Who that has seen Tyne- 
 mouth or Lindisfarne can ever forget the emotion of lone- 
 liness which filled him with the thought of God as he looked 
 from the wild grass headlands over the barren deep? The 
 wanderer, on the shore where Bamborough stretches forth 
 its length on the dyke of basalt, sees the white waves leap 
 over the isles of Earne, and feels as Cynewulf felt when he 
 saw the rocks " unmoved abide the waves, the lightning, and 
 the hail." There is not a more savage coast in England than 
 that which rises and dips from headland to valley — its jut- 
 ting jaws of ship-devouring rock opening out to sea — as we 
 voyage from Hartlepool to Whitby. All the nameless passion 
 of the sea and the stormy sky, of the loud winds and the 
 white horses of the deep, of the black clouds and the red 
 
xiT LITERATURE IN NOETHUMBRIA 275 
 
 lightning entered day by day into the life of those who 
 "watched the business and fury of the elements from the 
 edges of the cliffs ; and the ■watchers were men and women 
 who had received the impress of the sea and its love, not only 
 from their Teutonic forefathers, but from the Irish, whose tales 
 are full of the great waters, and who were as much children 
 of the billows as Beowulf and his men. The coracle was not 
 to be compared in size and safety to a dragon ship, but it was 
 handled with as great dexterity, and it needed greater sea 
 audacity. Not only then from one side, but from two, the 
 Northumbrians were prepared to receive the poetic impulse of 
 the sea. 
 
 These are the suggestions which I make in answer to the 
 question why poetry prevailed in Northumbria more than 
 elsewhere in England ; and, in making them, I have confined 
 myself to the seventh century, that is, to the century in which 
 Christian poetry was born in the soul of Caedmon, and sung 
 on the cliff of Whitby. 
 
 Nearly all these influences bore on Caedmon and nourished 
 his genius. That genius was silent for a long time ; it was 
 only when well on in years that he began to sing. But this 
 was natural enough. The beginner of a new form of poetry 
 in times which have no written literature and no models, is 
 not likely to begin early. But all the more he drinks in for 
 years, into a soul which is naturally receptive, the impulses 
 which come to him from human affairs and human nature, 
 from circumstances, and from the natural world ; and if we 
 say that Caedmon was about fifty when he began- to make 
 verse, and choose 670 for the date of his first poem, he began 
 to receive these impulses about the year 630, when he would 
 be ten years old, and when Eadwine was still King. Where 
 he was then living we cannot tell ; but he was probably a 
 heathen, for it was only in 627 that Eadwine was baptized. 
 In 658 Hild set up the monastery at Whitby, and as Caedmon 
 was a secular servant of the monastery, we may well conjecture 
 that he belonged to the little fishing hamlet which lay at the 
 foot of the cliff, or that he accompanied Hild as a retainer from 
 Hartlepool. About the age of forty, the influences of which I 
 speak began more directly to bear upon him. Hild, the Ab- 
 bess of his home, was of the royal stock of Deira, and grand- 
 niece of the great King Eadwine, by whose side, when she 
 was a girl of thirteen, she was baptized by PauUinus. Many 
 a time Caedmon must have heard that story told. Nor was 
 this all that Caedmon heard of the glory of Eadwine, for on a 
 
276 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 certain day he may have seen the procession and heard the 
 service which attended the reburial at Whitby of the body of 
 Eadwine ; ' and this tomb made for a time Whitby the West- 
 minster Abbey of Northumbria. He saw in 670 Oswiii laid low 
 in the same church, and perhaps his wife Eanfleda. Over the 
 tombs of these great princes shone into Caedmon's eyes the 
 national glory of Northumbria. Still deeper was probably 
 the impression made by the continual presence of ^Ifleda, 
 whose life in the monastery was bound up with the great 
 victory of Winwaed, when Penda, the scourge of Northumbria, 
 was at last slain and Oswald avenged. The story of her ded- 
 ication by her father Oswiu to Christ and her being given to 
 Hild at Hartlepool, must have been told again and again to 
 Caedmon. She was twenty years old when he began to write, 
 and she listened to his first song. Nor was this all ; Oswiu 
 and the princes of Northumbria, were frequently at Whitby, 
 and with them may have come at one time or another Ecg- 
 frith, who in 670 came to the throne of England when Caed- 
 mon ascended the throne of Poetry. 
 
 This was enough to fill his soul with the war-like glory of 
 his country, but its spiritual glory also came upon him. His 
 mistress had been baptized by Paullinus; he probably had 
 seen Aidan face to face, for Aidan died only twenty years be- 
 fore Caedmon began to sing, and Aidan had been Hild's father 
 in the Lord. Many were the monks and travellers who came 
 to Whitby from Lindisfarne, and all the story of Oswald and 
 Aidan's companionship in the evangelisation of Northumbria 
 was doubtless common talk at Whitby. After 664 he may 
 have seen the angel face of Cuthbert, the new Prior of Lindis- 
 farne, who for twelve years, before his retirement to Fame, 
 went on frequent missionary journeys through Northumbria, 
 and whose death took place only seven years after the death 
 of Caedmon. It is interesting to think that Cuthbert may 
 have sung the verses of Caedmon. The school of the monas- 
 tery of monks under Hilia contained, while Caedmon was yet 
 alive, five men who came to be bishops — Bosa to be Bishop of 
 Deira, with his See at York ; ^tla, whom Baeda makes Bishop 
 of Dorchester, and who is probably the same as Hedda, who 
 fixed the West Saxon See at Winchester ; Oftfor, the second 
 Bishop of Worcester; John of Beverley, who brought to 
 Whitby news of the new school of Canterbury and of Theo- 
 
 1 Eadwine was slain in 633. His head was brouglit to York and buried there. 
 His body was laid (Baeda, H. E. 24) at Whitby — when exactly I do not know, 
 but perhaps at the same time when Oswiu was buried there in 670. 
 
XIV LITERATURE IN NORTHUMBRIA 277 
 
 dore and Hadrian; and Wilfrid II., who became Bishop of 
 York ; all of them, save the last, men of original thought and 
 of power in affairs. At many points then the spiritual glory 
 of Northumbria bore upon the daily life of Caedmon. There 
 was one great event, moreover, which happened at Whitby 
 while he was alive, in which the splendour of a great cere- 
 mony brought together the kingly race of Northumbria, the 
 noble memories of the Celtic Church, and the intellectual 
 power, the unity and the awe of Rome. It is almost certain 
 that Caedmon saw the Synod of Whitby in 664. King Oswru 
 came there with his son Alchfrith, and his daughter .^Ifieda 
 came from the monastery to meet him. Colman of Lindisfarne 
 with his Irish clerks, Hild and her people and the venerable 
 Cedda represented the evangelisers of Northumbria. Wilfrid, 
 with Agilberht, Bishop of the West Saxons ; Romanus, chap- 
 lain of Eanfleda, Oswiu's wife ; and James the Deacon, one of 
 the companions of PauUinus, in whom men saw the image of 
 the first Latin mission so sadly brought to misfortune thirty 
 years before, represented the over-mastering power of Eome. 
 It was a sight to be forever remembered, even by a monastic 
 servant whose genius was as yet unawakened ; nor could any 
 one who heard Wilfrid — and the Synod may have been held 
 in the open air — speaking English "with a sweet, soft elo- 
 quence," forget the image of that keen and passionate partizan. 
 These things would work even on a stupid soul ; they would 
 certainly work on one in whom abode, though as yet in slum- 
 ber, the spark of genius. 
 
 The mixture of races in Northumbria on which I have dwelt 
 was not, I should think, personally represented in Caedmon. 
 It is not likely that the family of one who lived in the midst 
 of the east coast of Deira had anything to do with Cymry or 
 Pict or Irish. But, of course, the whole influence of the Irish 
 spirit, thrilling with the emotions of Christianity, was contin- 
 ually around him. It was the spiritual air that he breathed. 
 Lastly, to finish this application, t^e natural scenery which 
 surrounded him, the valley of the Esk, on whose sides he 
 probably lived, the great cliffs, the billowy sea, the vast sky 
 seen from the heights over the ocean, played incessantly upon 
 him. They did not work on him as vitally as they did on 
 Cynewulf, but they had their power. 
 
 It may be said that too much is made of this. We cannot 
 think that Caedmon, who was, as they say, " a herdsman," and 
 quite uneducated, derived much good from those influences, or 
 drank them in at all. But it does not follow that he was 
 
278 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap, xiv 
 
 wholly uneducated. He had been submitted to the monastic 
 teaching, as all Hild's dependents were, and had received 
 enough to stir his intellect and emotion. An elaborate educa- 
 tion unmakes rather than makes a poet. Chaucer, Shakspere, 
 Spenser, Wordsworth, Burns, Keats, Byron, Shelley, were not 
 great scholars, and the best of them all had no education at all 
 save what came in the air to him. I have sometimes wished 
 that Milton had not been so good a scholar. Burns followed 
 the plough along the mountain side, and may be set . side by 
 side with Caedraon who tended the horses on the night that a 
 Divine One spoke to him. 'Not does it follow, that because 
 Baeda says that he had the care of the cattle that night, 
 that he was a herdsman at all. He was one of the secular 
 attendants on the monastery, and may have been as good a 
 gentleman as Halbert Glendinning. When Baeda says "on 
 that night " it seems as if it were not Caedmon's regular habit 
 to look after the cattle ; but that he took it in his turn. But 
 even if he were a herdsman, it is as good a beginning for Eng- 
 lish poetry to have Caedmon a herdsman as it was for Hebrew 
 poetry to have David a shepherd. Whatever the man was, he 
 had genius and, sleeping long, it awoke at last. How it awoke, 
 and what it produced, either of itself, or in the hands of those 
 whom it influenced, is now our business. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 CAEDMON 
 
 Caedmon, as he is called, is the first Englishman whose 
 name we know who wrote poetry in our island of England ; 
 and the first to embody in verse the new passions and- ideas 
 which Christianity had brought into England. The date of 
 his birth is unknown, but Baeda tells us that he died in 680, 
 and as he began to write when he was well forward in years, 
 his poem is loosely dated about 670. Hild had been some 
 time at Streoneshalh ^ when he sang his first song, for we are 
 certain that her abbacy began in 658. It ended in 680. 
 Between these twenty-two years was laid the first stone of 
 that majestic temple of English Poetry within whose apse, 
 row after row, the great figures of the poets of England have 
 taken their seats, one after another, for more than 1200 years. 
 
 We knew of Caedmon's life and work from Baeda, but noth- 
 ing more was known of his verse to modern England until the 
 time of Milton. A similar chance to that which gave us our 
 single manuscript pf Beowulf and Judith gave us our single 
 copy of the set of poems which has been connected with the 
 
 1 Streones-halh. Baeda translates this " the hay of the Beacon," and it has 
 been taken to mean that there was a light of some kind either on the cliff or at 
 the entrance of the bay. But streon is not an English word, or this is the only 
 place where it occurs ; and healh or halh is a word of doubtful meaning, and 
 when it seems to occur in the charters has never the meaning of angle, or cor- 
 ner or bay. Baeda, however, may be supposed to know of what he was writing, 
 and it is most probable — as Mr. Gollancz has suggested to me — that Streones- 
 halh is a local name which the English found already given to the place, and 
 that this name meant Beacon-bay. 
 
 The origin of the name Whitby, "the white town," which the Danes gave 
 to the place, is as obscure as that of Streoneshalh. It could not be called so 
 from the colour of the cliffs, which are of dark lias shale. But the little har- 
 bour may have been surrounded by fishermen's dwellings, whitened with lime, 
 and such a village would gleam brightly against the darkness of the cliff. I do 
 not know whether the English whitened their wooden huts, but this is the only 
 conjecture I can make to fit in with the Danish name; unless we were to 
 imagine that White or Hwit was the name of the Dane who led the raid against 
 the place, or of some other who settled there in after days. 
 
 279 
 
280 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 name of Caedmon. Archbishop Ussher, hunting in England 
 for books and manuscripts with which to enrich the library 
 of Trinity College, Dublin, found this manuscript and gave it 
 to Francis Dujon, a scholar of Leyden, who is known in litera- 
 ture as Junius, and from whom the manuscript derives its 
 name of the Junian Caedmon. Junius, who was a great lover 
 of Anglo-Saxon, was then librarian to Lord Arundel, and when 
 he left for the Continent in 1650, took care to have the manu- 
 script printed at Amsterdam. He published it as the work of 
 Caedmon,^ and soon afterwards brought it back to England, 
 where it finally found a home in the Bodleian. It is a small 
 folio of 229 pages divided by a difference of handwriting into 
 two parts. The first part, said to be in fine handwriting of 
 the tenth century, is illustrated with rude pictures, and con- 
 tains the Genesis, Exodus, and Daniel. The second part, in 
 different and perhaps more modern handwriting, contains the 
 poem to the several subjects of which the name of Christ and 
 Satan has been given. It includes verses on the Fall of the 
 Rebel Angels, the Harrowing of Hell, the Resurrection, the 
 Ascension, Pentecost, the Last Judgment, and the Temptation. 
 Since the time of Junius critics have found in the separate 
 parts of this manuscript so many various elements, and so 
 much diversity of style, that they not only allot different 
 writers to these separate parts, but also hesitate to attribute 
 any one part to Caedmon. Indeed some have declared that 
 Caedmon did not write a single line of it. It would be weari- 
 some to give an account of all the theories and conjectures 
 made about the authorship of this set of poems. They will 
 be found collected with admirable skill by Wulker in his 
 Orundriss fur Geschichte der Angelsdchsischen Literatur. The 
 two things which interest us most are first, whether we may 
 impute any part of the poems we have to Caedmon, the monk 
 of Whitby of whom Baeda tells the story ; and secondly, the 
 poetry itself. With regard to the first, there is no doubt a 
 general correspondence between the lines which stand now at 
 the beginning of the Genesis and the words which Baeda says 
 Caedmon sang, and of which he gives the sense in Latin. 
 There is, moreover, a correspondence between the subjects of 
 which Baeda says the poet sang and the subjects treated of in 
 the Junian Manuscript ; and these two correspondences make 
 it somewhat probable that we have in this manuscript, along 
 
 1 " Finding a substantial agreement between the first lines of the MS. and 
 the Latin abstract which Baeda made of the verses Caedmon sang in his dream," 
 he assumes that the whole set of poems were by Caedmon. 
 
CAEDMON 281 
 
 with poems written by other persons, some at least of the 
 verses of Caedmon. If so, we must also add that they have 
 suffered from interpolations and corruptions, and from their 
 translation out of the Northumbrian into a West Saxon dialect. 
 On the whole I am inclined to hope that we may have the 
 pleasure of binding up the story in Baeda with some of the 
 poems we possess ; and if the severe Muse of History permit 
 this to us, it is a great gain to sentiment. But the autliorship 
 of the several poems shall be discussed as we come to them, 
 one after another. Before I enter on that task I must say 
 something about Milton and Caedmon, and tell the story of 
 Caedmon himself as it is given by Baeda. 
 
 When Junius brought the printed book back to England he 
 showed it, no doubt, to his literary friends. One of these 
 friends was Milton, and certain resemblances on which, in my 
 opinion, too much stress has been laid, make it a curious ques- 
 tion as to whether Milton had Caedmon's work before him when 
 he was writing Paradise Lost. It is most probable that Junius 
 translated the poem to Milton. Milton knew his Baeda well, 
 and it would be strange if he were not enough interested in the 
 story of Caedmon, his first predecessor in the art of poetry, to 
 be eager to hear what he was supposed to have written concern- 
 ing Milton's own subjects of the fall of the rebel angels and of 
 man. It is also probable that Milton, who borrowed thoughts A 
 from every side for his Epic, retained in his ear some of the 
 more vivid expressions of the poem Junius translated to him ; 
 that their spirit entered into him and took a Miltonic form in 
 scattered places of his poem.' But the resemblances are slight, 
 and less important than they would be if the subject were any 
 other than that of the Eall of Man. We must remember that 
 this subject had been treated of a hundred times in the myste- 
 ries and miracle plays ; that dramas and poems had been writ- 
 ten on it in every literature in Europe ; that a number of ideas 
 and phrases and descriptions used in writing of it had become 
 conventional ; and that the lines on which it was treated, and 
 on which the characters of Satan, Adam, and Eve were drawn 
 were similar through all this European work, if not frequently 
 the same. The originality of Milton's poem does not lie in the 
 subject or in its general treatment, but in the form of it and 
 the poetry ; and these, which are the main matters, are, in Mil- 
 ton's hands, as far superior to all the efforts of his predecessors 
 as the Zeus of Pheidias was to all other images of the God. 
 
 1 1 have noted hereafter, in their proper place, extracts from Milton which 
 resemble passages in the Genesis. 
 
M M M I 
 
 282 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 All we can say then is, that Milton had, it is likely, heard the 
 Genesis translated to him, and that he got from the writer a 
 suggestion or a phrase, here and there, which he used as he 
 would use a suggestion or a phrase from Homer or Virgil, from 
 Dante or Spenser. But, nevertheless, we may well imagine the 
 romantic interest the blind old man would have when, sitting 
 in some summer parlour, he listened to the song, a thousand 
 years old, which the first poet of his race had sung concerning 
 his own subject of " Man's first disobedience." 
 
 The story of Caedmon, as Milton read it in Baeda, is well 
 known, but it will bear repetition ; and it should be the first 
 lesson taught to every English child, for when the glory of Eng- 
 land's wealth, science, and arms has become but a subject for 
 an historical essay, her poetry will still inspire and console man- 
 kind. Empires die, but Poetry lives on, and the story of the 
 origin of English song in this land is the foremost of all Eng- 
 lish stories. It begins in the Abbey of Whitby. Hild, the Ab- 
 bess, under whose rule Caedmon wrote, had already lived thirty- 
 three years with great nobleness, when she took on her the 
 monastic life. Aidan placed her at this age on the banks of 
 the Wear, and then transferred her to Hartlepool. Nine 
 years afterwards, and on the same wild coast, she established 
 the double Monastery of Streoneshalh, and dedicated it to 
 St. Peter. Here, under this famous and beloved woman, 
 Caedmon lived, attached in a secular habit to the monastery. 
 It-was hot till he was well advanced in years that he learned 
 anything of the art of poetry, wherefore, whenever at feasts 
 it was agreed, for the sake of mirth, that all should sing in 
 turn and the harp came towards him, he rose from the 
 table and returned to his house. One evening, having done 
 this, he went to the stables, for the care of the cattle had 
 been for that night entrusted to him, and as he slept one 
 stood by him, saluted him, and called him by his name, 
 " Caedmon, sing me something." He answered, " I know not 
 how to sing, and for this cause I left the feast, because I could 
 not sing." Then the other who talked with him said, " All 
 the same, you have to sing for me." — "What shall I sing ? " 
 Caedmon answered. " Sing," said the other, " the beginning 
 of things created." Whereupon he immediately began to 
 sing in praise of God, the world's upbuilder, verses which he 
 had not heard before, and of which this is the sense :' "Now 
 
 ] 
 
 1 We have at the end of an old MS. of the Historia Ecclesiastica a Nor- 
 thumbrian version of this dream-song of Caedmon. Here ittis, and it is per- 
 
CAEDMON 283 
 
 must we praise the maker of the celestial kingdom, the power 
 and counsel of the Creator, the deeds of the Father of glory, 
 how He, since He is the Eternal God, was the beginner of all 
 wonders, who first, Omnipotent Guardian of the human kind, 
 made for the sons of men Heaven for their roof, and then the 
 Earth." This is the sense but not the order of the words 
 as he sang them in his sleep.' Then awaking he remembered 
 what, sleeping, he had sung, and soon added more words in 
 the same fashion in song worthy of the Deity .^ 
 
 In the morning he came to the town reeve and told him 
 what gift he had received, who forthwith led him to the 
 Abbess, and made that known to her. Then she ordered him 
 in the presence of many learned men to tell the dream and 
 sing the verses, that by the judgment of all it might be 
 approved what and whence this was ; and it seemed td all 
 that heavenly grace had been given to him by our Lord. 
 
 Then they told him some holy history and words of godly 
 lore, and bade him, if he could, turn these into the melody of 
 song. Eeturning in the morning, he sang to them in excellent 
 verse what had been bidden him. Therefore the Abbess began 
 to make much of and to love the grace of God in the man,' and 
 exhorted him to forsake the secular and to take to the monas- 
 tic habit, which being done, she made him a companion of the 
 
 haps the very form of the hymn which Alfred, in the translation he made of 
 Baeda, transferred Into his own dialect — i^ j 
 
 ) / Nd seylun hergan hefaenrices uard, ^^ 
 t ^ * ' Metudaes maecti end his modgidanc 
 
 Were uuldurfadur sue he uundra gihuaes 
 
 Eel dryctin or astelidae. 
 
 Hae aerist scop aelda barnum 
 
 Heben til hrofe haleg scepen 
 
 Tha middungeard raoncynnaes uard 
 
 Eci dryctin aefter tiadae 
 
 Firum folda, frea allmectig. 
 
 Most persons have held that we have in these lines the exact words, or nearly 
 so, of this first hymn of the poet ; others, however, maintain that they are not 
 original, but a translation into Northumbrian of Baeda's Latin ; and, for my 
 own part, their short abrupt rhythm suggests a late rather than an early date. 
 
 1 The order of which Baeda speaks is the rhythmical order, for he adds, 
 " neque possunt carmina, quamvis optime composita, ex alia in aliam linguam 
 ad verbum sine detrimento sui decoris ao dignitatis transferri." 
 
 2 There is a Norse legend concerning Halbiorn, a goat-herd, which has some 
 resemblance to this story, and the same kind of tale is told of many poets, of 
 Hesiod, for example. A similar gift of song in sleep is told of the writer of the 
 Heliand but this is probably taken from the story iu Baeda. There is no reason 
 to doubt of the person of Caedmon. Baeda lived not far off from Wliitby. He 
 was born in 673, and Caedmon died iu 680. He gives a free Latin translation 
 of Caedmon's hymn, and an Index of his work. He knew the poems. 
 
 ' I have introduced here and there into Baeda's account a few expressions 
 added by Alfred in his translation of this story. 
 
284 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 brethren in the monastery, and ordered him to be taught 
 the whole series of sacred history. Thus Caedmon, meditat- 
 ing within himself all that he had heard, and, like a clean 
 animal ruminating, turned it into the sweetest verse; and 
 his song and his verses were so winsome to hear that his 
 teachers themselves learned from his mouth. He sang j the 
 Creation of the world and the Origin of man, and all the 
 history of Genesis, and of the departure of Israel from Egypt 
 and the entrance into the land of promise, and of many other 
 stories in the sacred Scriptures, and of the Incarnation of the 
 Lord and of His Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension, and of 
 the coming of the Holy Ghost, and of the doctrine of the 
 Apostles. And of the terror of future judgment and the 
 horror of hell, and of the sweetness of the heavenly kingdom 
 he made many songs, and others also of the divine benefits and 
 judgments, — in all which he had care to lead men away from 
 the love of ill-doijig, and to stir them to the. love. of good 
 deeds. For he was a very devout man, humble and subject to 
 regular discipline, but inflamed with a fervent heat of zeal 
 against those Who were otherwise minded, wherefore he 
 brought his life to a fair ' end. For, when the time of his 
 departure grew near, he was burdened for fourteen days with 
 bodily infirmity, but his weakness grew so slowly upon him 
 that he could both speak and walk. But on the night on 
 which he was to depart he went to the house where those 
 likely to die were carried, and desired a place where he might 
 rest to be made ready for him. When it was past midnight, 
 having talked in a joyful lashion with those who were there, 
 he asked whether they had the Eucharist nigh at hand. "What 
 need of the Eucharist," they answered, "for you are not 
 likely to die, since you talk as merrily with us as if you were in 
 good health ? " — "But," he replied, "bring me the Eucharist; " 
 and having asked them if they were all in charity with^him, 
 and saying, " I am in charity, my children, with all the ser- 
 vants of God," he strengthened himself with the heavenly 
 viaticum and made ready for the other life. Then he asked 
 how near the time was when the brothers should sing the 
 Nocturns. " It is not far off," they said. " Well," he replied, 
 " let us wait that hour," and signing himself with the sign of 
 the Cross, he laid his head upon the pillow, and, falling into a 
 slumber, so ended his life in silerce."^ Thus, as he had served 
 God with a pure and simple mind, and with tranquil devotion, 
 
 1 In tlie same silent way, in sleep, Milton departed. 
 
CAEDMON 285 
 
 SO also he left the world with as tranquil a death; and the 
 tongue which had wrought so many health-bearing words in 
 the Creator's praise was silent also with God's praise, and 
 signing himself with the Cross, commended his spirit into 
 His hands ; and he seemed, indeed, to have had foreknowl- 
 edge of his death. Others after him tried, says Baeda in 
 another place, to make religious poems in the English nation, 
 but none could compare with him ; for he learnt the art of 
 song not from men, nor of man came it, but divinely aided, 
 he received that gift. Thus he inspired others to write after 
 him ; nevertheless " sweet and humble," said Baeda, " was his 
 poetry ; no trivial or vain song came from his lips." Undis- 
 turbed by any previous making of lighter poetry, he came 
 fresh to the work of Christianising English song. It was a 
 great step to make. He built the chariot in which all the new 
 religious emotions of England could now drive along ; and these 
 emotions and their thoughts were ideal. The aim of his 
 verse, wrote Baeda, was "to stir men to despise the world and 
 to aspire to Heaven." It could not then have been mere para- 
 phrase ; paraphrase does not stir and kindle the heart of men. 
 It was felt that in his fresh simplicity, in the native English 
 grace of God in the man, there was an inspiration, to which 
 his unlearned condition, perhaps his peasant origin, added a 
 wonder and a charm. 
 
 The place where this piety of our forefathers, like that of 
 Greece, derived from God Himself the art of song, was worthy 
 to be the cradle of English poetry. That poetry has again and 
 again rejoiced in the sea, and the sea almost surrounds the 
 height of Whitby. Kor has our poetry neglected the spirit of 
 the wild moorland or the river glens ; and the moors and 
 stream-scooped vales are companions of the cliffs of Whitby. 
 The Esk, which waters the foundations of the two headlands 
 between which Whitby lies, comes down through one of these 
 wooded valleys to the harbour and the sea. About its banks, 
 and on the steep hillsides above it, grew up the old sea-going 
 town. A few fishermen's huts may have grown into a town in 
 the time of Hild ; and if Streoneshalh be a local British name, 
 there was a little hamlet in the bay before she came. 
 
 Above the houses of this scattered town, fringing the beach, 
 a broad paved road soon led to the upper part of the cliff, — 
 that sharply-rising grassy bluff on the top of which now 
 stands the church of St. Mary, with its long procession of 
 tombstones to those drowned at sea. This slope was probably 
 dotted, in the tinie of Hild, with small oratories and cells, 
 
 ^c 
 
286 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 where monks, and perhaps nuns lived alone, apart from the 
 main building of the monastery, and it is likely that these 
 oratories were still there at the time of the Danish raid. 
 Higher up, on the platform of the cliff, just where it began to 
 climb from the western moor, stood the great hall of the mon- 
 astery itself, built originally of wood and thatched ^ with reeds. 
 Around it rose the houses of the Abbess and her officers, of the 
 monks, and, divided from them, of the nuns — the refectories, 
 the Abbey church, the guest-chambers, the dwellings of the stew- 
 ards and the other secular attendants of a great monastery, the 
 stables and all the necessary outbuildings. The Danes, about 
 two hundred years after the time of Hild, ^ came down the 
 valley of the Esk from York, and, leaping up the path, stormed 
 and burnt to the ground this hive of human life, plundered it 
 of all its goods, slew every one of its indwellers, and crossed 
 the moor by the light of the blazing beacon they had kindled. 
 In that condition the place continued for more than two hun- 
 dred years, when Eeinfrid, as the story goes, one of the knights 
 William sent to subdue the rising in the North, passed by the 
 spot, and seeing the devastation of this place of God, wept for 
 the ruin, and swore that he would repair the worship and the 
 temple of the Lord. Returning from the North, he entered 
 the monastic school at Evesham, and settled at Whitby.' 
 There he built a church around which a monastery grew of 
 which he became Prior. After many trials, the place grew 
 into wealth and importance, and finally the abbey, whose tall 
 and noble ruins we now see, was built. Standing, as one 
 looks upwards from the town, on the very ridge of the long 
 cliff, it dominates the vale below, and is seen sharp and dark 
 against the evening sky. The austere Early English of its 
 
 1 When Baeda tells us that Finan built a church in the Isle of Lindisfarne 
 after the death of Aidan, he adds, " he built it not of stone but of hewn oak, 
 and covered it with reeds — after the manner of the Scots" {E. H. Bit. iii. 
 ch. XXV.). The " reeds " were probably the tall bent which grows all over the 
 sand-dunes of the Northumbrian coast, and which blows back from the topsOf 
 the hillocks like hair tossed in the wind. All round Bamborough and Holy 
 Island this grass grows ; the heni does not grow at Whitby, and Hild thatchefl 
 her monastic buildings with straw, or reeds from the moorland pools. 
 
 2 Of course Streoneshalh may have been destroyed by some roving Viking 
 who sailed his ships into the bay ; but there is no evidence of this, and it is 
 more liliely that it perished in the systematic ravaging of the monasteries which 
 was carried out from York in 868. 
 
 8 This is a pleasant story, but it is problematical. Reinfrid, or Regenfrith, 
 was apparently a lay brother of Evesham, and with Ealdwiue, prior of Winch- 
 combe, and iElfwine, set out on foot to revive religion in the North, about 1071. 
 They repaired the church at Jarrow, and Regenfrith after a time went down 
 from Jarrow to Whitby. He may have been a soldier ; it does not follow that 
 he was a Norraau. Like Ealdwine and .Sllfwine, his name is really English. 
 
CAEDMON 287 
 
 windows and pillars suits with the severity of its site, and is 
 scarcely infringed on by the Decorated doorway at the west 
 end, and by some Decorated windows. As we rest among its 
 heaps of fallen wall and tower, we hear the sea roaring below 
 the cliff, and the sound fills the aisle like the chanting of a 
 solemn mass. We think then that this deep organ note 
 struck on the ears of Hild twelve hundred years ago, and that 
 the first chant of English poetry was made to its grave and 
 mighty music ; and so deep is the impression of antiquity when 
 we are thus forced to look back over the continuous stream of 
 English poetry that we seem, when we leave the eastern end 
 of the abbey, to be walking with Caedmon himself, among his 
 own cattle, over the long rank grass, to the outjutting point 
 of the headland, which looks due north over the sea. A few 
 minutes brings us t^the edge. Three hundred feet below the 
 dash of breakers is heard as they strike into the black caverns 
 at the base of the cliff. The tumultuous northern sea lies out- 
 spread before us. Over these stormy waters came our Angle 
 forefathers, bringing with them the poem of Beowulf. Over 
 them Caedmon looked at evening as he framed the verse in 
 which he sang the flood of Noah. Over them came the fierce 
 ships of the Northmen, first to plunder, then to settle ; and on 
 them, so constant is the lowlier life of men, the fishing-boats 
 have won their spoil and drifted into Whitby with the tide for 
 more than a thousand years. A poetry which has always 
 loved religion, and religion in its sterner and more solemn 
 forms, which has been passionate with adventure, which has 
 breathed with ease the airs of war, which has occupied with 
 joy the ocean, and which has never, from the lowly peasant 
 who began it to Chaucer, Shakspere, Milton, Wordsworth and 
 Tennyson, neglected to sing of the simple life of the hamlet, 
 could scarcely have had a fitter birthplace. 
 
 Nor was the spot devoid of other elements of poetry. Be- 
 hind Hild, as she walked on her high cliff at night, the moors 
 stretched away; and though she did not people them with 
 ?ieathen creatures of the mist like Grendel, she saw in the 
 foldings of the clouds the rebel angels whom Caedmon drew, 
 and the demons whom Cynewulf sang of as torturing Guthlac 
 on his solitary hill. When she looked up to the heavens and 
 beheld the stars — and keenly they shine on Whitby — or the 
 aurora lights to the North, she seemed to see the homes of 
 angels, and their choirs descend to bring on high the souls of 
 saints that she knew to be in hermitage and nigh to death. 
 And when storm was on the sea, and the light of the beacon 
 
288 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 she may have set up on the cliff, streamed over her head, and 
 she saw the dim gleam of other lights which monks or nuns 
 from her monastery had established in their cells along the 
 coast, and heard over the roaring of the waves the cries of sea- 
 men shipwrecked in the bay below, she heard also, in the wind 
 and the scream of the billows and the birds, the crying of 
 such demons as Cuthbert put to flight from the rocky solitude 
 of Fame. These things are no conjecture.. All early English 
 poetry is full of such thoughts, and they have entered into all 
 later poetry. Not once, but many times in English verse 
 
 The fishers have heard the water sprite, 
 Whose screams forbode that wreck is nigh. 
 
 Cynewulf saw the cloud-spirits of the rain and thunder stalk- 
 ing through the storm, and shooting their weapons. Baeda 
 tells many a story of the celestial visitants seen at night de- 
 scending from the stars ; of the radiance of their ascending 
 which St. Begu saw from Hackness — a cell founded by Hild 
 — on the very night when the soul of the great Abbess passed 
 away ; of the pillars of pure light that rose above the dead 
 bodies of the saints to the roof of heaven, and were seen far 
 and wide over England. The nature-myth became religious, as 
 much a part of the daily thoughts and visions of Christian as 
 it had been of heathen life. 
 
 The same things pervade the poem of Genesis, the ground- 
 work of which was at least done by Caedmon. The winds, 
 and especially the north-east wind, which sends in so fierce a 
 sea on Whitby, bear frost and bitter cold into the Hell of the 
 Genesis} The feeling of the writer of the Exodus (one of the 
 school of Caedmon) for the sea in tempest breaks forth again 
 and again in the poem, in long leaping lines, which follow one 
 another like the billows of the Northern Ocean. When Abra- 
 ham in the Genesis ascends the " steep downs till he comes to 
 the ring of the highland," and passes over the wolds to build 
 the bale fire for Isaac, it may well be the moors westward of 
 Whitby which the poet places in his verse ; and when God 
 speaks to Abraham of the stars to which He compares his 
 descendants for multitude. He speaks of them as Caedmon saw 
 them from the height of the abbey cliff.'' 
 
 1 Then in early morning comes an Eastern wind, 
 And a fierce-cold frost. — Genesis, 1. 315. 
 
 The passage is, however, in a, part of the Genesis which, it is said, was not 
 written by Caedmon. 
 
 2 Look upon the Heaven ; tell its high-adornments, 
 Clustered stars of sky ! These in splendour now 
 
CAEDMON -289 
 
 111 such, scenery the first English poem grew up, and, to 
 complete the picture, we may imagine the long hall of the 
 monastery at night filled with abbess or prior, monk and nun, 
 with lay brethren and servants, with thegns and churls and 
 merchants seeking hospitality, among the rest perhaps King 
 Ecgf rith seated near his sister Ml&eda., — for " kings and 
 princes asked and received advice from Hild," — with bishops 
 and saintly men who came to visit the place where they had 
 been brought up, — all gathered together, on each, side of the 
 huge fires, listening to Caedmon as he sang to them the para- 
 phrase of the portion of Scripture allotted to him iu the morn- 
 ing. Outside, the dark wind blew and shook the walls, and in 
 the pauses of the harp and song the roar of the waves lent 
 their deep tone to exalt the description of the Flood, which we 
 may fairly give to Caedmon. We may well imagine how they 
 listened to the noise of the wind and rain and the thunder of 
 the deep when they heard these lines — 
 
 Then sent forth the Lord 
 Heavy rain from heaven ; eke he hugely let 
 AU the welling burns on the world throng in 
 Out of every earth-vein ; let the ocean-streams, 
 Swarthy, sound aloud ! Then upstepped the sea 
 O'er the shore-stead walls ! Strong was he and wroth 
 Who the waters wielded, who with his wan wave 
 Cloaked and covered then all the sinful children 
 Of this middle-earth. Genesis, 1. 1371. 
 
 It may be that this passage, as I said, is by Caedmon himself ; 
 and, if so, it illustrates how, at times, his poetic work arose 
 above mere paraphrase. Whenever he is stirred by his sub- 
 ject, as when he describes the Creation, the Mood, the war of 
 Abraham with the Kings of the East, and the sacrifice of 
 Isaac, his style lifts, his metrical movement becomes full and 
 varied, his vision of the thing clear, his expansion of his 
 matter full of touches which, by belonging to the spirit and 
 manners of his time, quicken his work into reality. 
 
 Far through space are scattering their excelling loveliness ! 
 Brightly are they beaming over the broad sea. — Genesis, 1. 2189. 
 
 I do not say that Caedmon wrote these lines, though it is possible. But they 
 were written by one of his school, if not by him. And the writer may well have 
 lived at Whitby. He certainly, I think, wrote upon the coast. I may add that 
 to translate r-ume " far through space " Is perhaps more than I ought to do. 
 " Far and wide," with the sense of " plenteousness " added to it, is the exact 
 meaning. 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 
 "genesis a" 
 
 Oen'esis a, of which this chapter gives an account, and 
 ■which we may with some probability allot, at least in part, to 
 Caedmon, consists of the first 234 lines of the Genesis, and 
 then of the lines from 852 to the close. The lines from 235 
 to 851 contain a second account of the Fall of man, and are 
 called Genesis B. I shall treat them separately in the next 
 chapter. 
 
 Genesis A begins with an ascription of praise to the glorious 
 King, the Guard of the skies, which resembles the words of 
 the hymn Caedmon is said to have composed in his dream. 
 But the words are not the same as those of the earlier song. 
 The proper action of the poem is opened by a description of 
 the brightness and joy — the gledm and dredm — of the angel 
 hosts in obedience to the Lord, until the highest of the angels, 
 "who that ill counsel first began to weave," swollen with 
 "pride, and of malicious hatred all athirst, said that he would 
 strive with God for the wide clearness of heaven and make 
 him a home and lofty seat in the north part of the skies." ' 
 Then God, filled with grim wrath, "made a woful dwelling 
 for the false spirits — howls of hell and hard pains, a joyless 
 deep ; furnished with everlasting night and crammed with sor- 
 rows ; " " filled full of fire, and with frightful cold, with reek of 
 smoke and ruddy flame. Grim was the guilt they had gathered 
 against God : grim was the reward He gave them. " For 
 " He beat down their courage and bowed their pride, since He 
 was embittered ; and took from them peace and joy and their 
 
 1 Deep malice theuce conceiving and disdain, 
 
 Homeward with flying march where we possess 
 The quarters of the North. 
 
 Who intends to erect his throne 
 Equal to ours, throughout the spacious North. — Par. Lost, Bk. v. 
 290 
 
CHAP. XVI "GENESIS A" 291 
 
 glorious brightness." Then Caedmon, taking fire from his 
 own thought of the wrath of God, describes the personal battle 
 of God with His enemies, much as the poet describes the 
 wrestling of Beowulf with Grendel. Milton makes the aspect 
 alone of the Son of God enough to discomfit His foes, but 
 Caedmon is less divine. 
 
 Stern the mood He' had ; 
 In His grimness wrathful, gripped He on His foes 
 "With a cruel clutch, crushed them in His grasp ; 
 Cut them off from home, in His heart enraged. 
 
 Genesis, 1. 60. 
 
 When the battle is over, a far-off pathos comes into the tale. 
 Caedmon, with more sympathy than Milton had, tells of the 
 misery of the lost. " On a long way God drove the wretched 
 ghosts : broken was all their boast, and bowed their strength, 
 and their beauty shamed. In exile there they lived, fast 
 bound in that dark dwelling. No more they sang their lofty 
 song, but learned to know woe and care and sorrow and heavy 
 pain, with darkness decked," as with a garment. 
 
 Then in swift poetic change and contrast the pleasure and 
 peace of heaven is set over against their misery — 
 
 Then was sooth as ever soft society in heaven ; 
 
 Manners fair and mild, and a Master loved by all. 
 
 By his thegns their king ; and the glory of the warriors. 
 
 Of the joy-possessors, waxSd with the Lord. 11. 78-81. 
 
 It is the same contrast which is made in the last speech of 
 God in the Prologue to Faust. Yet how changed in form is 
 the modern conception, how laden with philosophy ! 
 
 Dooh ihr, die achten Gottersohne 
 Erf rent euch der lebendig reichen Schone ! 
 Das Werdende, das ewig wirkt und lebt, 
 Umfass' euch mit der Liebe holden Schranken, 
 Und was in sohwankender Erseheinung sohwebt, 
 Befestiget mit dauemden Gedanken. 
 
 God ponders then, as in Milton, how He may replenish the 
 empty seats of heaven, and looks forth on the vast abyss. 
 In its description the echo of heathen thought is heard, and 
 we may have in it the early English form of that universal 
 Teutonic conception which is best represented by the Norse 
 ginnCmga gap — the chasm of chaos, the world of dark mist 
 out of whose waste and yawning gulfs all creation rose. It is 
 well to note the word heolster-sceado — the shadow that hides 
 the caverned gloom, — Milton's "hollow dark " ; indeed, that 
 
292 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 sense of intense blackness of darkness which is so characteris- 
 tic of Northern poetry appears throughout the noble lines I 
 translate — 
 
 Nor was here as yet, save a hollow shadow, 
 
 Anything created ; but the wide abyss 
 
 Deep and dim, outspread, all divided from the Lord, 
 
 Idle and unuseful. With His eyes upon it 
 
 Gazed the mighty-minded King and He marked the place 
 
 Lie delightless — (looked and) saw the cloud 
 
 Brooding black in Ever-night, swart beneath the heaven. 
 
 Wan, and wasteful all,' till the world became. 
 
 But the everliving Lord at the first created — 
 
 He the Helm of every wight — Heaven and the Earth ; 
 
 Reared aloft the Firmament and this roomful land 
 
 Stablished steadfast there. 
 
 But as yet the Earth — 
 E'en the grass 2 — ungreen was now ! Gloomed in Ever-night 
 Far away and wide, waters rolling wan, 
 Ocean veiled the world. Then the wondrous-bright 
 Spirit of the Heaven's Ward o'er the heaving sea was borne 
 With a mickle speed. .... 
 
 Then the Lord of triumphs let ar-sundered be, 
 O'er the lake of Ocearn, light apart from gloom. 
 Shadows from the shining. 
 And of days the first saw the darkness dun 
 Fading swart away o'er the spacious deep. 
 Then that day departed o'er the ordered world 
 Of the midmost earth, and the Measurer drove 
 After the sheer shining — He our shaping God — 
 Earliest Evening on. On its footsteps ran — 
 Thrust along — the gloomy dark. That the King Himself 
 Named the Night by name. 
 
 After that stept swiftly on, striding o'er the Earth, 
 Bright the third of morns. U. 103-155. 
 
 1 They viewed the vast immeasurable Abyss 
 Outrageous as a sea, dark, wasteful, wild, 
 Up from the bottom turned by furious winds 
 And surging waves. Par. Lost, Bk. vii. 
 
 This whirling of the winds in the vast depths of darkness is not in the Teutonic 
 conception. That chasm of chasms is silent. But Milton has other phrases for 
 Chaos. He calls it " the wasteful Deep," " the waste, wide anarchy of Chaos, 
 Damp and dark," "the unvoyageable gulf obscure," "the dark, uubottomed, 
 infinite Abyss," " the vast Abrupt," — a splendid phrase. 
 
 The Void profound 
 Of unessential Night receives him next, 
 Wide-gaping, and with utter loss of being 
 Threatens him, plunged in that abortive gulf. 
 
 Par. Lost, Bk. ii. 
 
 Most of these phrases — so receptive was Milton — belong to the Teutonic and 
 not to the classical conception of the Dark beyond. 
 
 2 " A yawning gap was there, and nowhere was the grass." — ToZoipa. 
 
'GENESIS A" 298 
 
 Many of these phrases, especially when we consider that 
 Caedmon was so near to heathen ways of thinking, are inter- 
 esting. The earth, ungreen with grass, was the earth as yet 
 undivine ; to all Teutonic peoples the green sward was hallowed, 
 and had a consecrating power. When Adam is created he 
 " steps forth on the green grass." The description of Chaos 
 may be compared with the Norse Nijiheimr — the region under 
 earth covered with eternal night, joyless, alien from the gods,^ 
 filled with surging mist. Deep in this unbottomed darkness 
 the Christians afterwards put their hell. Then, the mickle 
 speed with which the Spirit of God is borne over the deep, is 
 a heathen thought added to the Mosaic story. That the even- 
 ing is shoved on by God is paralleled by a phrase in Beowulf, 
 where the bright morning is scofen and scynded (shoved and 
 s/jindiec?), and belongs to the same class of notions about the 
 dawn and day, evening and night, which represents them 
 as living beings pursuing one another, and eagerly hasting up 
 the sky. Night here runs and thrusts on after the day, like a 
 daemon, but day steps swiftly up the sky, like a youth in his 
 joy.^ There is a gap of three leaves now in the MS., and we 
 come at once to the Creation of Man. The little phrase that 
 "in the breast of both was burning love to God" marks the 
 nature of the poet and his race. God Himself is " blithe of 
 heart " as He blesses them, and that touch of Northumbrian 
 love of quiet nature, of which I have already spoken, steals in 
 when Eden is described. 
 
 At this point the work of the elder poet ceases, but we take 
 it up (Gen. A) again at the story of Cain and Abel. The 
 phrases "Books tell us," "as the Scriptures say," recall that 
 part of the tale of Baeda where he says that Caedmon heard 
 the Scripture narrated to him, and versed what he heard. 
 The poem now, with the exception of an inserted simile and 
 a few interesting phrases, becomes mere paraphrase. It is not 
 till the poet comes to swelling sea and rain and storm and a 
 great ship, — to matters, that is, with which he may have been 
 familiar at Whitby — that he rises into any original work. 
 The poem is set into dialogue, and the dialogue is always vig- 
 orous. God declares His wrath with the folk of earth, but 
 " thou shalt have peace," He says to Noah, " when the swart 
 water, the wan waves of death, swell with the sinful." " Make 
 thee a mickle mere-house, and resting-places in it and shelves 
 in the ship's bosom ; let the seams be fast against the work- 
 
 1 Milton's Chaos is equally apart from God. 
 
 2 See Grimm's Teut. Myth., articles "Day and Niglit." 
 
294 EAULY ENGLISH LITERATURE Chap. 
 
 ing of the waves with, earth-lime, alone of its kind, which 
 grows harder and harder the heavier the black sea^waves pash 
 and push upon it." And he calls it an ocean-house, a mickle 
 sea-chest, a seardwelling, a hewn-wood of the wave, a foamy- 
 ship, a nailed-up board, a wood fortress. Then the long de- 
 scription of the Flood begins, written by one into the study of 
 whose imagination had crept the sea. God will let downward 
 fall from above — 
 
 Slaughter rain upon tlie surface of tlie spacious earth. 
 And I'll set a feud of war for a space of forty days 
 'Gainst (the souls of) men ; and with surging troops of waves 
 Owners and their ownings, quell them all, in death ; 
 
 When the blackening racfci 'gins arise (in heaven). 1. 1350. 
 
 On this the verses follow which I have already quoted at p. 81, 
 and we have the image painted of the ark floating high upon 
 the flood, uninjured by that strange, indefinite creation of the 
 English poets — the Terror of the Water — 
 
 Then afar and wide rode on, all the welkin under, 
 
 O'er the Ocean ring that excelling house ; 
 
 Faring with its freight ; and this faring ship, — 
 
 That swift sailer through the seas — durst no surges' terror 
 
 Heavy heave upon ; but the holy God 
 
 Led them on and freed them. Fifteen ells on high 
 
 Deep above the dunes stood the drowning flood of sea. 
 
 1. 1392. 
 
 The ark then rests on Ararat, "the sea began to ebb, and the 
 heroes longed for the day when they might step over the nailed- 
 plank out of their prison-house above the sea-stream's edge." 
 It is a phrase which expresses what Caedmon must often have 
 heard from seamen long tossed in storm. The raven is then 
 sent forth, but the poet leaves him soon, and with the Northern 
 tenderness, sets his imagination to work round the story of 
 the Dove, expanding it with a delicate sympathy for the 
 "gray -blue" bird — 
 
 Far and wide she went, her own will she sought ! 
 All around- she flew, nowhere rest she found, 
 For the flood she might not with her flying feet 
 Perch upon the land ; nor on leaf of tree 
 For the sea-streams step ; but the steep hills were 
 Overwhelmed with waters. Then the -wild bird went 
 For the ark a-seeking, in the even-tide, 
 
 II have taken the reading sweart-racu (black rack of clouds) instead of 
 stredm-racu (stream-course),— that which is drifted out of the mountaiu-side. 
 
'GENESIS A" 295 
 
 Over tlie wan wave, wearily to sink, 
 
 Hungry, to the hands of the holy man. 1. 1455. 
 
 A second time slie is sent forth, and tte sympathy with 
 animals and with joy which marks the old English poets is 
 again expressed — 
 
 Far and wide she flew. 
 Glad in flying free, till she found a place 
 Pair, where she might rest 1 With her feet she stept 
 On a gentle tree. Gay of mood she was and glad. 
 Since she, sorely tired, now could settle down, 
 On the branches of the tree, on its beaming mast I 
 There she fluttered feathers, went a^-flying off again. 
 With her booty flew, brought it to the sailor. 
 From an olive tree a twig, right into his hands 
 Brought the blade of green. 11. 1465-74. 
 
 Then the chief of seamen knew that gladness was at hand, and he sent 
 forth, after three weeks, the wild dove who came not back again ; for she 
 saw the land and the greening trees. The happy creature, all rejoicing, 
 would no longer of the Ark, for she needed it no more. 
 
 The poem hurries now through mere paraphrase till it arrives 
 at the Abraham story. This begins with many speeches be- 
 tween G-od and Abraham, but there is nothing new in them. 
 There is one, however — that of Abraham to Sarah on going 
 down to Egypt — which, in the picture that introduces it, and 
 in the turn given to the fear of the husband, might come out of 
 a Greek tale — 
 
 Abraham made answer — (when) he marked in Egypt 
 Shining white the horned halls, and the high-built Burg 
 Blickering in brightness — .... 
 
 " When among Egyptians many haughty men 
 Shall have looked with eyes on thy lovely face — 
 When among the sstheliugs some of earls shall ween — 
 Woman sheen as elf — ! that (my vrife) thou art, 
 Bed-companion bright of mine, then will one of them 
 Have thee to his own ! I shall be in fear 
 Lest among these angered folk, one with edge of sword 
 Then may loose me of my life for his longing of desire." 
 
 1. 1820. 
 
 At last he reaches the invasion of Chedorlaomer ; ^ and his 
 experience of war leads him, finely inventing, to develop the 
 story with freedom into 200 lines; introducing all kinds of 
 English customs in war. We see first the Jordan Valley 
 
 1 Some say that the Abraham story is by another writer. It seems difficult 
 to impute to Caedmon, or to the author of the first part, a story so full of war 
 and the genius of war. Yet in those times every man was likely to have seen 
 war, ana Caedmon, now advanced in years, may have remembered his youth. 
 
296 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE Chap. 
 
 wasted from, the North by the four kings. It is a vivid picture 
 of the invasion of a Northumbrian province. There can be 
 nothing more historical. The whole "country-side is over- 
 spread with foes " 
 
 Then must many a fearful one, 
 Many a maiden, pale of cheek, pass away, in trembling. 
 To embracing of a stranger. Fallen were the shielders 
 Of the brides and bracelets,. sickened of their blood-wonnda. 
 
 1. 1969. 
 
 The country-folk gather under their kings and attack the invad- 
 ers, and the battle is joined. " Loud were then the lances " the 
 poet begins, but I have given the description of the first part 
 of this battle (vol. i. 182) . " Then were the Northmen over- 
 throwers of the Southfolk " ; and we almost seem to hear the 
 note of a Northumbrian victory over Mercia, or perhaps of some 
 Northumbrian woe like that when Ecgfrith fell at Nechtans- 
 niere, and though that was five years after the death of Caed- 
 mon, I mention it to make the reader feel that in this account 
 we have an actual picture of the time. The folk of Sodom and 
 Gomorrah, givers of gold — ' 
 
 In the surging crowd of shields shorn of their beloved were. 
 Of their warrior-comrades. Then they went them, for their life. 
 From that folk-encampment ! . . .. And they fell upon their track, 
 Eaten by the edge of sword, children of the sethelings. 
 
 Whom the weapons left 
 Went to find a fastness, but the foes shared all their gold. 
 Harried with their host that hoard-btirg of men. 
 
 AU the maidens fled away 
 And the wives and widows, robbed by slaughter of their friends, 
 From their sheltered home. 11. 1998-2011. 
 
 So the " war-wolves exulted in their triumph and their booty ; " 
 but now " a man, a sparing of the spears, fared quickly from 
 the battle-field seeking Abraham," and told all to the Hebrew 
 earl; and the hero told the evil hap to his friends — Aner and 
 Mamre and Eshcol, his willing war-comrades. " Quoth he, it 
 was the sorest of all sorrows that his brother's son suffered so 
 dreadful a need. Think of some rede to deliver him." 
 
 Then the brothers three, 
 With the swiftest speed when his speech was done, 
 Heal6d his heart-sorrow with their hardy words. 
 Gave to him their troth that upon his foes, with him. 
 They would wreak his wrong, or upon the Waretead fall. 
 Then the holy hero bade the hostmen of his hearth 
 Take their weapons up ; and of warriors he. 
 Found, in all, eighteen of ash-bearing men. 
 
XVI "GENESIS A" 297 
 
 And three hundred eke, loyal to their lord. 
 Of them all he wist, well could every one 
 On the fighting Fyrd hear the fallow linden. 
 
 11. 2033-44. 
 
 As evening falls, they draw near the camp. Then Abraham 
 plans with his chief men — and the particularity of the plan 
 makes me think that the poet had an actual night-surprise in 
 mind — to attack his enemy in front and rear " to show them 
 grimly the war-moot, and hard hand-playing on two sides, for 
 so in the strife of spears God will give them success " — 
 
 Then adventured, I have heard, under shadows of the night. 
 
 Heroes keen to combat. In the camps was clashing 
 
 Of the shields and of the shafts ; of the shooters falling ; 
 
 Brattling of the bolts of war ! Underneath the breast of men 
 
 Grisly gripped the sharp- ground spears 
 
 On the foemen's life. Thickly fell they there 
 
 "Where, before, with laughter they had lifted booty. 1. 2060. 
 
 The glory of the ashen-spears — the triumph of the North- 
 ern men — is reversed, and Abraham, Lot and the rejoicing 
 women " saw the fowls of prey tearing the flesh of the mur- 
 derers of freemen." To meet them bringing back the spoil 
 and captives come the King of Sodom, and Melchisedek, 
 bishop of the people. " Be thou honoured," cries Melchisedek 
 to Abraham, "amidst the multitude of men in the eyes of 
 Him who has given to thee war-glory of the ashes ; " and he 
 preaches such a little sermon as Aidan might have done to 
 Oswald. After which the war-king of Sodom takes up the 
 word, and he speaks well — 
 
 Give to me the maidens of my people here. 
 
 Those whom thou hast freed by the forces of thy host 
 
 From the death-clasps of these men. Keep the circled gold 
 
 "Which was own&d once of our people here, 
 
 Cattle, lovely trapping.?. Let me lead, in freedom. 
 
 All the bairns of sethelings back again to home. 
 
 To their wasted dwelling — all the women and the youths. 
 
 And the doleful widows ! Dead are now their offspring. 
 
 Good folk-fellows in the fight, save a few alone 
 
 Who must now with me hold the mark (against the foe). 
 
 1. 2126. 
 
 Then Abraham answered, and we hear in his words the 
 temper of a great English Ealdorman — 
 
 "Wielder of these warriors, now I vow to thee 
 Here before the holy God .... 
 
 that of this world's good 
 
298 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE Chap. 
 
 Neither scat nor scilling, will I seize, lest afterwards 
 Thou should'st say unto thyself that I've surely been 
 On this earth enriched with the ancient treasure 
 Of the Sodom realm, [with silver and with gold]. 
 But the booty mine by battle thou shalt bear away fronj hence, 
 All except the share of these aethelings of mine, 
 Of Aner and Mamre and of Eshcol too — 
 Never will I from my warriors take away their right. 
 
 Go, and bear with thee 
 Home the gold enchased, and the girls embraceable. 
 Women of thy people I For a while thou needest not 
 Eear the fighting rush of the foes we loathe — 
 Battle of the Northmen ! For the birds of carrion 
 Splashed with blood are sitting, under shelving mountains. 
 Glutted to the gullet with the gory death of hosts. 1. 2139. 
 
 With this fine passage, in which the English fierceness and 
 pride break out in spite of the new gentleness of Christ, the 
 war-story ends. 
 
 The paraphrase continues, relating the history of Abraham 
 and Sarah, Ishmael and Hagar. A few passages are full of 
 force. When the poet tells of the many lands the children 
 of Abraham shall have, he paints this picture which might 
 serve for many a Nortliumbrian fortress, if we may place it 
 on a Roman site where stone walls and houses were seen by 
 the English. It might do for York. Abraham's offspring, God 
 says, shall have as their own 
 
 Each of the folk-lands far as these three waters 
 Sweep around witli streams stone-burgs rising steep ; 
 Foaming flow the floods round the fortress i of the folk. 
 
 1. 2211. 
 
 But the most striking thing is the love of dialogue. Every- 
 thing is thrown into talk, and, unlike the story of the Fall in 
 Genesis B, the dialogue is here more dramatic than epic. One 
 might almost say that the dramatic genius of the English 
 people begins to show itself in this early poem ; and that it is 
 possible — -for Cynewulf runs also into dialogue — that the 
 drama might have been much sooner developed in England, 
 had not this tendency been, with others, overwhelmed by the 
 long-winded story-telling which came to us from France. At 
 any rate we have here, probably towards the end of the seventh 
 century, that half-dramatic form of poetry which would easily 
 slip among the common people into the miracle play, or the 
 mystery. But the note of it both in feeling and form is much 
 higher than that of the earlier mysteries. I give one passage 
 
 1 Byht = dwelling or territory. 
 
XVI "GENESIS A" 299 
 
 to illustrate what I mean. I have left out the connecting 
 phrases — "her the angel answered," and the rest — and the 
 piece becomes somewhat dramatic. The angel, a " thegn of 
 glory," speaks to Hagar — 
 
 Angel. Whither hastest thou, thou helpless woman, 
 
 "Wanderings sore to suHer ? Thee doth Sarah own. 
 
 Hagar. I have fled from woes, I, in want of every wish, 
 
 Mournful from my dwelling, from my mistress' hate, 
 Erom her vexing, from wrong words. Now within the waste 
 With a weeping face, must I wait my fate 
 When from forth my heart hunger or the wolf 
 Shall my soul and sorrow snatch away together. 
 
 Angel. Care not thou afar through thy flight to sunder 
 Fellowship with her ; find her now again ; 
 Earn to thee her pity ; poor of spirit, now hegin 
 To endure with goodness I Gracious he the Lord to you. 
 
 Genesis, 1. 2272. 
 
 This is but one example of a quasi-dramatic method which is 
 used through the Genesis. It is introduced also at intervals in 
 the tale of the sacrifice of Isaac with which Genesis A abruptly 
 ends. Homely Northern touches enter into it ; and it has a 
 further interest in this — that Caedmon was not so far from 
 heathendom as never to have heard of human sacrifices. Here 
 are portions of the story — • 
 
 God, intent to know the fortitude of the jEtheling, tested 
 him with austere words. "Go, Abraham, take thine own 
 child with thee, offer, thyself, thine only son to me. When 
 thou hast climbed the steep mountain, the ring of the high 
 land, thou shalt make ready a bale-fire for thy bairn, slay thy 
 son with edged sword, and then with swart fire burn up the 
 body of thy loved one. And the holy man, the white-haired 
 giver of gold, girded his gray sword upon him, bridled his 
 ass and led forth Isaac from his Hof, a bairn unwaxen ; then 
 took his way across the waste, until that, wondrous bright over 
 the deep water, arose the spear-point ^ of the third day." Then 
 he " saw up-towering the high downs," and climbed them with 
 his son — 
 
 Walking o'er the wolds ; wood the son was hearing, 
 
 Eire and sword the father ! . . . 
 
 So at last he stood on the high-land's roof. 
 
 Then began upload the pile and awaken fire. 
 
 And he fettered fast feet and hands alike 
 
 1 Ord is the word used, " the sharp point of a spear," the " edge of a 
 sword " ; lit., the beginning (or end ?) of a thing. It is here, I think, the first 
 gold edge of the sun as it emerges from the sea, like the triangular top of a 
 glittering spear. 
 
300 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap, xvi 
 
 Of his (only) bairn ! On tlie bale he heaved 
 
 Youthful Isaac up ; and at once he gripped 
 
 By the hilt the sword. With his hands he would 
 
 Slaughter now his son, sink the fire down 
 
 With his bairn's own blood. 11. 2898-2907. 
 
 It is almost an actual picture of a Norseman's human sacri- 
 fice, and the Genesis ends abruptly with its forbidding, and 
 with the blessing of God on Abraham — 
 
 Pluck the boy away living from the pile of wood. 
 
CHAPTER XVII 
 
 ' GENESIS B ' 
 
 Genesis B (U. 235-851) retells the story of the overthrow 
 of the rebel angels, and then passes on to the tale of the 
 temptation and fall of man; and most critics believe it to 
 belong to a much later time than the seventh century. A 
 multitude of theories have been formed about its sources, its 
 writer, its age, its metre, and its quality. The most important 
 of them all is that suggested by Sievers, and it is on the 
 grounds he has partly established that the division of the 
 Genesis into Genesis A and Genesis B has been made and gen- 
 erally accepted. He declares that in metre, in manner, in 
 style, and in language this episode stands apart from all other 
 English poetry ; but, on the other hand, it stands very near 
 to the Old-Saxon poem of the Heliand in metre, manner, style, 
 and language. The Heliand is a poem of the ninth century 
 on the Saviour ; an account in verse of the Gospel history, 
 the author of which used a Latin poem of the fifth century, 
 written by Bishop Avitus of Vienne, as his original. Sievers 
 claims to have proved that Genesis B is most nearly related in 
 language and diction to the Heliand, and that its writer also drew 
 largely from the poem of Avitus, from the books De origine 
 mundi, De originali peccato, and De sententia dei, and that he 
 is indebted to them for several "motives." On these grounds, 
 he infers that the poem, out of which this episode of ours 
 was taken and inserted in the Genesis, was originally written 
 in Old Saxon by the author of the Heliand;^ that an English- 
 man living in Germany translated it into English, and that 
 the translation, having lost its later part, was, in the tenth 
 century, incorporated into the Genesis poem in England. 
 
 1 This, says Wiilker, is the weakest part of Sievers' theory. Indeed, there 
 is no clear evidence of it. The evidence here ought to he the strongest, and it 
 is the weakest. 
 
 301 
 
302 EAELY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 Professor Ten Brink turns the theory round, and rejects the 
 notion of a translation. It was an Old Saxon — perhaps 
 Bishop John of ^thelney, whom iElfred brought from Old 
 Saxony — who, using the Latin work of Avitus, and fuU of 
 the spirit of the Heliand, of its metre, phrases, and style, 
 wrote a poem on the fall of man in English and in England. 
 Then some later editor of the Caedmonic Genesis, finding a 
 gap in the manuscript at line 234 (and the sheet containing 
 the beginning of the interpolated poem fails in the extant 
 MS.), filled up the space from this second English poem on 
 the same subject; but in order to give some unity to his 
 work began again at the beginning of things, and told over 
 again the Eall of the Angels, wholly reconceiving this sub- 
 ject, and stamping it with his own individuality. Thus 
 Northern Germany, where the Heliand had sprung up from 
 the seeds of English learning scattered by English mission- 
 aries, gave back in the Genesis B a part of what it had re- 
 ceiyed." ' I do not see why we may not make another sup- 
 position — that one of the Northern English missionaries to 
 Germany, or an English descendant from them, who had with 
 him the Caedmonic poems, and who became acquainted with 
 the work of Avitus, wrote the episode as we have it, and in- 
 corporated it with the work of Caedmon. Its likeness to 
 the Heliand might be explained by this Englishman having 
 read the Heliand, or if the episode were written before the 
 Heliand, by the writer of the Heliand having seen the 
 English poem.^ As regards the other theories, I refer my 
 readers to the Grundriss of Wiilker, where they are all given 
 in brief and clear abstract. One thing alone seems to stand 
 out with some clearness- — that this episode is later than the 
 rest of the Genesis, and that it has Old Saxon connections. 
 Yet even that has been denied, and in the midst of these 
 critical uncertainties, it is pleasant to go through the poem 
 itself and to translate those passages which seem to have a 
 literary value. 
 
 But first, it is right to say that it is not a paraphrase at all. 
 It is a poem of some elaboration of design, having a beginning, 
 middle and end, thrown with some artistic care into a whole 
 and treated in a quasi-epic manner. Then the metre is very 
 
 1 The whole statement will be found in Ten Brink's Hist. Eng. Lit. chaps, 
 iv. viii., and in the Appendix A. 
 
 2 A theory somewhat lilce this is that of Schraeller. He thinks that Caed- 
 mon's poems and the Heliand were written by the same poet. It seems a mere 
 conjecture, but then conjecture runs riot over this subject. 
 
'GENESIS B" 303 
 
 different from tliat of Genesis A. The lines are lengthened 
 ont, 13, 15, 17, and even 21 syllables,' so that the abrupt short 
 translations given by Thorpe and others do not, even in the 
 slightest way, represent the gallop and numerous trampling of 
 the Anglo-Saxon verse ; nor the stately procession, in pathetic 
 passages, of the language. Dr. Guest, who was profoundly 
 impressed with the metrical movement of the Genesis, and 
 whose authority on the matter deserves high consideration, 
 declares ^ that " the passages in which Caedmon puts on all his 
 sublimity are unfortunately among the most difficult. These 
 extracts (which he gives) may serve, in some measure, to show 
 the masterly manner in which he manages his numbers. His 
 accent always falls in the right place, and the emphatic syllable 
 is ever supported by a strong one. His rhythm changes with 
 the thought — now marching slowly with a stately theme, and 
 now running off with all the joyousness of triumph when his 
 subject teems with gladness and exultation. There is reason to 
 believe that to these beauties our forefathers were deeply sen- 
 sitive, and that Caedmon owed to them no small portion of his 
 popularity. In these respects he has no superior in the whole 
 range of our literature, and, perhaps, but one equal." Guest 
 had no doubt, it seems, of Caedmon's authorship of the 
 Genesis. 
 
 It is some consolation if we are, as it seems, to throw aside 
 Genesis B as Caedmon's, that so careful a scholar and so good 
 a metrist as Dr. Guest, saw in his time nothing irrational in 
 believing that Caedmon of Whitby was the writer of the Caed- 
 monic poems of Junius, and that it did not occur to him to doubt 
 that the writer of the beginning of Genesis was also the writer 
 of Genesis B. In fact, he applies his remarks about the excel- 
 lence of the rhythms almost more to the earlier than to the 
 later work. He makes more quotations from A than from B. 
 For myself, with all the criticisms before me, I see no absolute 
 improbability in Caedmon having done the whole of Genesis 
 and Exodus. I do not believe he did; but if the question were 
 only literary, I should say that if we grant him poetic genius, 
 then he may have had three different styles and periods — 
 even in the space of ten or twelve years, even though he began 
 so late in life ; and his movement forward in power of thought 
 and of technical excellence may have been extraordinary. No 
 one can tell what genius may or may not do. It is beyond 
 
 1 This is a special character of the Heliand, but the same expansion of the 
 line occurs in other Anglo-Saxon poems belonging to the eighth century. 
 
 2 History of English Rhythms. 
 
304 EARLY ENGLISH LITEEATTJRE chap. 
 
 analysis or prediction. Caedmon may have changed into 
 Exodus and fallen to Daniel. But this is very improbable. 
 If Caedmon had genius of this great character, it is likely that 
 it would have burst forth before he was "well advanced in 
 years." Moreover, even from the literary point of view, the 
 argument against his authorship of this poem (235-851) is 
 very strong. Genesis B has not only an intellectual subtlety 
 which is wholly absent from Genesis A, but also it does not 
 possess the poetic freshness which pleases us in the earlier 
 work, in the account, for example, of the Flood and of the 
 battles of Abraham. It smells of a more learned and more 
 artificial age. There is also in this episode a distinct concep- 
 tion of the characters of Adam, Eve, and Satan, an effort to 
 individualise them and to represent their action on one an- 
 other, which is almost unknown in other Anglo-Saxon work, 
 and which is utterly strange to the rest of the book. Unless 
 Caedmon passed, within ten years, from a natural simplicity as 
 objective as pictorial, to a complex, cultivated and somewhat 
 artificial poetry, subjective and therefore less pictorial ; unless 
 he lost, as time went on and he became more of the monk, 
 every trace of the heathen elements which lingered in the 
 peasant; unless he changed somewhat as art changed from 
 Giotto to Fra Angelico, he could not have written this portion 
 of the Genesis. It is not impossible, but it is extraordinarily 
 improbable. 
 
 Genesis B opens with the return of God to heaven after His 
 warning to Adam and Eve not to eat of the tree ; and then 
 describes the Angel tribes in heaven, and especially One, " so 
 powerful, so mighty in thought, swaying over so much, so 
 beauteous in his form, like to the light stars," that he was- 
 second only to the Lord of Hosts. Pride and insolence seized 
 on him, and it is one of the reasons given for this by the poet, 
 that when Lucifer looked on his body he saw that it was 
 "light and gleaming, clear-white and glorious-hued," as if 
 physical beauty lifted him to the level of God. Then his 
 haughtiness (while he is yet in heaven) breaks forth in a fine 
 soliloquy — 
 
 278. Why, then, should I toil ? quoth he. Not a shred of need there is 
 Now for me to have a master I With these hands of mine I may 
 Work as many wonders 1 Miokle wielding force have I 
 For the setting up of a goodlier stool than He 
 Higher in the Heaven ! Why should I at all, for His favour be 
 
 His slave, 
 Bow to Him in such a bondage ? la god may be, like Him. 
 
xvn "GENESIS B" 305 
 
 "With me stand strong-hearted comrades, who will nevermore, in 
 
 the struggle fail me; i 
 Heroes hardy-hearted ! They have for their Lord, chosen me 
 
 and hailed me : 
 286. Far-famed fighters they ! Any one may plan a rede, with such 
 
 followers as these 
 With such folk-companions frame it ! They are ready friends of 
 
 mine, 
 True in aU their thoughts to me ! I may be their (trusted) Lord 
 In this realm of mine to rule. So it is not right, methinks, 
 That for any favour I should need to fawn, 
 Or for any good, on God. I'll no longer be His Younger ! 
 
 This is the wild Northern freedom ! It is a great earl speak- 
 ing, whose pride in personal beauty, whose insolence of indi- 
 viduality, has set him into haughty anger against his lord. In 
 its swift revolt for the personal liberty of pride, and in the 
 fierce brooding of that pride, in the sense of power expressed 
 in it to work and to build a kingdom, in its deep feeling of the 
 close relation of chief and thegns and of their mutual respect, 
 in the praise of good rede with the Witan, the speech belongs 
 to early English heathendom ; and Milton, who also takes 
 pride as the .leading motive of the rebellion of Satan, similarly 
 conceives the lonely rage of the Archangel, which yet, not al- 
 together lonely, is shared with Beelzebub his friend; for Mil- 
 ton, unlike our poet whose Satan is more self-contained, creates 
 a pathetic passion round his fiend by filling his heart with 
 the ancient affections of heaven. Hell is then described, 
 the abyss of pain; swart, victoryless,^ deep-daled. At even, 
 through unmeasured length of hours, fire is ever new ; but it 
 is interchanged with bitter cold — 
 
 315. At the earliest of the dawning comes the Eastern wind, 
 And a fierce-cold frost ; ever fire or piercing cold ; 
 
 1 See how, in his rising passion and appeal, the lines run on. This line has 
 over twenty syllables. In the 286th line the first half consists only of the nor- 
 mal four syllables while the second half gallops into nine; and in the 290th 
 line, being one of concentrated scorn, the syllables are reduced almost as low 
 as possible. This is the self-restrained liberty and variety of a fine metrist, 
 who uses his vehicle as the passionate music of thought, contracts and expands 
 it to echo the vibration of his emotion. This free and noble manner of rhythms 
 runs through the whole of this B portion of Genesis, and extends, but with a 
 less variety of force and ease, into Exodus. 
 
 ^ Victory-less — sigeleas. 1 do not like the word I use, and sige as a prefix 
 loses often its meaning of victory, and has the general meaning of noble or 
 glorious, as when, in the Andreas, Matthew is called Andrew's sigebro'^or. 
 Nevertheless I keep the word victory as often as I can, because it brings us 
 back to the early source of glory. There was no possibility of victory falling 
 to the lot of any of the warriors of Hell ; no glory there. 
 
306 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATUEE chap. 
 
 324. Hot the boiling (heat) of war in the breast of Hell, 
 
 Burning and the breadth of flame, and -withal a bitter reeking, 
 Darkness, vapour dun .... 
 
 333. Lightless was the land, full of leaping blaze, 
 Mickle was the fear of fire.i 
 
 On this "bed of death" lay Satan, once sheenest of the 
 angels, whitest within the heaven, fettered down with iron 
 bands, feet and hands, and hafted over neck and breast with 
 " great heat-smitten bars," so that when he plots the fall of 
 man, he cannot carry out his plan himself, but must give it 
 into the hands of one of his comrades. The rude picture in 
 the MS. represents him bound in this fashion. " His thought 
 boils about his heart," as hot g,s the hell around him ; and here 
 is the famous speech, which is almost the only passage in the 
 poem known to Englishmen, and whose beginning, in its pas- 
 sionate regret for heaven and its lonely Northern pathos, is 
 strangely like a renowned Miltonic passage " — 
 
 356. how most unlike is this narrow stead 
 To that other home which of old we knew 
 High in Heaven's realm ! . 
 
 364. This the greatest of my sorrows — 
 
 Is that Adam now, who of earth was wrought, 
 
 1 Here are some Miltonic parallels — 
 
 Beyond this flood a frozen continent 
 
 Lies dark and wild, beat with perpetual storms 
 
 Of whirlwind and dire hail. 
 
 The parching air 
 Burns frore, and cold performs th' effect of fire. 
 
 The damned are haled from beds of raging fire to starve in ice, thence hurried 
 back to fire. — Par. Lost, Bk. ii. 
 
 A dungeon horrible, on all sides round, 
 
 As one great furnace flamed ; yet from those flames 
 
 No light ; but rather darkness visible . . . 
 
 The seat of desolation, void of light 
 
 Save what the glimmering of these livid flames 
 
 Casts pale and dreadful. — Par. Lost, Bk. i. 
 
 Milton has left out the reek, the bitter smoke. 
 
 2 O how unlike the place from whence they fell! 
 
 " Is this the region, this the soil, the clime," 
 Said then the lost Archangel, " this the seat 
 That we must change for Heav'n? — This mournful gloom 
 For that celestial light ? " . . . 
 
 " Farewell, happy fields. 
 Where joy for ever dwells I " — Par. Jiost, Bk. i. 
 
"GENESIS B" 307 
 
 Shall possess my stool, hold my stronglike seat ; 
 
 Be in bliss himself and we this bale endure, 
 
 Harm this hell within ! Ai, ai ! Of my hands had I the power. 
 
 Might I out of this for one hour be, 
 
 But one winter hour, with this host would I ! 
 
 But about me braced lie the bands of iron. 
 
 Rides me here a rope of chains, realmless am I now ! 
 
 Mickle fire is here 
 Over me and under. Ne'er before I saw 
 Landscape loathlier than this. Never lulls the iiame 
 Hot along this hell .... 
 
 382. .... Eound about me lie 
 
 (Heavy) forged in heat, of the hardened steel. 
 Great, the gratings barred. Me hath God with them 
 Hafted by the hals. Wherefore wot I well, that my heart He 
 
 knew. 
 And as well He wist. He of warriors Lord, 
 That for Adam and for me evil-work would rise 
 All about the heavenly realm, had I only, anywhere, wielding ^ 
 
 of my hands — 
 Yet we now endure, pains of doom in hell : such the darkness 
 
 and the heat 
 Fierce and fathomless. TJs hath God Himself 
 In the swart mists swept away. 
 
 393. Shall we not for this have vengeance. 
 
 And with any pain repay him since from Light he parted us ? 
 
 God has made earth and men to take our place — on Adam 
 then and on his offspring be our ill avenged ! Turn them aside 
 from God, till they, too, fall into this grim abyss. Here the 
 bairns of men shall be our thralls ! Begin we, now, to think 
 upon this Fyrd.^ Then he appeals to his thegns — 
 
 409. If to any thegn have I treasures of a king 
 
 Given in the days gone by, while as yet in that good realm 
 Blissfully we sat, o'er our seats had sway — 
 Then at ne'er a happier hour could he ine repay, 
 
 1 Geweald is, of course, " power," the German gewalt. But I think I may 
 be allowed the above translation. 
 
 2 The argument of Beelzebub in Par. Lost, Bk. ii., is very similar to this. I 
 quote a portion of it, but the whole is worth comparison with our passage— 
 
 " Or, if not drive, 
 Seduce them to our party, that their God 
 May prove their foe, and with repenting hand 
 Abolish His own works. This would surpass 
 Common revenge, and interrupt His joy 
 In our confusion, and our joy upraise 
 In His disturbance; when His darling sons, 
 Hurl'd headlong to partake with us, shall curse 
 Their frail original, and faded bliss — 
 
 Tl T 
 
 Faded so soonl Advise if this be worth 
 Attempting, or to sit in darkness here 
 Hatching vain empires." 
 
308 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 Eor my gift return me gift — if for that would one, 
 
 Any one of all my thegns, 
 
 Come out of tMs cellarage, and had craft with him^ 
 
 Outwards far to fly with his feathered garment, 
 
 Wheel him through the welkin where, well-wrought, are 
 
 standing 
 Adam and his Eve on the earth their kingdom 
 With their weal enwreathed — and^ — hither whirled adown 
 
 are we 
 Into these deep dens. 
 
 425. .... This is on my soul so sore. 
 
 Most this rueth me in heart, that the realm of heaven 
 Is their own for ever. Ah, if one of you 
 Should this work with any wiles — that the Word of God 
 They may leave and all His lore, loathier they'll he to Him ! 
 If they break His bidding, then His wrath shall burn on them, 
 Then their weal is whirled away, and their wretchedness is 
 
 readied. 
 Harm and sorrow hard ! Have in thought then, all of you. 
 How ye may o'ercraft them, so within these chains shall I 
 Softly rest me then. 
 
 This is pure heathen, and the comfort of vengeance was never 
 better put ! " Who does this for me," he cries, " shall sit here 
 by myself." Then one of his thegns sprang up and readied him 
 for the journey, and it is a vigorous piece of word-painting — 
 
 442. Then a grim-set foe of God 'gan to gird himself, 
 Eagerly, in his equipment : artful was his mind ; 
 Set on's head a hollow helm, and full hard he bound it. 
 Spanned it down with spangs ; ^ many speeches well he knew 
 All of words awry I Thence he wheeled him upward. 
 Heaved him through the hell-doors, strength of heart had he. 
 Beat his wings the lift along,* foully bent his mind was ; 
 
 1 ' ' Come on — you hear this fellow in the cellarage . ' ' — Hamlet. The Anglo- 
 Saxon word is cfcsior— a bar, or cell. I use craft in the translation in the 
 sense of power. 
 
 2 This sudden breaking off at the and, with the fierce contrast which follows, 
 is well wrought. The writer must have heard or been a great orator. 
 
 8 " With glittering spangs that did like starres appear." — Spenser, Fairy 
 Queen, iv. 11-45. Gascoigne also uses it in the Steele Glasse. Spang is a 
 metal fastening. 
 
 * Literally, " played, moved up and down on the lift." It means the up and 
 down movement of the wings, as " the hard hand-play " means the rising and 
 falling of the smiting hands in battle ; or it might mean that he himself rose 
 and fell on the air of Hell, like Satan, who 
 
 Puts on swift wings, and toward the gates of Hell 
 
 Explores his solitary flight: sometimes 
 
 He scours the right hand coast, sometimes the left ; 
 
 Now shaves with level wing the deep, then soars 
 
 Up to the fiery concave towering high. — Par. Lost, Bk. li. 
 
"GENESIS B" 309 
 
 Swung the flre on either side by his fiendish power,i 
 454. Till he Adam found in the earthly realm, 
 
 Wrought in wisdom there, and his wife was with him, 
 
 Winsomest of women. .... 
 
 460. And a twain of trees therein stood beside them ; 
 
 "With abundant fruit were they overladen. 
 ^66- • . . . Not alike their waxing was : 
 
 One was so delightful, beautiful and sheen ! 
 
 Lythe it was and lovesome ; that of life the tree was ! 
 
 477. But the other stood, swart above and swart below ; 
 Dark it was and dusky, and of death it was the tree. 
 That much of bitter bare. 
 
 The temptation foUo-ws, set forth in dialogues which belong 
 more to an epic than a dramatic manner. The inventiveness 
 of the talk and the imaginative presentation of the subject — 
 those two essential qualities — are equally remarkable. They 
 are even subtle, of that subtlety which does not belong to the 
 simpler age of poetry. But the full impression is spoiled by 
 repetition of thoughts and words. 
 
 The fiend throws himself into the form of the Worm and 
 winds himself round the tree of death, and with the fruit in 
 his grasp (for he is as yet the Worm with hands and feet) 
 speaks to Adam : "Longeth thee for aught, Adam, up to God? 
 Hither on His errand I have fared from far ! Not long since 
 I sat with Himself, and He bade me tell thee to eat this fruit, 
 that thy strength, thy mind,- should be mightier. Thou hast 
 made thyself dear to God ; I heard Him praise thee. By me 
 He bids thee learn knowledge. Take then this fruit in hand, 
 bite it and taste. Thy heart shall be expanded, and thy form 
 for it the fairer." " When I heard the Lord of Victory speak," 
 answers Adam, " and bid me hold fast His word, and gave me 
 this bride — this woman fair and sheen — swart hell. He said, 
 should hold him who bore aught of that loathly thing in his 
 breast. I wot not whether, lying, thou comest here, or art in 
 truth a messenger from Heaven." And the English caution 
 of the speech, with its note of scorn, ends in a sharp repulse 
 of the tempter, and an outburst of trust in God — " I know 
 naught of thy bidding, works or ways ; I do know what He 
 bade me when last I saw Him. To none of His angels art 
 thou like. Therefore I hear no more from thee ; thou mayest 
 take thee hence ! Fast is my faith in the Almighty God who 
 wrought me with His hands, and He can give me all good 
 
 1 On each hand the flames 
 Driven backward slope their pointing spires. — Par. Lost, Bk. 1. 
 
310 EARLY ENGLISH LITEKATUEE chap. 
 
 things, even though. He send no Junger here." Wroth of 
 mood, the mightiest of Scathers turned him where Eve was 
 standing — and sheen was she shapen — and first he frightens 
 her. " God will be in wrath when He hears that His message 
 is rejected. But if thou listenest to me, punishment will be 
 warded off from both of you. Then will thine eyes also become 
 so clear that thou shalt see all over the wide world and the 
 throne of God Himself and win His grace. Then, too, thou 
 mayest turn Adam round thy pleasure, if thoii hast will for 
 that."^ So with lies he lured her, and "the Worm's thought 
 began to seethe within her ; her heart bent to his tempting." 
 She took the fruit of the tree of death, and straightway — 
 
 603. Sheener to her seemed all the sky and earth ; 
 
 All this world was lovelier ; and the work of God, 
 
 Mickle was and mighty then, though 'twas not- by man's device, 
 
 That she saw (the sight) — but the Scather eagerly 
 
 Moved about her mind. .... 
 
 611. " Now thyself thou mayest see, and I need not speak it — 
 thou, Eve the good, how unlike to thy old self 
 Is thy beauty and thy breast since thou hast believed my words ! 
 
 Light is beaming 'fore thee now, 
 Glittering against thee,^ which from God I brought, 
 White from out the Heavens. See, thy hands may touch it ! 
 Say to Adam then, what a sight thou hast, 
 And what powers — through my coming ! " 
 
 Then follows on this fine thought a pretty picture of Eve and 
 a noble description of the vision she sees through the magic 
 power of the fruit. I give it in parts. It is, alas ! filled up 
 with homiletic passages — 
 
 626. Then to Adam went Eve, the sheenest of all women, 
 Winsomest of wives, e'er should wend into the world, 
 Eor she was the handiwork of the heavenly King. 
 ' . . . .Of the fruit unblest 
 
 Part was hid upon her heart, part in hand she bore. 
 
 655. " Adam, my Lord, this apple is so sweet, 
 
 1 Milton puts this thought in the mouth of Eve — 
 
 Shall I to him make known 
 As yet my change, and give him to partake 
 Full happiness with me, or rather not, 
 But keep the odds of knowledge in my power 
 Without copartner? so to add what wants 
 In female sex, the more to draw his love, 
 And render me more equal, and perhaps — 
 A thing not undesirable — sometime 
 Superior; for, inferior, who is free? — Par. Lost, Bk. ix. 
 
 2 Glaedlic ongean, " glad or shining against thee." It comes pouring on to 
 her in waves. 
 
"GENESIS B" 311 
 
 Blithe within the breast ; bright this messenger j 
 'Tis an Angel good from God ! By his gear I see 
 That he is the errand-bringer of our heavenly King ! 
 
 I can see Him now from hence 
 Where Himself He sitteth, in the south-east throned, 
 All enwreathed with weal ; He who wrought the world 1 
 And with Him I watch His angels, wheeling round about Him, 
 In their feathered vesture, of all folks the mightiest, 
 Wmsomest of war-hosts ! Who could wit like this 
 Give me, did not God Himself surely grant it me. 
 
 Ear away I hear — 
 And as widely see over all the world. 
 O'er the universe widespread ! — All the music-mirth 
 In the Heavens I can hear ! — In my heart I am so clear, 
 Inwardly and outwardly, since the apple I have tasted. 
 See ! I have it here, in my hands ; my good Lord ! 
 Gladly do I give it thee ; I believe from God it comes ! " 
 
 It is characteristic of English feeling, but curiously unlike 
 Milton "who makes Adam yield at once, moved by overwhelm- 
 ing love, that the Caedmonic Eve takes the whole day, speak- 
 ing closely to him with many beseechings, to make the man 
 eat ; and he surrenders at last, as Merlin to Vivien, half from 
 love and half from weariness. As if to insist on this, it is 
 twice, thrice repeated that his heart began to change towards 
 her will, though I fancy that the repetitions are but interpola- 
 tions. Yet the honour of the woman is saved as it is not in 
 Milton. She did not do this for the sake of wrong, but 
 " through a faithful heart, to win for Adam all the good the 
 fiend — who seemed to her an angel — had promised them from 
 God." At the last he from the woman took 
 
 718. Hell and Hence-departure,' though 'twas hight not so, 
 But it owned the name only of a fruit. 
 Yet it was Death's dream, and the Devil's subtle lure. 
 Hell and Hither-going, heroes' overthrow. 
 Murder it of men ! 
 
 Then in a fine exultant joy Satan's Thegn, having won his day, 
 bursts out into triumphant mockery ; and so vividly does the 
 poet see the thing that he makes his devil, excited by the flam- 
 ing joy of vengeance, call up before his eyes the very presence 
 of his master, bound deep in hell, and speak to him as it were 
 face to face. " Soon as the fruit touched at the heart of Adam 
 then laughed and sported there that bitter-thoughted messen- 
 ger ; and cried out for both of them his thanks to his Lord " — 
 
 726. " Now for me I have the favour 
 
 Thou hast vowed me, won, and thy will accomplished 1 
 
 1 Death. 
 
312 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Now for many, many days men are here tefooled, 
 Adam and his Eve 1 Unto them disfavour 
 "Weirded from the Wielder is. . . . 
 
 So they shall no longer 
 Hold the heavenly realm, hut to hell must go 
 Down the swart descent. So, no more of sorrows 
 Need'st thou bear within thy breast, where in bonds thou liest ; 
 Nor have mourning in thy mind for that men are dwelling 
 In the heavens high, while that harms must you and I 
 Now endure, and direful woes, and the dusky land. 
 750. .... Therefore let thy mind 
 
 Blithe within thy breast be now ! 
 
 For two things are done — the children of men have lost the 
 skies, and. into the flame, into hot hell, shall wander down to 
 thee — and eke is harm to God and grief of mind wrought out. 
 Whatever misery we bear 
 
 756. This is now on Adam all paid back again. 
 
 With the loathing of his Lord and with utter loss of heroes, 
 With the murder-pains of men ! Therefore is my mood all healed. 
 Round my heart my thought's enlarged, all our harms are now 
 
 avenged. 
 All the pain we long endured ! Now will I again, to the flaming 
 
 low be nearer ! 
 Satan I will seek therein ; he abides in swarthy hell ; 
 Captive held in clasp of rings ! " Netherward his course again 
 Took that bitterest of boders. 
 
 There are not many passages finer than this in the poetry of 
 scornful joy. The sudden outburst of contemptuous laughter, 
 the Northern joy in vengeance, as if it were a sport (plegode is 
 the word used), and mingled with it and uplifting it beyond 
 mere vengeance, the Germanic clinging of the war-comrade to 
 his chief, are nobly expressed. He scarcely thinks of himself 
 (save for one characteristic touch of pleasure that he has won 
 his high seat) in his rejoicing that his lord will be blithe and 
 comforted of all his pain where he lies bound, for now he has his 
 vengeance ; and the triumphant return to hell is equally for his 
 master's sake. There is no wish to linger in the bright air, no 
 liking, such as Milton's Satan has, for Paradise. He returns 
 at once, exulting that he has never bowed the knee — no, nor 
 his chief — to God. 
 
 Adam and Eve are left, conscious of their fall, "and oft 
 between them words of sorrow went." In Milton the pleasure 
 of sin continues in lust of each other, and then, in reaction 
 after the joy of the flesh, they feel their guilt. Mutual recrim- 
 ination 'follows, and not till that is exhausted does repentance 
 follow and prayer. But here the mocking of the fiend and the 
 
'GENESIS B" 313 
 
 vanishing of Eve's vision of Grod bring about the sense of ruin 
 instantly, and as instantly repentance. It is the Northern 
 quickness of conscience. Other elements are now added to the 
 situation — tenderness to one another and a passion of peni- 
 tence. There is no mutual blame as in Milton, no lack of 
 courtesy from the man to the woman, no subordinate relation- 
 ship of the woman to the man, such as in Milton seems to 
 license the reproofs of Adam. Adam here makes one reproach, 
 not bitter but in sadness of love, and Eve's short answer is ten- 
 der and still. She never ceases to be to him the most winsome 
 of women. He thinks more of his own sin than of hers, and 
 in broken sentences, which, in the poet's way of expressing 
 strong emotion, are not ended (the thoughts forcing them- 
 selves into fresh forms before their first form is completed, a 
 manner Shakspere sometimes has), Adam breaks into a wild 
 cry of desire to do the will of God such as we do not find in 
 Milton. Here follows part of this scene, and it is worth while, 
 for it is a touch of pure art, to call attention to the dark con- 
 trast now introduced to Eve's splended vision, when Adam cries 
 out — " Seest thou now Hell ? " 
 Adam speaks — 
 
 791. " 0, alas, thou, Eve, ill indeed hast thou, marked out 
 
 For ourselves, our fate ! i See'st thou now the swarthy Hell, 
 Greedy there and ravening ? Now the roaring grim of it 
 Mayst thou hear from hence ! 0, the Heaven-realm 
 How unlike that flame L . 
 
 802. .... Hunger rends me now and thirst 
 Bitter in my breast ; erst of both we were 
 Careless at all times. 
 
 How shall we live now or this land indwell, 
 Ifthe wind come here from the West or out of East, 
 Erom the South or North ? Swart upclimhs the cloud, 
 Falls the showery hail, swift and close from heaven : 
 Frost therewith is faring, fiercely cold it is ! 
 Out of heaven at times, hot above us blazing, 
 Blinds us, bright, the suit- 
 
 814. But with us Almighty God 
 
 Wrath in spirit is ! — to what shall we become ! 
 Now may long it rue me that I prayed the Lord of Heaven, 
 He the good All-Wielder, till He wrought thee here for me, 
 From these limbs of mine ^ Now thou'st led astray 
 Me into the wrath of God. So may I repent me now 
 Ever and for ever thai; mine eyes have seen thee." 
 Then again Eve spoke, sheenest of all women, 
 Loveliest of wives — .... 
 
 I " You tried to play the part of God — and finely have you done it." 
 
314 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap, xvn 
 
 824. " Thou mayst it reproach me, Adam, my beloved, 
 
 In these words of thine ; yet it may not worse repent thee. 
 Rue thee in thy mind than it rueth me in heart." 
 Then to her for answer Adam spoke again — 
 " if I could know the AU-Wielder's will, 
 What I for my chastisement must receive from Him, 
 Thou should'st never see, then, anything more swift, — 
 
 though the sea within 
 Bade me wade the God of Heaven, hade me wend' me hence 
 In the flood to fare— Nor so fearfully profound' 
 Nor so mighty were the Ocean, that my mind should ever 
 
 waver — 
 Into the abyss I'd plunge, if I only might 
 Work the wiU of God!" 
 
 " But naked like this we may not stay. Let us go into the 
 covert of the holt. So they went mourning into that green 
 wood, and there they fell to prayer, and every morniag 
 begged of God the Almighty that He would not forget them, 
 but make known to them how henceforward they should live." 
 
 Here ends, at line 851, Genesis B. Genesis A now takes 
 up the story. The well-known dialogue follows between 
 Adam, Eve, and God in the garden, and though it is chiefly 
 paraphrase, yet English touches enter in, enough to interest the 
 hearers of the song. At last the scene closes, and in the pity 
 of the writer there is left for comfort to these exiles, not only 
 the fruits of the ground, but also — and it is a poet's consolation 
 — "thereof of Heaven full of holy stars." "Behind their 
 steps, with flaming sword, a holy watcher closed the Home of 
 hope and happiness and joy." It is the same picture, but how 
 different in power, as Milton drew — 
 
 They, looking back, all th' eastern side beheld 
 Of Paradise, so late their happy seat, 
 Wav'd over by that flaming brand ; the gate 
 With dreadful faces throng'd and fiery arms. 
 
CHAPTEE XVIII 
 
 " EXODUS " 
 
 The poem of the Exodus, in the judgment of nearly all the 
 critics, is by a single writer who had nothing to do with either 
 the Genesis or the Daniel. It certainly stands alone, a com- 
 plete and united whole. Even the episode which is intruded 
 into the midst of the overthrow of the Egyptians, and which 
 links the Israelites back to Abraham, is judged by Wulker 
 and others to be by the same writer as the rest of the poem. 
 If so, he is less of an artist than I should otherwise think 
 him. The episode interrupts the story at the moment of its 
 greatest interest, and is also excessively dull. I can scarcely 
 conceive that a writer, who has some sense at least of unity 
 and of choosing the best things to describe, can have been so 
 dull. I should rather think that he or some one else wrote 
 this piece as a separate song — as a kind of explanatory gloss 
 — and that afterwards it was .inserted by a stupid copyist into 
 the poem. At any rate, this is not a poem which lends itself 
 to critical disintegration. We are spared A, B, and C, and 
 all their tribe.' The thing is a whole, and can be spoken of as 
 such. It is taken up with one event — with the Exodus — the 
 beginning, progress and close of which it records ; it moves 
 swiftly and it ends well. Triumph begins it and triumph con- 
 cludes it. In the midst is the trial of the Israelites and the 
 destruction of the Egyptians. 
 
 The use of dialogue is not so common as in the Genesis; and 
 when it is used it is brief and dry. On the other hand, the de- 
 scriptive parts are long, and elaborately treated. We are by no 
 means so close to human nature as we are in the Genesis. Ip 
 this poem there is neither the simplicity of human feeling we 
 find in Genesis A, nor the intellectual subtlety which belongs to 
 Genesis B. Description, not passion, fills the lines ; but the 
 
 1 It has been done, however, by Strobl and others, but fortunately not so as 
 to convince even the giants of disintegration. 
 
 315 
 
316 EARLY ENGLISH LITEEATUEB chap. 
 
 description is of a more careful and conscious finisli than any in 
 the Genesis. There is no actual battle such as that between 
 Abraham and the kings of the East, but war and the circum- 
 stance of war are a great pleasure to this writer. The gather- 
 ing of hosts, their march, ensigns and music, their ordering, 
 their camping, the appearances and speeches of the chiefs, are 
 drawn with so much clearness and personal interest that we feel 
 that the writer had been an eager warrior. The real battle of 
 the poem is the battle of God, and of the charging waves God 
 wields, with Pharaoh and his host ; and a fine piece of rough 
 early work it is. God strikes, to let the water-destruction loose, 
 the walls of wave on either hand " with an ancient sword." "■ It 
 is no battle then of host with host, but of Jehovah Himself, 
 wielding the elements as His weapons, with Pharaoh. A great 
 number of curious, vigorous, and pictorial expressions, of which 
 the sense is too often repeated, mark a time much later than 
 the quieter style of the earlier Genesis; and the freer handling 
 of the Bible story, as if the writer had wholly rejected para- 
 phrase in order to compose a work of art, is some proof of a 
 later date. I am not sure that the poetry is not too forcible, too 
 much desirous of effect, too flamboyant, if I may be allowed that 
 term ; and were this true of the whole, as it certainly is of some 
 parts, it would be characteristic of a poetic period which had 
 just taken its first turn towards sensationalism, but which, 
 nevertheless, retained a great deal of the power of a simpler and 
 more natural age of song. There is also no sense of regret or 
 looking back in the poem, such as we find in Cynewulf's later 
 work. Wherever in date we put Judith, we may put the Exodus. 
 There is in both the same literary audacity and youthful exu- 
 berance. The Exodus opens with a celebration of Moses as the 
 giver of laws and as a leader of men, beloved of God and con- 
 secrated to the deliverance of Israel. His future work in 
 Canaan is briefly touched. Then we hear that it was in the 
 desert of Sinai, before the Exodus, that the truth about crea- 
 tion was revealed to him ; in what way " the Lord, mighty in 
 victory, set the rounded circle of the earth and on high the 
 firmament " ; and at this point, after thirty lines of brief intro- 
 duction, the poet sweeps instantly into his subject, and with a 
 fine image which carries with it the central matter of the poem — 
 
 33. Then in that old time, and with ancient punishments,''' 
 (Deeply) drenched with death was the dreadest of all folk. 
 
 1 There is another rendering of this which I mention in its place. 
 
 2 That is, with drowning — with the ancient doom of the Flood. 
 
'EXODUS" 317 
 
 First, the fate of the first-born is described, and the words 
 used are full of interest — 
 
 By the death of hoard-wards wailing was renewed ; 
 Slept the joyous song in hall spoiled of all its treasure ! 
 God had these man-scathers, at the mid of night, 
 Fiercely felled (in death) — heaps of the first-born. 
 Broken were the huig-defenders ; far and wide the Bane strode ; 
 Loathly was that people-Hater ! All the land was gloomed 
 With the bodies of the dead ; all the best were gone away. 
 Far and .wide was weeping, world-delight was little, 
 Looked together lay the hands of the laughter-smiths ! i 
 47. ... . Famous was that day 
 
 Over middle-earth when the multitude went forth. 
 
 Then follows the journey to Ethan, through " many a narrow 
 pass ajid unknown ways, until, all armed, they came to the 
 dark warriors (the Ethiopians), whose lands were covered 
 with a helm of air, and whose march-fortresses were on the 
 moorland." ^ Below them lay " the land of the Sun-men, the 
 burnt-up city heights, and the folk embrowned with hot coals 
 of heaven. But the holy God shielded the folk against the 
 dreadful glare, o'erspread the blaziag heaven with a veil, with 
 a holy network.^ It drank the fire-flame up, and the heroes 
 were amazed ; gladdest of troops were they. The o'ershading 
 of the Day-Shield* wended (was drawn over) the welkin, for 
 the God of wisdom had overtented the pathway of the Sun 
 with a sail, though the men saw nothing of the mast-ropes nor 
 of the spars of the sail, nor how was fastened down that 
 greatest of field-houses. When the third encampment brought 
 comfort to the folk, all the army saw how high were uplifted 
 the sacred sails ! 'Twas a Lift-wonder, flashing light ; and the 
 
 1 This is one of the short and vivid phrases of this writer. All who made 
 laughter sat with hands clasped in woe; and the word "laughter-smiths " is 
 peculiar to this poet, who goes out of his way to be strange. 
 
 ^ Mearchofu morheald, "moor-holding mark-enclosures." This reads like 
 a personal remembrance, perhaps of forts on the Northumbrian border. 
 
 s Another of this poet's favourite metaphors is that of a Net. Here the 
 cloud-shield is like a woven web. At line 202 an army is wael-^et, " slaughter- 
 net." 
 
 * I suppose this is the concave firmament which is conceived of as a shield 
 hung over the earth, under whose hollow the day abides. But it may be the 
 sun Itself, which in Icelandic poetry is sometimes called the shield of the sky. 
 Grein translates Daeg-scealdes, " Tag-sohiffes," perhaps to bring it into har- 
 mony with the strange and, I think, unique metaphor of the sail which follows. 
 But the shield-image is, I think, right. I cannot but fancy from several 
 phrases in the passage that the writer had heard of the velarium spread over 
 the amphitheatre, and that he used the image of it here to express the mist- 
 covering, the pillar of cloud, which protected the Israelites from the blaze of 
 the sun. If this conjecture be right, it explains the ropes, the mast, and the 
 mighty tent — " greatest of field-houses." 
 
318 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 people knew that the Lord had come Himself to mark their 
 camping out." 
 
 This sail is the poet's shaping of the pillar of cloud which 
 led them by day. "The sail directed their journey." He 
 then describes the pillar of fire by night, and his imagination 
 pictures its effect upon the armour of the host in the shadows 
 of the night, and how it drove away from the hearts of the 
 Israelites that terror of the waste-land of which we have 
 heard in Beowulf — 
 
 111. Brilliantly 
 
 Stood above the shooters, sheen, a iiery light ! 
 Shimmered then the shields, shadows slunk away. 
 All abysmal shades of night scarcely had the power 
 Then to hide their hollow cave,i Heaven's candle blazed (so 
 
 bright). 
 'Twas a new night-warder who must of necessity 
 Watch above the warriors — that the wan-gray heath, 
 Through the terror of its waste, through its tempests, ocean-Hke, 
 Should not sunder ever, with a sudden grip, their souls. 
 Eiery flaming looks had that Forward-ganger ; 
 Brilliant were his beams ; bale and terror boded he 
 To the thronging host with the heat of flaming fire.^ 
 
 At length "the sea-fastness at the limit of the land withstood 
 the men." There they rested, while the " meat-thegns " waited 
 on them with food. "At the sounding of the trumpet, the 
 sailors (so the poet calls them) spread out the tents along the 
 slopes of the mountains. The fourth encampment then, this 
 resting-place of the shield-warriors, was by the Eed Sea shore." 
 While they rested, "dreadful tidings from inland came into 
 their camp. The loathly foe was on their track. Hopeless 
 grew their heart when they sighted clear, from the Southern 
 ways, Pharaoh's fyrd a-forward ganging." 
 
 I have translated (vol. i. 181) the fine passage which fol- 
 lows, describing the coming of the Egyptian host — flags fly- 
 ing, trumpets sounding, the ravens circling above it, the wolves 
 
 1 That is, the fire-pillar was so bright that the deep shadows of night, flying 
 to their cave, where they sheltered and lived by day— a common conoeption — 
 could scarcely hide it from the attack of the light, or, prevent the light from 
 discovering it. = > > r a 
 
 ■ ? '^'^^1,'°°?® '''^^ ^^^ description of a comet, done from memory or from 
 sight. The liery locks, the forward movement suggest this, and the boding of 
 bale-terror is a part of the popular superstition of comets. I have looked into 
 tne t/ironicle. In 678 " a comet (the Star Cometa) appeared in August and 
 snone like a sunbeam every morning for three months.^' This then Caedmon 
 °7'^: „^V o-^„ ® ""'""y ^^! " ""^'"^ 7^^^ ^ """"e' appeared, and St. Ecgberht died 
 at 11. In 892 another is recorded: "Some men say in English that it is a 
 nairy star, because a long radiance streams from it, sometimes on one, and 
 sometimes on the other side." 
 
xvm "EXODUS" 319 
 
 howling on its skirts, the haughty thegns riding in the van, 
 the king with his standard in front of his thegns, fastening his 
 visored helm, shaking his linked armour. Close beside him 
 riding were his veteran comrades — hoary wolves of war, who 
 greeted the battle, thirsting for the fray, faithful to their lord. 
 The well-known horn gave order by its notes how the host 
 should march along ! ' So the dusky warriors heavily moved 
 on, troop after troop, thousands and thousands of fighters. 
 "But in the camp of Israel weeping was upraised, an awful 
 evening song. Terrors stood round them and guarded the 
 death-net,-' as the noise (of marching hosts) came on and the 
 frightful tidings flew." But he turns to contrast the glory of 
 the host of Pharaoh with the dark fate that was at hand. 
 Haughty, battle-brilliant were the warriors, but their doom 
 was already dealt. 
 
 The next part opens with the rousing of the Israelites. All 
 night, hopeless, they sat on the hill-slopes in gleaming weeds 
 of war, till Moses bade the earls — 
 
 216. With the blare of brass at the break of day- 
 All the folk to gather and the fraok to rouse, 
 Don their linked war-coats, dream of noble deeds, 
 Bear their blickering armour, with their banners call 
 Nearer to the strand the squadrons ! Swiftly then the watchmen 
 Now bethought them of the war-cry. Hastened was the host 1 
 At the sound of shawms, on the sloping hills, 
 Struck their tents the sailors. 
 
 The twelve tribes are marshalled under their leaders, their 
 numbers are counted ; the gray -headed warriors are left aside, 
 "and the youths who could not yet guard their breast-net 
 against the foe under the rim of the shield," nor had yet en- 
 dured the "boastful play of the spear." Quick and eager were 
 they all when the pillar of gleaming cloud showed them their 
 way. 
 
 248. Then uprode their banner, 
 
 Brightest this of beams : all abode there, waiting, 
 Till the Pointer of their path, near the pourings of the sea, 
 Lightening on the hndens, broke the lift-enclosures.'' 
 
 1 The passage ia obscure. I think it is the poet's reading of the 19th verse 
 of the 14th chapter of Exodus : ' ' And the angel of God, which -w-ent before the 
 camp of Israel, removed and went behind them ; and the pillar of cloud went 
 from before their face, and stood behind them. It was a darkness to the 
 Egyptians." A terror then stood round the host of the Israelites, and defended 
 their army — "the slaughter-net." This phrase, in the writer's fantastic 
 metaphor, may mean the Interlocked array of the army. 
 
 2 This banner is, I suppose, the cloud-pillar, "the boder of their path" 
 {si^-ioda). It comes in front of them in the morning, glowing bright, and its 
 gleam is reflected on the linden-shields, as it breaks like the sun through the 
 
320 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 This is a fine picture, and the writer may have seen that 
 which follows. It is the image of the English host-leader 
 when the crisis of action drew near, and he made his war- 
 speech. " Then to the forefront of the heroes leaped the war- 
 chief, and upheaved his shield ; bade the folk-leaders silence 
 the host, that all might hear. 'Have no fear,' he cried, 
 ' though Pharaoh bring vast armies of sworded warriors.' " 
 God will overthrow them. And with scorn and faith he uses, 
 as I think, the same bold figure that Keats uses when Lorenzo 
 rides with the brothers — "And those two brothers with their 
 murdered man,"' — he calls the whole proud Egyptian host, 
 dead men. " ISTor will ye dread these dead troops. The loan 
 of their life is taken from them. High-hearted and high-famed 
 is Abraham's God, and His hand is mighty." 
 
 At this Moses turns to the sea, and in the vivid realistic 
 way of this writer, Moses, while he divides the sea, describes 
 its doings. We see, we almost hear, the sea retreat — 
 
 278. Hearken, look ye now, most beloved of folk, 
 
 (See) how I have stricken, I and this right hand, 
 
 With a green rod Ocean's deep ! 
 
 XJp the surge is faring, swiftly is it working 
 
 Water to a fortress-wall ! Now the ways are dry ; 
 
 Ashen-gray the army-paths, opened out the main, 
 
 Old profounds of sea ; I have never heard 
 
 Over all mid-garth men have fared thereon : 
 
 (Lo) the fields of foam,i sea-foundations fettered down. 
 
 That from everlasting, on unto this instant, 
 
 Waves have vaulted o'er. (See) the south wind's swept away 
 
 Blowing of the bath-way ; burst asunder is the Deep ! 
 
 (Now) the ebb's spewed forth the sand. 
 
 295. Now the Lord has lifted up 
 
 To a shield-like mountain all the Red Sea-streams. 
 There 2 before you are the walls ; fair are they uptowered ! 
 Wondrous is this wave-upfaring to the Welkin's roof. 
 
 The march begins, tribe by tribe, each in order, with their 
 banners and their devices. "They raised their white lindens 
 and their standards on the shore. Eirst went the fourth tribe 
 
 clouds — the air-fortresses — of the night. Lyft-edoras, "air-enclosures." 
 JEdor is a fence, such as was thrown round Bambbro' ; and becomes that which 
 was fenced in, a town or a fortress. I wish I could think that the Boder, the 
 herald of their journey, was the sun, and that this was a description of his 
 bursting through the wall of night-clouds upon the horizon, and lighting up 
 the shields of the host as they stand upon the seashore. 
 
 1 The foamy fields here, are not the foam-covered surface of the sea, but the 
 wide path laid bare across the sea on which the foam lies white. For Saelde 
 saegrundas, some read " salt sea^depths " ; but it is not apart from Teutonic 
 myth to think of the bottom-rock of ocean as riveted to its place. 
 
 2 I have ventured on this translation of syndom \<a foreweallas. 
 
'EXODUS" 321 
 
 and waded into the wave-stream, o'er the greenish depth. It 
 was the tribe of Judah. Eagerly and alone it led on that 
 unknown way. These upreared over their shields, above the 
 crowd of spears, a lion all of gold. The greatest of folk bore 
 the boldest of beasts. No insult to their leader did they ever 
 bear when in the war they lifted the spear-wood." In the 
 van, they ran to onset — 
 
 329. Bloody were the bill-tracks and a rush of battle-strength, 
 
 Grind on grind of visored-helms — there where Judah drove. 
 
 After them went the sons of Eeuben — "sailors proudly mov- 
 ing, shields these sea-vikings {saevAcinge, the word may sug- 
 gest a date for the poem) bore over the salt marsh." Next 
 came the sons of Simeon; "their ensigns waved over their 
 spear-faring, and their shafts were wet with dew. Then the 
 rustling murmur of the day-dawn came to them over the 
 moving of the ocean ; God's beacon rose, bright shining morn." 
 At this moment the episode of the descent of the Israelites 
 from Noah and Abraham is introduced, and to the spoiling of 
 the action of the poem. The sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham, 
 " father of free-born men," closes it ; and it is followed by 
 the two parts which end the poem — the overthrow of the 
 Egyptians, and the triumph of the Israelites on the farther 
 shore. The poet has put all his force into the description of 
 the Overwhelming, but in the effort he shows that he is not a 
 great artist. He has not been able to choose out of all the 
 images that have occurred to him the best fitted to make the 
 reader create the scene for his own imagination. He has not 
 been able to introduce the catastrophe so as to double its 
 horror, nor so to end it as to leave the horror of it in the mind. 
 It is not done as .^schylus has done the outbreak of all the 
 elemental forces on Prometheus. Our writer says over and 
 over again the same thing in different words, using_ that 
 cumulative method, which is sometimes effective, but which is, 
 of all methods, the most dangerous an inferior artist can use. 
 It leads him to violence of expression, to repetition of words 
 and images. He thinks he will be heard for his much speak- 
 ing. He is heard, but he wearies the hearers. As an example 
 of what I mean, and because there is also a detached vigour and 
 fury in some of the repeated descriptions, with a few but 
 startling images, I translate part of the overwhelming of the 
 host — 
 
 446. Then afeared was the folk, terror from the flood o'ercame 
 
 These deep-troubled souls ; ocean threatened them with death. 
 
322 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 All besteamed with blood i heaved the billows mountain high ; 
 Poul gore spat the sea ; on the surges clamour rose ; 
 Full of weapons was the water ; slaughter-vapour rose. 
 454. .... Darkened then against them 
 
 Baleful billows' welter ! Never back did any one 
 Of the host return to home, but behind them Wyrd 
 Wrapt them with her wave. Where the ways had lain 
 Mad of mood the sea was ! Drowned the might (of Egypt) lay ! 
 Then upsurged the streams ; storm (of cries) went up 
 High into the Heavens — greatest of host-wailings ! 
 Shrieked aloud the loathly foes, and above, the lift grew black : 
 Blood was borne along the flood with the bodies of the doomed ! 
 Shattered were the shield-burgs 1 ^ This, of sea-deaths greatest. 
 Beat upon the firmament. 
 
 The next lines repeat the same picture. A fine phrase 
 speaks of the ice-cold sea (once wont with the salt waves to 
 wander over its ever-during foundation) returning as a naked 
 boder of evil, as a herald coming on foot filled with a foeman's 
 wrath, to fall upon the Egyptians. Another describes the 
 " blue air " — that is, the dark purple thunder-clouds (for the 
 sky could not be " azure " in this awful hour) — as blent with 
 gouts of gore ; and another the inbursting sea threatening 
 blood-terrors to the Egyptians. 
 
 Again and again, in anxiety to realise the scene by repeti- 
 tion, we see the poet struggling in vain to find the brief words 
 with which a great poet would have left the right and awful 
 impression on our mind. Even when he comes to the last, the 
 real matter, he fails, yet his final effort deserves translation — 
 
 481. Rushed all foam the flood, sank the fated down. 
 
 On the Lake-laud ^ tumbled I All the lift was troubled ! 
 Smashed, the strong walls fell, burst the surges in, 
 Melted were the towers of sea, when the Mighty smote 
 Heroes strong as trees ; * all that stately people. 
 
 489. .... Wild grew Ocean then. 
 
 Up it soared, and in it slid ! * Terrors stood about them, 
 
 1 This Is the phrase used in the runes of the Ruthwell Cross, on the reUc in 
 St. Gudule, and in the Vision of the Rood. 
 
 2 The sea-walls that sheltered them. 
 
 B That is, the Ocean which had become flim as land ; but there is another 
 reading, " the Lake (the Ocean) road." 
 
 * Wer-beam, " tree of defence," hence warrior ; but why not men like trees, 
 strong or tall as trees ? 
 
 5 That is, the wall of water on either side, leaped upwards and fell inwards ; 
 as a retreating wave meeting the incoming wave becomes a leaping ridge of 
 spires and then tumbles inwards. Up dteah, on sUap, is quite excellent. 
 Ef/esan stddon, "terrors stood," is nothing more than a conventional phrase; 
 there were terrors about them ; but its original use goes back to the time when 
 terrors were thought of as personages. 
 
"EXODUS" 323 
 
 Welled the death-wounds forth ! Fell the wondrous road i 
 High from Heaven down, handiwork of God. 
 Then He smote the flood-defences, 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, 
 Slept that crowd of sinners ! Fast encompassed there, 
 Pale aB.flood, the war-men fled out of their souls, 
 When the brown Upweltering overwhelmed them all, — 
 Highest that of haughty waves ! 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 dread- 
 ful, 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 
 hobts. 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 oh 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. That greatest of folk-troops sang 
 their war song. 
 
 579. Then was easily to see many an Afrio maid, 
 
 On the Ocean's shore, all adorned with gold. 
 584. And the Sea-escaped began from their seines to share, 
 
 On the jetsam of the waves,' jewels, treasures old, 
 
 1 Wit-rod (rdd), Zauberstrasse, says Dietrich, which I have adopted. Wite- 
 rod, "the rod of punishment," is the other reading; and this seems to parallel 
 what follows. 
 
 2 Or take fdmigbosma (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 poeti- 
 cal, 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." Jet- 
 sam, 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. 
 
324 EARLY ENGLISH LITEBATUBE chap, xviii 
 
 Bucklers and breast-armour. Justly fell to them, 
 Gold and goodly web, Joseph's store of riches, 
 Glorious wealth of Warriors ; but its Wardens i lay 
 On the stead of death, strongest of all nations. 
 
 1 Werigend, "the defenders, the wardens;" hence those who had, as mas- 
 ters, kept guard over the Hehrews; their enslavers, or here, perhaps, their 
 pursuers. Or, it might refer back to the treasures of the E'gyptians, " 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. 
 
CHAPTEE 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.' 
 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 fur- 
 nace. This is the one oasis in the desert of Daniel. As to its 
 date, some say that it was written after ^Ifric, others that it 
 belongs to the time of jElfred. 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 probahle supposition is that the Azarias 
 was a rifaaimento of a portion of the Daniel. 
 
 325 
 
326 EAELY ENGLISH LITEEATURE chap. 
 
 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 Eesurrection, 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 resem- 
 blance 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.^ Wiilker disagrees with 
 him, and thinks that Ten Brink's view that the Christ and 
 Satan is later than Cynewulf much more probable. The ex- 
 treme 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 vari- 
 ous, 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 
 verse. After the dreary waste of Daniel it is a comfort to 
 come upon this rugged, varied and somewhat primseval moun- 
 tain side of song. 
 
 1 The first three parts of the first poem on the Pall of the Angels, as if they 
 were separately made, end with three similar hymns of praise. They are like 
 three lays, into which a Scflp might divide his one suhjeot, to he sung on three 
 separate evenings ; and such may have heen 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. 
 
XIX THE "DANIEL" AND "CHRIST AND SATAN" 327 
 
 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 Chris- 
 tian 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, mist- 
 world (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 fire- 
 world 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 vig- 
 orously 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 mediaeval notion of the last pit 
 of hell. Below these, as if on their strand, the fiends some- 
 times assemble and mourn. The cliffs stand round a " deep, 
 tossing, and weltering sea of fire, greedy and ravenous — a 
 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 ser- 
 pents " ) ; 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 gnash- 
 ing of their teeth is heard in the abyss of space. The gates 
 are huge, dragons sit at them, and they are fast shut and im- 
 movable, 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 
 
328 EARLY ENGLISH LITEEATUUE CBAt. 
 
 to be on earth in the book of Job. The very distance from 
 Palestine is given. Hell is 100,000 miles below the Mount of 
 the Temptation. This is as definite as Dante. Much of this 
 is freshly imagined, and its possible nearness to heathen thought 
 gives it a greater interest than the later mediaeval conceptions 
 
 The first poem, The Fall of the Angels, begins with a praise 
 of God as Creator, and with a sketch of the fall of Satan into 
 hell. Then the " Old One " wails for his loss of heaven, and 
 for the fiery ruin in which he lives. He is far more convinced 
 of his sin than the audacious devil of Genesis. " I may never 
 hope," he cries, " to have again the better home I lost through 
 pride." A new motive is now introduced. In the Genesis all 
 his companions love him and are on his side. Here they re- 
 proach and scorn him. " With lying words thou hast deceived 
 us ; God thou wast ; thyself wast the Creator — so thou saidst ; 
 a wretched robber art thou now, fast bound in bands of fire." 
 Another curious phrase is the following, where we meet with 
 the Son of the devil, as if in heaven he had imitated God and 
 sent his son forth as master. " Full surely thou saidst that 
 thy son was the creator of man ; all the greater are now thy 
 pains." Again Satan takes up his complaint, and repeats in 
 different phrases the same motive — regret for heaven, hopeless- 
 iiess of return, the present horrors of hell. A third time he 
 takes up the same cry ; and then a fourth time, the words flying 
 from him in sparks likest to poison, he bursts out into a pas- 
 sionate agony of vain repentance — 
 
 164. thou Helm of banded hosts 1 O high glory of the Lord ! 
 thou might of the great Maker I O thou Middle-Earth ! 
 thou dazzling day-light 1 delight of God 1 
 ye angel hosts ! thou upper Heaven ! 
 that I am all bereft of the Everlasting Joy 1 
 That I may not with my hands reach unto the Heaven, 
 Never with these eyes of mine upwards look again ; 
 Even with mine ears ever hear again 
 Sounding clear the clang of the clarions of God. 
 
 " Woe and torment, exile must I bear, wander a wide wan- 
 dering in wretchedness and care, for I strove to drive from His 
 throne the Lord of Hosts." This is the first song in the poem, 
 and it ends with an outburst on the poet's part of warning to 
 men, and of a prophecy of the joy of heaven. 
 
 The second song of the poem begins at line 225, and is a 
 repetition of the first, save for the expression of Satan's vague 
 hope of God giving him back his seat in heaven \ and it ends 
 
XIX THE "DANIEL" AND "CHRIST AND SATAN" 329 
 
 as before with a religious psalm of the poet's. A third song 
 begins to the same motive at line 316, and the whole poem 
 ends with another hymn of the bliss of heaven at line 365. 
 These three songs are like three lyrical poems sung at differ- 
 ent times to the same theme, and placed in the manuscript one 
 after the other. 
 
 The second complete poem of this part of the Junian Caed- 
 mon is on the Harrowing of Hell and begins at line 366. It is 
 a subject, as I have said, which always attracts the imagina- 
 tion. In this treatment of it, some things are novel and inter- 
 esting, and seem to belong to an earlier and more simple time 
 than that in which the separate poem in the Exeter Book on 
 the Descent into Hell was written. Speeches rather than 
 dialogue fill it, and its scenery is vivid and well arranged. 
 
 It begins with a sketch of the fall of Lucifer into hell, and 
 then breaks abruptly into the subject. Anguish came on hell, 
 thundercrash before the Judge, as he bowed and shattered the 
 gate of hell, but joy was in the heart of men (that is, of the 
 good spirits in prison) when they saw the Saviour. But full 
 of horror were the fiends, wailing far and wide through the 
 windy hall. "Terrible is this, since the Storm has come to us, 
 the Hero with his following, the Lord of Angels. Before him 
 shines a lovelier light than we have ever seen, since we were 
 on high among the Angels. So will now our pains be deeper." 
 Then — for now the poet repeats his motive in order to intro- 
 duce the speech of Eve, — then came the Angel-cry, loud thunder 
 at the break of day. The Lord had overcome his foes — war- 
 feud was open on that morning, when he came to lead forth 
 the chosen souls of Adam's race. Yet Eve could not look 
 upon the glow of joy till she had spoken, and her speech occu- 
 pies nearly forty lines. It may mark the early origin of the 
 poem, that the important place among the souls in Hades is 
 given to a woman. She tells the story well ; she makes picture 
 after picture of hell before the Saviour's coming. He listens 
 courteously to the end. She begins with the story of their 
 fall, speaking for Adam and herself. " Our guilt was bitterly 
 recompensed ; thousands of winters have we wandered in this 
 hot hell, dreadfully burning. But now, I beseech thee. Prince 
 of Heaven, that I with all my kinsfolk may go up from hence. 
 Three nights ago came a servant of the Saviour (this is Judas) 
 home to hell. Fast is he now in prison, yet he told us that 
 God Himself would enlighten this house of hell, our dwelling." 
 Then, from this happy invention of Judas, his message and his 
 fate, she turns to describe how the news was received by all 
 the Old Testament saints waiting in hell. 
 
330 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 432. Then uplifted each himself, on his arm he set himself, 
 On his hands he leant. Though the hellish Horror 
 Full of awfulness appeared, yet was every one 
 Midst their pains delighted, since the Prince of men 
 Willed their home to seek, help to bring to them. 
 
 Then she reached out her hands and besought the King of 
 Heaven through the office of Mary. "Thou wert in truth, 
 my beloved Lord, born into the world of my daughter, now it 
 is plain that thou art God." 
 
 She ended, and Christ, driving the fiends deeper into hell, 
 took upwards with him all the host of the redeemed. " That 
 was fair indeed, when they came to their fatherland, and with 
 them the Eternal to his glorious burg. Holy prophets put 
 forth their hands and lifted them into home," and they sat 
 down to feast. Then, as in an assembly of English nobles, 
 Christ rose and made his speech to them — and the phrase 
 with which he begins recalls the Witan : " Wise spirits " he 
 says, and in his turn he gives another account of the fall and 
 of its punishment : " 'twas woe to me," he cries, " that the 
 work of my hands should endure the chain of the prison-house. 
 Then I came on earth and died. Well it was for you that the 
 warriors pierced me with spears upon the gallows tree." So 
 spake the Ward of Glory on the morning of the Resurrection. 
 The poem turns then to describe the Eesurrection, the Ascen- 
 sion, Pentecost, and the Last Judgment, and each fragment 
 closes with a separate outbreak of religious warning and joy. 
 As in the previous part, this similar ending suggests that these 
 were each isolated songs, here collected and placed together by 
 a later editor. There is nothing in them of any special worth. 
 
 At line 665, another fragment of a separate poem, inserted 
 out of its historical place, relates a part of the story of the 
 Temptation. It is only remarkable for the mocking speech of 
 Christ when he repels the tempter on the mountain, such a 
 speech as an English warrior might have made to his foe: 
 " Go, accursed, to the den of punishment, but I bid thee take 
 no jot of hope to the burghers of Hell; but promise them 
 the deepest of all sorrows ; go down, and know how far and 
 wide away is dreary Hell. Measure it with thine hands, and 
 grip against its bottom. Go, till thou knowest all the round 
 of it ; from above to the abyss measure how broad is the black 
 mist of it. Then wilt thou understand that thou fightest 
 against God. Go with speed, and before two hours are passed, 
 thou shalt have measured thine allotted house ! " 
 
 So he fell down to dreadful pains — down towards hell, and 
 
XIX THE "DANIEL" AND "CHRIST AND SATAN" 331 
 
 first he measured with his hands the torment and the woe, 
 and then (as he descended) the lurid flame smote upwards 
 and against him, and then he saw the captives lie below him 
 in hell, and then the howl of the demons reached his ear when 
 they saw the unholy one return, and then he on the bottom 
 stood. And when he was there it seemed to him that to hell 
 door from the place where he had been was 100,000 miles by 
 measure. And he looked round on the ghastly place, and 
 there rose a shriek from all the lost, and they cried aloud to 
 the Lord of their kingdom — 
 
 733. There 1 te ever thou in evil ! Erst thou wouldst not good. 
 
 With this fine passage close the poems that bear the name of 
 Caedmon. Whatever their several dates be, they are a noble 
 beginning to English song. Whoever be their several writers, 
 they owe their impulse to the man who on that night took 
 care of the cattle in the monastery of Hild. Honour from all 
 the English race, from all the poets, greatest of the English 
 race, is due to his name. He was the first (and I borrow some 
 of Ebert's phrases) who, like a Sc8p singing heroic tales, sang 
 to the people in their own tongue the tales of the Old Testa- 
 ment and the subject-matters of Christianity. He showed 
 how this new material might be assimilated by the genius of 
 the people. He made the bridge which led to the artistic 
 poetry which begins, after him, to handle the same subjects. 
 The old singers of heathendom, crossing it, became the new 
 singers of Christianity. 
 
CHAPTEE XX 
 
 "JUDITH" AND OTHER CABDMONIAX POEMS 
 
 The followers of Caedmon were many, Baeda says, and the 
 phrase proves that there was a number of Northumbrian poems 
 on Christian subjects at the time of Baeda's death in 735. 
 Some of these poets adopted, no doubt, Caedmon's method, 
 which may have been hymnic, and among them there were 
 simple paraphrasers of the Sacred Books, men who sang only 
 for the monastery and not for the mead-hall. But there were 
 others, as we see plainly from the Exodus, who, while they fol- 
 lowed him, passed far beyond simple narration. They con- 
 ceived their subject in somewhat of a Saga fashion, and recited 
 their work to please the warriors, the king, the thegns, and 
 the freemen as they sat in the hall at the mead. The reli- 
 gious element is of course introduced, and the poem, half war, 
 half religion, touching heathendom with one hand and Chris- 
 tianity with the other, equally excited and instructed the 
 feasters. 
 
 Of this type is the Judith: a poem of the cycle of Caedmon, 
 written, it is most likely, in Northumbria, and which we may 
 perhaps roughly date at about the middle of the eighth cen- 
 tury. Had this long and important piece of work been by 
 Caedmon, as some have said, it would not, I think, have been 
 omitted from Baeda's catalogue of the poet's work, nor passed 
 over without a distinct reference, among the plurimae sacrae 
 scripturae historiae which he ascribes to Caedmon. Moreover, 
 the form in which the poem is cast, its unity of story which 
 can be discerned even in the portion left to us, its careful com- 
 position and its rhythmical changes ' bear witness to a time 
 
 1 The Writer of Judith, like the writer of Genesis B, has frequent recourse 
 to those long swelling lines when he is excited, which, while retaining the three 
 alliterative stresses — two in the first half of the line, one in the second ; some- 
 times only one in the first half — allowed the poet to insert at the beginning of 
 each half line as many unaccented syllables as he chose. Hence the third 
 letter-stress is almost always on the last word but one of the line. 
 332 
 
CHAP. XX "JUDITH" AND OTHER CAEDMONIAN POEMS 333 
 
 ■when poetry had added to its early simplicity a more artistic 
 method, such as, for example, we find in the Exodus. 
 
 The same uncertainty as to date which belongs to the 
 greater number of Anglo-Saxon poems belongs also to Judith. 
 The dates given by well-known scholars range over three hun- 
 dred years, from the seventh to the tenth century. This is 
 enough to show that we have no clear criterion in our hands. 
 The various conjectures will be found drawn together, with an 
 exhaustive treatment of the poem itself, in a book written by 
 Mr. Cook, who puts forward an interesting suggestion with 
 regard to the origin of the Judith.^ He thinks it was com- 
 posed in gratitude for the deliverance of Wessex from the fury 
 of the Northmen, and dedicated to Judith, the stepmother of 
 Alfred, the great-granddaughter of Charles the Great, whom, 
 in her charming youth, JEthelwulf brought to England as 
 his wife in the year 856. Her name, her joyous reception 
 by the people and her beauty suggested the choice of the sub- 
 ject, and it inay have been written by Swithhun, Bishop of 
 Winchester, iEthelwulf's friend and teacher. The arguments 
 by which he strengthens this theory deserve consideration, 
 but the poem still remains for me a Northumbrian poem of 
 the beginning or the middle of the eighth century; after 
 Baeda's death, and before the times of anarchy and decay. 
 There is no melancholy note in the poem. It exists only in a 
 single manuscript, the same in which the Beowulf has been 
 handed down to us. The several parts of the poem are headed 
 with numbers, and we possess fourteen lines of section ix., 
 and the whole of sections x. xi. xii. These together reach to 
 350 lines. The other books are lost — that is, about three- 
 fourths of the poem. It was then an important piece of about 
 1400 lines in all, and I say again that had a poem of this length 
 and power been in existence while Baeda was alive, he would 
 probably have mentioned it when he spoke of the followers of 
 Caedmon, or as Caedmon's own, had Caedmon written it. 
 
 The tenth book begins with a vigorous description of a 
 great drinking feast given by Holofernes which lasts the 
 whole day till all the Captains are furiously drunk. As to 
 Holofernes, he seems to be drawn direct from some English 
 chief, well known for drinking prowess. "He laughed and 
 shouted and raged so that all his folk heard far away how the 
 stark-minded stormed and yelled, full of fierce mirth and mad 
 with mead." He bids Judith be led to his tent. A golden 
 
 1 Judith. Albert S. Cook, Professor of English Language and Literature in 
 the University of California. Boston, Heath and Co. 
 
334 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATUKE chap. 
 
 fly-net hangs between his bed and the drinking chamber, so 
 that he could see the guests, but they might not look on him. 
 Drunk, he fell on his bed, and Judith steps forth, with plaited 
 tresses. And she held a sharp sword, hardened by the storms 
 (scwum) of battle, " drew it from the sheath, and called on the 
 Ward of Heaven — God the creator, spirit of consolation." 
 The prayer is nobly wrought, brief and forceful, full of pas- 
 sion — passion for her country and her God, passion of the 
 woman brought so near to shame. " Let me hew down," it 
 ends, " this lord of murder ! Venge thou, God, that which 
 is so angry in me, the burning in my heart." The slaughter is 
 then carefully described. Her cleverness, as she seizes the 
 heathen by the hair and fits him for the blow ; her strength, 
 as she drives the glittering sword half through his throat, and 
 then again smites the heathen dog, half dead, till his head 
 rolled out upon the floor, are as vigorously hewn into the verse 
 as the sword into Holofernes. "There lay the foul carcase, but 
 the spirit turned to go to the deep abyss, and "was battened 
 down, with pangs, with worms enwound in that snake-hall." 
 Book xi. then takes Judith and her " pale-cheeked maid," 
 with the head in their bag, out of the sleeping camp, till they 
 see the "shining walls of fair Bethulia. There sat on the 
 ramparts the burghers, watching, and Judith called to them, 
 and the folk ran to the gate, men with women, crowding 
 together; stormed and raced, old and young in thousands, to 
 meet the divine maid." She bids her girl unwrap the bloody 
 head, and Joan of Arc could not have made a more impas- 
 sioned, a more warlike speech — 
 
 177. Clearly may ye now, conquering heroes strong ; 
 
 ye leaders of the people, (looking) stare upon the head 
 Of this heathen lord of flght, of this loathliest (of men), 
 Holofernes, now unliving, 
 
 Who of all men made most of murderous woes for us ! 
 185. .... By the help of God 
 
 1 have wrenched his life away. Now will I bid each of you 
 Each burg-dweller to the battle. 
 
 189. Fit ye for the fighting ! When the God of first beginnings. 
 Merciful and monarch,i eastward makes arise 
 Bright the blaze of day, bear your lindens forward then, 
 Shield-board sheltering your breast, byrnies for your raiment, 
 Helmets all a-shining, midst that horde of soathers ; 
 Felling the folk-leaders with the flashing swords, 
 Chieftains cursed for death ! (Courage 1) all your foes 
 To the death are doomed 1 Ye shallliave dominion, 
 
 1 Ar/aeat oyning, " gloiious king " ; but ar has also the sense of compassion. 
 
XX "JXJDITH" AND OTHER CAEDMONIAN POEMS 335 
 
 Gain a glory in the battle ; as the greatest Lord 
 Hath a handsel given through mine hand to you. 
 
 Then the host of swift ones speedily was readied; all the 
 warriors bold as kings, all the comrades, bore their victory- 
 banners, fared into the fight; forward in right line they 
 moved ; all the heroes under helm from the holy burg at the 
 breaking of the day. Din there was of shields, loud they rang; 
 and the gaunt wolf of the weald rejoiced, and the black raven, 
 greedy of slaughter. Well they knew both of them that the 
 heroes thought to count out death to the doomed ; ' and upon 
 their track flew the Earn, hungry for its fodder ; all its 
 feathers dewy ; dusky was its sallow coat ; horny-nebbed, he 
 sang his battle-song. Swiftly stepped the chiefs of battle to 
 the field of carnage, with the hollow lindens sheltered. . . . 
 Then they let, with valiancy, showers of their arrows fly, 
 adders of the battle from their bows of horn, hard-headed 
 bolts. Loudly stormed the warriors fierce, and their spears 
 they sent, right into the host of hard ones. ... So the He- 
 brews showed their foes what the sword-swing was. 
 
 By this time the Assyrian host is roused, and Book xii. 
 relates how the messengers came from the outskirts of the 
 host to the chief thegns, and how they roused the standard- 
 bearing warrior; and how they took counsel whether they 
 dared to wake Holofernes. Too much at this crisis is made 
 of this poor motive. They ga'ther round their lord's tent. 
 No noise awakens him. At last, one bolder than the rest 
 breaks in, and lo ! pale lay his gold-giver on the bed, robbed 
 of life. "Here lies," he cries, "headless, hewn down by 
 sword, our Upholder." All their weapons fall; they fly; 
 behind them urges a mighty folk ; the Hebrew heroes " hew 
 a path with swords through the press, thirsty for the onset 
 of the spear." So fell in dust the nobles of Assyria, left 
 to " the will of the wolves, fodder for the fowls of slaughter." 
 Then is told the gathering of the spoil. " Proud, with plaited 
 locks, the Hebrews brought precious treasures to Bethulia's 
 shining burg — helms and hip-seaxes, bright-gray byrnies, and 
 panoplies of warriors inlaid with gold. And to Judith, wise 
 and fair of face, they gave the Sword and bloody helm, and 
 eke the huge byrnie of Holofernes all with red gold em- 
 bossed, and his armlets and bright gems. Tor all this she 
 said praise to the Lord of every folk." Then the poem makes 
 a fair ending, tender and gracious and touched with that 
 
 1 Or, perhaps, " to furnish for them their fill on the doomed," 
 
336 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 love of natufe which we have so often found among the 
 English. 
 
 347. To the Lord beloved, for this, 
 
 Glory be for widening ages 1 "Wind and lift He shaped of old, 
 Sky above and spacious earth, every one of the wild streams, 
 And the other's jubilation — through His own delightfulness. 
 
 Judith is a good, ringing piece of English verse, but I 
 cannot agree with those who place it in the highest rank. It 
 lacks imagination, and its finest passages are somewhat con- 
 ventional. A man, whom we should call to-day a cultivated 
 man, wrote it. Its form and arrangement are therefore good ; 
 its metre and language are excellent, but the creative spirit of 
 poetry does not often say, as the poem moves on, " Let there 
 be light ! " Nevertheless, if we wish to compare the poetry 
 of the time before .lElfred with that of the age which fol- 
 lowed him, we may understand the vast difference between 
 them by reading the Homily of .^Elfric on Judith. That homily 
 is in a loose alliterative verse. If our Judith touches a prosaic 
 note now and again, so that we are jarred, .(Elfric's verse-hom- 
 ily is nothing but prose. It must be a difficult task to persuade 
 oneself that the date of Judith lies in the tenth century. 
 
 There still remains to complete this account of the Caedmon 
 cycle of poems the runes upon the Cross of Euthwell in 
 Annandale, the dying song of Baeda, and the short verse 
 quoted in the letters of Winfrid.^ Of the separate Azarias I 
 have already said enough. 
 
 1 The versa In the letters of Winfrid is scarcely worth mentioning. It is 
 quoted in a letter, not from Boniface himself, but from a monk, and I give 
 Kemble's account of it below. At least it is dated. 
 
 " On passing some time lately with my friend, Professor Schmeller of 
 Munich, my attention was called by him to an ancient Saxon proverb quoted 
 in an epistle of St. Boniface, which he had read in the 3d vol. of Pertz The- 
 saurus, just published. As it stood in Pertz, it ran thus — 
 
 " Oft daed later domae for eldit si gi sitha gahuum suuylt it |>iana. 
 
 " A very old MS. copy of the same epistle in the Munich library, and like 
 that from which Pertz printed, written in Germany, gave the same, as follows — 
 
 " Oft daed latadom aefor eldit si gisitha gahuuem suuylt it ])iana. 
 
 " On translating this from its half-German, half -Northumbrian dialect, into 
 good plain "West Saxon (Anglo-Saxon) , I arranged the lines as follows — 
 
 "Oft daedlata 
 dome forylde^ 
 sigesi^a gehwaem: 
 swylte'S By ana. 
 
 " ' Oft doth the dilatory man with justice lose by his delay in every success- 
 ful undertaking ; therefore he dieth lonely.' As this was written by Boniface, 
 
XX "JUDITH" AND OTHER CAEDMONIAN POEMS 337 
 
 The Eunes have been attributed to Caedmon, and the Cross 
 to the seventh century ; and Stephens translated the runic 
 inscription on the top of the Cross as " Caedmon me fawed," 
 that is, Caedmon had, he thought, himself made the verses on 
 the Cross.^ But the Cross, so far as its make goes, might 
 have been set up during the seventh, eighth, or the beginning 
 of the ninth century ; and as to the Eunes — there were runes 
 carved on stones after the Norman Conquest. Neither the 
 
 or to call him by his Anglo-Saxon name, WinfriiS, in the early half of the eighth 
 century, it is one of the earliest pieces of Saxon poetry on record. It shares 
 the character of the Saxon proverbs generally ; viz. that of a solemn gnomic 
 saying, treasured probably as a wise rule of life. WinfriS quotes it as well 
 known, and therefore as earlier than his own period. On this account it may 
 perhaps be placed by the side of the verses cited by Baeda in his last moments. 
 . . ." — J. M. Kemble, in the Gentleman's Magazine, 18.36, June, p. 611. 
 
 1 It is possible that the inscriber took some phrases out of a poem of Caed- 
 mon's which had been worked over afterwards by another writer, perhaps by 
 CynewuU; and meant by his inscription, "These lines are by Caedmon." But 
 it is just as likely that Caedmon, which, odd as it is, may have become a 
 Northumbrian name, is the name of the sculptor of the Cross. On the Anglo- 
 Saxon Cross at Brussels the maker's name is written : " Drahmal me worhte." 
 I place the translation of the Ruthwell Runes side by side with their parallels 
 from the Bream — 
 
 Ruthwell Cross. Dream of Cross. 
 
 geredae hinae god almechttig 39. Ongyrede hine \>a. geong haelelS 
 
 pa he walde on galgu gistiga ([laet waes god aelmihtig) 
 
 modig fore allae men Strang and sti^mod ; gestah he on 
 
 bug gealgan beanne 
 
 modig on manigra gesyhSe. . . . 
 
 5. ic riicnae kyninge 44. Rod waes ic araered: ahof ic ricne 
 
 heafunaes hlafard cyning 
 
 haelda ic ni darstae heofona hlaford, hyldan me ne 
 
 bismaeradu ungcet men ba aet gadre dorste. 
 
 ic waes blodi bistemid .... 
 
 bigoten of ^g Bysmeredon hie unc butu aetgae- 
 
 dere. Eall ic waes mid blode 
 bestemed 
 begoten of Jiaes guman sidan. . . . 
 
 Crist waes on rodi 56. . . . Crist waes on rode, 
 
 hwebrae ber fusae Hwae^ere Jiaer fuse feorran 
 
 fearran cwomu cwoman 
 
 aejjbilae til anum To bam aeSelinge : ic J>aet eall 
 
 ic baet al beAeald beheold. 
 
 sore ic waes mi> sorgum gidraejd Sare ic waes mid sorgum gedrefed, 
 
 hnag hnag ic hwaeSre Jjam secgum 
 
 to hande. 
 
 mib strelum giwundaed 62. Eall ic waes mid 
 
 alegdun hiae hinae limwaerignae straelum forwundod. 
 
 gistoddun him aet his Kcaes Aeafdum Aledon hie «aer limwerigne, 
 5liheaMdmi hiae per heafun gestodon him aet his lices 
 
 heafdum; 
 belieoldon hie Jjaer heofenes dry- 
 
 hten. . , , 
 
338 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 stone nor its writing then say anything certain concerning the 
 age of the inscription. Kemble and Dietrich, on the other 
 hand, reject altogether the view that the runic verses are by 
 Caedmon. Kemble translated them. The inscription, he says, 
 is in the usual Anglo-Saxon runes, and in the dialect which 
 was spoken in Northumbria in the eighth and ninth centuries; 
 and he finds their original in several passages in the Dream of 
 the Holy Rood, passages which I have placed opposite to their 
 runic resemblances on p. 144. That Dream has been allotted 
 to Cynewulf by Dietrich and many others ; and it is argued 
 then that the lines on the Cross are Cynewulf's, and that the 
 Cross is not earlier than the end of the eighth century. But 
 it is a further question whether Cynewulf wrote the Dream of 
 the Rood, and if he did not, we cannot for certain say that the 
 Eunes on the Euthwell Cross are so late as the end of the 
 eighth century. The matter then is open to debate ; and if, 
 as I think, the Dream of the Rood contains an old poem worked 
 up by Cynewulf, and if the lines on the Euthwell Cross belong 
 to this old poem, it is just possible that the lines were written 
 by Caedmon himself, or by some one of his school. Whoever 
 wrote this poem, it became famous, and certain passages in it 
 were used for inscriptions on crosses and relics. It is not only 
 on the Euthwell Cross that we find lines quoted from it. It 
 seems to have supplied some words, or at least some suggestion 
 for an inscription which has been found on a reliquary of the 
 true cross in the treasure chamber of St. Gudule at Brussels, 
 the latest history and criticism of which have been written by 
 Dr. Logeman of Utrecht University.^ This inscription exists 
 on a thin plate of silver which ran round the reliquary ; and 
 here is Logeman's arrangement of it. It is not in runes but 
 in Eoman letters, and is probably of the tenth century. " Rod 
 is min nama geo ic ricne cyning baer,^ hyfigynde hlode bestemed.^ 
 Thas rode het ^thlmaer wyrican J Adhelwold hys berotho; 
 Griste to lofe, for u^lfrices saule hyra berothor." — "Eood is 
 my name ; long ago I bore a goodly king ; trembling, dripping 
 with blood, ^thlmaer bade work this rood, and Adhelwold 
 his brother. To the glory of Christ, for the soul of Mliiic 
 their brother ! " On the back of the Cross the artist has 
 placed his name — "Drahmal me worhte " (Drahmal wrought 
 
 1 LJInscription Anglo-Saxonne du Reliquaire de la Vraie Croix" au Tr&or 
 de I'Bglise des S.S. Miohel-et-Gudule, i, Bruxelles. — 1891, Londres, Luzao et 
 C'= 46 Great Russell Street. 
 
 ^ " Rod waes ic araered : ahof ic ricne cyning." — Dream of Rood, 1. H. 
 
 ' " Eall ic waes mid blode hestemed." —Dream of Rood, 1.'48. 
 
XX "JUDITH" AND OTHER CAEDMONIAN POEMS 339 
 
 me). The phrases "blode bestemed" and " ricne cyning" are 
 from the Dream; and the trembling of the rood, and the per- 
 sonal cry of it, are suggested also by the same poem. 
 
 I am glad to close this chapter with the verses that Baeda 
 recited on his death-bed, and perhaps in no better place — 
 since I wish to bind up the great scholar with the poetry of 
 England — can I more fitly insert part of that pure and touch- 
 ing story, which, like a solemn evening landscape seen from 
 the hill-top of a long life of faithful work, breathes so quietly 
 the gentle and clear air of death.' 
 
 " To Cuthwin, my fellow-reader, beloved in Christ, Cuthbert 
 his schoolfellow — Health for ever in the Lord ! I have 
 received with much pleasure the small gift you sent to me, 
 and with equal pleasure read your letters ... in which I 
 found that you carefully celebrate masses and holy prayers 
 for our father and master Baeda, whom God loved. . . . He 
 was much troubled with shortness of breath, yet without pain, 
 before the day of our Lord's resurrection, that is about a fort- 
 night; and after that, he led his life in cheerfulness and joy, 
 giving thanks every night and day — nay, every hour — to 
 Almighty God, till the day of our Lord's ascension, that is the 
 seventh of the calends of June (26th May), and daily read 
 lessons to us, his disciples. As to the rest of the day, he 
 spent it in singing psalms ; but in the night he lay awake, full 
 of praise and delight, save when a short sleep fell on him, but 
 no sooner did he awake than he began at once his wonted 
 exercises, and, with uplifted hands ceased not to give thanks 
 to God. In sooth, I declare that I have never seen with my 
 eyes, or heard with my ears, any man so earnest in giving 
 tharis to the living God. truly happy man ! He chanted 
 the text of the blessed Apostle St. Paul — 'It is a dreadful 
 thing to fall into the hands of the living God,' — and much 
 more from holy writ ; and also in our tongue — that is in the 
 English tongue, as he was learned in our songs — he said some 
 things. Moreover, he spoke this saying, making it in Eng- 
 lish— 
 
 For ))am neodfere nenig wyr^e'S 
 panoes snottra Jjonne him >earf sy 
 To gehiggene aer his heonen-gange 
 Hwet his gaste godes o««e yveles 
 Aefter dea'Se heonen demed wurtSe 
 
 which means, ' Ko man is wiser than he need be, before this 
 
 1 The following account of Baeda's death occurs in a letter written by one 
 of his pupils to another. 
 
340 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATUUE chap, xx 
 
 necessary departure, that is, to think, before the soul go hence, 
 what good or evil it hath done, and how it is to be judged 
 after its departure.' " 
 
 So far writes Cuthbert, Baeda's pupil, on this part of his 
 master's dying hours. I give an accurate translation of the 
 Anglo-Saxon, and place below, in a note, the old Northumbrian 
 of the little song.^ It will be found in Sweet's Oldest English 
 Texts — 
 
 Before the need-faring no one becomes 
 Wiser in thought than behoves him to be, 
 To the out-thinking, ere his liencegoing, 
 What to his ghost, of good or of evil, 
 After his death, shall be doomed (in the end). 
 
 1 Fore there neidfaerae naenig uuiurthit 
 thonosnottura than him thar[f] sie, 
 to ymbhycgganuae, aer his hiniong[a]e, 
 huaet his gastae godaes aeththa yflaes, 
 aefter SeothtSaege doemid uueorth [a]e. 
 
 MS., St. Gall. 254. 
 
CHAPTEE XXI 
 
 NOETHUMBBIAN LITEEATUBE OTHER THAN ENGLISH 
 
 From 670 to the death of Baeda — 736 
 
 The death of Oswiu and tlie accession of Ecgfrith in 670 are 
 pi'obably coincident with the first verses by which Caedmon 
 began the religious poetry of England and founded the school 
 of whose writings I have now given an account. About the 
 same date, or a little before it, the Latin learning and litera- 
 ture of Northumbria began, and it flourished till the eommg of 
 the Danes. The history of this is, as far as the death of 
 Baeda, the subject of this chapter. 
 
 English poetry has two distinct periods, the first of which 
 belongs to the time of the glory of Northumbria, and the 
 second to the time of its anarchy and decay. The first is 
 bound up with the school of Caedmon, and may be said to close 
 with the death of Baeda. The second, hereafter to be treated, 
 may be collected round the name of Cynewulf. One is uncon- 
 scious of sorrow and regret ; the other is deeply conscious of 
 both. There was then a division of sentiment, answering 
 partly to a change in the fortunes of the kingdom, which 
 breaks into two branches English Verse in Northumbria. 
 There is no such break in the history of Latin literature in the 
 North. It was only slowly affected by the internal troubles, of 
 the kingdom. Pursued in its monastic centres, apart from the 
 strife of kings and pretenders, by men whom all sides honoured, 
 concentrated finally in the ecclesiastical and political capital 
 of the North where it was safest from disturbance and most 
 easily patronised, it lived through all the anarchy, and may 
 even have continued a miserable existence after the Danes had 
 taken and settled in York. York was its last refuge. 
 
 It may be said to have begun in the reign of Ecgfrith, when 
 Wilfrid obtained possession of the See of York, when he 
 built new churches at Eipon and Hexham and founded their 
 
 341 
 
342 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 libraries, and when Benedict Biscop set up his monastery of 
 Wearmouth in 674. Benedict, however, far more than Wilfrid, 
 was the real founder of the Latin school ; the true source of 
 all that Northumbrian learning which, passing through Baeda 
 and the scholars of York, restored to life, by English voices, 
 the letters and sciences of Europe. He had brought to Nor- 
 thumbria the knowledge and arts he had acquired at Eome, 
 and the methods of teaching he had practised with Theodore at 
 Canterbury. In a few years, as we have already seen, he had 
 collected two brother libraries- at Wearmouth and Jarrow, 
 founded one great school in these monasteries, and started sci- 
 ence and literature on the path over which his scholar Baeda led 
 them to a greater glory. In a long life he was never inactive 
 in the cause of learning and beauty. Architecture, painting, 
 music, glassmaking, embroidery were part of his religion. 
 When ill and sleepless, he lessened the weariness of the night 
 and soothed his pain by the reading of the Scriptures, and 
 chiefly of the patience of Job. He was half palsied, and no 
 wonder, for he had made five times that terrible journey to 
 Eoiue, the woes of which seemed, however, as nothing to the 
 eagerness of this great collector. No man did more for the 
 materials of Northumbrian learning, and it is not uninterest- 
 ing to contrast this impassioned traveller with his scholar 
 Baeda, who never left, save for a visit or two to York, the 
 shelter of his monastery. When Benedict Biscop died in 690, 
 Aldfrith was reigning, and this king's West Saxon and Irish 
 learning gave a fresh impulse to Northumbrian culture.' He 
 had a ready inspirer and helper in Abbot Ceolfrid, Biscop's 
 successor at Wearmouth and Jarrow. The school of Ceolfrid 
 became famous. The Pope asked his advice on ecclesiastical 
 questions. Naiton, King of the Picts, desired a letter from 
 him concerning the Roman tonsure and time of celebrating 
 Easter, and this tractate, which Baeda gives in full, places 
 him with justice among clear and vigorous writers. Baeda 
 himself wrote his life, and a delightful piece of literature it 
 is. There is no better picture of the daily life of an English 
 monastery. 
 
 Both he and King Aldfrith are further connected by their 
 literary relation to the book in which Adamnan of lona gave 
 
 1 Aldfrith, we are told by Baeda hi the Life of Cuthbert, " in insulis Sco- 
 torum ob stadium literaruin exulabat" — "in regionibus Sootorum lectioni 
 operam dabat" — "ipse ob amorem sapientiae spontaneum passus exilium." 
 Malmesbury (26) gives the same testimony, and Eddius calls him rex sapientis- 
 srnius. Wilfrid trained him also, and he was a fellow-pupil of Ealdhelm. 
 
XXI NORTHUMBRIAN LITERATURE IN LATIN 343 
 
 an account of Arculf's journey to the Holy Land, the first of 
 those books which in this country awakened the desire of pil- 
 grimage to Jerusalem. Arculf, shipwrecked on the west coast, 
 found his way to lona, and dictated to Adamnan his voyage 
 and adventures. Adamnan, who had been the tutor of Aldfrith, 
 brought him the book, sure of his interest and patronage. The 
 King received it eagerly, sent it on to Ceolfrid, had many 
 copies made of it, and dispersed them about Northumbria. 
 The book is still preserved, and became popular in Europe 
 through Baeda's abridgment of it, and through the extracts he 
 made from it in the Ecclesiastical History. Ceolfrid also saw 
 Adamnan and received him at Wearmouth on his second visit 
 to Northumbria. It may be that Adamnan mingled with the 
 discussion which then converted him to the observance of the 
 Eoman Easter some accou.nt of the Life of St. Columba which 
 he compiled at Zona in the last decade of the seventh century. 
 Baeda, however, does not seem to have been acquainted with 
 this important book. 
 
 Some time later, after 709, Wilfrid's biography was written 
 by his well-tried friend and companion, Eddius Stephanus. 
 This book, composed in an excellent style, is of the greatest 
 help to the history of the Northumbrian Church in the seventh 
 century. It is worthy also of other remembrance, because it 
 is the first biography written in England ^ — the first of a class 
 of literature in which, though rarely, we have excelled. 
 Another name of this time, linked to Hild, whose scholar he 
 was ; to Wilfrid, for he became Bishop of Hexham and of 
 York; to Theodore, under whom he studied; and to Baeda, 
 whom he ordained ; is John of Beverley, whom we remember 
 best from the fair minster which in after ages bore his name. 
 He loved magnificence when he played the great bishop's part, 
 but he loved solitude even more. The man of the world was 
 frequently merged in the anchorite. He had a solitary oratory 
 on the top of the Earn's-Howe, a hill on the Tyne, to which he 
 often retired from Hexham. It is curious to meet this rever- 
 sion to the Celtic feeling of his youth, and we owe to it the 
 founding of Beverley. In a region, as desolate then as it is now 
 thickly populated, John chose in the midst of the woods and 
 waters of Underwood a solitary meadow with a tiny church, 
 round which the river Hull, delaying its speed, had been 
 dammed by the beavers who afterwards gave the spot its name. 
 
 1 Another biography, and written ahout the same time, is the TAfe of St. 
 Cuthbert by a nameless writer, which was done and kept at Lindisfarne, and 
 which Baeda used. 
 
344 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 Here, as he had done at Hexham and York, he kept up a school 
 of learning, to which a host of persons, both lay and clerical, 
 resorted.-' One other name is sufficiently bound up with liter- 
 ature to be mentioned here — Acca, Wilfrid's closest friend, 
 the most devoted supporter of his plans. Wilfrid nominated 
 him to be Abbot of Hexham just before his death. In the same 
 year, 709, he became bishop, and he ruled the See for twenty- 
 three years. He was as fond of architecture as of music. He 
 finished the three churches near Hexham which Wilfrid had 
 begun. Baeda praises his skill in ecclesiastical music. He 
 was another of the great collectors of books ; the library at 
 Hexham was famous. If he did not write himself, he caused 
 others to write. It was he who urged Eddius to compose the 
 Life of Wilfrid. He pressed Baeda to begin a commentary on 
 St. Luke ; and Baeda addressed to him his commentary on St. 
 Mark, a poem on the Last Day, and perhaps the Hexameron. 
 
 These are the chief names among a number of persons who 
 spread Latin learning and literature at this early time over 
 Northumbria. That learning, however, if it were to attain con- 
 sistence and directive power, needed to be gathered together 
 and generalised by a man of some genius. In Baeda of Jarrow 
 the man was found. He made in himself a reservoir into which 
 all the isolated streams of learning flowed. He added to them 
 waters of his own which he had drawn from all the then known 
 sources of learning in the past, and he distributed in channels 
 hewn by himself all that he had collected, not only over Eng- 
 land but, after his death, over Europe. And this was done just 
 in time. The knowledge Baeda left behind him was concen- 
 trated in the mind of Alcuin, and reached the court and king- 
 dom of Charles the Great exactly at the right moment — when 
 Charles was extending his power far and wide, when he desired 
 to unite his various tribes and peoples by an intellectual as well 
 as a spiritual force. It was a great work, but the means whereby 
 it was done had been stored up in the studious years which 
 Baeda had filled at Jarrow with unremitting work. 
 
 The chief information which we have of his life is given by 
 himself at the end of the Ecclesiastical History. " Baeda, a ser- 
 vant of God and priest of the monastery of the blessed apostles, 
 Peter and Paul, which is at Wearmouth and Jarrow, who, being 
 born in the lands of the same monastery, was, at seven years old, 
 handed over to be educated by the most reverend Abbat Bene- 
 
 1 Baeda's tale of one of John's miracles gives us a vivid picture of a part of 
 the life of these schools attached to a monastery. — Book v. c. vi. 
 
NORTHUMBRIAN LITERATURE IN LATIN 345 
 
 diet, and afterwards by Ceolfrid ; ^ and, passing all the rest of 
 my life in that monastery, wholly gave myself to the study of 
 Scripture, and to the observance of the regular discipline and 
 of daily chanting in the church, an4.had always great delight 
 in learning and teaching and writing.^ When I was nineteen 
 years old, I received deacon's orders, and when I was thirty 
 those of the priesthood, and both were conferred on me by 
 Bishop John and by order of Abbat Ceolfrid. From which 
 time- till I was fifty-nine years of age, I made it my business, 
 for the use of me and mine, to gather together out of the writ- 
 ings of the venerable Fathers, and to interpret, according to 
 their sense, these following pieces:'" — and here follows a list 
 
 1 1 quote here the admirable summary of the means of education which fell 
 to the lot of Baeda in Bishop Stubbs' article in the Diet. Ecdes. Biography : 
 " Under the liberal and enlightened administration of Benedict Biscop and 
 Ceolfrith, Bede enjoyed advantages which could not perhaps have been found 
 anywhere else in Europe at that time ; perfect access to all the existing sources 
 of learning in the West. Nowhere else could he acquire at once the Irish, the 
 Roman, the Galilean, and the Canterbury learning ; the accumulated stores of 
 books which Benedict had bought at Rome and Vienne ; or the disciplinary 
 instruction drawn from the -monasteries of the Continent as well as from the 
 Irish missionaries. Amongst his friends and instructors were Trumbert, the 
 disciple of St. Chad, and Sigfrid, the fellow-pupil of St. Cuthbert under Bteisil 
 and Eata ; from these he drew the Irish knowledge of Scripture and discipline. 
 Acca, Bishop of Hexham, and pupil of St. Wilfrid, furnished him with the 
 special lore of the Roman school, martyrological and other; his monastic 
 learning, strictly Benedictine, came through Benedict Biscop, through Lerins 
 and the many continental monasteries his master had visited; and from Can- 
 terbury, with which he was in friendly correspondence, he probably obtained 
 instruction in Greek, in the study of the Scriptures, and other more refined 
 learning. His own monastery was a place of rest and welcome for all learned 
 strangers, such as Abbot Adamnan." I must mention a second time, in this 
 connection, the literary friends whom he quotes as his authorities at the begin- 
 ning of the Ecclesiastical History. Albinus, Hadrian's pupil; Nothhelm, who 
 worked for him at Rome ; Daniel of Winchester, and Forthhere of Malmesbury, 
 who brought to him, I suppose, the works of Ealdhelm, which had their own 
 influence on Northumbrian literature ; Esl from East Anglia ; Cynibert from 
 Lindsey; the monks of many monasteries, and chiefly those of Lastingham 
 who gave him the traditions of Cedda and Ceadda — poured each their knowl- 
 edge into Baeda's ear. Kings gave him their friendship — Aldfrith and Ceol- 
 wulf to whom he dedicates his history. He had friends and correspondents in 
 various parts of Europe, and a host of visitors going and coming for manyyears 
 filled the cell at Jarrow with the experience of many men and many lands. 
 
 2 It is said that he declined to be made Abbot of Wearmouth on the ground 
 that the care of a great house distracted the mind from the pursuits of learning. 
 
 2 The list of works seems to be " with some important exceptions, in the 
 reverse order of their composition." The first written are probably the Ars 
 Metrica, the Do Natura rerum, and the Se Temporibvsi and their proper date 
 is from 700-703. These were followed by the De Sex sstatibus saeculi — an 
 admirable primer of the history of the,.world — written to be read to Wilfrid 
 about the year 707. The Commentaries on almost all the Books of the Old 
 and New Testaments are after 709; for they are dedicated to Acca, Bishop of 
 Hexham, who succeeded Wilfrid in that year. They range over many years. 
 The Lives of Cuthbert and of the Abbats of Wearmovth and Jarrow were 
 probably written between 716 and 720. The J)e Temporum ratione is dated 
 
346 EAELY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 of his works, at the end of which is this gracious sentence, 
 " And now, good Jesus, I pray that to whom thou hast granted 
 of thy grace to sweetly partake of the words of thy wisdom 
 and knowledge, thou wilt also vouchsafe that he may at some 
 time or another come to thee, Eount of all wisdom, to stand 
 before thy face for ever, who livest and reignest world without 
 end. Amen." 
 
 These are the last words of the book. "Here ends," he says, 
 " by God's help, the fifth book of the Ecclesiastical History of 
 the English Nation." It is his greatest work, the book in which 
 he showed that he was more than an industrious compiler ; one 
 who had gained that power of choice, of arrangement, of rejec- 
 tion of materials which is necessary to win before building any 
 work of literature into a form which will justly teach and please 
 mankind. This shaping power he had won when he wrote the 
 Ecclesiastical History, and with it he possessed also, by virtue of 
 his happy nature, that other power of ornamenting his literary 
 building with clear and fair description of his characters, and 
 with softly-carved and delicate tales.' In a slighter way this 
 is also shown in his life of Cuthbert, and, in a graver fashion 
 and on a graver subject, in his letter to Ecgberht, the form of 
 which is admirable. 
 
 Along with this much of the " shaping power of imagina- 
 tion," he had a careful love of truth and of testing his mate- 
 rials. He may fairly be called the father of modern history, 
 our first critical historian. He spent a world of time, and 
 employed a host of assistants, in collecting contemporary in- 
 formation. He rarely sets down anything without giving his 
 authorities for it, or without stating that it is without author- 
 
 726. The Ecclesiaaiical History was finished in the year 731. After this, 
 shortly before his death, is the Epistola ad Egiertum ; and on the day of his 
 death he was still employed on his translation Into English of the Gospel 
 according to St. John. 
 
 Many other things, including Homilies, he wrote, but these are the chief. 
 Most of them are studious epitomes, of great learning, of little originality. 
 The scientific works are mostly derived from Pliny the elder ; the grammatical 
 and rhetorical writings prove his large acquaintance with the classic writers 
 then known. He' possessed as a scholar Greek and Latin, and he knew " as 
 much Hebrew as he could learn from the writings of Jerome." The Commen- 
 taries are a mixture of a calm, clear, sensible, and unaffected teaching of 
 Christian conduct and love with an extravagance of allegorical Interpretation. 
 Allegory was then, as it has often been, at times when piety has limited the 
 love of beauty, the safety-valve of the imagination. But the chief burden of the 
 teaching of the Commentaries is morality and love. They preserve that steady 
 piety which has made the practical religion of the English people — " seeking," 
 as Baeda said Cuthbert and Boisil did while they read together the Gospel of 
 St. John, " that simple faith which works by love, nor troubling themselves 
 with minute and subtle questions." Of all these works none can be said to 
 belong properly to literature except the Lives of Cuthbert and the Abbats, the 
 EcclesiasUcal History, the Letter to Ecgberht, and perhaps the Hymns. 
 
NORTHUMBRIAN LITERATURE IS LATIN 347 
 
 ity. The elaborate account of all the sources of his history to 
 which I have already drawn attention does not stand alone as 
 an example of his conscious pride in his own accuracy. The 
 pains he took to verify his facts is the chief subject of his pref- 
 ace to his prose life of St. Cuthbert. "I have not dared," he 
 says, "to transcribe what I have written without the most 
 careful examination of credible witnesses. Moreover, I inserted 
 the names of my authorities to establish the truth of my nar- 
 rative. I kept back my book from public reading till I had 
 submitted it to Herefrith and others who had long known 
 the life of this man of God." He then tells how he sent it to 
 Eadfrith of Lindisfarne — that is, to Cuthbert's own monastery. 
 For two days the elders then read and examined it, and pro- 
 nounced it worthy to be copied. It may be that Eadfrith's 
 criticisms bored him. "Eadfrith," he says, "added many 
 other facts concerning Cutlibert in conversation, but I have 
 not inserted them ; the book, after due consideration, I con- 
 sidered to be fully finished." After this naXve remark he is 
 equally pleasant about his life of Cuthbert in Latin Hexame- 
 ters, which Lindisfarne had evidently not as yet cared to pos- 
 sess. The book is dull, but Baeda was pleased with it. " If 
 you wish," he says, " to have these verses, you can get a copy 
 of them from me." 
 
 The whole of this belongs to the literary side of his char- 
 acter. He is not critical, it may be said, concerning the 
 miracles he inserts. But in his time miracles were believed 
 to be part of the order of Kature, and they replaced in daily 
 life the legendary stories of the heathen heroes. Indeed, the 
 chief literary value of the Ecclesiastical History is to be found 
 in its stories of miraculous events and in its sketches of char- 
 acter. The form of these is excellent, their style of a charm- 
 ing simplicity, their tenderness poetic. The character of Baeda 
 is revealed in the conduct of these tales. The more we read 
 the greater the affection which we feel for him ; and the awak- 
 ening of such an affection is one of the most delicate proofs 
 which a book can give of its being fine literature. Baeda ex- 
 celled in stories, not by his learning or by his intellectual 
 training, but by the child in him : by the admiration, humility, 
 unconsciousness, trust, and love which led him gladly to 
 believe and delightedly to record his wonders. Moreover, 
 these same qualities enabled him to see with clearness what 
 was best in the men of whom he wrote, and to express it with 
 so much joy and tenderness, so lucidly and so sweetly, that the 
 characters in the History stand forth like pictures done by a 
 
348 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 painter like Pra Angelico. The images of Eadwine and Coifi, 
 of Oswald and Aidan, of Cuthbert and Ceadda, of Hild and 
 Caedmon, — and I choose only a few, — make us see and love 
 our forefathers. He has the same power elsewhere. The 
 Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow, of whom he speaks in his 
 little book upon them, appear as alive before us and win our 
 reverence. The entrance of Eosterwine into the monastic life, 
 the death of Benedict, the departure of Ceolfrid for Eome like 
 Paul from the sea-shore, could not be better done. But the 
 best of these lives is that of Cuthbert of Lindisfarne. Baeda 
 loved his subject, and his love of the man pervades the book 
 with charm, — a charm derived from two delightful but differ- 
 ent characters — the character of Baeda the writer and the 
 character of Cuthbert the subject of the book. 
 
 This biography is made up of many tales, and most of them 
 are of miracles. It is strange that after such repeated care 
 and the reading of the life by so many persons, no doubt what- 
 ever is thrown on any of the miracles told of a man who had 
 died so short a time before. One of them is so curious that 
 Baeda thinks it may be questioned. The passage is marked 
 by his happy simplicity, and yet by a sudden stirring in him 
 of his desire of truth. It illustrates, then, on two sides, his 
 literary character. Cuthbert, troubled by a swelling in his 
 knee, is prescribed for by a man on horseback clothed in white 
 robes and of an honourable aspect. He follows the prescription 
 and gets well. "At once," says Baeda, "he perceived that it 
 was an angel." Then he considers the matter and adds, "If 
 any one think it incredible that an angel should appear on 
 horseback, let him read in the history of the Maccabees," and 
 he alludes to the story of Heliodorus which Eaffaelle has so 
 nobly painted. It is also worth saying, for it still further 
 illustrates his literary character, especially as an historian, 
 that, when he is speaking in his own person, he has no knowl- 
 edge of the miraculous. When he has told the tale of Cuth- 
 bert quenching in one day a supernatural as well as a natural 
 fire, he adds, "But I, and those who are like me conscious of 
 our own weakness, can do nothing in that way against material 
 fire." Again, when he speaks of the beasts and birds obeying 
 Cuthbert— "We, for the most part," he says, "have lost our 
 dominion over the creation, for we neglect to obey the Lord." 
 The same careful note steals sometimes into the Ecclesiastical 
 -History. It represents the struggle, it may be an altogether 
 unconscious struggle, of the temper of the scholar who demands 
 accuracy with the temper of the pious monk to whom the 
 miraculous was so dear and so useful. 
 
XXI NORTHUMBRIAN LITERATURE IN LATIN 349 
 
 No man, judging from his writings, "was less self-conscious, 
 and it is partly owing to this that his tales of others are so 
 vivid. There is scarcely a single personal allusion in his writ- 
 ings, nor does he fill up his stories with remarks of his own. 
 It seems a pity that we know so little of him ; but then, had 
 he been personal, he had not been so delightful a story-teller,^ 
 nor would he have done so well his special work of collecting 
 into one body the knowledge of his time. 
 
 That no imaginative work full of his personality exists, sets 
 him apart from the men who feel the poetic impulse, and his 
 long home-staying agrees with this judgment. No inner driv- 
 ing sent him on pilgrimage ; his was a scallop-shell of quiet. 
 But though he sat at home, he knew the world. The news of 
 travel and knowledge in England and Europe were brought to 
 the cell of Baeda, and all the corn he received he made into 
 bread which men could eat and digest with ease. We can well 
 imagine with what charm he welcomed his guests and how 
 many were the friends he made. One man, however, as age 
 grew on him, seems to have been nearest to him. This was 
 Ecgberht of York, whom Baeda must have chosen to carry on 
 his work of learning, of teaching and writing. Almost the 
 only visit he paid in his long life was to Ecgberht, when for a 
 few days they sat together and talked over education, literature, 
 and the state of the Church in ISTorthumbria. The year after 
 he sent to Ecgberht the last of his extant writings, the well- 
 known Epistola ad Egbertum. " The soundness and far-sight- 
 edness of the ecclesiastical views in this work would be 
 remarkable in any age, and are especially remarkable in a 
 monk. The lessons contained in the letter might serve, in the 
 neglect or observance of them, as a key for the whole history 
 of the Anglo-Saxon Church."^ Independent of this usefulness 
 is the literary quality of the letter. It is in excellent form ; 
 it slides, with easy and natural connection, from subject to 
 subject ; it is as clear as a bell ; its firmness and authority are 
 as distinguished as its gentleness and courtesy. What he says 
 
 1 One personal touch belongs to the artistic side of the man, and it is of the 
 more interest when we think of the hoy who sang in the choirs at Wearmouth 
 and Jarrow, of the man who admired the poetry of Caedmon, who sang psalms 
 and antiphons with mingled joy and sorrow on his death-bed, who made and 
 chanted English hymns. He is speaking of music, and he cannot keep back 
 his pleasure in it : 
 
 "Among all the sciences, this is more commendable, courtly, pleasing, 
 mirthful, and lovely. It makes a man liberal, courteous, glad, amiable; it 
 exhorts him to bear fatigue ; it comforts him under labour ; it refreshes the 
 troubled mind ; it takes away headaches and sorrow ; and dispels the depraved 
 humours and the desponding spirit." — Bed. Op. vol. viii. p. 417. (S. Turner's 
 translation.) 
 
 ^ These are the words of Bishop Stubbs. Bede, Diet. Kcdes. Biog. 
 
350 EAKLY ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 of the fitting language to be used by a bishop may well be said 
 of the style of his letter — "His speech should always be 
 seasoned with the salt of wisdom, elevated above the common 
 diction, and more worthy of the Divine ear." Few pastoral 
 letters, and it may well bear that name, have been more 
 weighty with wisdom, piety, and grace ; and the words are 
 worthy of the emotions and thoughts with which they are 
 charged. Its love of the souls of men, its love of the work of 
 Christ, are both suffused with a solemn and admonitory love 
 of his country. Sadness and hope, when the old man looks 
 forth from his quiet place over the past and future of Nor- 
 thumbria, commingle in his language, and the sense of his ap- 
 proaching departure gives the letter all the dignity of the last 
 words of a servant of the Lord. For now his time was at hand, 
 and his scholars clustered more closely round him. While he 
 could still move, he never missed his daily service in the church. 
 "I know," he said, with his childlike grace, and it is Alcuin 
 who records the phrase, "that the angels visit the canonical 
 hours and the gatherings of the brethren ; what if they do not 
 find me among the brethren? Will they not say. Where is 
 Baeda; why does he not come with the brethren to the pre- 
 scribed prayers ? " At last, as the days grew on to the time of 
 the Lord's Ascension, his sickness grew upon him; and Cuth- 
 bert, his scholar, has recorded in a letter, some of which I 
 have already quoted, and which, from its observant and affec- 
 tionate grace, is a part of English literature, the hapjiy hours 
 of the dying of his father and master whom God loved. He 
 sang the antiphons, but when he came to the word. Do not for- 
 sake us, he burst into tears and they all mourned with him. 
 But he had also much joy, and he filled even these days with 
 work. "I have not lived so as to be ashamed," he said, "among 
 you ; nor do I fear to die, because we have a gracious God," 
 — words which St. Ambrose also used. He laboured to com- 
 pose two works. The first of these was Collections out of the 
 notes of Bishop Isidorus, and of this he said — his love of 
 truthful work still strong in death — "I will not have my 
 pupils read a falsehood, nor work therein without profit after 
 my death." The second was a translation of the Gospel of St. 
 John as far as the words, "But what are these among so 
 many?" — and the history of English literature speaks of it 
 with pleasure and regret ; with pleasure, for it is the first 
 translation into our own tongue of any book of the Bible; 
 with regret, for the translation has not come down to us. 
 
 On the Tuesday before the Ascension he suffered still more, 
 but dictated cheerfully, saying among other things, "Go on 
 
NORTHUMBRIAN LITERATURE IN LATIN 351 
 
 swiftly ; I know not how long I can continue. My Maker 
 may soon take me away." The night was passed in thanks- 
 giving, and on Wednesday he bid them write with speed what 
 he had begun. " Most dear Master," said one, "there is still 
 one chapter -wanting, does it trouble you to be asked more 
 questions?" — "It is no trouble," he answered. "Take 
 your pen, make ready and write fast." Which he did, but at 
 the ninth hour he said to me, " I have some little things of 
 value in my chest, such as pepper, napkins, and incense ; run 
 quickly and bring the priests of our monastery that I may 
 distribute among them the gifts which God has given me." 
 Then he passed the day "joyfully till the evening, and the 
 boy -who wrote for him said, ' Dear Master, there is yet one 
 sentence unwritten.' He answered, 'Write quickly.' Soon 
 after the boy said, ' The sentence is now written.' And he 
 ■replied, ' It is well ; you have said the truth. It is ended. 
 Take my head into your hands, for I am well satisfied to sit 
 facing my hqly place, where I was wont to pray.' And thus 
 on the pavement of his little cell, singing, ' Glory be to the 
 Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost,' — when he 
 had named the Holy Ghost, he breathed his last, and so de- 
 parted to the kingdom of Heaven." So passed away, as 
 quietly as he had lived, the "Light of the Church," the 
 " Father of English learning." ^ 
 
 While he was yet alive, a new school of poetry, other than 
 the Caedmonic school which he had celebrated, had begun; 
 and soon grew steadily. It lasted fully fifty years after his 
 death ; until that fatal time when Jarrow and Wearmouth 
 where he had worked, and Lindisfarne which he had loved, 
 were harried by the heathen men. It is this new school and 
 its labours which now call us back from the prose writers to 
 the poets, from the literature in England of a foreign tongue 
 to a literature in our own language. 
 
 1 They wrote an epitaph for him — 
 
 Presbyter hie Baeda requiescit carne sepultus; 
 Dona, Christe, animam in caelis gaudere per aevum ; 
 Daque ilii sophiae debriari fonte, cui jam 
 Suspiravit ovans, intento semper amore. 
 
 I have placed these bad verses here that I may quote the indignant criticism 
 which William of Malmesbury, with all the humorous haughtiness of a scholar, 
 makes upon them. Moreover, his criticism shows how rapidly scholarship, 
 beyond York, decayed in Northumbria. " They are contemptible," he says, 
 and adds, when he has quoted them, " Is it possible to thin down by any 
 excuse the disgrace, that there was not to be found, even in that monastery 
 where, during his lifetime the school of all learning had flourished, a single 
 person who could write his epitaph, save in this mean and paltry style? But 
 enough of this ; I will return to my subject." — Chron., Bk. i. 3. 
 
CHAPTER XXII 
 
 "the discouese of the soul to the body" and "the 
 elegiac poems " 
 
 The characteristic of the Caedmon cycle of poems is the 
 absence of self-consciousness ; the personality of the poet does 
 not appear in Genesis, Exodus, or Daniel, in the Christ and Satan, 
 or in Judith. It is true that in Genesis B a good deal of subtle 
 drawing of character exists — as subtle, that is, as the age per- 
 mitted, — but this part of the poem is said to be much later 
 than the death of Baeda. Yet, even here, the writer is not con- 
 cerned with himself, his own sorrows, or his salvation. 
 
 It is quite different with a class of poems which began to rise 
 about, I think, the beginning of the eighth century. These 
 poems are concerned with personal fates, and with the emotions 
 these fates awaken; with the personal relation of the soul to 
 God and its eternal state ; and many of them are written with 
 the eye of the writer fixed on his own heart and its imagina- 
 tions. Baeda's death-lay is a short piece which represents a 
 whole class of poetical prayers wrung forth by the passion of 
 the soul for redemption ; and this class of poem now continued 
 to be composed by the English. Every one of them worth call- 
 ing poetry is steeped in personal feeling. This subjective drift 
 of poetry is especially marked in Cynewulf. All the poems 
 which he has signed with his name, however far the story he 
 tells in them be impersonal, contain, either in their midst or at 
 the end, a short or long passage which is entirely taken up with 
 his own feelings. Even the Riddles may begin and close with 
 a personal representation ; and the things concerning which he 
 riddles are personifi.ed with a force which proves how deeply he 
 was penetrated with this individual manner of thinking and 
 feeling. 
 
 The poems discussed in this chapter are, I think, earlier than 
 
 Cynewulf's work, somewhat earlier even than the Biddies. 
 
 Four of them belong to the earthly fates of men, and one to 
 
 their spiritual fate. This one poem is called the Discourse of 
 
 352 
 
CHAP. XXII THE ELEGIAC POEMS 353 
 
 the Soul to its Body. The other four are the Elegies, and I 
 think I may claim that term for them ; at least in its earlier 
 sense among the Greeks. Three of them are laments, and one 
 is a longing cry of love. 
 
 The Discourse of the Soul to its Body exists in full as a double 
 poem. The first is the speech of a lost soul to its corpse ; the 
 second of a saved soul to its body. The first is found in the 
 Exeter and also in the Vercelli book ; the second — a fragment 
 without an end — is only in the Vercelli book, and the 
 first is as good as the second is poor work. So distinct is 
 their power, though their motives are similar, that I am in- 
 clined to guess that the second was written some time after the 
 first, in order to complete the representation of the subject, and 
 by another poet ; and if this be the case, it might explain why 
 the second poem does not appear in the Exeter book. More- 
 over, the second poem stands alone. The first was frequently 
 imitated, the second never. " No poem of a similar kind," says 
 Hammerich, "in which a pious soul speaks with its body is 
 found in any other literature." We may conjecture then, since 
 the one was imitated and the other not, that the first poem orig- 
 inally stood alone, and the second was afterwards added, per- 
 haps by Cynewulf himself. It is not worth while perhaps to 
 make this suggestion, but unless it is made, I cannot express 
 my opinion that the fijst verses may be as early as the begin- 
 ning of the eighth century. I give this date with diffidence, 
 because I am conscious of expressions and of a certain manner 
 in various parts of the poem which seem to belong to a later 
 time, and so much so, that even if the suggestion be not true, I 
 must still hold that the poem was edited with additions at a 
 later period. Nevertheless, the lines I subjoin seem to mark 
 the year in which it was written. 
 
 Then shall come the spirit, crying out with sorrows ! 
 
 After seven nights shall the soul draw near to find 
 
 Always its own body (once long time it hore it — ) 
 
 For three hundred winters ; if the King of nations, 
 
 If Almighty God earlier will not work 
 
 Of this world the end. 1. 9. 
 
 The spirit, when seven nights have passed, will, every night 
 for 300 years, visit the corpse it once inhabited. Why 300 
 years ? The answer is, I conjecture, that it was the general 
 expectation at this time that the end of the world would come 
 in the year 1000. If the poet was thinking of this, the date 
 of the poem would be about the year 700 ; and that he was 
 thinking of this appears more probable from his phrase, " un- 
 
354 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 less it be the -will of Almighty God to bring the world to an 
 end sooner than in 300 years." Some literary questions con- 
 cerning Anglo-Saxon poetry would be made clearer if this 
 meaning of the verses should prove to be justifiable. 
 
 " Cold is the voice of the Spirit and grimly it calls to the 
 corpse, ' gory dust ! why didst thou vex me ? O foulness, 
 all rotted by the earth ; likeness of the clay ! God sent me 
 into thee, I could not leave thee ; thy sinful lusts pressed me 
 down, it seemed to me 30,000 winters till thy death-day! 
 Thou wert rich in food, sated with wine ; I was thirsty for 
 God's body, for the drink of the Spirit. Shame shalt thou 
 bear in the great Day. Thou art dearer now to none than the 
 swart raven. Thou hast no goods, only thy naked bones ; thy 
 joys are nothing, but by night I must seek thee again and 
 again, and at cock-crowing go away. Better, on the day thou 
 shalt give account, hadst thou been born a bird, a fish, the 
 fiercest of serpents than a man. Wroth will the Lord be at 
 that Doom-tide. And what shall we two do ? '" 
 
 This is the abstract of the speech, and it has its own special 
 quality. Then the poet describes the spirit's departure, and 
 the silence of the body. It cannot speak; it is altogether 
 riven asunder and plundered by the worms. One of them 
 leads the way into the body for the rest, and this is the sole 
 piece of creative imagination in the poem — 
 
 119. Gifer is he Mght, (grim that "Worm is,) 
 
 Sharper than the needle are the jaws of him. 
 
 First of all — he drives into the Earth-grave, 
 
 Tears the tongue asunder : through the teeth he pierces ; 
 
 Prom above, into the head, eats he through the eyes ; 
 
 Works for other vyorms way unto their food, 
 
 To their wealthy banquet ! 
 
 This King, this Captain of the Worms, Gif&r, venomous 
 Greed; piercing his way for the rest through the head into the 
 corpse, is worthy of Ezekiel. 
 
 There are four Elegies full of interest in Anglo-Saxon poetry; 
 these are the Wanderer, the Seafarer, the Wife's Complaint, 
 and the Husband's Message. To these we may add the Buin, 
 though it is not sufficiently personal in its passion to come 
 easily within the proper circle of the Elegy. I have already 
 translated the Buin. Its motive — the sorrow for departed 
 splendour and happiness awakened by the sight of a town long 
 since desolate, with its fortress and market-hall crumbling ~in 
 the midst of it ; the recalling of the joyous life that once was 
 there, and the imaging, through its death, of the' passing away 
 
XXII THE ELEGIAC POEMS 355 
 
 of all the world — is a common motive. The Rhyming Poem 
 seems to take it up. It is reproduced in some of Cynewulf's 
 longer poems. It appears in the midst of one of these four 
 Elegies, in the Wanderer; and the passage is so like certain 
 lines in the Ruin that it almost seems to be suggested, if not 
 copied, from the Ruin, or the passage in the Ruin from it. 
 
 This was a motive which lay continually before the eyes of 
 men in Wessex, Mercia, and Northumbria during the long 
 series of petty wars of the seventh, eighth, and ninth centu- 
 ries. The subject alone cannot then date these elegiac poems. 
 But when we consider the elements in them which distinguish 
 them from other Anglo-Saxon poems of the eighth century, 
 and at the same time keep our eye fixed on the history of that 
 century in Northumbria, I think we may make a probable con- 
 jecture as to their date. 
 
 The internal evidence of the Wanderer, the TTi/e's Complaint, 
 and the Husband's Message points to their having been written 
 in a time of disturbance, when not only the halls of nobles 
 were desolated, but when exile was common. The wife talks 
 of her husband driven from his folk and refuging in a far-ofE 
 land. The message of the husband comes from a foreign coun- 
 try to England. She is to join him in his exile where he has 
 made a home. The wanderer has fled from England, and sees 
 the vision of his ruined happiness and of his slaughtered 
 friends. This state of things would suit with the condition 
 of England after the coming of the Northmen. But there is 
 no allusion to the Danes in the poems, and there was no liter- 
 ature ia Northumbria in the ninth century. It would also 
 suit with the time of anarchy in Northumbria after the resig- 
 nation of Eadberht in 758, to which period we may refer the 
 passages in Cynewulf's poems which sorrowfully remember 
 happier days. But I do not feel as if these elegies belonged 
 to the latter part of the eighth century, and my reason is first, 
 that they have a certain pagan element which has wholly dis- 
 appeared from the poems which belong to the Cynewulf cycle ; 
 and secondly, that the sorrow expressed is not a retrospective 
 sorrow, like Cynewulf's, for the decay of the whole land, but 
 a personal and present pain. We might fairly find such a time 
 in that parenthesis of bad government and of national tumult 
 which filled the' years between the death of Aldfrith in 705 
 and the renewed peace of Northumbria under Ceolwulf in the 
 years that followed 729. 
 
 The pagan quality, or rather the absence of any Christian 
 element in these poems, is remarkable. There is not a trace 
 
356 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 of Christianity, save perhaps a certain overfineness of senti- 
 ment, in the Wife's Complaint or the Husband's Message. In 
 the Seafarer the first part of the poem is without a single 
 Christian touch. The second part is a Christian allegory of 
 the first. Many think, however, that the poem is one, that 
 the writer had the second part in his mind when he wrote 
 the first. The matter cannot be determined ; but my impres- 
 sion is that they are distinct, and that either some later writer 
 added the allegory to the first part, or that the poet himself, 
 later in his life, distressed to find his early work so much 
 without religion, continued it into a Christian allegory. As 
 to the Wanderer, it opens with a Christian prologue and closes 
 with a Christian epilogue, but the whole body of the poem was 
 written, it seems to me, by a person who thought more of the 
 goddess Wyrd than of God, whose life and way of thinking 
 were uninfluenced by any distinctive Christian doctrine. 
 
 Now I conjecture that in the first twenty or thirty years of 
 the eighth century there were poets living in the courts of the 
 princes and earls of Northumbria — such, for example, as we 
 know Cynewulf was in his youth — who were Bohemian enough, 
 if I may be permitted that term, not to care for anything but 
 poetry ; to whom Christianity was a good thing, but over whom 
 it had no special hold ; who were half pagan at heart while 
 Christian in name ; and who resembled, but only in the general 
 temper of their minds, the class of literary men whom the 
 Eenaissance made in Florence and Eome. It was this class 
 who wrote, I think, these elegies, and it is probable that there 
 were a great many more poems of this kind. Later on, they 
 were taken up by bards who were connected with the monas- 
 teries, and we may almost lay our hands on the work of these 
 men in the prologue and epilogue of the Wanderer. But even 
 this Christianising of older work was not done by men who 
 lived late in the eighth century. At that time, when Cynewul:^ 
 for example, wrote the Christ, these additions would have been, 
 at least in my opinion, more specialised in their doctrine. To 
 this early time belong also, as I think, a number of the riddles 
 attributed to Cynewulf. The riddles on the Bow and Sword 
 and Spear, on the Hurricane, the Swan and others, are quite 
 apart from Christian sentiment. They are the work of a man 
 who, a Christian no doubt in name, cared only for his art. 
 
 Another thing worthy of remark about the elegies is their 
 intensity with regard to the aspects of Nature. I hesitate to 
 call it a love of nature, because I do not think it was a con- 
 scious pleasure, such as we possess. But, as I have said else- 
 
XXII THE ELEGIAC POEMS 357 
 
 where, the descriptions of nature show so close an observation 
 both of what is beautiful and what sublime, that there must 
 have been pleasure to account for the observation, and where 
 there is pleasure there is love. The Seafarer could scarcely 
 describe better the savage doings of the German Ocean or the 
 soft incoming of the spring ; the Wanderer paints the tumbling 
 waves and the sea-birds dipping and preening their feathers, 
 and the wintry storms darkening the sky. and binding the earth ; 
 the Wife's Complaint dwells like a Highland ballad on the wild- 
 wood dwelling under the roots of the great oak among the 
 briars ; the Husband's Message sings of the advent of the sum- 
 mer, and the cuckoo crying from the woods that fledge the 
 mountain-steep. There is nothing like this in Icelandic poetry 
 — nothing of the same contemplative quality. And what is still 
 more remarkable and modern, is that the natural objects are 
 not always seen as they are, but as they seem to the mood of 
 the poet. They are touched with his joy or gloomed with his 
 misfortune. The pleasant cry of the cuckoo is a voice of 
 sorrow to the longing lover. The careering waves and the sea- 
 birds' play are mournful to the exile who sits alone and griev- 
 ing on the cliffs. Even the modern passion of being alone 
 with Nature is not unrepresented. The young man in the 
 Seafarer longs to be away from the joys and noise of men 
 upon the far paths of the solitary sea. There is nothing so 
 modern in sentiment, nay in very expression, in the whole of 
 English literature till we come to Tennyson, as the first part 
 of the Seafarer. The cry of Tennyson's Ulysses is in it, and 
 the cry of his Sailor Boy. Were I to put it into blank verse, 
 every one would say that I was imitating Tennyson. Even in 
 lines of mere description, without the elegiac sentiment of 
 humanity, this Tennysonian likeness appears. When the 
 Seafarer says that he was in the Northern Sea 
 
 Iciole-hung, while flew the hail in showers, 
 
 one would swear that the line was from the mint of Tennyson. 
 Nor is the psychological passage in the Seafarer less modern 
 in feeling. I remember nothing in the Icelandic poems which 
 is similar to it ; and I do not know where, in the history of 
 English poetiy, to find the poetic temper likely to produce it 
 except in the later Elizabethans of the reign of James I., and 
 in the last thirty years. The young seaman, eager for the 
 ocean, sees his soul pass from his body, make the voyage he 
 desires to make, and return to him, greedy with new passion 
 for the deep. The Wamderer embodies his memories in the 
 
358 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 ghosts of his friends who float before him in the mist ; he cries 
 to them, mindful of old comradeship, but they are silent. 
 They bring him none of the old familiar songs. They swim 
 away in the mist, as in a sea, and his pain is deepened. This 
 is not so modern as the passage in the Seafarer, but it is quite 
 at home in the nineteenth century. When we think that these 
 poems were written fully 1100 years ago, this is very remark- 
 able ; and the recurrence, after all those centuries, of a special 
 distinct note of sentiment, only shows how constant are the 
 roots of English song, and how needful it is, if we would fully 
 understand it, to go back to the ground in which it was 
 planted. Seeing then that these elegies are important, and 
 that, as short pieces of poetic art, they are the best things of 
 this kind which we possess from ancient times, -I discuss and 
 translate them at large. 
 
 The Husband's Message, or, as I think it should be more 
 justly called, the Lover's Message, consists of an introduction 
 of eleven lines describing, in the manner of an Anglo-Saxon 
 riddle, the slice of wood on which the message is carved in 
 runes. The rest is the message itself ; and the wood-tablet is 
 the spokesman throughout — an awkward and fantastic experi- 
 ment of the poet. It tells first of its origin among the Tree- 
 kin, and then of how often, in the bosom of the ship, it was 
 sent over the salt sea streams to those in high-buUt houses. 
 This time it brings a message of love to the beloved, hoping 
 to find her constant, imploring her to join its sender in his 
 foreign home. Bethink thee, it says, of the troth thou didst 
 pledge of old in the burgs where mead was drunk ; a hatred 
 drove thy lover forth from the folk of victory ; now he calls 
 thee to take rede how thou mayst sail the s^a to him. 
 
 19. Soon as ever thou shalt listen on the edges of the cliff 
 To the cuckoo in the oopse-wood, chanting of his sorrow, 
 
 25. Then hegin to seek the sea where the sea-mew is at home ; 
 Sit thee in the sea- hark, so that to the south-ward 
 Thou mayst light upon thy lover, o'er the ocean path-ways, 
 Where thy Lord with longing looks and waits for thee. 
 
 Here, after this charming call, the manuscript is disturbed, but 
 the meaning is that there can be in the whole world no joy so 
 great as would be if they were together. Treasure of gold the 
 Lover has won and a fair land, and many warriors serve him. 
 He has overcome all trouble ; but nothing is worth anything 
 unless he have her with him. No desire has he 
 
XXII THE ELEGIAC POEMS 359 
 
 43. Nor for jewels, nor for horses, nor for joys 'beside the mead, 
 Nor for any of Earls' treasures, here the earth upon — 
 If, King's Daughter, he should lack thee. 
 After all the troth of yore pledged between the twain of you. 
 
 And the poem ends with the binding together of the runes of 
 their names S. R. EA. W. and Jlf.,^ to symbolise the bond of 
 love he will keep faithfully till death. The motive is clear 
 and simple, and the strain of feeling passionate and innocent. 
 It has neither the strength nor the intensity of Icelandic work 
 on a similar subject, but it has its own distinct note of tender 
 sentiment. 
 
 The Wife's Complaint is a much more involved piece — its 
 subject obscure, its motives varied, and its thought finely 
 woven. Its fault as a poem is over-subtlety, but it is better 
 written than the last, and more interesting. We might almost 
 say, if we could think that both these poems were written by 
 the same person, that he perhaps unconsciously contrasted the 
 simplicity of a man's affection with the tangled variety of a 
 woman's love, his one thought with her multitudinousness. It 
 was Ettmuller who first said it was the plaint of a woman, and 
 some have asked whether it stood alone, or was part of a larger 
 poem, in which also the Husband's Message was contained. Both, 
 it has been thought, might belong to the poems of the Genovefa- 
 Saga, in which Genovefa, "abandoned by her husband, pours 
 forth her sorrow in the solitude of the Ardennes' wood." But 
 Ten Brink thinks it is a single poem which tells its own sub- 
 ject, and Wtilker, agreeing with him, says that if it belong to 
 any Saga, it would be to the Offa Saga, which at least was 
 known in England. 
 
 The foes of the woman, the relatives of the husband, have 
 made bad blood between him and her, accusing her either of 
 falseness or magic. Exile was the punishment for both these 
 crimes, and the husband banishes her to a wood, to an allotted 
 place within boundaries which she must not overstep. Many 
 women, it is probable, were living in this fashion in England 
 during the eighth century, and this one begins — 
 
 1. Of myself with sadness laden do I sing this song. 
 Tell the tale of mine own fate ! Truly can I say 
 What of sorrows I have suffered since I was upwaxen, 
 Whether new or old, but never worse than now. 
 
 6. First, my Lord, he fared from his folk away, 
 
 O'er the surging of the sea ! Morning-sorrow then was mine ! 
 
 1 The runes that stand for D and M are so like one another that it is doubt- 
 ful which letter is here. Wiilker prefers M. 
 
360 EARLY ENGLISH LITEEATURE chap. 
 
 Where, where within J,he land was my Master now ? 
 Then to fare me I was faring, following of him to seek, 
 Friendless and a flying exile ! 
 
 Then lier husband's kinsmen began with crafty thought to 
 plan how they might set them apart, so that they should " live 
 the loathliest of lives, but she endured the longing of desire." 
 And her lord bade her take a dwelling in the wood. There 
 were few who loved her, few were her friends, and all the 
 worse was her cruel fate. He whom she loved most, who loved 
 her most, had most mistaken her, and had hidden his heart 
 from her. " My heart for this is grieved the most " — and Des- 
 demona herself might have used the words — 
 
 18. That I found a man wholly fitted for me ; 
 Yet of soul unhappy, sorrow-struck in spirit, 
 From me hiding all his heart ; holding murder in his thoughts, 
 Yet so blithe of bearing. O full oft with vows we bound us 
 That save Death alone nothing should divide us. 
 Nothing in the world — but now — all changed is that ! 
 Now is it, alas, as if had never been 
 Friendship erst between us. Far away or near, 
 I must bear the hatred of my best-beloved. 
 
 27. In a grove amid this wood they have garred me dwell, 
 Underneath a holm-oak tree, in this hollow of the earth I 
 Old is this earth-house ; I am all one long desire ! 
 Dim these cavemed dells, steep the downs above, 
 Bitter my burgh-hedges, with wild-briars overgrown. 
 
 Dreary is my dwelling ! Here my Lord's departure 
 Oft has wrought me wretchedly. 
 
 Lovers in the world there are, 
 Who in loving live together, lie together on their bed. 
 While I, in the early dawning, all alone am going 
 Underneath this oak-tree, in and out of these earth-hollows, 
 Where I needs must sit alone all the summer-lengthened day, 
 Where I, weeping, shall bewail for my woful banishment 
 My uncounted sorrows. 
 
 And this part of the elegy ends with an accent of despair, 
 " Never, never shall I rest from misery and longing." Then, 
 if Grain's conjecture be right, and it is quite plausible, she 
 turns to curse the author of her exile in the following lines. 
 But it may as well, and even better, be said by her of her hus- 
 band. In that case the lines below are not imprecation but a 
 mournful statement of what he is sure to suffer. Care will be 
 his and woe and outlawry — 
 
 42. Sorrowful of soul shall the young man ever be ; 
 Hard to bear his heart-thought, howsoe'er he have 
 Outwardly blithe bearing — and therewith breast-care. 
 
xxii THE ELEGIAC POEMS 361 
 
 Ever-during sorrow's driving ? Doomed to him let be, 
 All world-woefuluess ; and full wide be he outlawed 
 In a far-land of the folk. 
 
 Then with a rapid change she thinks of her husband as exiled 
 from her. She is not angry with him — and the whole of this 
 passage is subtly thought — but full of tender womanliness, 
 full of pity that he is deprived of her. She knows he loves 
 her still, pictures his lonely life thinking of his home that 
 once was so happy. She creates around him scenery in har- 
 mony with her heart and his. Confident of her own fidelity 
 she lets herself love him ; but he who thinks her guilty, and 
 yet loves her, what sorrow must be his ? Worse, worse 
 than mine ! Wretched am I, 
 
 47. Eor my friend is sitting 
 
 Under the o'erhanging cliff, over-frosted by the storm ; 
 my Wooer, so outwearied, by the water overfloweu, 
 In that dreary dwelling ! There endures my dear one 
 Anguish mickle of the mind, far too oft remembers him 
 Of a happier home ! O, to him is woe 
 Who shall with a weary longing wait for the Beloved ! 
 
 From this remarkable poem, so modern in feeling, we pass to 
 a poem still more modern, more distinctly English, mingling in 
 it our sear-longing and our sense of the dangers of the sea. 
 This is the Seafarer. It has, like the Wanderer, some obscure 
 passages to which many meanings have been allotted. These 
 render translation di£B.cult, but the chief difficulty arises from 
 the modern feeling of the poem. It is almost impossible not 
 to slip into blank verse, and blank verse of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury. . To do that were to make it far more modern than it 
 ought to be made. The early English note would be lost. 
 Nevertheless, just to show how near the Seafarer and the 
 Wanderer are to us, and how easily they wear our dress, I have 
 put them both literally into blank verse in a note at the end of 
 this volume. 
 
 I have already said that the latter part of the poem, from 
 verse 64, or as Eieger thinks from verse 72, is a later religious 
 addition. That part I pass by. It resembles any of the hom- 
 ilies, and it has neither intelligence, passion, nor imagination. 
 The first part has these elements, and has them remarkably. We 
 may take it as a dramatic soliloquy, in which the poet contrasts 
 two views of a seaman's life, and ends by saying that whether 
 the life be hard or not, the attraction to it is irresistible ; or with 
 some German critics, with Eieger and Kluge, arrange it as a 
 dialogue between an old seaman and a young man on whom the 
 
362 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 passion for the sea has come, in vliich the old man tells, in 
 warning, of the dangers and woes of the deep, and the young 
 man replies. It is a convenient form into which to put the 
 poem, and I use it here, though we may just as well taJie it as 
 a dramatic lyric.'' 
 
 Seafarer 
 The Old Man — 
 
 Sooth the song that X of myself can sing, 
 Telling of my travels ; how in troublous days, 
 Hours of hardship oft I've borne ! 
 With a bitter breast-care I have been abiding : 
 Many seats of sorrow in my ship have known ! 
 Frightful was the whirl of waves, when it was my part 
 Narrow watch at night to keep, on my Vessel's prow 
 "When it rushed the rocks along. ^ By the rigid cold 
 East my feet were pinched, fettered by the frost, 
 10. By the chains of cold. Care was sighing then 
 
 Hot my heart around ; hunger rent to shreds within 
 Courage in me, me sea-wearied ! This the man knows not, 
 He to whom it happens happiest on earth. 
 How I, carked with care, in the ice-cold sea, 
 Overwent the winter on my wander-ways. 
 All forlorn of happiness, all bereft of loving kinsmen. 
 Hung about with icicles ; flew the hail in showers. 
 Nothing heard I there save the howling of the sea, 
 And the ice-chilled billow, 'whiles the crying of the swan 1 
 20. All the glee I got me was the gannet's scream. 
 
 And the swoughing of the seal, 'stead of mirth of men ; 
 'Stead of the mead drinking, moaning of the sea-mew. 
 There the storms smote on the crags, there the swallow of the sea 
 Answered to them, icy-plumed ; and that answer oft the earn — 
 Wet his wings were — barked aloud. 
 
 None of all my kinsmen 
 Covdd this sorrow-laden soul stir to any joy. 
 Little then does he believe who life's pleasure owns 
 While he tarried in the towns, and but trifling balefulness, — 
 Proud and insolent with wine — how out- wearied I 
 30. Often must outstay on the ocean-path ! 
 
 1 Rieger divides it into six parts, and holds that the whole of the poem is 
 conrposed by one man. The Old Man speaks, he says, the lines 1-33 {coma 
 caldast) ; from 39-47 (funda'^) ; from 53-57 {lecgaiS); and from 72 to end. 
 The Young Man speaks from lines 33-38 {gesece) ; from 48-52 {gewitan) ; from 
 58-71 (o^-prmjre'S) . This division is partly adopted in the text, but I am not 
 sure that Kluge's division is not better. It is certainly simpler. The Old Man 
 speaks from 1-33, and the Young Man from 33-64 or 66. Kluge also believes 
 that the original poem ends at verse 64 or 66 ; and that the rest is a later edition 
 borrowed in parts from the homilies ; but he seems to detect in it also several 
 heterogeneous elements. Wiilker thinks that the poem may be a dialogue as 
 far as verse 64, and that this first part had originally nothing to do with 
 Christianity. 
 
 ^ Be clifum cnossade, "when it dashed against the seas as It ran by the 
 cliffs." This is, I think, the true meaning. It cannot mean " when it struck 
 on the cliffs." 
 
XXII THE ELEGIAC POEMS 363 
 
 Sombre grew the shade of night, and it snowed from nor'rard, 
 Erost the field enchained, fell the hail on earth, 
 Coldest of all corns. 
 
 Young Man — 
 
 Wherefore now then crash together 
 Thoughts my soul within that I should myself adventure 
 The high streamings of the sea, and the sport of the salt waves ! 
 Eor a passion of the mind every moment pricks me on 
 All my life to set a-faxing ; so that far from hence, 
 I may seek the shore of the strange outlanders. 
 
 The Old Man now, if -we adopt Eieger's division, which is 
 certainly the most dramatic, is carried away by the passion of 
 the young fellow, and remembers his own sea-longing and sea- 
 loving. " Yes," he answers, " there is nothing like it " — 
 
 Old Man — 
 
 Yes, so haughty of his heart is no hero on the earth, 
 40. Nor so good in all his giving, nor so generous in youth, 
 Nor so daring in his deeds, nor so dear unto his lord, 
 That he has not always yearning unto his sear-faring. 
 To whatever work his Lord may have will to make for him. 
 For the harp he has no heart, nor for having of the rings, 
 Nor in woman is his weal, in the world he's no delight. 
 Nor in anything whatever save the tossing o'er the waves ! 
 O for ever he has longing who is urged towards the sea.^ 
 
 Young Man — 
 
 Trees rebloom with blossoms, burghs are fair again. 
 Winsome are the wide plains,. and the world is gay — 
 50. All doth only challenge the impassioned heart 
 
 Of his courage to the voyage, whosoever thus bethinks him. 
 O'er the ocean billows, far away to go. 
 
 And now the ancient mariner takes up again the voice of 
 warning, and with a touch of sorrowful irony brings in to help 
 his prudence the bird of Spring of which the youth has spoken — 
 
 Old Man — 
 
 ^Every cuckoo calls a warning, with his chant of sorrow ! 
 'sings the summer's watchman, sorrow is he boding. 
 Bitter in the bosom's hoard. This the brave man wots not of. 
 Not the warrior rich in welfare — what the wanderer endures, 
 Who his paths of banishment, widest places on the sea. 
 
 1 This passage, and the previous one beginning, " That he has not always 
 yearning," etc., may be otherwise explained. " Yearning to seafaring " may 
 be simply yearning in seafaring for the land, and " longing for the sea " may 
 be no more than "longing on the sea for shore." This would, no doubt, suit 
 the old man's argument, but I believe that the meaning in the text is the right 
 one. 
 
364 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 Then the youth breaks forth, his passion spurred by oppo- 
 sition, and paints, with a force and freedom of imagination 
 which at this early time is astonishing, how his spirit has left 
 his body — hovers for a moment over his heart, has flown 
 away now over the sea, has made the voyage to the outlanders, 
 and now returns, a lonely-flier, yelling like a cormorant, to join 
 again his body and drive him forth to sea. The passion for 
 the deep has seldom been better imaged. What is this to 
 me, he cries, for that is the sense of the For\on with which he 
 begins — 
 
 For behold, my thought hovers now above my heart ; 
 O'er the surging flood of sea now my spirit flies, 
 60. O'er the homeland of the whale — hovers then afar 
 O'er the foldings of the earth ! Now again it flies to me 
 Full of yearning, greedy ! Yells that lonely flier ; 
 Whets upon the Whale-way irresistibly my heart, 
 O'er the storming of the seas ! 
 
 The rest is a sad business ; religion, as too often is the case, 
 has slaughtered poetry. There is no such break of power in 
 the Wanderer which is the last of these elegies in the Exeter 
 Book. Some have thought that at verse 80 new matter has 
 been linked on, but this is criticism searching for something 
 to say. The poem moves easily from its beginning to its end, 
 and of all Anglo-Saxon poems it is best in form. It has been 
 allotted to Cynewnlf, btit there is no proof whatever that he 
 wrote it ; nay, the total absence of any Christian feeling in it 
 would almost suggest that in its original form it may have 
 been a purely pagan utterance, but this is a very problemat- 
 ical opinion. Yet some phrases in the prologue lead us to 
 think that the poem was old, was found by some monk, ad- 
 mired and edited by him with a Christian introduction and 
 end — 
 
 The Wanderer 
 
 Peologde 
 
 Oft a lonely wanderer wins at last to pity, 
 
 Wins the grace of God, though, begloomed with care, 
 
 He must o'er the water-ways, for a weary time, 
 
 Push the ice-cold ocean, oariag with his hands. 
 
 Wade through ways of banishment 1 Wyrd is fully wrought. 
 
 Thus there quoth an Earth-stepper — of his troubles taking thought, 
 
 Of the fall of friendly kinsmen, of the fearful slaughters. 
 
 Oft I must alone, at each breaking of the day, 
 Here complain my care I Of the Quick there is not one 
 10. Unto whom I dare me now declare with openness 
 
XXII THE ELEGIAC POEMS 365 
 
 All my secret soul. Of a sooth, I know 
 That for any Earl excellent the habit is 
 That he closely bind all the casket of his life, 
 Hold his hoard-cofier secure — but think in heart his will 1 
 Never will the weary spirit stand the Wyrd against, 
 Nor the heart of heaviness for its help provide ; 
 Therefore this unhappy heart ' oft do Honour-seekers 
 Closely bind and cover in the coffer of their breast. 
 So it happed that I — of ^unhappy me ! 
 
 20. Far from friendly kinsman, forced away from home — 
 Had to seal securely all my secret soul, 
 After that my gold-friend, in the gone-by years, 
 Darkness of the earth bedecked ! Dreary-hearted, from that 
 
 time. 
 Went I, winter-wretched, o'er the woven waves of sea, 
 Searching, sorrow-smitten, for some Treasure-spender's hall, 
 Where, or far or near, I might find a nian, 
 Who, amidst the mead-halls, might acquainted be with love, 
 Or to me the friendless fain would comfort give. 
 Pleasure me with pleasures. 
 
 He who proves it, knows 
 
 30. What a cruel comrade careful sorrow is to him. 
 
 Who in life but little store of loved forestanders has ! 
 
 His the track of exile is, not the twisted gold. 
 
 His the frozen bosom, not the earth's fertility ! 
 
 He the Hall remejnbers then, heroes, ajid the treasure-taking, 
 
 How of yore his gold-friend, when he but a youngling was, 
 
 Customed him to festal days ! Fallen is all that joy !- 
 
 O too well he wots of this, . who must long forego 
 
 All the lore-redes of his Lord, of his loved, his trusted friend, 
 
 Then when sleep and sorrow, set together at one time, 
 
 40. Often lay their bondage on the lonely wretched man. 
 And Jt seemeth him, in spirit, that he seeth his man-lord, 
 Clippeth him and kisseth him, on his knee he layeth 
 Hands and head alike, as when he from hour to hour, 
 Erewhile, in the older days, did enjoy the Gift-stool. 
 Then the friendless man forthwith doth awaken. 
 And he sees before him only fallow waves. 
 And sea-birds a-bathing, broadening out their plumes ; 
 Falling sleet and snow sifted through with hail — 
 Then the wounds of heart all the heavier are, 
 
 50. Sorely aching for One's-own ! Ever new is pain. 
 
 For the memory of kinsmen o'er his mind is floating. 
 With glee-staves he greeted them, gladly gazes on them — 
 These companionships of comrades swim away again ! 
 Of the old familiar songs few the spirit brings 
 Of these floaters in the air.i Fresh again is care 
 For the exile who must urge, often, oh how often. 
 O'er the welding of the waters his outwearied heart ! 
 
 1 1 take fleotendra to mean the hovering spirits of his comrades whom he 
 sees in the air. 
 
EARLY ENGLISH LITEEATURE 
 
 1 Wherefore I must wonder in this world of ours 
 Why my soul should not shroud itself in hlackness, 
 
 60. When about the life of earls I am wholly wrapt in thought. 
 How they in one instant gave their household up, 
 Mighty mooded thanes ! So this middle-earth, 
 Day succeeding day, droops and falls away ! 
 
 2 Wherefore no one may he wise till he weareth through 
 
 Share of winters in the world-realm. Patient must the wise man 
 
 he. 
 Neither too hot-hearted, nor too hasty-worded, 
 Nor too weak of mind a warrior, nor too wanting in good 
 
 heed. 
 Nor o'erfearful, nor too glad, nor too greedy of possessions. 
 Never overf ond of boasting till he throughly know himself. 
 70. Every son of man must wait ere he make a haughty vow ' 
 Till, however courage-hearted, he may know with certainty 
 Whither wills to turn its way the thought within his heart. 
 
 A grave man should grasp this thought — how ghostlike it is 
 When the welfare of this world all a-wasted is — 
 Just as now, most manifold, o'er this middle-garth. 
 Walls of burgs are standing by the breezes over-blown. 
 Covered thick with chill frost, and the courts decayed. 
 Wears to dust the wine-hall, and its Wielder lies 
 Dispossessed of pleasure. All the peers are fallen, 
 80. Stately by the ramparts ! War hath ravished some away. 
 Led them on the forth-way ; one the flying ship has borne 
 O'er high-heaving ocean — one the hoary wolf 
 Dragged to shreds when dead ! Drear his cheek with tears. 
 One an earl has hidden deep in earthen hollow.* 
 
 So the Maker of mankind hath this mid-earth desert made, 
 Till the ancient Ogres' work idle stood and void 
 Of its town-indwellers, stripped of all its joy. 
 
 1 Now the motive changes; it is no longer Ms personal grief that disturbs 
 him the most. It is the sorrow of the whole world ; how and with what temper 
 it must be met; and yet of what little use is any guard against the misery. 
 Wyrd has its own way ; and the Winter Weather is its image. 
 
 2 He turns to sketch the temper of mind which is best fitted to combat with 
 this incessant Pate, and there is no better portrait of the steady mean of the 
 best English nature. Settled, secure in courage between excess and defect, not 
 moving till his plan is made, but ready then to face all consequence. This is 
 not quite the Happy Warrior at Wordsworth, but it may well be compared 
 with that image of a hero. 
 
 8 This refers to the custom of standing at the great feast of the year and 
 taking vow to perform some valiant deed before the year shall close. Many 
 troubles came on men who, drunk or excited, swore that of which next day 
 they repented; and it is on such overweening vows that the story of some Sagas 
 is built. 
 
 * These are the various kinds of death, — death on the war-path; death on a i 
 sea-expedition, that is, death in a foreign land (Fugel is the war-ship) ; death, 
 when outlawed, by the wolf ; death in old age ; and the earl weeps when he 
 buries his friend in the barrow because he has not died in battle,— one of the 
 pagan touches in the poem. 
 
XXII THE ELEGIAC POEMS 367 
 
 Wtoso then this Wall-stead ^ wisely has thought over, 
 And this darkened Life deeply has considered, 
 90. Sage of soul -within, oft remembers far away 
 
 Slaughters cruel and uncounted, and cries out this Word, 
 ' ' Whither went the horse, whither went the man ? Whither went the 
 
 Treasure-giver ? 
 What hefeU the seats of feasting 1 Whither fled the joys in hall ? 
 Ea, la ! the beaker bright ! Ea, la ! the bymied warriors ! 
 Ea, la ! the people's pride ! how perished is that Time ! 
 Veiled beneath Night's helm it is, as if it ne'er had been ! " 
 
 Left behind them, to this hour, by that host of heroes loved. 
 Stands the Wall, so wondrous high, with worm-images adorned ! 
 Strength of ashen spears snatched away the earls, 
 100. Swor& that for the slaughter hungered, and the Wyrd sublime ! 
 See the storms are lashing on the stony ramparts ; 
 Sweeping down, the snow-drift shuts up fast the earth — 
 Terror of the winter when it cometh wan ! 
 Darkens then the dusk of Mght, driving from the nor'rard 
 Heavy drift of hail for the harm of heroes. 
 
 AH is ivX\. of trouble, all this realm of earth ! 
 Doom of weirds is changing all the world below the skies ; 
 Here our fee ^ is fleeting, here the friend is fleeting, 
 Eleeting here is man, fleeting is the kinsman ! 
 110. All this earth's foundation is an idle thing become.^ 
 
 Epilogue 
 
 So quoth the sage in his soul as he sat him apart at the runing.* 
 Brave is the hero who holdeth his troth : nor shall he too hastily ever 
 Give voice to the woe in his breast, before he can work out its cure, 
 A chieftain, with courage to act ! O well 'tis for him who comfort doth 
 
 seek 
 And grace from the Father in Heaven, where the Fastness stands sure 
 
 for us all. 
 
 THs is the last and finest of these elegies, pagan in feeling, 
 and, it may be, built on some pagan original; but it is not 
 more pagan than many of the Biddies of Cynewulf, half of 
 ■which seem to me also to belong to this early part of the 
 eighth century, and to have been written when the young poet 
 
 1 A place where walls had been, a ruined burg. ^ Goods, property. 
 
 8 This is the end, and the last line clinches the subject of the poem with a 
 fine climax of passion. Then comes the Epilogue, the addition of the more 
 Christian poet who found and edited the earlier work ; he has nothing original 
 to say. He only repeats, a mere editor, the motive of the lines 66 and 70. 
 It is true we may grant him the contrast he makes between the Fastness in 
 Heaven — the city which hath foundations — and the wasted and passing for- 
 tresses of earth described by the poet. 
 
 * That is, in secret counsel with himself ; or is it possible that the origmal 
 was really written in runes ? 
 
368 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 was living at the court of some lively ^theling, riding, war- 
 ring, singing, making love, — one of those semi-heathen Bo- 
 hemians with a Christian education of whom I have spoken. 
 
 The Biddies are contained in the Exeter Book, not together, 
 but in three separate divisions. The manuscript appears to 
 contain ninety-five of them, but, as generally reckoned, we 
 have only eighty-nine, though there were probably a hundred. 
 It was the custom of riddle-writers to make a century of them. 
 Symphosius made a hundred, so did Ealdhelm. Tatwine, Arch- 
 bishop of Canterbury, only composed forty, and Eusebius, of 
 whose life we know nothing, completed the collection of Tat- 
 wine up to a hundred. Boniface and others wrote a few, but 
 they are chiefly of a sacred character. These were all written 
 in Latin verse, and vary from four to twenty lines. Ealdhelm, 
 however, who treated his subjects with more fancy, wrote 
 many of a much greater length. What sort of thing a riddle 
 of this time meant is sufiB.ciently plain from the examples 
 already given. 
 
 The collection in the Exeter Book is, with the exception of 
 one riddle, in English verse, and at least half of it is worthy 
 of the name of literature. Symphosius, Tatwine, Eusebius, and 
 Ealdhelm are used by the writer, and since he makes use of 
 them all, he could not have written earlier than the eighth 
 century. The Eiddles are of various lengths, from four to 
 over a hundred lines. The greater number of them escape 
 from the Latin convention, and are as English in matter and 
 feeling as they are in verse. Even when they closely follow 
 for a line or two the Latin original, the translation takes an 
 English turn, as if the English verse and words compelled a 
 change of thought and sentiment. Wor is this the only differ- 
 ence. The writer has the poetic faculty of which his models 
 are destitute, and his work is as superior to theirs in concep- 
 tion of each subject, in impersonation of it, and in imagination, 
 as Shakspere's Hamlet is to its precursor. Those who state 
 that these riddles are merely imitations can either not have 
 read them, or, having read them, are unable to distinguish be- 
 tween what is poetry and what is not poetry. Their excel ence 
 is not however uniform. Some are poor and meagre, and these 
 are chiefly those which follow the Latin most closely. Others 
 are of an extraordinary fine quality, as, for example, those on 
 the storms and the weapons of war. It is more than probable 
 then that various writers shared in their composition ; but it 
 is also plain that there was one man of youthful and vigorous 
 imagination, and of an original personality, who, having a poet's 
 love of humanity and of nature, made a great number of them. 
 
THE RIDDLES 369 
 
 Who this man -was is still a subject of discussion. Leo, in 
 1857, declared that the solution of the first Eiddle was the name 
 of Cyne-wulf. As he had written his name in runes in other 
 poems, so here, at the head of the Biddies, he -expressed it 
 enigmatically, following the sound and not the spelling of his 
 name. Dietrich disagreed with this explanation, but neverthe- 
 less maintained the authorship of Cynewulf. The eighty-sixth 
 Eiddle, which concerns a wolf and sheep, was related, he said, 
 to Cynewulf ; and the eighty-ninth, which he explained as the 
 Wandering Singer was Cynewulf himself. This evidence of 
 authorship, resting on a riddle of great obscurity and on ques- 
 tionable assumptions, is of extreme tenuity, and Trautman and 
 others have bluntly thrown it aside. Professor Morley also is 
 satisfied that the answer to the first Eiddle is the " Christian 
 Preacher," that the eighty-sixth means the "overcoming of 
 the Devil by the Lamb of God," and that the eighty-ninth 
 means the " Word of God." These answers, in which we are 
 rather overwhelmed with Christianity, make an end, he sug- 
 gests, of all the supposed evidence that Cynewulf was the 
 writer of the Eiddles. Each critic argues himself into faith in 
 his own rightness, but the fact is that no conclusion is possible 
 at present. I believe myself that Cynewulf was the writer of 
 the greater number of the Eiddles, and that they were written 
 at different periods of his life, but the grounds for this belief 
 are vague. It is clear, I think, that their writer was a wander- 
 ing singer at one time of his life, that he had fought as a war- 
 rior, that he had sailed the seas, that he knew well a rocky and 
 storm-lashed coast, that he had seen many phases of religious, 
 social, and domestic life, that he had lived with the rich and 
 the poor, with the ecclesiastic and the war captain. Any poet 
 might have had all these experiences as well as Cynewulf. 
 But we know of Cynewulf, and we know that he did once belong 
 to a noble's court, and that his youth was healthy and gay ; 
 that he was a singer of songs, and that the probability is that 
 he wandered as a poet from court to court, from village to vil- 
 lage, from monastery to monastery. It is also plain, from 
 passages in Guthlac and in the Elene and the Christ, that Cyne- 
 wulf knew the seas and knew about war. It is not absurd then, 
 even if we give up the first and last Eiddles as evidence for 
 Cynewulf's authorship, to think that the Eiddles belong to him. 
 Moreover, there are certain parallel passages between some of 
 them and the authentic works of Cynewulf which, not only in 
 wording, of which I think little, but in sentiment, of which I 
 think much, might lead one to infer that they were written 
 
370 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap, xxii 
 
 by Cynewulf. These grounds are, however, only literary, and 
 literary persons alone are likely to receive them as amounting 
 to probability. Nor am I at all anxious to prove the point. 
 What is important is not who wrote the poetry, but of what 
 kind the poetry is. I hope I have made it pretty clear in pre- 
 vious chapters, not by criticism, but by examples, that the 
 writer, whoever he was, had not only talent, but some genius ; 
 nor do I hesitate to say that some of the most imaginative 
 Anglo-Saxon poetry we possess is contained in about a dozen 
 of the Riddles. I do not think I need dwell here on their 
 range of natural description, or on any of their special charac- 
 teristics. Those who have read what I have given of them in 
 the chapters on the " Settlement," and the " Sea," can indulge 
 in and supply their own criticisms. The Riddles given in those 
 chapters are, however, on noble subjects, belonging to Nature 
 and War and Wisdom ; things fitted for the hearing of the gray- 
 haired prince, the warrior, and the monk. There are a number 
 of others, of which I have not written, which were made for the 
 villagers and the ruder sort ; to fit the other end of society. The 
 common animals of the hamlets — the ox, the dog, the hens, the 
 swine ; the common things in use — the cowhide, the leathern 
 bottle, the wine-vat, the onion, the one-eyed garlic seller, and 
 the fools who are led astray by the night — are celebrated by 
 this manifold writer who had seen the world. It only remains 
 to say that there are a few of such primaeval grossness that 
 they indicate a young man's hand, and a coarse audience in vil- 
 lage or camp. It seemed to me once, that if he was afterwards, 
 as some think, the Bishop of Lindisfarne or even a monk — I do 
 not believe he was either — he would not have allowed tli,em 
 to exist. But it is probable that he could not have repressed 
 them. They were afloat, and were no doubt repeated from 
 mouth to mouth. They may not have been collected until after 
 the writer's death. Moreover, English folk, even the monks, 
 were never very prudish, and became less and less so as monas- 
 ticism grew corrupt , in Northumbria. Even Leofric, who, I 
 suppose, read the Exeter Book through before he gave it to his 
 Cathedral Library, did not erases, these riddles. 
 
CHAPTEE XXIII 
 
 CTNEWULF 
 
 We know the names of only two writers of Anglo-Saxon 
 poetry, and these two are Caedmon and Cynewulf. We know 
 that Caedmon was a Northumbrian of Whitby, but we do not 
 know whether he wrote any of the poems which bear his name. 
 It is different when we think of Cynewulf. Many believe him to 
 have been a Northumbrian, but we do not know this with any cer- 
 tainty. But we do know some of the poems he wrote ; he has 
 signed four of them with his name — Juliana, the Christ, the 
 Fates of the Apostles, and the Elene. There is a fifth writing — 
 the Riddles — which most persons think he has also signed with 
 his name. In the four first he signs in this fashion. He puts 
 the runes which spell his name into certain connected and per- 
 sonal verses in the midst, or at the end, of each of these poems ; 
 and Kemble was the first to discover that these runes, when 
 placed together, made up the poet's name. Owing to this 
 discovery it occurred, as we have seen, to Leo that the first 
 Eiddle contained in a charade the syllables of Cynewulf's 
 name, and that in this way the Biddies were also signed. 
 
 Attached to the four signatures, if I may call them so, there 
 are four personal statements in which something of his char- 
 acter and part of his life are vividly portrayed. Moreover, the 
 last riddle which I have translated in the first chapter is, if we 
 allot it to him, as vivid a description of himself as a young 
 poet, as the personal descriptions in the signed poems are of 
 himself as a religious man in old and middle age. We possess 
 then not only his name, but we can also realise him as a man ; 
 and he is not unlike some of our own poets, though so many 
 centuries have passed away. He is, for instance, as personal 
 as Cowper, and in much the same way. No other of the 
 Anglo-Saxon poets has this fashion of talking about himself, 
 and it is so unique, and the manner of it so distinct, that when 
 I find it in a poem which is not signed by him — in the Dream 
 of the Bood — it seems to me to be as good as his signature. 
 
 371 
 
372 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 Tlie question as to whether he was a Horthumbrian or not 
 has been elaborately argued to and fro, and Wiilker, wfbh all 
 these warring arguments before him, concludes that the matter 
 remains doubtful until further evidence, for or against, is sup- 
 plied.^ I have, however, a few suggestions to make in confir- 
 mation of my belief that he was a Northumbrian, or at least 
 lived in the North ; and I am not aware (though it is prob- 
 able enough) that they have been made before. The first is, 
 that if Cynewulf wrote the Riddles — and far the greater num- 
 ber of critics think he did — he was well acquainted with a 
 storm-lashed coast bordered with cliffs ; with the life and 
 business of sailors in their ships, and that the seas which he 
 knew were not only tempestuous but frequently weltering with 
 ice. It seems incredible that the writer of the riddles on the 
 Anchor and the Tempests, to say nothing of others, could have 
 lived inland in Mercia, or on the low-lying coasts of East An- 
 glia, or on the southern coasts of Wessex where ice was never 
 seen in the sea,^ and where seamanship in the eighth century 
 was at a very low ebb. The Christ is also full of sea allusions ; 
 the cliff-barrier between sea and land is once, at least, vigor- 
 ously seen; and the famous passage, translated at vbl. i. p. 256, 
 is written by one who had been a sailor, who knew the pains 
 
 1 A full discussion of the whole question will be found in Wiilker's Grund- 
 riss, pp. 157-164. 
 
 2 This welter of sea and ice which, frequently spoken of in Beowulf, is there 
 no doubt a remembrance of the Baltic frosts, is also spoken of in the Seafarer 
 and the Riddles, and other poems which belong, as I think, to Northumbria. 
 It would not be seen, I have said, on the Anglian or Wessex coasts, but it is 
 seen to this day on the Northumberland coasts, especially where the great 
 saud-flats extend far out to sea, and are covered daily by the tide. In the 
 course of a severe three days' frost, the sand-flats become one vast ice-field, 
 many hundreds of acres in extent and five or six inches in thickness. The tide 
 daily breaks this up and carries the broken masses about ; fresh ice forms on 
 the vacant parts, and this is again broken up, till, as the storm comes in, the 
 welter of ice and water is amazing. " Where, as happens in such extremity 
 of cold as we experienced " (and I quote from Abel Chapman's Bird Life of 
 the Borders, p. 165) " in the winter of 187&-79, and again in January 1881, 
 the frost continues unbroken for weeks at a time, the phenomena created by the 
 ice and tide are almost incredible save to those who have witnessed them. The 
 masses of detached ice, split up by their own weight into fragments of all sizes 
 and shapes and carried here and there by the currents, drive helter-skelter in 
 the tideway, and along the lee shores are thrown np into ridges and rugged 
 piles, extending for miles along the shore. Outside this glacial barrier of 
 stranded blocks, the floating floes, carried along by the strong tide currents, 
 grind and crash against each other, piling up table on table tiU they become 
 miniature icebergs, and form a spectacle such as few have seen outside the 
 Arctic regions." If this took place in Northumberland in 1881, what must it 
 have been in the eighth century, when the winters, owing to the vast extent of 
 Me forest land, were much colder than now, and the snowfall much heavier. 
 The Northumbrian poets saw this continually, and described it, but the Wessex 
 and Mercian folk did not see it at all. 
 
CYNEWULP 373 
 
 and longing of a seaman's life, and who spoke to men -who, 
 being themselves seamen, •would understand him. It is not a 
 passage -which a poet, writing in Mercia or Wessex, was likely 
 to have written. Again, if we allot the last part of the Outhlae 
 to Cynewulf, and we may do so with the greatest probability, 
 the supposition that he was a Northumbrian of the seacoast is 
 strengthened. The voyage over the fens is turned into a sea- 
 voyage. It is as if the poet knew nothing of the reed-feus, but 
 described what he did know — a passage by sea from one point 
 of the coast to another. If, again, we allow that one of his 
 school or he himself wrote the Andreas, the Northumbrian 
 origin of Cynewulf is so far strengthened. 
 
 The scenery of that poem closely resembles the coast-scenery 
 of the North. The writer was evidently a sailor ; there is even, 
 as I hold, a personal statement of this in the poem.^ No in- 
 land man, no Mercian, is likely to have written that voyage. 
 Moreover, I do not know of any place on the coast of Wessex 
 where a sea-poet was likely to write. Many such places did 
 exist on the coast of Northumbria — Whitby, Hartlepool, Jar- 
 row, Tynemouth, Lindisfarne, Coldingham, — all centres of 
 learning, and all in constant sea-communication. Many stories 
 in Baeda make us aware that sailing, and in rough seas, went 
 on continually along that coast. The atmosphere of the Christ 
 and the Elene, and of the end of Outhlae, to say nothing of the 
 Andreas, is as Northern as that of the sea-pieces in the Riddles. 
 An " atmosphere " is perhaps poor evidence, but it is of value 
 when it goes with other probabilities. Moreover, it is not such 
 weak evidence as it seems. One might say, for example, that 
 Tennyson could never have lived on the Northern coast. His 
 atmosphere is of the gentler lands and coasts below the Hum- 
 ber ; and I can no more conceive the Elene and the Biddies, 
 Outhlae and the Andreas, being written on the Southern coast 
 or inland, than I can conceive Maud being written at Bambor- 
 ough or Whitby. 
 
 The second suggestion is that we have no proof that any 
 school of native poetry existed either in Mercia or Wessex, 
 while we have plain proof that a good school did exist in Nor- 
 thumbria. The simplest probability then is that poems of so 
 high a class as the Christ, the Elene, and some of the Biddies, 
 arose in a country where native poetry had been practised and 
 nurtured for fully a century. 
 
 Thirdly, I make another suggestion as to the Northumbrian 
 origin of these poems of Cynewulf, by comparing the personal 
 
 1 Lines 498-499. 
 
374 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 sentiment of them with the historical conditions of Nor- 
 thumbria. All the personal portions are marked by regret and 
 melancholy, not only for himself and his sins, but for the state 
 of the world in -which he lived. He speaks in the Christ of 
 how a man should nourish his soul, " while this world, speed- 
 ing through its shadows, still shines for him, so that he lose 
 not, in this fading tide, the blossoms of joy." The time is 
 barren in which he lives. Life is " a dangerous stream of im- 
 measurable waves, and these are stormy oceans on which to 
 and fro we toss, here in this weak world, over the deep sear 
 paths." ' These might be only personal phrases referring to 
 his spiritual state ; but they take a more national significance 
 when we read, in the Elene and the Fates of the Apostles, how 
 wealth is fleeting under heaven; how all the treasures of earth 
 glide away like water, or pass like the wind which rushes 
 through the sky and then is shut in silence and in prison. 
 Even more remarkable are the expressions in the introduction 
 to Guthlac. "The glory of all the fruit of earth is smitten 
 with eld ; all the kinds of growth change away from loveliness ; 
 the latter tide of every seed is now weaker of virtue ; therefore 
 no" man may dare to hope — face to face with this world's 
 change — that the world will bring him any fair delight." ' 
 This note of retrospective melancholy, which is the undertone 
 of all these poems, does not suit the life men lived in Mercia 
 when .(Ethelbald and Offa, with only a short break of disaster 
 between them, lifted Mercia into prosperity and fame, from 
 716 to 796 ; nor does it suit the national life of Wessex after 
 the battle of Burf ord (754) . Wessex was then looking forward, 
 in fine fighting condition, active and young. Its position would 
 kindle a poet into hope rather than inspire him with a melan- 
 choly regret. But Northumbria was exactly in the state which 
 would be likely to produce the half-sad, half-despairing note of 
 Cynewulf, who finds all his joy, not on the earth, but in the 
 world to come. 
 
 This argument depends on the supposition that Cynewulf's 
 signed work was written in the latter half of the eighth century. 
 This is, however, generally confessed. We cannot place the 
 Christ and the Elene until twenty or thirty years after the 
 death of Baeda. We should have to place them even later if 
 we thought that Cynewulf was born about the date of Baeda's 
 death, as some persons have thought. I conjecture that he 
 
 1 Lines 1584H586, 850-856. 
 
 2 No doubt such phrases belong to all sermonising. But they do not occur 
 in the Caedmonian poems ; and, moreover, Cynewulf was, I beUeve, a layman. 
 
CYNEWtfLF 375 
 
 ■was bom twenty years or so before Baeda's death, that he 
 wrote the Biddies somewhere about 730 when he may have 
 been twenty-five years old, and that the date of the Christ and 
 the Elene varies from 750 to 780, when he may have been from 
 forty-five to seventy years of age. As to the forward limit of 
 their date, we need not discuss whether they belong to a time 
 after the reign of Alfred. Few persons, I imagine, hold that 
 view. The question is, when did Cynewulf cease to write ? 
 and I think he had done so before the first Viking incursions 
 on the coast of Northumbria. There is not a single allusion 
 to these terrible strangers, and, given a writer so personal as 
 Cynewulf, so sensitive to the sorrows of the world, it is very 
 strange, if he were then writing, that not a trace should be 
 found in his work of events like the storming of Lindisfarne 
 and Jarrow, which terrified all Northumbria and brought 
 horror to the heart of Alcuin far off upon the continent. 
 The argument, is stronger if we think that the Dream of 
 the Rood is Cynewulf's last poem. It is extremely personal 
 at the close, but not a word is there of the dreadful blow 
 which fell with so dire a threat in it on Northumbria in 
 793. I hold then that Cynewulf had ceased to write before 
 that year. 
 
 These are the suggestions that I make concerning Cyne- 
 wulf's date and his dwelling-place. It is easy to throw doubt 
 on his N orthiunbrian origin, but is very difiicult to prove that 
 he was not a Northumbrian. The probabilities point the other 
 way. As to the statement that his poems, being in the West 
 Saxon dialect, are most probably West Saxon, — it proves too 
 much. It would prove that all Anglo-Saxon poems are also 
 West Saxon, for they are all in that dialect ; and the further 
 statement that there is nothing in his language to testify to a 
 Northumbrian origin is not true, and if it were, might only 
 prove that the West Saxon translator was an intelligent and 
 clever fellow. 
 
 The next matter is his life and his character. What do we 
 know about them ? The character of a poet may be partly 
 inferred from his style, from his mode of seeing and thinking 
 of the things concerning which he writes, from the changes in 
 his writings as he grows older. But very little weight belongs 
 to such inferences unless we have some known foundation to 
 build upon. We do possess this in the case of Cynewulf. We 
 have four distinct revelations of his feelings and thoughts in 
 poems signed by himself. Inferences then which do not quar- 
 rel with these known things are, in this case, of some value, 
 
376 EAELY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 and th.e fact is that Cynewulf stands before us with some 
 clearness. 
 
 We know less of his life than of his character. The allu- 
 sions which concern his life are vague, and the temptation to 
 take other poems, like the Wanderer, to call them Cynewulf's, 
 to add their personal detail to his life, and to build up, in 
 theory, a complete biography, is very great. A series of 
 guesses, made by allotting to Cynewulf any poem in which a 
 few lines occurred to fit their theory, enabled some critics to 
 build up Cynewulf's life from his cradle to his grave. This is 
 an agreeable exercise, but it is not history. What we do know 
 I shall now put down in Cynewulf's own words, quoting the 
 passages of which I have spoken. They will tell us something 
 of his character and something of his life ; and whatever in- 
 ferences or additions to these I shall make shall be recorded 
 as inferences alone. 
 
 We have to begin with something of an assumption. I 
 assume that he wrote the Riddles. The proof that he wrote 
 them, which is derived from the supposed enigma on his name 
 in the first Eiddle and from the explanation of the last Eiddle 
 as the " Wandering Singer," is, as I said, not clear. But, for 
 other reasons as well as this, the critics in Germany and Eng- 
 land have, with few exceptions, accepted him as their writer. 
 If then they are his work, they tell us what he was as a young 
 man. It is plain he was a lover of nature and of animals ; that 
 nothing human was alien to him, and to such a degree that the 
 human impersonation of inanimate objects, which the form of 
 the Eiddle demanded, was especially easy to him and delight- 
 ful. He was a close observer and accurate recorder of all he 
 saw and heard ; imaginative also, and rejoicing in his imaginar 
 tion ; a natural poet to whom everything he saw was a sub- 
 ject ; moving (and here I must repeat a little) at ease among 
 rich and poor; as ready to verse a rude, even a coarse song, 
 for the peasant or the soldier as a lay of battle or of ancient 
 wisdom for the ^theling, the abbot, or the king ; loving praise 
 in the hall, and fond of gifts ; loving solitude also when the fit 
 came on, and hiding himself from men; having a clear con- 
 sciousness of his worth as a poet ; gay, ready for sports, riding 
 with the troops of young men ; indifferent to religion, but not 
 irreverent ; not much troubled with morality, and so little that 
 he looked back afterwards on his life as weighted with sins ; 
 sensitive, and one who felt friendship keenly, — such is the 
 picture we should be likely to make of the man who wrote the 
 Biddies, and much of it is borne out by the signed statements 
 
CYNEWULP 377 
 
 of the Christ and the Elene. When he recalls his youth in the 
 Elene, he speaks of the treasures, the appled gold, which once 
 were given him in the mead-hall, of his horse proud of its 
 equipments on which he measured the miles of the road, of his 
 joy and pride of yore, of his youth and its gaiety. 
 
 The time came when this careless happiness passed away 
 "like the hasting waves," he says, " like the storm which ends 
 in silence." Some overthrow happened, such as might easily 
 occur in the tempestuous anarchy of Northumbria ; and many, 
 taking the Wanderer to be written by him, say that the de- 
 scription of the exile's fate in it is Cynewulf's description of 
 what happened now. Such a fate may indeed have been his, 
 but we do not know. What we do know is that we find him 
 next in the bitterest sorrow, convinced, as men say, of sin ; 
 fear of the wrath of God lying heavy upon him, and so bitterly 
 smitten by remorse that his song-craft left him ; he was no 
 more a poet. Then he had a revelation of the redeeming 
 power of the Cross of Christ. Hope entered his soul, and I 
 believe, but cannot say for certain (this is one of the infer- 
 ences), that the Dream of the Holy Rood is his poetic account, 
 written in old age, of this moment of conversion. At any 
 rate, and here we return to the certain, the craft of song 
 returned to him with the beginnings of hope. God Himself, 
 he says, unlocked the power of poetry in his breast ; and the 
 first thing that he wrote was the Juliana} In that he is still 
 despondent ; little spring or life balances the remorse which 
 weighs upon him, and he implores all those who read his book 
 to pray for him. Here is the passage, and we see the man. 
 The runes, which I print in Eoman letters, and which have 
 only here the value of letters, spell the name Cynewulf.^ 
 
 1 1 feel inclined to think that the first part of Guthlac (A) preceded the 
 Juliana. 
 
 2 The Eunes used are, h : fe : -\. : M : F* : IS = ^ : 1^ : • C. Y. N. 
 E. W. U. L. F. Two only of the four passages which contain these runes 
 include the E. rune, the |VJ . These are in the Juliana and the Elene. It is 
 not found in the passages in the Christ and in the Fates of the Apostles. 
 Cynewulf then spelt his name in two ways, with and without the E. 
 
 These runes have in the Juliana only the value of the letters of his name. 
 They do no more than spell Cynewulf. But in the three other poems, they 
 stand not only for the letters of his name, but have also the meaning of the 
 runes themselves, that is, of the words by which the runes are named. These 
 meanings are to be read into the verses. When, for example, we read [ toglide'S 
 — L. ebbs away, we translate the rune p. into the name by which it is called, 
 into Lagu, water, and read, water ebbs away, and we do the same thing; for 
 all the other runes. f 
 
 Each of these three passages is then a kind of riddlmg charade on his name. 
 
378 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE Chaip. 
 
 "Great need have I," he says, "that this Holy One (Juli- 
 ana) should make help for me, when the two married ones, the 
 soul and body, the dearest of all, break up their kinship, and 
 my soul go out of my body on voyage to the unknown land, to 
 seek another shore, for sins done long ago." 
 
 703. Sorrowful is wandering 
 
 O ; and Tand N! He, the King, is wrathful, 
 God, of conquests Giver ! Then, beflecked with sins, 
 E and V and U must await in fear 
 
 and a runic puzzle. The meanings, or rather the words which name the runes 
 in all these three sets of verses, are as follows : — 
 
 C. stands for Cerie, the keen, the courageful warrior. 
 
 Y. stands for Ttfel, which means " as a masculine adjective, wretched ; or as 
 an abstract noun, misery." 
 
 N. stands for Nyd, necessity, hardship. 
 
 E. stands for Sh, horse. 
 W. stands for Wyn, joy. 
 U. stands for Ur, our. 
 
 L. stands for Lagu, water. 
 
 F. stands for Feoh, wealth. 
 
 These meanings fit all the three passages; that is, they are easily connected 
 with their context in all the passages. The same rune has the same meaning 
 throughout. 
 
 This unity of interpretation has been brought about by Mr. GoUancz. It 
 did not, in the case of four of the runes exist until his edition of the Christ. 
 
 G. was taken to mean sometimes Cene, keen, and sometimes Cen, a torch, 
 the name of the C. rune in the runic alphabets. Y. was taken to mean Tr, the 
 Norse name lor the Bow, by which name it is called in the Rune-poem which 
 was written in England after the Danish invasions, but, as this gave impossible 
 meanings to the text, it was said to signify Yrm'So, misery. W. was sometimes 
 taken to mean Wyn, joy, and sometimes Wen, hope. U. was the great diffi- 
 culty. Its name in the Rune Song is Ur, a bull, and some scholars thought 
 that Cynewulf took it in that sense. Others said that Ur meant property in 
 general (oxen being one of the chief sources of wealth). Others took it as the 
 adverb Ur, formerly ; but this adverb does not occur in Anglo-Saxon. These 
 are the divers meanings given to these four runes. It was important to get 
 the same meaning in all the three passages to each rune. That was not impos- 
 sible with C. and W. But it was thought to be impossible with regard to Y. 
 and 0. till the appearance of Mr. Gollancz's edition of the Christ, to which he 
 added an Excursus on the Oynewulf_ Runes. His explanation of the Rune Y. 
 as yfel, and of the Rune U. as equivalent to Ur, our, noster (he discovered 
 Ur glossed as noster in a Runic alphabet), has, I think, settled the question. 
 These explanations fit in with the context in all the three passages. 
 
 When I originally wrote this chapter, this note did hot exist, and all the new 
 information contained in it is taken from this Excursus in Mr. Gollancz's book, 
 an early copy of which he was kind enough to send to me. I had also, follow- 
 ing the greater number of critics, translated the Y. and the U. runes by YrmtSo 
 and by Ur in the sense oi formerly, and the C. rune in the passage in the Elene 
 by Cen, a torch. I was now compelled, while the book was going through the 
 press, to rewrite this chapter and the translations, so far as they were affected 
 by the new meanings given by Mr. Gollancz to these runes. However, when it 
 was done with the help of his discovery, I felt all the satisfaction a person feels 
 who, long tossed on an uncertain sea, finds himseU at last on firm land. Those 
 who wish to pursue the subject further, and to see it thoroughly penetrated, 
 will do well to obtain Cynewulf s Christ, edited by Israel Gollancz and pub- 
 lished by David Nutt, in the Strand, London. 
 
CYNEWULF 379 
 
 "What, their deeds according, God will doom to them 
 For their life's reward ! L and F are trembling, 
 Waiting, sad with care. Sore I now remember me 
 Of the wounds of sins wrought by me of old. 
 Or of late within the world. 
 
 " Weeping, I mourn them with tears. All too late I shamed 
 me of my evil deeds ; while as yet body and soul voyaged in 
 health together on the earth. So I pray that every man, who 
 shall read this song of mine, may think of me and ask of God 
 that He, the Helm of Heaven, may bring me help in that 
 great Day." This is the personal cry in the Juliana, and it is 
 made more personal by his appeal for prayer to his hearers. 
 
 In the Christ, which is the next poem we know to be his, 
 this note of melancholy continues, but with a difference. He 
 is still hard pressed with the result of ancient wrong-doing. 
 " How are we troubled," he cries, " through our own desires ! 
 Weak, I wander, stumbling and forlorn. Come, King of men, 
 tarry not too long ; we need thy mercy that we may do the 
 better things." But there is also another note — the note of 
 peace almost attained, of a modest and chastened joy, and 
 these two mix their music, like life and death, throughout the 
 poem. The personal passage in which he records his name in 
 its runic letters belongs to his sorrow. He is looking forward 
 to the coming of Christ to judgment, and fear holds him for a 
 time. " I dread," he says, " the sterner doom, because I did not 
 keep faithfully what in books my Saviour bade me ; therefore 
 shall I see terror and vengeance for my sin, as full well I know." 
 
 797. Then the Courage-hearted quakes, when the King he hears 
 
 Speak the words of wrath — Him the wielder of the Heavens — 
 Speak to those who once on earth but obeyed him weakly. 
 
 While as yet their Teaming pain and their Need most easily 
 Comfort might discover. 
 
 "These shall await their judgment;" but he has now 
 turned from his own fate to the overthrow of all the earth, com- 
 paring its ancient destruction by a flood of water to its coming 
 destruction by a flood of fire, — and into three of the words he 
 sets the remaining letters of his name, omitting the E — 
 
 805. Gone is then the Winsomeness 
 
 Of the Earth's adornments ! What to Us as men belonged 
 Of the joys of life was locked, long ago, in Lake-flood,^ 
 All the Fee on earth. 
 
 1 Lake-floods, is Lagu, and means the great water of the Flood ; but I have 
 kept the word Lake, in order to retain the letter L. in Cynewulf 's name. 
 
380 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 Thus he records his name in a passage as sad as that in the 
 Juliana. But a change, a progress has taken place in his 
 mind ; the sadness is no longer unrelieved. Only a few lines 
 farther on, at line 851, occurs that lovely strain (translated 
 vol. i. 256) in which he describes the voyagers upon Life's sea, 
 and how, " at last, after the frightful stream of overwhelming 
 waves, help came, and the Spirit-Son of God led us into the 
 haven of salvation which the Heavenly Pather had outspanned 
 for us." Peace and holy hope had then entered his heart, and 
 the close of the Christ is a triumphant song of the bliss of 
 those who hunger and thirst no more. So far then, without 
 any theory, we may see into the story of his heart. With 
 this new restfulness and comfort the note of the Phoenix 
 agrees. The Phoenix is an unsigned poem of Cynewulf's, writ- 
 ten, it is most likely, after the Christ. In it he has passed 
 from doubt and fear into a rapture of faith. Passage after 
 passage is full of that lyric joy which, men tell us, belongs, at 
 least in the early days of that bright conviction, to those who 
 feel themselves saved. " The Lord of Victories we shall see " 
 — so ends the Phcenix, — "world without end; and with laud 
 perennial sing praise to Him, happy with angels. Hallelujah ! " 
 
 Between the Christ and the JElene I am inclined to place the 
 Fates of the Apostles, and I should still give it this position, 
 even if it be, as Mr. Gollancz suggests, the epilogue to the 
 Andreas. The personal passage in that poem containing the 
 poet's signature, conjectured long since, by Wiilker, to exist, 
 was lately discovered at Vercelli by Professor Napier. Cyne- 
 wulf has said to his readers, alluding to the runes he is going 
 to insert : " Here may find out the wise in forethinking, whoso- 
 ever joyeth him in songs, what man it is that wrought this 
 lay." The runic letters of his name now follow, but not, as in 
 the other poems, in order. They begin with F, the last letter 
 of his name ; W, U, and L follow ; then come C and Y. 
 "Wealth (Jfeoh) stands at an end; earls enjoy it on earth, 
 but they and it cannot abide together in this world's life. 
 Joy (Wyn) shall fall away; our (Ur) joy upon the earth. 
 Then drop asunder the fair trappings of the body, as Water 
 (Lagu) glides away." The next two lines contain C, and Y, 
 but N has been obliterated. Mr. Gollancz restores them thus. 
 " Then the bold warrior (Oene) and the afilicted wretch ( Yfel) 
 shall crave for help in the anxious watches of the night, but 
 Destiny (Nyd) o'errules, the king exacts their service." 
 "Now thou canst tell," Cynewulf goes on, "who has here 
 made himself known to men." Then he repeats the cry in 
 
CYNEWULF 381 
 
 the Juliana. He asks again for prayer ; for " I must, hence- 
 forth, alone, search out my long home, a land lying where I 
 know not. Strange dwellings are they, that land and that 
 home ; strange to me, strange to all, save we hold fast to the 
 Spirit of God. All the more zealously let us cry unto God, 
 praying for a home in the height where the King of Angels 
 granteth the spotless an unending meed. ISTow for ever His 
 praise be great and His might abide ever-youthful, everlasting, 
 over all the universe." Thus the strain of regret for the fad- 
 ing of the world is again mingled with Cynewulf's higher 
 strain of faith. 
 
 This passage leads us on to another personal passage in the 
 Elene. It is like a rough sketch of the completed picture in 
 the Elene; just as the use of the heroic manner and the words 
 of Sagadom in the introduction and body of the Fates of the 
 Apostles are, as it were, a trial beforehand of the new heroic 
 manner and verse which he was to use in the Elene. Indeed, 
 it is this double impression of a " study," as it were, for more 
 finished work which induces me, in spite of its weakness and 
 dulness, to place the Fates of the Apostles here, so late in Cyne- 
 wulf's life. Otherwise it is scarcely credible that its conven- 
 tional verse could be written between the Christ and the Elene, 
 when Cynewulf was at the zenith of his power. If it be right 
 to place it here, it must have been written to order, and at a 
 time when he was depressed or ill ; and such strange descents 
 in force and imagination are not uncommon in the history of 
 poets — men who are an uneasy sea, ebbing and iiowing, none 
 knoweth why. Fluctuation is everywhere written in Cyne- 
 wulf's work.' 
 
 But when we get to the Elene we are in the presence of a 
 poet whose last known work, written, as he tells us, when he 
 was advanced in years, was done with his full power, and in a 
 new fashion of thought and verse. Yet there is little of old 
 age in it. The spirit of it is almost as young as that of the 
 Biddies. He uses, with fuller power and with more art than 
 he has before done, the quick-hammering strains of the short 
 
 1 1 leave this as it was -written, because I am not sure that I can as yet agree 
 with Mr. GroUanoz that the Fates of the Apostles is the epilogue to the Andreas, 
 and therefore that the Andreas was written by Cynewulf. I wish I could at 
 once confess that he is right, for then the difficulty of the dulness of the Fates 
 at this time of CynewuU's life, would no longer exist. The Fates would then 
 appear only as a tag to a brilliant piece of work like the Andreas done with 
 CynewuU's full power. No one would then ask that the epilogue should be as 
 gond as the poem it follows; we should judge the Fates of the Apostles from 
 quite a different standpoint. 
 
382 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 epic line. He uses, with the greatest freedom, the old saga- 
 phrases of warfare by land and sea; and in order to use them, 
 he leaves his original behind and invents the course of the 
 battle with the Huns and the expedition to Greece. It is as 
 if he had received a new impulse of song, as if a fresh range 
 of work had opened for him. Instead of becoming less the 
 artist as age grows on, he becomes more the artist. 
 
 This is a curious point of character, and I have a theory con- 
 cerning it which, if it be true, illustrates the biography of 
 his soul. As long as he was troubled in mind about his sins, 
 lately joined to the band of converted sinners, he kept his 
 poetry clear of all the heathen phrases, of all the forms of 
 heroic poetry ; and this may have been urged on him by the 
 pious who dreaded his relapse. But when his soul was fully 
 at rest, as we leave it in the Ohrist, his original bardic nature 
 resumed its sway. Certain now of God's love, full of faith in 
 redemption, he is no longer afraid to use the phrases about 
 war and the passion of war which his forefathers used. He 
 no longer limits his inventiveness to sacred things, nor fears 
 to let his imagination play at ease. The heathen ornaments 
 and illustrations, the epic manner of Beowulf, are now brought 
 in to enliven Christian stories. It is as if the old man loved 
 to snifE again the breath of pagan war, as if the very sound 
 of the stock words used by the Sc6p in a song of battle, had 
 pleased him as much as they pleased him in his youth. This 
 is a wonderful resurrection, and the Elene is written in the 
 air of its morning. This theory of an artistic change in Cyne- 
 wulf's life is made more probable if we allot the Andreas to 
 him. That poem is even bolder than the Elene in its use of 
 heroic terms, in its free play of the imagination on the sub- 
 ject matter. It is full of the freshness of a new youth, of an 
 unconventional pleasure in a new artistic world ; and it is 
 more individual, more English, more frank than even the 
 Elene. It is, if it be Cynewulf's work, the poem of a man 
 who had found new powers in himself, and was enchanted to 
 find them, and to use them. There comes a time in an artist's 
 life when he has learnt to manage his tools so easily, after 
 long labour, that he attains almost automatic facility in execu- 
 tion. Then, since he has no need to give much trouble to 
 execution, ideas stream in upon him in a flood, and he is able 
 to do what he likes with them. Joy and freedom and force 
 fill his soul. He renews his youth, but he has the power to 
 embody ideas fully, a power his youth had not. And this, 
 perhaps, was Cynewulf's now. 
 
CYNEWULF 383 
 
 It is quite in accordance with this theory that the personal 
 epilogue of the Mene should tell us how he came to write the 
 poem, and that it should recapitulate his life, first in simple 
 verse, and then in a riddling representation under the Eunic 
 letters of his name. 
 
 " Thus I," so he begins, " old and ready for death in this 
 frail tabernacle " — 
 
 1237. Craft of words have woven, wondrously have culled them out 
 Over it, and o'er It thought, anxiously have sifted, 
 In the night, my thinking ! Never thoroughly did I know 
 Rightly of the Rood the truth, till a roomier knowledge 
 Wisdom had unveiled to the inwit of my soul, 
 Through a might majestic. 
 
 Then he recalls what he had been, how light came to him, how 
 the power of song returned ; God Himself restored it. 
 
 1243. I was stained with mis-deeds. 
 
 Snared with sius was I, with my sorrows tortured, 
 Bound with hitter thoughts, burdened sore with troubles. 
 Ere the Lord gave lore to me through a light-imparting 
 
 Form ; i 
 For my solace, now I'm old ! "lis a gift unshameable 
 Me the mighty Kiug has measured ; in my mind outpoured it ; 
 Dazzling has unfolded it, day by day for it made room ! 
 He my bone-cofEer unbound. He my breast-locker unwound. 
 He unlocked the singing art, that I used with all my heart. 
 With a will, the world within. 
 
 Then he recurs to his subject of the Cross of Christ, " the 
 tree of glory," and at first speaks of the story he has just told, 
 of the Invention of the Cross, and of his meditation of it. 
 " Not only once, but often, I had inward thinking of the tree 
 of glory, before I unveiled the wonder which enwrapt the 
 bright wood ; as in books, and in the course of history, and 
 in writings, I found all made known that concerned that bea- 
 con light of victory." 
 
 But now, at line 1267, as I explain the passage, he turns from 
 the story of Helena to speak directly of the story of his own 
 soul. He calls to remembrance his own Finding of the Cross in 
 his life ; it is of the hour of his conversion that he is thinking 
 when he says, "Till then I myself was crushed" — till the 
 hour I found the Eood in my heart. Here is the passage, and 
 
 1 1 suggest that this may mean the form, the vision of the Cross — that is, if 
 we take the Dream of the Rood to he written by Cynewulf ; but the words 
 might be translated, " in His luminous way," or " through light-bearing office." 
 
384 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 though, made obscure by the various meanings which may be 
 given to the runes in which he signs his name, the general 
 biographical direction of it is clear, and so is the state of his 
 soul. 
 
 1257. Aye till then was ill-content ! 
 
 Beaten by care-billows, G began to fail, 
 Though he in the mead-hall took of many treasures, 
 Of the appled gold. Y was wailing sorely ! 
 N was his companion ; harrowing was the grief he brought, 
 'Twas a Rune that cramped him,i when before him E 
 Paced along the mile-paths, proudly raced along, 
 Prankt with woven wires. W is weakened now ! 
 After years, my pleasure and my youth are passed away, 
 And my ancient pride ! U was in the times of old 
 Once a gleam of youth. Now the gone-by days 
 Par away have faded when the fated hour came — 
 Vanished, with delight of living, as when L doth fall apart, 
 Flood that follows flood F for every soul 
 Is but lent below the lift, and the land's adornments 
 Vanish all the welkin under, to the wind most like 
 When in sight of men, roaring, it up-steps the sky, 
 Hunts the clouds along, hurries raging on,^ 
 And all suddenly again silent is become. 
 In its clamp6d chambers closely prisoned now ; 
 Pinned with mighty pressure down.' 
 
 "So has all this world passed away," and so is Cynewulfs 
 melancholy note struck again; but he does not remain in it. 
 He passes on into triumph, and the Elene ends with a picture of 
 the righteous, victorious in beauty. 
 
 With the Elene the poems signed by Cynewulf come to an 
 end ; but there is yet another poem, the conclusion at least of 
 which I believe to be written by him, and this conclusion was, 
 in my opinion, the last thing he ever wrote. This poem is the 
 Dream of the Rood, and the questions regarding its authorship, 
 and the poem itself will be hereafter treated. At present, I 
 assume that the conclusion is his, and it closes then this sketch 
 
 1 Enge rune, "a narrow rune." A secret grief that bound his soul in a 
 prison of pam. The rune itself may be alluded to. 
 
 This IS the old imagination of the Wild-Hunt in the sky, which Grimm 
 traces back to the worship and name of Woden. But I think it is older far 
 taan Wodeu. 
 
 8 C. stands for Ceree. " The keen warrior began to fail " 
 
 Y. stands for Yfel. " The wretched one was wailing." 
 
 N. stands for Jfyd. "Need was his companion." 
 
 E. stands for Eh. " When before him the Horse." 
 W. stands for Wyn. " Joy is weakened now." 
 
 y. stands for Ur. " Ours was once tlie radiance of youth." 
 
 »«»; wfSf % n -^"•9"; 1^^ ^'^f ""^**«' '^^"^ apa>-t- Day after day, lite wave 
 after wave, faUs apart, the one from the other." j, uvonoYo 
 
 F. stands for Feoh. •• Wealth is but lent " etc. 
 
CYNEWULF 385 
 
 of his character. Cynewulf, looking back when all his poems 
 were finished, has resolved to place on record and to glorify the 
 Dream and the happy hour he had when first he knew Christ ; 
 and then, saying farewell to life, to express his joy in the 
 heaven whither he was going. " The Eood of the Lord which 
 I erst beheld " {aer sceawode) is a phrase which seems to say 
 that he is speaking of a vision seen at the beginning of his 
 Christian life. He tells that vision in the previous part of the 
 poem, either in his own words, or in editing an old fragmentary 
 poem on the same subject, and he tells it always in the past 
 tense. When the story is told he begins at line 122 his per- 
 sonal confession,- and the resemblance it bears to the conclusion 
 of the Elene, and the spirit of the verse, full at first of his 
 pathetic individuality, and then marked by his rushing and 
 exultant manner when he is engaged in hope or praise, are so 
 like Cynewulf's work, and so unlike the work of any other 
 Anglo-Saxon poet, that I cannot see why a critic should go 
 out of his way to allot the poem, or at least this conclusion of 
 it, to another writer. 
 
 The first lines of this personal confession are still retrospec- 
 tive. They tell how he felt immediately after the Dream, 
 which I place at the time of his conversion, and as its cause. 
 He felt " blithe of mood," for he was forgiven ; " passionate 
 in prayer, eager for death," — common feelings in the hearts 
 of men in the first hours of their religious enthusiasm. 
 
 122. Then I prayed me to the Tree, pleasant of my mood, 
 With a mickle eagerness, where alone I was 
 With a smallish company ; and my spirit was 
 Passioned for departure. 
 
 This is followed — so I read the passage — by two half -lines 
 which tell us that he did not die, as he then desired, but was 
 forced to live on through many days of sorrow — 
 
 Far too much have I endured 
 In all long-wearying days. 
 
 So far the verses seem retrospective. Now he turns to the 
 present and describes his actual state of soul — 
 
 126. Now the hope of life is miue 
 
 So that I may seek — and with service due, 
 All alone, and oftener than all other men, 
 Honour "Victory's Tree I Will I have to that, 
 Mickle in my mind ! I have made my refuge 
 Keady near the Rood.i 
 
 1 "/ have directed my defence to the Rood" is literal, but seems without 
 meaning. 
 
386 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap, xxm 
 
 Then he remembers all the friends who have gone before him, 
 and sings his death-song, waiting in joyful hope to meet those 
 he loved at the evening-meal in heaven. " Few are left me 
 now of the men in power I knew " — 
 
 131. Pew of friends on earth ! They have fared from hence, 
 Far away from worldly joys, wended to the King of Glory : 
 Now in Heaven they live, near to their High Father, 
 Worming in their glory ! And I wait me here, 
 (Living) day by day till my Lord His Rood, 
 Which I looked upon, long ago on earth, 
 From this fleeting life fetch my soul away : — 
 And shall bring me then where the bliss is mickle. 
 Happiness in Heaven 1 There the High God's folk 
 To the Evening-meal are set, there is everlasting joy ! 
 And He there shall place me where thenceforth I may 
 Dwell in (winsome) glory; well among the saints 
 In delight rejoice ! May the Lord befriend me. 
 Who upon the earth long ago has suffered 
 On the gallows-tree for the guilt of men ! 
 There He did release us, there our life He gave us. 
 And the heavenly Home. 
 
 At last, with a happy reversion to the earlier theme of 
 which he was so fond — to the deliverance of the Old Testa- 
 ment saints from Hades — he turns from himself, now going 
 home, to the triumphant home-coming of Jesus. 
 
 148. Hope was then renewed, 
 
 With fresh blossoming and bliss, for the souls who'd borne the 
 
 Are: 
 Strong the Son with conquest was, on that (soaring) path ; 
 Mighty and majestical,i when with multitudes He came, 
 With the host of spirits, to the home of God : — 
 He the Almighty King — to the Angels' bliss. 
 And to all the Holy Ones, who in Heaven long before 
 Had abode in glory — when the Omnipotent came home. 
 Where His lawful heirship lay — God the Lord of all ! 
 
 This is the close of the Dream of the Bood. It is the close, 
 in my opinion, of the work and life of Cynewulf. If it be 
 truly his, we bid him farewell, with thoughts satisfied in quiet. 
 His regret has merged in rapture. We see him pass away 
 " as sorrowful, yet alway rejoicing, as having nothing, and yet 
 possessing all things." 
 
 1 "Majestical " is successful, and " home " in the next line is literally 
 realm. 
 
CHAPTEE XXIV 
 
 THE SIGNED POEMS OF CTNEWULP 
 
 The Juliana is in the Exeter Book. In placing it first 
 among the poems of Cynewulf, after the earlier Eiddles, I 
 differ from the greater number of the critics. I cannot class 
 it after the Christ, for the Christ is written with all the poetic 
 power which Cynewulf possessed, and a poet in his power 
 does not fall back in a long poem into conventional work. He 
 may do a short poem like the Fates of the Apostles in a weary 
 manner, but not a long piece like the Juliana. I must then 
 place it where it is. 
 
 Its sources are the Acta S. Julianae, virginis, martyris. 
 Cynewulf has taken the legend and worked it up with some 
 care for unity of feeling and for accumulating development. 
 Juliana is led from triumph to triumph, till she receives the 
 crown of life in death. One episode after another carries on 
 the action, and these episodes are couched in dialogue. There 
 is a leading thought, a special aim, and these are conducted, 
 through such play and clash of passion as Cynewulf could 
 conceive, to the final purification of the heroine whose image 
 at last is left alone upon our minds. There is then a certain 
 art in the poem. But the art is not good, and the work is 
 poorly done. Abrupt changes, crude dialogue, wearisome 
 repetition, but by no means so wearisome as we meet in the 
 first part of Guthlac, disfigure Cynewulf's recast of the legend. 
 I have a fancy that he was unconsciously bored by the whole 
 matter, that Christian legend was so new to his genius that 
 he worked it mechanically. Nevertheless, there are certain 
 curious and clever things in the poem which I select in the 
 following account of it. 
 
 la'the days of Maximian there was a prince named Heliseus, 
 a cruel persecutor of the Christians, whose heart began to 
 love Juliana, daughter of Africanus, but she said nay to him 
 unless he would become a Christian. "No torments," she 
 
 387 
 
388 EAELY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 cried, " will make me waver from these words of mine ; " so 
 resolute is the woman ! It is on this quality in her character, 
 which Cynewulf sometimes makes into grimness, that he 
 builds all the action of the poem. Her contempt works bit- 
 terly in Heliseus, and he and Juliana's father meet, "lean 
 their spears together, sick with sins," and resolve to slay her 
 if she do not yield. The sketch of the two furious men, set 
 over against that of the delicate girl, is well conceived but ill 
 wrought. The father speaks to his child, at first with love, 
 and then with wrath. The dialogue which here is crisp, sets 
 forcibly before us Cynewulf's conception of the strong-hearted 
 heroine of the Cross. Yet he does not neglect to contrast with 
 this the charm and tenderness of her womanhood. Her father 
 calls her his " dearest daughter, sweetest to his imagination, 
 his only one on earth, the light of his eyes." The people 
 wonder at her beauty ; Heliseus himself, when she is brought 
 before him, breaks out, "Thou art my sweetest sunshine, 
 Juliana ; fulness of youth thou hast, infinite gifts of grace, and 
 bloom of loveliness." 
 
 But her charm, which Cynewulf means us to keep in mind, 
 for he brings it forth again at the close, now slips into the 
 background, and henceforth he paints only the Amazon of the 
 faith. Through one strife after another she passes, always firm 
 as rock, always triumphant, but fixed as fate. The glory of the 
 strength of the soul against wealth and physical pain, against 
 the force of the world and the allurements of love, against the 
 devil himself (always the art-motive of martyrdom), is seized 
 on and told by Cynewulf, often at wearisome length, but as it 
 were in a series of lays which, separately recited in the monas- 
 tic hall, must have been effective. She is tortured the whole 
 day and is victorious. Then she is thrown into prison, and a 
 quasi-epic character is given to the poem by the introduc- 
 tion of the supernatural. As she sits in her cell, where her 
 " eternal guard and companion is the Holy Ghost," one of the 
 devils, sent by the chief Fiend, appears to her in angel-shape 
 and bids her sacrifice to the Gods. " Whence art thou ? " she 
 cries ; " I am," he replies, " an angel of God, and I bid thee 
 save thyself." She answers by an impassioned prayer to God 
 that He will keep her true, and reveal to her what kind of man 
 is this — this "flier through the lift," who bids her fall away 
 from God. And a voice answers out of the sky — " Grasp at 
 the wicked one and liold him fast, until he tell thee all con- 
 cerning his works." And the devil is forced to stay and talk 
 all the night long, to his great trouble and dismay. Cynewulf 
 
xxiv THE "JULIANA" 
 
 follows his original closely enough, but a certain grim humour 
 steals into the account which seems to be his own. When the 
 devil has told many of the wrongs he has done to men, Juliana 
 is not content. " Say on," she says with endless curiosity, 
 " thou poor, uncleanly spirit ; " and the fiend, driven to distrac- 
 tion, " amazed with the woman," becomes impatient, breaks 
 out into complaint, " This is a bitter business," he says, " an 
 immeasurable oppression. I must tell all thou askest. Yet 
 were I to speak all a summer-long day, I could never tell all 
 my wickedness." Four times he despairingly tries to escape, 
 four times she forces him back and insists on his telling all 
 his crime. He tries compliment in vain. " No man was ever 
 so brave as thou, O holy One, to lay hands on me ; not one on 
 all the earth was ever so high-spirited; not one of the patri- 
 archs, nor yet of the prophets, could crush me as thou hast 
 done, nor bind in bonds the strength my father gave to me, 
 who sent me from the dark to sweeten sin to thee. Misery 
 has come of that, and heavy battle. Never shall I dare, after 
 this bitter punishment, rejoice amid my comrades for this voy- 
 age, when I shall bring back my wretched failure to my joyless 
 dwelling." 
 
 At this point, for, now it is day, and the governor summons 
 Juliana, the devil, bewailing and beseeching Juliana to let him 
 go, is let loose. " There is not a woman in the world," he 
 cries, " of greater spirit, nor among maids one mightier in 
 anger than thou art." The episode of her final martyrdom fol- 
 lows. She endures all, and every pain enhances her beauty. 
 At last Heliseus bids her be beheaded. The fiend returns at 
 this moment and sings a scornful song. Juliana glances at him, 
 and he takes to flight. " Woe is me, accursed," he cries, " a 
 second time she will disgrace me as before." Freed and vic- 
 torious she makes now her last speech to the people, and here 
 her softness and sweetness return. She is again the tender 
 maiden, the loving spirit. '' Peace be with you and true love 
 for ever," she says and dies. Immediately on her death fol- 
 lows the death of Heliseus, robbed of his life at sea among the 
 hungry waves ; and in the den profound of hell none of his 
 thegns received from him any more, on the benches of the 
 beer-hall, rings or appled gold. But songs of praise went with 
 the maiden's corse to the grave ; and with this contrast the 
 poem closes and is followed by the personal epilogue of which 
 I have already spoken. 
 
 The Christ is a poem of far finer quality. It is formed into 
 a whole. It is not a translation of a legend, it is original. It 
 
360 EARLY ENGLISH . LITERATURE chap. 
 
 has ail epic march, or something that resembles it. Cynewulf 
 has recovered his imagination, his freedom of movement, his 
 shaping power. His dignified manner has come upon him, 
 passion moves him, he rushes at times into an exalted strain, 
 and he does this with ease ; and he has sometimes even an 
 heroic manner both in pathos and joy. There is an immense 
 step between the Juliana and the Christ. 
 
 The Christ is contained in the Exeter Book, and it is the 
 first poem in that book. But several leaves are lost. At the 
 8a leaf the poem begins, and it comes to a conclusion at leaf 
 32&. We owe to Dietrich the proof that all the hymnic poems 
 in this section, which before his time were held to be separate, 
 and some of them by different writers, are one connected 
 whole, and written by one poet whose name is signed, con- 
 cealed in runic letters, in the second part. He arranged these 
 apparent fragments into their right order and said, " This is 
 one poem, and Cynewulf is its author." His divisions of the 
 poem were guesses. He had no opportunity of seeing the 
 manuscript. It has now been divided rightly by Mr. G-ollancz 
 in accordance with indicatioiis in the manuscript. Part first 
 celebrates the Nativity ; part second, the Ascension ; and the 
 third part, the Day of Judgment. The fiist ends at line 438 ; 
 the second at line 865. As to its sources, the first part follows 
 the Gospel of St. Matthew for the story of the Incarnation. 
 The second makes a free use of Gregory's homily on the 
 Ascension. (Homil. xxix.) The third relies, as Professor 
 Cook has shown, on the Latin Hymn — De die judicii, to which 
 Baeda refers in his treatise, De Metris. The 10th homily of 
 Gregory is also used in the second and third parts. But one 
 can scarcely say that these were sources ; they are, even when 
 whole passages are followed, rather assistances. The poem is 
 truly original, and originally conceived. It is the history, 
 I might say the epic, of salvation. 
 
 Though I have used the word epic in regard to this poem, it 
 is not an epic in any true sense of the word. It is more a 
 series of hymns, at least at the beginning, closed by choric 
 outbursts of praise. I fancy, however — for the third part is 
 much more continuously wrought than the first or the second 
 — that when the poet had written a number of these short 
 pieces, a larger aim dawned on him, and then fully rose in his 
 mind ; and that then he determined to work his three subjects 
 into a connected whole. If he went back for this purpose to 
 his earlier labours, he did not fulfil his purpose well. The 
 weaving together of the first part is not successful. The dif- 
 
THE "'CHRIST" 391 
 
 ferent pieces remain separate lays. In the second part the 
 two subjects — the Ascension itself, and the ascension with 
 Christ of the souls delivered from Hades into Heaven — might 
 easily have been made into a continuous narrative if Cynewulf 
 had thought of weaving them into one piece when he began. 
 As it is, they remain distinct, loosely and awkwardly bound 
 together. The third part shows, I think, that he conceived 
 the Last Judgment as a whole before he began to write it ; and 
 it is then, when this was finished, that I suggest he went back 
 and did his best to weld all the parts together, but without 
 a complete success. Nevertheless, of all Cynewulf's poems 
 the Christ is the weightiest, because in it he has made his 
 greatest struggle towards an artistic unity, and has best shown 
 in a sustained effort his .constructive power. It is, moreover, 
 essentially the work of a poet, though of a poet untrained in 
 composition. The rushing outbursts of praise — the lyrics of 
 the work — are poetry of a higher fervour than anything in 
 the Caedmonic verse. In these he reaches his nearest ap- 
 proach to a fine style ; and, as always with a poet, his style is 
 a revelation of his character. We seem to feel the man him- 
 self when, in the contrast so natural to an artist, this trumpet- 
 tongued piety and joy is succeeded by personal passages full 
 of pathetic regret, repentance, and humility. In praise and 
 prayer, in mournfulness and exultation, he was equally pas- 
 sionate. 
 
 The dramatic pieces are vividly represented, and the pic- 
 torial parts — the pictures of the ascent from Hades, of the 
 opening of the Last Judgment, of the deluge of fiame, of the 
 blazing rood streaming with blood and set up from earth to 
 heaven, of Christ pointing to it while he speaks, of the final 
 ascension of the good — are done with all the poetic force of 
 the writer of the riddle of the hurricane. I need scarcely draw 
 any further attention to the personal epilogue except to say 
 that no one who was not a true poet could have done it so 
 well. There is nothing more difficult in poetry than to reach 
 charm in a personal passage, and especially when it is set for- 
 ward, as it is here, in a form which is half a riddle. 
 
 The mutilated manuscript of the Christ opens happily 
 enough, by almost a fortunate chance. The broken^ first line 
 has only one word " cyninge " ; to the King. It is not of 
 course the title of the poem, but it would serve that purpose. 
 An invocation to Christ to comfort, preserve, and glorify His 
 own work, the Church, is preceded by an address to Him as the 
 Wall-stone — that is, the Corner-stone — 
 
392 EAULY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 2. Lo 1 Thou art the Wall-stone which the workmen once 
 From the work rejected 1 Well it Thee becometh 
 That Thou hold the headship of this hall of glory ; 
 And the broad-spaced walls of the flint unbreakable, 
 With a fastening firm, fitly knit together ; 
 That among the Earth-burgs all with sight of eyes 
 May for ever marvel ! 
 
 Master of Magnificence ! 
 Now through mighty wisdom manifest Thy proper work. 
 True-fast and triumphant-clear ! 
 
 So the poem begins. A prayer follows that the Euler who 
 holds the locks, who opens life, will pity His people and make 
 them worthy. We speak thus in our need, cries Cynewulf, 
 becoming personal ; " we who in prison yearn for the sunlight, 
 who must turn us to the narrow shore, cut off from our Father- 
 land." Then the Virgin and her miraculous conception of 
 Christ enter the poem, and immediately, in one of those lyric 
 outbursts for which the Christ is remarkable, Jerusalem the 
 holy city is addressed — 
 
 60. See ! O sight of Peace, sacred Hierusalem ! 
 
 Thou, of kingly thrones the choicest, Citadel of Christ, 
 
 Native seat of angels, of the soothfast souls 
 
 That for ever sit, they alone, at rest in thee, 
 
 In their splendours, singing joy. Never sign of stain 
 
 In that settled dwelling-stead shall be seen at all ; 
 
 But afar shall flee away every fault from thee. 
 
 All the curse and all the conflict. 
 
 As in the epic of Dante, Jerusalem is the centre of the universe. 
 "The wide creation and the roof of heaven look on it from 
 every side, and now the King of Heaven draws near to dwell 
 in it. Bliss He brings thee, loosen thy bonds ; He knows men's 
 straitened need ! " 
 
 At this point the dramatic dialogue begins, which may be 
 of some literary importance. It seems to be the first dawning 
 in our literature of the Mystery Play. I cannot but think 
 that this part of the poem was written to be recited in the 
 church, or in the market-place on a stage, and that the charac- 
 ters were taken by different persons. If so, we ought to look 
 on the next few lines with the interest which should gather 
 round the beginning of the English drama. The dialogue 
 passages in the Caedmonic poems are such as we are accus- 
 tomed to in epical verse. Here it is different. The characters 
 are dramatically disposed; a certain scenic effect is made for 
 their entrance, a choir seems to await them, as in the first lines 
 
xxtv tflE "CHRIST" 
 
 I translate, where Mary, coming into view, is hailed by the 
 dwellers of Jerusalem, and they call to her to tell her tale ^ — 
 
 71. In the glorious glory, hail I Gladness thou of women, 
 Loveliest of maids in the lap of every land, 
 That the ocean-rovers ever listened speech of, 
 Make us know the mystery that hath moved to thee from Heaven, 
 
 "Mary, ever full of triumph," answers' — 
 
 89. What is now this wonder at the which ye stare, 
 Making here your moan, mournfully a-wailing — 
 Son of Solima ; daughter thou of Solima ? 
 
 " Ask no more ; the mystery is not known to men ; but the 
 guilt of Eve is closed, the curse is overcome, the poorer sex is 
 glorified. Hope is won that men may dwell with the Father 
 of truth for ever." 
 
 A chorus to Christ follows this dialogue. "Hail, Earendel!' 
 sooth-fast, sun-bright ; Sunbeam that enlightenest all the tides 
 of time, come thyself, illumine those long since wrapt in dark- 
 ness. Thanks to the Lord triumphant that he willed to send 
 us himself." Then, turning to a favourite subject, the chorus 
 speaks of the souls that long waited for Jesus, bound in the 
 abyss, "weary, tormented thralls, worn with burning bitter 
 tears." And the poet, in his swift impassioned changes, im- 
 personates the souls in prison. They become the chorus. 
 "Come to us here," they cry, "sad captives in spirit, kingly 
 show forth thy mercy, Christ the Saviour ! Leave not so 
 great a throng behind thy going hence." Then the dialogue 
 begins again. Joseph arrives sad and troubled, on the scene, 
 and Mary turns to him — 
 
 164. Mary. Ea, la, Joseph mine, chUd of Jacob (old) ! 
 
 Kinsman thou of David, king of a great fame, 
 Must thou give up now grace so deeply set — 
 Let my love be lost ? 
 Joseph. Lo, this instant I 
 
 Deeply am distressed, all undone of honour. 
 
 1 Since I first wrote this passage I have seen Wiilker's note in his Grundriss 
 on the " Dramatische Bestrebungen " of the Anglo-Saxon poems, and though I 
 do not feel inclined to give up the idea that these hymns were sung in parts in 
 the church — which he himself conceives possible, — I think that all notion of 
 their being represented on a stage, or dramatised in any true sense of the 
 terra, must be given up. 
 
 2 Many previous lines concerning the miracle of the Incarnation weaken here 
 the dialogue. 
 
 3 Earendel. This means some brilliant star. Grimm suggests a connection 
 with Orvandeh-td. Orwendel's toe which, frozen as Thor carried Orwendel 
 through the sky, broke off. Thor threw it at the sky and it became a star. 
 
394 EARLY ENGLISH LIfERATURE chap. 
 
 " Sore speeches have I heard, insult to thee, mocking scorn of 
 me. Tears I must shed, yet God may cure " 
 
 174. Easily the anguish deep that is in my heart, 
 
 And console me sad ! Sorrow ! sorrow ! young girl ! 
 Maid Maria ! 
 Mary. Why bemoanest thou, 
 
 Criest now care-wearied ? Never crime in thee 
 Have I ever found ; yet thou utterest words — 
 As if thou thyself wert all thronged with sin ! 
 
 Joseph — somewhat indignant with this feminine turning of 
 the tables on himself (if this be the right allocation of the 
 dialogue) — answers, with a certain sharpness but with dig- 
 nity, that he has had already too much of bale from this child- 
 bearing, but that silence or speaking is equally ill to him. If 
 he speak, the daughter of David must die ; if he be silent, he 
 will have to live false-sworn, ill-famed, among the folk-men. 
 Maiy replies to this appeal in a speech of seventeen lines, with 
 which the dialogue closes ; nor is it in this form again re- 
 newed. It is as if Cynewulf wished to show his hand in this 
 kind of art, and then laid it by. What does follow is another 
 choric invocation which celebrates the begetting of Christ; and 
 using the story of the creation of light as an allegory of the 
 birth of Jesus, cries, " Come, Lord of triumph, graciously 
 visit us ; mercifully bless the earth " — 
 
 251. And the golden gates, that in gone-by days, 
 All too long of yore, locked together stood — 
 Order now to open, exalted Lord of Heaven ! 
 And then seek us out, through Thy very self a-coming 
 Meek to middle-earth ! Of thy mercies we have need ; 
 For the wolf accursed, beast that works In darkness, 
 Lord, thy sheep hath now scattered asunder, 
 Driven them devious, far. 
 
 " Save, us then from the Baleful One, from the Slayer of the 
 mind. Helm of all created things, free us from the Scather 
 of men ! " 
 
 The next canto celebrates the Virgin Mary, and takes, in 
 order perhaps to bind it up with the preceding, the motive of 
 the golden door, which here is made to mean Mary herself 
 through whom Christ entered humanity. " thou glorious 
 lady of this middle earth," so it begins. She is the ring- 
 
 The word in Anglo-Saxon glossaries is translated jvbar. Oynewulf used it to 
 signify Christ, and as he is here speaking of Jesus as descended from David, I 
 have no doubt he was thinking of the text in Rev. xxii., where Jesus says " I 
 am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star." 
 
THE "CHRIST" 395 
 
 adorned bride of heaven's Lord. The thegns of Christ, high- 
 est in heaven, name her Lady of the angel-hosts, and of the 
 tribes of men, and of those who abide in hell,; because she 
 brought her sinless maidenhood to God. Isaiah [Ezekiel] 
 spake of old concerning her. O'er all the land he looked and 
 saw where stablished stood 
 
 308. Glorious an Ingang I Gate immeasurable ! 
 All embossed it was with unpriced gems, 
 Wound with wondrous bands.i 
 
 Only God shall make these gates resplendent, and Christ close 
 them after Him for ever as with a key. We gaze on the Child 
 on thy bosom, plead for us with Him " ; and this hymn, as I 
 may call it, to the Virgin closes with another choric prayer to 
 Christ. 
 
 The fifth canto begins with an invocation to the Trinity ; 
 and there is a fine passage concerning the singing and the 
 flight around the throne of the praising Seraphim — 
 
 393. Ever and for ever all adorngd with the sky, 
 
 Far and wide they worship God the wielder of the world, 
 And with wing6d plumes watch around the Presence 
 Of the liOrd Almighty, of the Lord Eternal ! 
 All around the threne of God, thronging they are eager, 
 Which of them the closest may to Christ the Saviour 
 Plashing play in flight, in the garths of peaoefulness ! 
 
 And thus they sing — 
 
 403. Holy art Thou, holy, high Prince of archangels, 
 
 Thou true Lord of triumph. Thou art holy evermore ! 
 King of kings art Thou, ever dwelleth Thy dominion 
 Over men on earth ; and to all eternity 
 Worshipped wide and far. Lord of warrior hosts ! 
 For Thou hast full-filled all the field of earth and heaven 
 With Thy splendour, shield of fighters ! 
 Helm of all things ! in the highest, be to Thee 
 Everlasting welfare, laud upon the earth. 
 Shining midst of men. 
 
 And now this first part of the poem is closed by a prayer 
 that, with some feeling for art, refers back to the wonder of 
 the Incarnation with which it began, but which itself is noth- 
 ing but the same pious thoiights we have so often had before. 
 This repetition is so frequent in the Christ that I am more and 
 
 1 A nohle doorway, ae)>elic ingong. I have put this into the text because I 
 think that the writer had in his eye the cover of a great missal, as well as such 
 a church door as we see in Norway. 
 
396 EAKLY ENGLISH LITEEATIJEE CSaP. 
 
 more inclined to think that these tails at the end of the narrar 
 tive or dialogue passages were sung by full choirs in church, 
 by the listeners in the monastery halls, or perhaps by the 
 whole band of some mission expedition in town or village, 
 when the chief singers had first sung the narrative and dia- 
 logue. 
 
 The second portion of the poem is taken up with the Ascen- 
 sion and that which followed and preceded it. The beginning 
 links back to the Nativity, and then asks, with Gregory's 
 homily — " Let a wise man seek out how it happened that 
 though there were angels at the birth of Christ, yet they were 
 not arrayed in white garments." Now when the "great 
 leader gathered his thegns together at Bethany " before his 
 Ascension, they did appear in white robes. After this fan- 
 tastic question another half-dramatic dialogue begins. Christ 
 speaks, and the verses embody the words of farewell in the 
 Bible, with an addition such as would be made by a poet whose 
 people had lately been idolatrous, and who were even while 
 he wrote living in warfare. " Break the idols," Christ says, 
 " overthrow them, abhor them ; quench strife and hatred, sow 
 peace among men." Then the Angels come, the King departs. 
 Light glitters around his head, and the angels speak the first 
 words of a new dialogue. • 
 
 "Why do ye stay, why stand ye here, ye men of Galilee? 
 . . . The Lord has mounted upward to his native home, to his 
 Fatherland." The Apostles answer — 
 
 517. how fain would we in this fashion, with this band. 
 
 With this cheerful company, o'er the cover of the Heaven, 
 To the brightening Burg, bring the Lord along. 
 
 The reception into heaven naturally follows the Ascension, 
 and is slightly touched. The angels come to meet Christ; 
 immeasurable joy fills the Glory, and Jesus takes his high 
 seat, ruling in splendour mid-earth and the majestic host. So 
 ends line 557. The order of the poem now becomes- confused. 
 An episode is introduced which concerns the Harrowing of 
 Hell, an event which the legend always places after the Ees- 
 urrection, and not after the Ascension. I conjecture that 
 Cynewulf had these lines by him (11. 558-585), and that they 
 belonged to another poem, of which the Descent into Hell, in 
 the Exeter Book, may be a fragment. When he was refitting 
 the Christ into a whole, he inserted these lines which are full 
 of imagination, and took no particular pains to fit them prop- 
 erly into their place ; or he thought, perhaps, that they might 
 
THE "CHRIST" 397 
 
 represent a hymn sung in heaven after the Ascension. The 
 hymn would then describe the event, also an ascension, which 
 had taken place forty days before when Christ brought up to 
 Paradise the soiUs from Hades. Even if that be the case, the 
 passage is most unhappily built together. 
 
 The episode (11. 558-585) is really a choric hymn supposed 
 to be sung by the host of angels who come forth from the 
 gates of heaven on the day of the Eesurrection to meet and, 
 welcome the Old Testament saints as, rising from Hades, they 
 mount the sky with Christ. The scene is laid in mid-space. 
 The angels from heaven have met the ascending bands, and 
 when Cynewulf sees this mighty meeting in his vision, the 
 warrior wakens in him, and the speech the angelic leader makes 
 to his followers is such as a heathen chief might have made 
 to his Lord returning from war with the spoils of victory. 
 "Lo," the Angel cries, pointing to the approaching host of 
 Christ and the delivered souls — 
 
 558. See, the holy Hero Hell hath now bereaved 
 Of the tribute all that in times of old, 
 In that (lawless) war, so unlawfully it gorged 1 
 Overthrown are now, and in torment quick, 
 Hafted down and humbled ' in the Hell's abyss, 
 All the champions of the Fiend, cut off from their prowess ; 
 Those who strove with Him might not speed in battle 
 With their weapon-whirlings when the warrior king of glory. 
 He the Helm of Heaven's realm, had arrayed the war 
 Right against his ancient foes, with his only might. 
 Then he drew from durance, from the devilish burg, 
 This the dearest of all spoils, this unnumbered folk. 
 Lo ! the host itself here you gaze upon ! 
 Now the Saviour of all souls wills to seek the throne 
 Where is given grace to spirits,^ — He of God the proper bairn. 
 After his war-playing. 
 
 The speaker now turns from his own following to speak to 
 the souls who have come from Hades, and to welcome them ; 
 and then turns back again to look towards the gates of Heaven, 
 and bids them unclose. It is well imagined — 
 
 575. Forward now to friends, frankly march along. 
 With a gladdened heart ! 
 
 0, ye gates unclose. 
 He will unto you, He of all the Wielder ! 
 He the King into his city. He, Creation's Lord, 
 With no little army, now will lead his folk 
 To the joy of joys. 
 
 1 " Wills to seek the gilt-stool of spirits." 
 
398 EARLY ENGLISH LITEKATTJRE chap. 
 
 And the speecli ends with a proclamation of peace and of the 
 covenant of God with men. It is followed at line 686 by a 
 risumi of the whole matter of the poem up to the present 
 point, and this, I think, came originally after the 657 line 
 before the insertion of the hymn. There is a passage in it 
 which needs to be noted, because, while the alliterative stress 
 is carefully observed, each limb of the verse is set in rhyme. 
 "Every one," it says, "may now choose" — 
 
 591. As of Hell the scornful story, so of Heaven the noble glory ; 
 As the lightsome light, so the loathly night ; 
 Glory's rush of gladness, or of gloomy souls the sadness ; 
 As with devils all discord, so delight with God the Lord ; 
 Torment grievous with the grim, glory with the seraphim. 
 Either life or death 1 
 
 Therefore it is fitting to thank the Lord. " He gives us food 
 and the fulness of goods ; " 
 
 605. Welfare o'er the wide-land and a weather gentle, 
 'Neath the shelter of the sky ! Sun and moon alike, 
 Kingliest of the constellations, candles of the Heaven, 
 Shine on every man that on earth abideth ; 
 Dew and rain descend, and they draw abundance forth ! 
 
 But chiefly thanks are due to him of whom Job spoke, as of a 
 bird, and well : for he winged his way to the angels' home ; 
 and thence again, at one with the Spirit, flew down at Pente- 
 cost and gave gifts to men. And here intervenes a passage of 
 which there is a parallel in the Gifts of Men — a common 
 motive for poetry, which, treated by Cynewulf, may boast itself 
 of a finer poetic quality than is elsewhere shown.^ 
 
 664. Sage the way of speech that He sendeth unto one 
 
 To the memory of his mind through the spirit of his mouth — 
 
 Noble mastery of thought. Many, many things" 
 
 He can sing and say ; in his soul is fastened 
 
 Weighty wisdom's power ! Well another can 
 
 With his hand the harp awaken 'fore the heroes loudly, 
 
 1 The origin of these English descriptions of the various gifts of men has 
 been referred to the texts in 1 Corinthians concerning the gifts of the Spirit, to 
 the Homily of Gregoiy, and other sources. There was also, I think, an inde- 
 pendent heathen song on the matter. It is a subject which was sure to catch 
 the thoughts of men. Homer himself has seized it. "Hector" (says Poly- 
 damas, Iliad, xiii.), " thou art hard to be persuaded by them that would coun- 
 sel thee ; for that God has given thee excellence in the works of war, therefore 
 in council also art thou fain to excel other men in knowledge. But in no wise 
 wilt thou be able to take everything on thyself. For to one man God has given 
 for his portion the works of war, to another the dance, to another the lute and 
 song, but in the heart of yet another hath far-aeeing Zeus placed an excellent 
 understanding." — Leaf's Translation. 
 
THE "CHRIST" 399 
 
 Greet the glee-beam then. One the godlike law 
 May aright reveal. One the roaming of the stars 
 Tells — that wide creation. One the word men speak 
 Wisefully can write. War-luck on another 
 In the battle He hestoweth, when the band of shooters 
 Send the storm of darts o'er the shield's defence, 
 Winging- work of arrows. Bpldly will another 
 Urge the ocean-wood o'er the salt sea^stream, 
 Stir the surging deep. One the soaring tree 
 Can, though steep, ascend. One can smithy well 
 Steelfed sword and spear. One the spacious ways 
 Knows and all the plains' outgoing. So to us the Lord, 
 Bairn of God, His gifts on the grounds of earth divides. 
 
 The next two portions -whicli finish the "Ascension" are 
 both of curious interest: the first for its allegorical exposi- 
 tion,* in the mediaeval manner, of the text in Canticles ; the 
 second for its autobiographical detail, and for the sketch, the 
 little " study," as it were, of the final subject of the Last Judg- 
 ment. Of the allegorical six leaps of Christ I have already 
 spoken in chapter xi. "So must we men," it ends, "leap 
 from virtue to virtue to the highest height. Great is our need 
 of salvation, for the Accuser " — and the reference is to the 
 deadly arrow-flights of Korthern war — 
 
 764. Midst the folk of God forth is sending now 
 From his bended bow the embittered shaft. 
 So that sudden shot let us stand on guard against, 
 Lest the point of poison, bitter-piercing dart, 
 Stormer of the shield, sudden-coming craft of foes, 
 Break in under the bone-locker. Baneful gash that is, 
 Lividest of wounds ! 
 
 And now begins the last portion of the "Ascension." It 
 falls into three divisions. The first, while it says that no one 
 need fear the shafts of the Piend if God shall shield him, sud- 
 denly breaks into that remarkable personal passage of which 
 I have already spoken. The "Day of Doom" is near, he 
 
 1 There is, beginning at line 692, an allegorical simile more fully developed 
 than is usual in Anglo-Saxon poetry. I translate it: "God honoureth His 
 work, even as the Prophet said " (_Ps. cxxxvi. 7-9.) 
 
 692. That the holy gems were upheaved (then) 
 Stars serene of Heaven, high unspeakably. 
 Moon and sun ! O what may these be, 
 Gems so glittering bright, if not God Himself ? 
 He is the soothfast shining of the sun, 
 For the angels, for earth dwellers, ever noble splendour 1 
 Glimmers (mild) the moon o'er the middle earth, 
 Spiritual is that star ! So the Church of God, 
 Through the congregations of the True and Just, 
 Beameth brightly now. 
 
400 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 cries, " and I — I fear a sterner doom." This personal pas- 
 sage is the first hint of the subject of the third book ; and the 
 short sketch, the " study," as I said, for the finished picture of 
 the third part, follows in this fashion — 
 
 807. Then shall all earth-glories 
 
 Burn within the bale-fire. Bright and swift 
 Eages on the ruddy flame, wrathfuUy it strides 
 O'er the outspread earth ; sunken are the plains ; 
 Burst asunder the burg-steads ! See ! the Burning on its way, 
 Greediest of guests, gorges pitilessly now, 
 All the ancient treasures that of old the heroes held, 
 While that on the earth pride ^bode with them I 
 
 When Cynewulf has finished his sketch he becomes personal 
 again. " our need is great, before that grim terror to be- 
 think us of God's grace ; " and he passes into that lovely sea- 
 suggested passage which I have already translated, and in 
 which his soul stands clear before us. As I have put it into 
 a trotting rhythm before, so now I put it into blank verse, 
 nor is that metre apart from its elegiac strain — 
 
 848. great our need 
 
 That we bethink us in this fruitless time, 
 Ere that grim fear, upon our spirits' grace. 
 For now is it most like as if on ships 
 O'er water cold, on ocean's flood, we sail, 
 Driving the sea-wood through the far-spread deep, 
 On our sea^steeds. A dangerous stream is this, 
 Of endless waves, oceans wind-tossed, where we 
 About this swooning world swing to and fro 
 Upon the unfathomed road. Hard was our state. 
 Ere we had sailed across the storm-ridged deep 
 Safely to land ; but then our help arrived, 
 That led us to the hithe where Healing is — 
 God's Spirit-Son, who gave us grace to know — 
 Outlooking o'er the bulwarks of our keel — 
 Where we should bind with anchors deeply set, 
 Our old wave-horses, stallions of the sea ! 
 There in that haven, let us stablish Hope, 
 The which He roomed for us who rules the skies. 
 When he climbed Heaven, Holy in the height. 
 
 And now, at line 866, the Day of Judgment, the third part of 
 the poem, begins. Like a thief in the blackness of night it 
 surprises men. The blithe and shining host, the faithful of 
 the Lord, assemble glorious on Mount Zion. Then Cynewulf, 
 as if suddenly smitten with a vision (and he is the only Anglo- 
 Saxon poet who has these poetic outbursts), breaks into a 
 noble description of the four summoning angels — 
 
THE "CHRIST" 401 
 
 878. Therewith from the four far-off corners of the world, 
 From the regions uttermost of the realm of earth, 
 All a-glow the angels blow with one accord 
 Loudly thrilling trumpets. Trembles Middle-Garth 
 Earth is quaking under men. Right against the going 
 Of the stars they sound together, strong and gloriously 
 Sounding and resounding from the south and north. 
 Wakening from the dead bairns of doughty men, 
 All aghast from the grey mould ; all the kin of men. 
 To the dooming of the Lord. Out of that deep sleep 
 Suddenly they bid them rise. 
 
 After that " a blaze of sun comes from the south-east to the 
 hill of Zion," and after the blaze the Son of God, "marvellously- 
 countenanced, diversely for the blessed and the lost, bitter for 
 the baleful, benign for the blest." And on each side of him 
 troops of angels and societies of the saints fare their way. 
 
 Another outburst of description, tpuched with a human in- 
 terest, follows, and it rises in the last lines into imaginative 
 splendour. 
 
 930. Deep creation thunders, and before the Lord shall go 
 Hugest of upheaving fires o'er the far-spread earth ! 
 Hurtles the hot flame, and the heavens burst asunder, 
 All the firm-set flashing planets fall out of their places. 
 Then the sim that erst o'er the elder world 
 With such brightness shone for the sons of men, 
 Black-dark now becomes, changed to bloody hue. 
 And the moon alike, who to man of old 
 Nightly gave her light, nither tumbles down : 
 And the stars also shower down from heaven, 
 Headlong through the roaring lift, lashed by all the winds. 
 
 Then Cynewulf, who, while he loved the soft aspects of 
 Nature, loved even more the raging sea and hurricane, again 
 describes, when he has placed Christ on the top of the hill of 
 Zion, the howling winds, the dreadful din that weakens and 
 wastes the world, but chiefly the ocean of fire and its over- 
 whelming of the earth ; always however, in a manner which is 
 his own, introducing his sorrow and pity for the fates of men. 
 " Great and dire shall be the tribulations of the kin of Adam 
 when that wan welter of fire, the swarthy flame — seizes on 
 these three things — seas with their fish, earth with her moun- 
 tains, and the upper heaven magnificent with stars." 
 
 972. So the greedy ghost shall gang searchingly through earth, 
 And the Elame, the ravager, with the Fire's terror 
 Shall the high up-timbered houses hurl upon the plain. 
 Lo ! the fire-blast, flaming far, fierce and hungry as a sword, 
 ■Whelms the world witha.1 ! And the walls of burghs 
 
402 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 In immediate ruin fall ! Melt tlie mountains now, 
 
 Melt the olifEs precipitous, that of old against the Sea 
 
 Fixed against the floods, firm and steadfast standing. 
 
 Kept the earth apart ; — hulwarks 'gainst the ocean billow 
 
 And the winding water. Then on every wight 
 
 Fastens the death-flame ! On all fowls and beasts, 
 Fire-swart, a raging warrior, rushes Conflagration, 
 All the earth along. 
 
 Even the " white host of the archangels, bright as heaven," 
 and now assembled round the sovereign God on Zion, trembles 
 in that dreadful day. Much more the kin of Adam who now 
 " rise quick and young again " ; and in them as through a glass 
 is clearly seen " the figure of their works, the memory of their 
 words and the thoughts of their heart." This motive, with that 
 of the terror and the fire, is now repeated in many different 
 fashions, and as a kind of peroration to this part of the poem. 
 It would be very tiresome reading were it not for the word- 
 changes, and for a certain swirling of the verse which reveals 
 the passionate feeling of the poet. We must remember, when 
 we are weary of these repetitions, that what is written here 
 was to be sung, not read. 
 
 Another theme is now taken up at line 1081 — the theme of 
 the Holy Eood. It is nobly conceived. The Cross, standing 
 with its root on Zion's hill, rises till its top strikes the sky. 
 All the assembled hosts look upon it. Nor is it difBcult to 
 see, for by its light all things are seen. The sun is gone ; it 
 shines instead of the sun ; it is the brightest of all beacons. 
 All shade is banished by its brilliancy. From head to' foot it 
 is red, wet with the blood of the King of heaven. Christ is 
 seen by all the multitude of good and evil crucified upon it. 
 The good see it, and it brings brightness to their souls. The 
 evil see it for their torment and their teen. 
 
 This fine imagination is followed by an account of the Cru- 
 cifixion, and by a description of the agony of the whole crea- 
 tion in sympathy with the death of Jesus. This is a motive 
 which is -again taken iip by the writer of the Dream of the Holy 
 Eood. It seems to run side by side with the weeping of all 
 things for the death of Balder. Whether that idea was im- 
 ported into the Norse mythology from Christian mythology, 
 or whether it comes down to both from similar myths more 
 ancient than either, does not engage us here. It appears 
 slightly in Gregory's Homily, but our interest here is the 
 deliberate and close way in which Cynewulf works up the 
 thought, and his representation of Nature's sympathy with 
 man. The earth and sky and trees and seas share in the pas- 
 
THE "CHRIST" 403 
 
 sions of humanity. To the statement that the sun was ob- 
 scured, Cynewulf adds, "darkened with misery." When he 
 speaks of the earthquake, he says not only that the " earth 
 shook," but also that it was "marred by fear." Nay, the 
 whole Universe was, like a living Being, conscious of the 
 death of Christ. 
 
 1143. And the broad-set sea 
 
 Made its might of power known, from its clasping marges broke 
 
 Up in ireful fury, o'er the breast of earth ! 
 
 Yea, their shining stead withiu all the stars forsook 
 
 Each his own aspect ! On that very tide 
 
 Wist the lucid Heaven who it was had made it 
 
 So upsoariug and so sheen, with its starry gems. 
 
 Hell, also, the guilt-avenging, knew that the Maker had 
 come, and gave up her hosts from her hot bosom. And the 
 sea declared who had spread it forth, the trees told who had 
 shaped them with their blossoming, when mighty God stepped 
 up on one of them. Many a one was all o'er-run beneath its 
 rind with bloody tears. Ked and thick, their sap was turned 
 to blood. Earth's dwellers cannot tell how many things in- 
 animate yet felt within themselves the travail of the Lord. 
 
 The poem now turns to the division between the jus't and 
 the unjust, and the three signs which mark the blessed, and 
 the three others which indicate the cursed. Of these the only 
 one worth dwelling on is the third sign of the blessed which 
 might be due to the pen of Jonathan Edwards. " The happy 
 band shall see the lost suffer sore pain amid the bale of dark- 
 ness " — 
 
 1250. Flame that welters up and of worms the fierce aspect, 
 
 With their bitter-biting jaws — school i of burning creatures ! 
 And from this a winsome joy waxes for the righteous. 
 
 There is not much of interest in the next portion of the poem, 
 which is an enlargement of the reasons for the judgment of 
 the good and evil given in chapter xxv. of St. Matthew's Gos- 
 pel. The speech of Jesus to the good is short, but the speech 
 to the evil is long and homiletic, and repeats, with the common 
 aim of instruction, the whole story of the Fall, the Incarna- 
 
 ^ Scale. The Dutch speak of a school of fish. It is also a Lincolnshire word 
 lor a shoal of fish. It was, if I remember right, set apart by the Nantucket 
 whalers to describe the herded households of the sperm-whale. I do not think 
 that they employed it for any of the dwellers of the sea except the whale ; and 
 this usage of it for the great monsters when banded together may be as old as 
 Cynewulf' s time. 
 
404 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATUEE chap. 
 
 tion, the Crucifixion, and Resurrection. It is not devoid of 
 nobleness, constantly changing too in metrical movement in 
 accordance with the meaning, full of quick appeals, exces- 
 sively personal (Jesus speaks as if he were speaking to one 
 only among the vast host), well fitted then for use in a homily, 
 a use to which I have no doubt it was put. Some passages in 
 it must have been effective when sung in a kind of recitative. 
 " I was born alone," one of these begins, and the lines run to 
 a great length and must be thought of as sung with a rushing 
 and impassioned speed 
 
 1421. All alone I was begotten 
 
 For the comfort of the folk ; with their hands they folded me, 
 
 Wrapped me in a poor man's weeds and within the darkness wovmd 
 
 me, 
 All bedight with dusky swathing. Lo, for all the world, I endurSd this. 
 Of a little worth, I seemed, to the sons of men. On the flinty stone I 
 
 lay 
 Young, a child within his crib. 
 
 Nor, indeed, is the passage less effective when Christ, ap- 
 parently turning to the gigantic rood, as a Catholic preacher 
 to the crucifix, points to himself hanging there, and cries to all 
 the vast host of the lost, " See now the deadly wounds which 
 men erst made upon my palms, and also on my feet, by which 
 I hung, fastened most bitterly ! Here, too, mayst thou look 
 on the wound, blood-streaming, on my side. O how uneven 
 there between us two the reckoning ! . . . Why didst thou 
 forsake the glorious life I bought for thee through love? 
 Give me back thy life which I gave thee. I claim the life 
 thou hast slain with sins. . . . Why hast thou crucified me 
 worse upon the rood of thine hands than when of old I hung 
 upon the tree ? " The reasons of the sentence are now given 
 which are written in the twenty-fifth chapter of St. Matthew, 
 and this passage ends — " Go now, accursed, cut off by your 
 own will from angels' joy, into eternal fire, made ready, hot 
 and grim, for Satan and his comrades, for all that dusky shoal. 
 And the Ward of Empire is mighty and enraged, ireful and 
 terrorful ; no foe upon this path of earth may then abide his 
 presence. For he sweeps down with his right hand the sword 
 of victory, and the devils fall headlong into the den profound, 
 into the swarthy fire." The rest is homiletic exhortation and 
 the final locking of hell; and, at the last, the opening of 
 heaven to the hosts of the just. Cynewulf's description of the 
 perfect land closes the poem — 
 
THE "ELENE" 405 
 
 1649. There is angels' song, there enjoyment of the blest, 
 There belov6d Presence of the Lord Eternal, 
 To the blessed brighter than the beaming of the Sun ! 
 There is love of the beloved, life -without the end of death ; 
 Merry there man's multitude ; there unmarred is youth by eld ; 
 Glory of the hosts of Heaven, health that knows not pain ; 
 Rest for righteous doers, rest withouten strife, 
 For the good and blessed ! Without gloom the day, 
 Bright and full of blossoming ; bliss that's sorrowless ; 
 Peace all friends between, ever -without enmity ; 
 Love that envieth not, in the union of the saints, 
 Eor the happy ones of Heaven ! Hunger is not there nor thirst. 
 Sleep nor heavy sickness, nor the scorching of the Sun ; 
 Neither cold nor care ; but the happy company, 
 Sheenest of all hosts, shall enjoy for aye 
 Grace of God their King, . glory -with their Lord. 
 
 The last of the signed poems of Cynewulf is the Elene. It 
 is in the Vercelli Book, and contains 1321 lines. Its source, 
 as Kemble and Grimm first laid do-wn, appears to be the Latin 
 life of Quiriacus or Cyriacus, Bishop of Jerusalem, -written in 
 the Acta Sanctorum of the 4th of May ; but reasons have been 
 alleged for thinking that some other life -was used by Cyne- 
 wulf. Some have thought — and the vie-w is based on the 
 Greek title of the poem — that the Greek life of Cyriacus, 
 -which is of the 3rd of May, may have been brought to Eng- 
 land and foUo-wed by Cyne-wulf, but the mere form of the 
 name cannot prove this, and Greek had decayed in England 
 ■when Cynewulf was writing. Cyriacus is the Judas of the 
 poem. 
 
 If Cynewulf used the life in the Acta Sanctorum, he used it 
 with the freedom of a poet. He expands and contracts when 
 he pleases, and he has interpolated two long inventions of his 
 own. Professor Kent, in an excellent edition of the Elene,^ 
 has given the Latin text along with the Anglo-Saxon. Any 
 one can now see without trouble where Cynewulf has followed, 
 or not followed, his source ; and the original matter in the 
 poem seems worthy of the pains which Cynewulf says he 
 bestowed on its composition. The subject is the Finding of 
 the True Cross, and the action passes steadily on to this end. 
 The Huns gather against Constantine as he lies asleep in 
 camp, who dreams his famous dream of the Eood, and is 
 bid to conquer by that sign. The battle follows, the victory, 
 Constantine's study of the Scriptures, Helena's journey to 
 Jerusalem, the council held by Helena with the Jews, the 
 
 1 Elene, edited with introduction, Latin original, notes and glossary, by 
 Charles Kent, Univ. of Tennessee. Giun & Co., Boston and London. 
 
406 EAELY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 separate council of the Jews when Judas advises them not to 
 reveal the place of the Cross, his imprisonment, his release, 
 his prayer to Christ, his declaration of the death of Jesus for 
 the redemption of the world, the finding of the Crosses, the 
 discovery of the true Cross by a miracle, the devil's indigna- 
 tion and speech, the reply of Judas, the message of Helena to 
 Constantine, the baptism of Judas as Cyriacus and his appoint- 
 ment to the Bishopric of Jerusalem, the finding of the nails 
 and the return of Helena. The last canto is Cynewulf's per- 
 sonal account of how he wrote the poem and of his state of 
 mind. 
 
 Many have said that this is the finest of his poems, but I 
 cannot agree with them. Cynewulf was at his best when he 
 had to invent, not to follow. When he works as he does here, 
 on a given story, his imagination seems fettered. It is very 
 different when, as in the Christ, he is building his lofty song 
 out of his own heart. It is different, even in the Elene, when 
 he wholly abandons his original, and invents the battle, the 
 sea-voyage, and the personal epilogue. These are excellent, 
 and it is their goodness, I think, which has made the critics 
 place the whole poem on so high a level. I have already 
 translated them all and need dwell on them no more. The 
 rest of the poem is, I think, extremely dull. 
 
 In the battle and sea descriptions many heathen terms are 
 used which enliven and strengthen the verse. Moreover, those 
 swift, surprising, vivid phrases which mark a poet ; that word- 
 invention of which every poet is fond at one time or another 
 of his life, and which, in the shape more of double-shotted sub- 
 stantives than of adjectives, the Anglo-Saxon poets of Nor- 
 thumbria were only too eager to use — appear frequently in the 
 Elene. The metrical movement and swing of the lines are much 
 more fixed and steady than in his other poems. There are 
 very few verses which even tend towards the long line that 
 belongs to the Caedmonian poems. On the contrary, that 
 short epic line is used into which, after .^Elfred, all English 
 poetry seems to have drifted, as we see for example in the 
 songs of the Chronicle. Rhyme and assonance are also not 
 uncommon. All these characteristics point to a time when the 
 art of poetry had consciously adopted rules, and when the 
 metrical freedom of the poet began to be more rigidly limited. 
 It does not, however, follow that because a poet like Cynewulf 
 adopted the short epic line in its strictness that he was pre- 
 cluded from using the long line of the Caedmonian poetry ; 
 
THE "ELENE" 407 
 
 and whether he did use it in any later poem than the Elene is 
 a question that will meet us when we describe the Dream of 
 the Holy Rood, which, though I believe it to be at least partly 
 Cynewulf s, I leave to the following chapter because it is 
 unsigned by him.' 
 
 1 1 have said no more, in this chapter on the signed poems of Cynewulf, of 
 the Fates of the Apostles. It did not seem worth while to treat of it apart. 
 But when these pages had gone to press Mr. Gollancz's hook on the Christ 
 appeared, and I have placed in a note at the end of this volume his new theory 
 concerning the Fates of the Apostles and the Andreas. 
 
CHAPTEE XXV 
 
 UNSIGNED POEMS EITHER BY CXNEWULF OK BY MEN 
 OF HIS SCHOOL 
 
 The poems whicli still remain for appreciation have all of 
 them been attributed by divers critics to Cynewnlf. No posi- 
 tive proof, however, can be given of his authorship of them. 
 'Five of them are important poems — the Ghithlac, the Descent 
 into Hell, the Fhoenix, the Dream of the Rood, and the Andreas. 
 The order in which I have here enumerated them is probably 
 the chronological order of their composition, but no evidence 
 really worth having can be given for this order. I may then 
 classify them as I please, and I take first the Guthlac and the 
 Andreas, both of which are saint-legends, then the Descent into 
 Hell, then the Phoenix, and lastly, the Dream of the Hood, 
 because, as I have said, it closes in my opinion the life and 
 work of Cynewulf. 
 
 The Guthlac is the story of that anchorite on whose island 
 refuge in the fens the Abbey of Crowland was built. The 
 poem is in the Exeter Book, and its conclusion is missing. 
 There is scarcely any critic of importance who does not say 
 that Cynewulf had a hand in it, and the second part at least 
 is almost unanimously allotted to him. It is more than prob- 
 able that we should find in its lost ending, had we but the luck 
 to discover it, Cynewulf's signature in runes. The poem has 
 been divided into two parts, and then into three, by various 
 Writers. Many attribute only the second part to Cynewulf; 
 and those who think that he wrote the whole, think also, for 
 the most part, that there was a long interval between the com- 
 position of the first and second portions,^ between Guthlac A 
 
 1 Kieger divides it into two, written at different times by Cynewulf. Chari- 
 tius adopts the division, but only the second part is Cynewulf's. Lefevre 
 divides it into three parts, with a long interval between the second and third 
 parts. Dietrich and Morley say it is one poem by one hand. Wiilker thinks 
 that the second part is Cynewulf's and his earliest work! These differing 
 doctors show at least that no clear conclusion has been arrived at. 
 408 
 
CHAP. XXV "GUTHLAC" 409 
 
 and Outhlac B.. The style and poetic power of the first are very- 
 inferior to the second. Moreover, the first part differs con- 
 siderably from the Life of Gutlilac by Felix, who may have 
 been a monk of Crowland, while the second part follows that 
 life closely.^ On the whole, then, it is most probable that 
 Cynewulf, at the beginning of his Christian life, while his 
 imagination was yet hampered by his natural avoidance of all 
 profane poetry, wrote the first part of GutJilac from oral tradi- 
 tion, and then, much later in life, when his imagination was 
 delivered by the peace in his soul, took up his old work again, 
 after the production of the lAfe of Gfuthlac, and added to it an 
 end, with a special account of the anchorite's death. The free 
 and noble manner of this part is a great contrast to the barren 
 and limping movement of the first part. Could we but be 
 certain that Cynewulf wrote both parts at different times, the 
 comparison of the poet in the one to the poet in the other 
 would be a fascinating bit of criticism. 
 
 One thing remains to be said. Mr. Gollancz tells me he has 
 transferred to the beginning of Guthlac (which follows the 
 Christ in the Exeter manuscript) a number of lines which have 
 been usually printed at the end of the Christ. These form, he 
 says, the true introduction to Guthlac, and he supports his 
 opinion by the fact that there is a blank space in the manu- 
 script, before these lines begin. The Christ certainly ends 
 better where he makes it now end, at line 1663. It is not so 
 clear that the Guthlac begins better where he makes it begin 
 — Se hid gefeana faegrast. It is a better beginning, as a matter 
 of form, but the difficulty lies in this, that the quality of this 
 new introduction, as poetry, is of a much higher value than 
 the rest of the first part oif the poem. It is, in fact, of the 
 same poetic value as the Christ itself, with which it has been 
 so long connected, or as the second part of Guthlac. It is not 
 possible, I think, to hold that this introduction could have been 
 written by the poet of Guthlac A at the time when A was 
 written. It is not only a difference in artistic work which 
 divides them, but it is a difference in thoughtfulness, in expe- 
 rience of life, such as, to compare small things with great, 
 divides the outlook over life taken by Milton in the Samson 
 Agonistes from that taken in the Comus. It is more than 
 probable that Mr. Gollancz is right in tagging on these twenty- 
 nine lines to the Guthlac, but I think he will have to say that 
 
 1 If so, this partly dates the poem, lor that life was written between 747 and 
 749. 
 
410 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 they were placed there many years after the first part was 
 ■written, when Guthlac B was added — about the time, that is, 
 when Cynewulf wrote the Christ. Indeed, I think that the 
 whole preface has been remodelled if not entirely written at 
 this time. It is done with something of an artist's hand. The 
 picture with which it begins is tenderly conceived, and tender- 
 ness is one of the qualities of Cynewulf's genius. The mourn- 
 ful note in it, the patriot's sorrow, belongs also to Cynewulf, 
 and has some historical interest if we identify his life with the 
 evil days of Northumbria. There is also a contemplative ele- 
 ment in it as of one who had retired from the stormy world 
 and was inclined, in the conventionality of conversion, to 
 classify the different kinds of saints. In such a classification 
 he easily slips into his subject. The life of Guthlac belonged 
 to the highest class. He is one of the anchorites whom Nor- 
 thumbria's old traditions, derived from the Celtic monks, con- 
 sidered to live nearest to God. "Fairest of joys it is," so the 
 poem begins, when at first they meet — the angel and the 
 "happy soul who has forsaken the frail delights of earth." 
 And sweet and tender is the greeting that the angel gives — 
 
 Now mayst fare thy way whither fondly thou didst yearn 
 
 O so long, and often times 1 It is I shall lead thee ; — 
 
 Pleasant are the paths for thee, and displayed for thee 
 
 Glory's gleaming light. Way-goer art thou now 
 
 To that holy home, harbour from afflictions, 
 
 Whither sorrow comes no more. Ohr. 1671 (Guth. 6). 
 
 From this, the introduction passes on through the classification 
 I have mentioned to those chosen champions of God who 
 dwell in wildernesses ; and glides at once into the life of Guth- 
 lac in lines which seem to confirm the inference that this first 
 part of the poem followed an oral tradition rather than the 
 book of Felix. 'iNow we may declare what men of holy 
 estate made known to us, how Guthlac directed his mind to 
 the will of God." 
 
 The first part has but little poetic power of any kind, and 
 the few lines in it which describe the hermit's life with nature 
 have been already quoted. The second part reveals at once a 
 more experienced and more imaginative hand. It takes up, 
 after an homiletic account of the Fall, the story of the death 
 of Guthlac, and his death is told in heroic terms. It is the 
 last fight of a Christian warrior. His death-song is sung ; he 
 is received into the Burg of triumph. The scenery is well set 
 and the Sun plays his part in the battle. Night too appears 
 
"GUTHLAC" 411 
 
 with her shadow-helm to darken the battle-field. Night fol- 
 lows after night, each striding like a phantom over the sky. 
 The Fiend and Guthlac meet one another like two heroes, 
 armed for battle. Guthlac stands alone. Satan comes on him 
 with many troops — "smiths of sin; roaring and raging, like 
 wild beasts"; but the hill where this Holm-gang is set is 
 Guthlac's field of victory. "His heart, his bones, were tor- 
 tured," but his soul, full of joy, was ready for the Forth-going. 
 The praise of God burnt in his breast ; fiery hot was love in 
 his heart, as the days stepped on and the cloud-helmings of 
 the nights." When sickness came heavier on him, "the deadly 
 drink that Eve had poured for Adam," death entered the lists 
 — the warrior greedy of corpses ; the stealthy bowman drew 
 near to Guthlac in the shadow of the night. But he was not 
 alone. His disciple asked him, "How is thine heart, my lord 
 and father, shelter of thy friends, so sore oppressed ! Knowst 
 thou how this sickness will have an end?" "Death is near," 
 answers Guthlac, — "the warrior who is not weary in the fight. 
 Long do I tarry here " — and the whole passage is replete with 
 the anchorite's tenderness and rapture. "Then the heavens 
 grew dim over the children of men, dark strode the roll of 
 nights above the clouds," and the day dawned on which Christ 
 arose. Death was closer now ; "stark, with thievish steps, he 
 sought the house of the soul. Hot and near to Guthlac's 
 heart the whirring arrow-storm, with showers of war, drove 
 into his body. The cunning keys unlocked the treasure of his 
 life." Then Guthlac gives his last message to his sister, a;nd 
 all the lines are steeped in that pathetic humanity which 
 belongs in its fulness only to Cynewulf among Anglo-Saxon 
 poets. I would the passage were not too long to translate. 
 
 After this he reveals to his disciple the secret of his con- 
 verse with an angel who visits him between "the rushing of 
 the dawn and the darkening of the night." "My soul," cries 
 Guthlac, "is struggling forth to reach true joy." Then sank 
 his head, but still, "high-minded, he drew his breath," and it 
 was fragrant "as the blowing herbs in summer time, which — 
 each in its own stead — winsome o'er the meadows, dropping 
 honey, sweetly smell." With this lovely verse the poet, 
 thrilled by the note that he has struck, is so uplifted that the 
 impulse bears him onwards for a long time in a fuller flight, 
 and the next sixty lines are some of the finest and the most 
 sustained in the whole of Anglo-Saxon poetry. The sunset, 
 the darkening of the night, the upleaping over the body of the 
 saint of the heavenly pillar of light by which the shadows of 
 
412 EAELY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 the darkness are quenched, the dawn, the death, the rapturous 
 welcome of the saint iu heaven, the voyage of the ship over 
 the sea — are all touched with true fire, and burn with a steady- 
 light. They are, just because they are good, difficult to trans- 
 late, but here they are — 
 
 1252. When the glorious gleam 
 
 Sought its setting-path, swart the North-sky grew, 
 Wan helow the welkin ; veiled the world with mist, 
 Thatched it thick with gloom ! ver- thronged i the night, 
 Shrouded the land's lovelinesses 1 Then of Lights the greatest, 
 Holy, from the Heavens, came, shining high, serenely. 
 Bright above the burg-halls.^ 
 
 He abode his end-day ; 
 Blessed in his boldness, as it should befit him ; 
 Stricken down by death-darts. 
 
 And the dazzling of that glory. 
 Noble round the noble one, all the night livelong, 
 Shone, bedecked with sheen ; and the shadows dwindled. 
 Loosed and lost* below the Lift. Thus that Light illuming. 
 Shone, around the sacred house — candle of the sky it was — 
 Prom the Even-gloaming, till from Eastward came, 
 O'er the path profound, soft the murmur of the dawn : 
 Weather-token warm ! 
 
 Then arose the glorious man. 
 Blessed, mindful to be brave ! To his ministering thegn. 
 To his time companion spoke he, " Time is, that thou farest 
 And dost all-bethink thee of my errand now. 
 And with speed dost bring it, as I erst did bid thee. 
 Straight to my dear Sister ; for my spirit now 
 Swiftly from my body hastens, sighing for the joys of God." 
 Then he heaved his hands on high, with the Housel fed. 
 Meekly with the food majestic ; and his eyes he opened. 
 Holy jewels of his head ; to the Heavenly kingdom gazed, 
 Glad of heart for graces, and his ghost sent forth. 
 Beautiful with blessed deeds, to the bliss of glory. 
 Then was led along Guthlac's soul on high 
 On the up-way ! Angels bore it on 
 To that long delight ; but his lyoh * grew cold 
 Soul-less under skies. 
 
 Then out-streamed a Light, 
 Brightest that of beaming pillars ! All that Beacon fair. 
 All that heavenly glow round the holy home. 
 Was up-reared on high, even to the roof of Heaven, 
 From the field of earth, like a fiery tower. 
 Seen beneath the sky's expanse, sheenier than the sun, 
 
 I Ni^ht urged its way over the sky. 
 
 " This is the Pillar of Light afterwards more fully described. 
 
 ' To-lysan = to dissolve. " Loosed and lost " expresses the process as well as 
 the end of the dissolutiou, and this is the full meaning, I think, of the word. 
 
 * As the word link for corpse is used in Piers Plowman, and in our lych-gate, 
 I use it here for alliteration's sake. 
 
"ANDREAS" 413 
 
 Glory of the glorious stars ! Hosts of angels sang 
 
 Loud the lay of Victory ! In the lift the ringing sound 
 
 Now was heard the heaven under, rapture of the Holy Ones ! 
 
 So the blessed Burgstead was with hlisses filled, 
 
 With the sweetest scents, and with skiey wonders, 
 
 With the angels' singing, to its innermost recesses ; 
 
 Heirship of the Holy One ! i 
 
 More onelike it was, / 
 
 And more winsome there, than in world of ours 
 Any speech may say ; how the sound and odour, 
 How the clang celestial, and the saintly song 
 Heard in Heaven were — - high-triumphant praise of God, 
 Kapture following rapture. ^ 
 
 All our island trembled, 
 All its Field-floor shook. 
 
 The messenger shook also with fear, drew forth his ship, and 
 hastened to -the sea-voyage I have already translated.' I think 
 Cynewulf wrote these, and in the zenith of his power. The 
 sorrow-laden disciple gives his message to Guthlac's sister, 
 and while he is yet speaking, the poem breaks off suddenly, 
 unfinished. Had we the rest of it, we should probably, as 
 I have said, have some personal conclusion, in •jrhich Cynewulf 
 would record his name in his usual runic fashion, and tell the 
 tale of his state of mind. But for this we must wait in hope 
 of some fresh manuscript, and meanwhile visit the Andreas. 
 
 The Andreas is in the Vercelli Book and extends to 1722 
 lines. Grimm was inclined to say that Ealdhelm was its 
 writer. A number of critics following Dietrich attribute it to 
 Cynewulf. Fritzsche's work upon it, while allotting it to an 
 imitator of Cynewulf, has made it improbable that he was the 
 writer, and this is now a common opinion. The poem cer- 
 tainly does not possess the special sentiment of Cynewulf, nor 
 his habit of accumulating repetitions of the same thought in 
 many different forms, nor his slow-moving manner broken by 
 rushes of impulsive song, nor his satisfaction with a few inci- 
 dents on which to work, and his apparent dislike to vary them. 
 The Andreas is full of changing incidents, its movement is 
 swift and following, its picture is filled with many images, and 
 the writer does not repeat as much as usual in Anglo-Saxon 
 poetry. There are no rapturous outbursts, and no personal 
 joy or sorrow, one or other of which we look to find in a poem 
 by Cynewulf. Nevertheless there are many phrases which 
 put us in mind of Cynewulf, but then there are many which 
 
 1 That is, heaven, the yrfestdl, the hereditary seat of the saints, therefore of 
 this saint. „ „ , . 
 
 2 "Preahtem aefter breahtme," ' Vol. i. 242, 
 
414 EARLT ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 put us in mind of Beowulf. The writer was probably, then, 
 a follower of Cynewulf, some contemporary poet who had read 
 the Beowulf and loved the early word-usages of his people. 
 I think he lived, like Cynewulf, on the sea-coast, or perhaps, 
 as a sailor, knew it well. His sea-voyage, in many curious 
 phrases, suggests that he had been a sailor. There is even a 
 personal touch, as I believe, in one passage, which speaks of 
 his having been sixteen times on sea-journeys.^ 
 
 The poem is full of original touches, and of curious interest. 
 I have not read the Acts of Andrew and Matthew, Greek MSS. 
 which are the sole source of the legend,^ and do not know to 
 what extent the poet used his original ; but he probably worked 
 with the usual freedom of the English poets, and the English 
 note and air are fuller in the Andreas than in the Elene or the 
 Juliana. It may be that this distinctive voice in the verse 
 arose from the poet having only heard the story told to him by 
 some monk who was still acquainted with Greek. He had 
 nothing before his eyes to follow ; he had only his memory to 
 guide him. Hence his freedom ! 
 
 The poem begins in the heroic strain, transferred to a Chris- 
 tian subject, "Lo, from days of yore we have heard of twelve 
 heroes, famous under the stars, thegns of the Lord. The glory 
 of their warfare failed not when the helms crashed in fight. 
 Far-famed folk-leaders were they, bold on the war-path, when 
 shield and hand guarded the helm upon the battle-field." In 
 this easy fashion the story is brought on of Matthew, one of 
 these heroes, waiting in prison to be devoured by the man- 
 eating Mermedonians. His seizure is told in the strains of 
 heathen war, with a full use of old heathen phrases. Matthew 
 cries to God out of the prison, and God descends and departs 
 home again, like a pagan Deity, but tells his servant that 
 Andrew will come to deliver him. We now await the real 
 hero of the piece. The first morning dawns. "The night- 
 helm glode off, swiftly it vanished. Behind it came the light, 
 the trumpet sound of the dawn." And the Mermedonians, 
 wolves of slaughter, raged for the flesh of Matthevr', but had 
 three days yet to wait. It was then that the Lord appeared 
 to Andrew, while he dwelt in Achaia, in a dream, and bade 
 him go to Mermedonia. "There languishes thy brother in 
 
 1 Mr. Gollancz restores the Andreas to Cynewulf. See the note at the end 
 of this volume. 
 
 " They were discovered in the Royal Library at Paris, and in two of them 
 the main details of the poem are found. There was probably a Latin transla- 
 tion of the legend in England. 
 
"ANDKEAS" 415 
 
 victory. Go and deliver him." — "How can I, Lord," said 
 Andrew, "make my voyage so swiftly over the paths of the 
 deep ? One of thine angels from the high Heaven might more 
 easily do this. He knows the going of the seas, the salt 
 streams, and the road of the swan ; the onset of the billows, 
 and the Water-Terror, but not I. The earls of Elsewhere are 
 unknown to me, and the highways over the cold water." 
 
 " Alas, Andrew ! " answered the Lord, " that thou should'st 
 be so slow of heart to fare upon this way. Nathless, thou 
 must go where the onset of war, through the heathen battle 
 roar and the war-craft of heroes, is boded for thee. At early 
 dawn, at the marge of the sea, thou shalt step on a keel, and 
 across the cold water break o'er the bathway. No skulker in 
 battle was Andrew, but hard and high-hearted, and eager for 
 war. , Wherefore at opening day he went over the sand-links 
 and to the searstead, his thegns with him, trampling over the 
 shingle. The ocean thundered, the billows beat the shore, the 
 resplendent morniag came, brightest of beacons, hastening 
 over the deep sea, holy, out of the darkness. Heaven's candle 
 shone upon the floods of sea." 
 
 This is all in the heroic manner, and more so than in any 
 other Anglo-Saxon poem. Moreover, it is filled with the sea- 
 air and the morning breaking on the deep. The very verse 
 has the dash and salt of the waves in it, and the scenery is 
 Northumbrian. No one can mistake it for that of an East 
 Anglian or a Wessex shore. 
 
 Then, as Andrew stood on the beach, he was aware of three 
 shipmasters sitting in a sea-boat, as they had just come over 
 the sea, and these were Almighty God, and his angels twain, 
 " clothed like ship-farers, when on the breast of the flood, they 
 dance with their keels, far off upon the water cold." 
 
 "Whence come ye," said Andrew, "sailing in keels, sea- 
 crafty men, in your water-ruSher, lonely floaters o'er the 
 wave ? Whence has the ocean stream brought you over the 
 tumbling of the billows ? " 
 
 "We from Mermedonia are," replied Almighty God. "Our 
 high-stemmed boat, our snell sea-horse, enwreathed with speed, 
 bore us with the tide along the way of the whale, until we 
 sought this people's land ; much grieved by the sea, so sorely 
 were we driven of the wind." 
 
 " Bring me there," said Andrew ; "little gold can I give, but 
 God will grant you meed." — " Strangers go not there," an- 
 swered the Lord, standing in the ship ; " dost thou wish to 
 lose thy life ? " — " Desire impels me," said Andrew, and he 
 
416 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 is answered from the bow of the boat by God who is, like a 
 sailor of to-day, " sitting on the bulwark above the incoming 
 whirl of the wave," — and the extreme naivetd of the demand 
 for payment, and the bargaining on the part of God, belong to 
 the freshness of the morning of poetry ; while the whole con- 
 versation supplies US with a clear picture of the manners and 
 talk of travellers and seamen. We stand among the mer- 
 chant carriers of the eighth century in England. 
 
 " Gladly and freely," the shipman says, " we will ferry thee 
 over the fishers' bath when you have first paid your journey's 
 fare, the scats appointed, so will the shipwards take you will- 
 ingly on board." Then answered Andrew, sore in need of 
 friends : " I have no beaten gold, nor silver store, nor lands, 
 nor rings, to whet hereto your will." " How then," said the 
 king, " would'st thou seek the sea-hills and the margin of the 
 deep, over the chilly cliffs, to find a ship ? Thou hast nothing 
 for comfort on the street of sea ; hard is his way of life and 
 work who long makes trial of the paths of sea." ^ " It does 
 not become thee," Andrew replies, " since the Lord has given 
 thee wealth and good luck in the world to answer with biting 
 speech and over-haughtiness. 'Tis better when a man modestly 
 and couthly speaks to him who hastens to a far land. So 
 Christ commanded — his thegns are we — chosen for his war- 
 riors. He bid us go over the bottomless abyss to woo souls to 
 him, as far as the water bends around the world, or the ham- 
 let-covered plains lie either side the streets of sea. He bid us 
 take no treasure for the journey. Now mayst thou think how 
 stands our voyage in thine eyes ; soon shall I test what thou 
 meanest for our consolation." " Yes," answers God, " if you 
 are his thegns, I will take you." Then they stepped up on the 
 keel, and over the swinging of the waves Andrew sat by the 
 ocean-ward, ^theling by jEtheling. " JSTever heard I," cries 
 the poet, " that men, glorious kings and lovely thegns, sat in 
 a comelier ship than that, laden with high treasures." And 
 then the mighty king bade his angel comfort the poor men 
 with food, that they might better bear their way over the 
 welter of the flood, over the thronging of the billows, because 
 now the whale-mere was vexed and mightily disturbed. 
 
 The storm is now described in words that come, one after 
 another, short, heavy, and springing, like the blows of the 
 waves, and the gusts of wind. We know as we read that the 
 writer had seen the thing. I have translated it before; I have 
 
 I Cf . Seafarer. 
 
"ANDREAS" 417 
 
 need to translate it here again ; but, for the sake of variety, I 
 put it into blank verse, and literally — 
 
 370. The sword-fish played, 
 
 Through Ocean gliding, and the grey gull wheeled 
 Greedy of prey ; dark grew the Weather-torch ; 
 The winds waxed great, together crushed the waves, 
 The stream of ocean stirred, and drenched with spray 
 The cordage groaned ; then Water-Terror rose 
 With all the might of armies from the deep. 
 
 And the thegns of Andrew were much afraid. But when the 
 steersman offered to put them ashore, they refused, as in 
 Beowulf, as in the Fight at Maldon, to- leave their lord. 
 " Whither can we go," they cry, " if we should leave our lord ? 
 In every land we should then be shamed before all folk, when 
 the sons of men, for courage known, sit to choose who best of 
 them has stood by his lord in war, when hand and shield upon 
 the battle-plain, hewed down by grinding swords, bear sharp 
 straits in the play of foes." Andrew, as chieftain, has also his 
 duties to his comrades. The steersman bids, him cheer and 
 stir them with words ; and he does this by telling them the 
 story of Christ calming the sea of Galilee. It is a happy situa- 
 tion which the poet conceives, for Andrew, not knowing that 
 Christ himself is seated beside him in the stern, tells Christ a 
 story of Christ. " This Water-Terror shall be chid to stQlness 
 by the Lord of power." ^ 
 
 438. So happened it of yore, when we in ship 
 
 Steered for the sea^-fords o'er the foaming bar, 
 
 Riding the waves ; and the dread water-roads 
 
 Seemed full of danger, while the ocean-streams 
 
 Beat on the bulwarks ; and the seas cried out, 
 
 Answering each other ; and at whiles uprose 
 
 Grim Terror from the foaming breast of sea. 
 
 Over our wave-ship, into its deep lap. 
 
 And then the crowd 
 
 'Gan wail within the keel, and lo, the king. 
 
 The Glory-giver of the angels, rose 
 
 And stilled the billows and the weltering waves. 
 
 Rebuked the winds ! Then sank the seas, and smooth 
 
 The might of waters lay. Our soul laughed out. 
 
 When we had seen beneath the welkin's path 
 
 The winds and waves and water-dread become 
 
 Fearful themselves for fear of God the Lord. 
 
 Wherefore in very sooth I tell you now 
 
 The living God will never leave unhelped 
 
 An earl on earth if courage fail him not. 
 
 1 Whenever I translate in blank verse I have done the passage elsewhere 
 more literally, and in a measure nearer to the Anglo-Saxon rhythm, of which 
 blank verse is no representative. 
 
418 EAKLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 Now sleep invades the thegns and. the sea grew calm. But 
 Andrew and the steersman, still awake, renew their talk. It is 
 much more full of change and reality than is usual in Anglo- 
 Saxon dialogue, and the characters of the speakers are also 
 clearly distinguished. Christ and Andrew are seated together, 
 but Andrew does not recognise his master, and when he is 
 urged to tell what he remembers of Jesus, it is to Jesus him- 
 self that he tells all. This I have said is a good dramatic 
 situation, and it is bettered by the vivid way in which the poet 
 keeps the boat and the sea before our eyes. Touch after touch 
 makes us aware that we are flying along the sea to deliver St. 
 Matthew. Andrew's curiosity is awakened first by the skill of 
 the steersman. 
 
 "A better seafarer I never met," he says. "Teach me the 
 art whereby thou steerest the swimming of this horse of the sea, 
 this wave-floater, foamed over by ocean. It was my hap to 
 have been time after time on a sea-boat, sixteen times, pushing 
 the deep, the streamings of Eagor, while froze my hands, and 
 once more is this time — yet never have I seen a hero who like 
 thee could steer o'er the stem. The searwelter lingers on our 
 sides, the foaming wave strikes the bulwark, the bark is at full 
 speed. Foam-throated it fares ; most like to a bird it glides 
 o'er the ocean. More skilful art in any mariner I've never 
 seen. It is as if the ship were standing still on a landstead 
 where nor storm nor wind could move it, nor the water-floods 
 shatter its foaming prow ; but over seas it sweeps along, swift 
 under sail. Yet thou art young, refuge of warriors, not in 
 winters old, and hast the answer of a sea-playing earl : and a 
 wise wit as well." 
 
 "Oft it befalleth," answers Almighty God, "that we on 
 ocean's path break o'er the bathway with our ocean-stallions ; 
 and whiles it happeneth wretchedly to us on the sea, but God's 
 will is more than the flood's rage, and it is plain thou art his 
 man, for the deep sea straightway knew and ocean's round, 
 that thou hadst grace of the Holy Ghost. The surging waves 
 went back, a fear stilled the deep-bosomed wave." 
 
 Andrew, hearing this, bursts into a song of praise and joy 
 with which this part of the poem closes, for now the steersman 
 changes the conversation ; he asks Andrew to recall his life 
 in Palestine with Jesus, — the same curious situation of Christ 
 asking about himself is kept up, — and in these questions the 
 teaching element in the Anglo-Saxon poems enters in. Poems 
 were used as sermons, just as some homilies were written in 
 rude verse. With this purpose the poet makes Andrew give a 
 
"ANDREAS" 419 
 
 brief account of the chief miracles, and ends with a touch of 
 personal recollection and love, which lifts the passage into art. 
 "Now hearest thou, young hero, how the Lord of Glory loved 
 us in life, and by his. teaching drew us to fair joys." Further 
 questions follow, and the last seems to Andrew to go so much 
 to the heart of the matter that he is amazed. "What dost 
 thou ask," he cries, " with wonderful words and seemest to 
 know every hap by the sharpness of thy spirit." — "Out of no 
 lying craft or entrapping words," answers the steersman, "do 
 I ask thee this — here on the path of the whale ^ — but because 
 my heart is full of joy. Tell me more of the divine child." 
 And Andrew is swept away by the passion of the steersman, 
 and will tell him all he has known. In this way, and the 
 whole dialogue is written by an artist, the strange legend is 
 introduced of the stone images of the Cherubim => in the Temple 
 being quickened by Christ, stepping down from their place 
 and bearing witness to Jesus before the elders; and then 
 being sent over the green plains of Judaea to call Abraham 
 and Isaac and Jacob from their graves, to bid them be young 
 again and to come to Jerusalem to bear witness to Christ. 
 Thus all day long Andrew spoke in many tales till suddenly 
 sleep overtook him. And Christ bade his angels bear this 
 loved and sea-wearied one to land, where they leave him and 
 his comrades sleeping on the highway, near the city of the 
 Mermedonians. 
 
 And now begins what I may call the glory of St. Andrew, 
 in which the half-epic battle of the " hero hard in war," — his 
 purification through long martyrdom — is accomplished. It 
 consists of four parts — the introduction, the delivery of St. 
 Matthew, the martyrdom of Andrew, and the final triumph of 
 the saint in the conversion of the Mermedonians. 
 
 The introduction paints the Apostle waking in the morning. 
 He slept 
 
 835. Until the Lord had hid in hrightness shine 
 
 Day's candle, and the shadows swooned away, 
 Wan under clouds ; then came the Torch of air, 
 And Heaven's clear radiance hlickered o'er the halls. 
 Then woke the hard in war, and saw wide plains 
 Before the burg-gates, and precipitous hills, 
 And, round the gray rook and the ledges steep, 
 Tile-glittering houses, towers standing high, 
 And wind-swept walls. 
 
 1 This, and many other little touches keep our eyes fixed on the presence of 
 the sea. 
 
 2 I do not know whence this legend is derived. 
 
420 EARLY ENGLISH LITEKATURB 
 
 Then Andrew awakened his comrades. "'Twas Christ the 
 ^theling," he says, " that led us across the realm of the oar." 
 — " We too," they answer, "have had our adventure " ; and this 
 poet who has a special turn for various incident invents for 
 them a dream in which they are brought into the heavenly 
 Paradise. 
 
 862. " Us weary with the sea sleep overtook ! 
 
 Then came great earns above the yeasty waves, 
 Swift in their flight and prideful of their plumes ; 
 Who from us sleeping took away our souls, 
 And bore them blithely through the lift in flight, 
 "With joyful clamour. Bright and gentle they 
 Caressed our souls with kindness, and they dwelt 
 In glory where eternal song was sweet, 
 And wheeled the firmament." 
 
 And there they saw the thegns of God, the patriarchs and 
 martyrs and prophets, and the apostles and archangels prais- 
 ing the Lord. And Andrew gives thanks to Christ who now 
 in form of a young jEtheling draws near. " Hail to thee, 
 Andrew ! " he cries, " the grim snare-smiths shall not o'er- 
 whelm thy soul." 
 
 " How could I not know thee on the journey ? " Andrew 
 answers. " That was a sin." 
 
 "Not so great," replies Christ, "as when in Achaia thou 
 saidst thou could not go over the battling of the waves. But 
 now arise, set Matthew free. Bear many pains, for war is 
 destined to thee. Let no grim spear-battle make thee turn 
 from me. Be ever eager of glory. Eemember what pains 
 I bore when the rood was upreared. Then shalt thou turn 
 many in this burgh to the light of Heaven." 
 
 Andrew, then, — and here begins the Delivery of St. 
 Matthew — enters invisibly the town, like a chieftain going 
 to the field of war. Seven watchmen keep the dungeon. As 
 the saint drew near death swept them all away ; hapless they 
 died ; the storm of death, beflecked with blood, seized on these 
 warriors. The door fell in, and Andrew, the beast of battle, 
 pressed in over the heathen who lay drunken with blood, en- 
 sanguining the death-plain. In that murder-coffer, under the 
 locks of gloom, he found Matthew, the high-souled hero, sing- 
 ing the praises of God. They kissed and clipped each other. 
 Holy and bright as heaven a light shone round about them, 
 and their hearts welled with joys. 
 
 Now when Andrew had delivered Matthew, he went to the 
 city and sat him down by a pillar of brass on the march-path, 
 
"ANDREAS" 421 
 
 full of pure love and thoughts of bliss eternal, and waited what 
 should happen. And here begins the story of his suffering. 
 The folk-moot is held, and the people demand the prisoners 
 for meat. But the fierce bearers of the ashen-spears find the 
 keepers dead, and the hammer-work unlocked. Fear of Hun- 
 ger, that pale table-ghost, falls upon them, and the story of 
 this cannibal crowd in an agony of famine is told with a grim 
 humour which is very rare in Anglo-Saxon poetry. The first 
 question is. Should they eat the dead guards of the prison ? 
 Then the burghers are called to council, and they come to the 
 Thing-stead riding on their horses and haughty with their ash- 
 shafts, and cast lots whom they shall devour. And the lot 
 falls on an old redesman, who redeems his own life by offering 
 his young son. Is it a touch of savage humour that they 
 thankfully accept the change ? And the youth sang his Harm- 
 song, but no compassion held from him the " edge of the 
 sword, hardened in the rain of blows, many coloured with fire- 
 splotches." But Andrew has pity on the youth, and the edge 
 of the sword becomes as wax and melts away. A rude, mock- 
 ing description follows of the state of the town. "Howling 
 of woe arose, the host burst into cries, the heralds shouted 
 through the streets for famine. The horned halls, the wine- 
 houses were empty, men enjoyed no welfare in that bitter tide ; 
 the wisest thinkers met to take rede of their wretchedness in 
 secret runing ; and one warrior said to another, " Let no one 
 who has good lore hide it, for an immeasurable plague is on 
 us." Whereat a devil steps up before the chiefs ; wan and 
 colourless he was and his hue that of a cursed one. " It is 
 Andrew," he says, " a stranger .^theling, who has done you 
 this wrong. There he stands." Andrew replies with the 
 usual vigour of the saints ; and a curious passage follows in 
 which the whole host, under its ensigns, with spears and shields, 
 rushes to the gates to attack a single man. The scene is absurd, 
 but after all it is the poet's way of heightening the aspect of 
 the hero. To do this still more, God intervenes: "Andrew, 
 thou shalt do a deed of valour ; strengthen thy heart against 
 the strong. Torments and cold bonds await thee, but I abide 
 with thee." The saint is bound and dragged through mountain 
 gorges and over stony hills, and over the streets, the ancient 
 work of giants, paved with parti-coloured stones. So the 
 whole day long was this sun-bright hero swinged, till the sun 
 that blazed in the firmament sank to its seat of rest. Light 
 was his thought and his courage unbroken. 
 Here follows an heroic picture in which the saint is set in a 
 
422 EARLY ENGLISH LITEKATURE Chap. 
 
 frame made by the description of a bitter night of frost. This 
 also is done to enhance him in our eyes. Nature is used to 
 heighten the lonely figure of the martyr. 
 
 1265. Then was the Holy One, the stark-souled Earl.i 
 
 Beset with wisdom's thoughts the whole night long, 
 Under the dungeon gloom. 
 
 Snow bound the earth 
 With whirling flakes of winter, and the storms 
 With hard hail-showers grew chill, and Erost and Rime — 
 Gray gangers of the heath — locked closely up 
 The homes of heroes and the peoples' seats ! 
 Erozen the lands ; and by keen icicles 
 The water's might was shrunken on the streams 
 Of every river, and the ice bridged o'er 
 The glittering Road of the sea. 
 
 Presh torment filled the next day, and in answer to Andrew's 
 piteous prayer for help, only the Fiend appears, the fierce war- 
 lock who cries to the torturers, "Smite the sinner over his 
 mouth, the foe of the folk. Now he speaketh too much." 
 And the martyrdom goes on till " the Sun gliding to his tent, 
 went under a headland of clouds, and Night, wan and brown, 
 drew down her helm o'er earth and veiled the mountains 
 steep." 
 
 Then in the prison there was a wild scene. The murderous 
 Lord of ill, with seven devils, came mocking, " What thinkest 
 thou, Andrew, of thy hither-coming ? " And he urged on his 
 thegns, "Let the spear-point, the arrow poison-dipped, dive 
 into the heart of this doomed man ; run boldly in and bow the 
 pride of this lord of battle." The rush of the devils is stopped 
 by the Cross ; and the great captive of hell is grieved. " What 
 has befallen you, my warriors bold, my shield-companions, that 
 so little is your luck ? " Then one answered him, " Nought can 
 we pain him. Go forward thyself. A bad, a frightful fight 
 wilt thou have, if thou darest venture thy life against this 
 lonely man. Dearest of Earls, we may give thee a better rede ; 
 take care how it may go with thee in the changing of blows. 
 Better to twit him in his wretchedness ; we have the words all 
 ready." Then, at a distance, the devil mocked the saint, but 
 the answer drove him to flight. 
 
 The third day dawned, another day of torment ; and at its 
 end, while he lay weary of his life upon the plain, he cried 
 piteously to Christ, " Thou, on the Cross, didst call, ' Father, 
 
 1 This also I have translated before, and I put it, therefore, Into Wank verse. 
 
' ANDREAS " 423 
 
 Prince of life, why hast thou forsaken me ' ; and I, tormented 
 for three days, now cry, .' Joy-giver of souls, let me yield up 
 my life.' Moreover, thou didst promise that not a hair of our 
 heads should be lost, nor sinew or bone lie on swathe ; and 
 now my locks lie driven through the land, my sinews are 
 cramped, my blood is spilled — death is dearer than this life- 
 care." — " Weep not," answers Christ, " thy wretchedness. 
 This is not too hard for thee. Nothing of my word shall fail. 
 Look on thy track where thy blood has gushed out." And the 
 champion looked back, and lo, he saw blowing bowers rise, 
 laden with blossoms, where he had poured out his blood ! The 
 fourth night now comes, and Christ is still present with his 
 servant. The trial is closed, the triumph has begun. "No 
 longer," Jesus cries, "shalt thou suffer sorrow." Then rose 
 the hero, nor was his beauty now spoiled, nor a fringe of his 
 garment unravelled, nor a hair of his head loosened. He was 
 whole as before. 
 
 The fourth division, which tells of the glory of the saint, 
 begins with a few personal remarks about the poet's treatment 
 of his subject. The only thing in it which reveals character 
 is a certain touch of proud humility, mingled with the self- 
 consciousness of an artist. " I have already told of the saint's 
 deeds, but far beyond my powers goes on the well-known his- 
 tory : a man of fuller insight than I may tell it all ; yet I 
 may give a few more words of the song." This is nothing 
 more than an introduction to the new canto. There is none 
 of that sentimental personality in it which, had Cynewulf 
 written the poem, he would have certainly introduced, once he 
 had begun, as the poet does here, to speak of himself. I can- 
 not fancy the writer of the individual passages in the Christ, 
 the Elene, and the Juliana holding his tongue under these cir- 
 cumstances. But it is just about as much personality as an imi- 
 tator of Cynewulf would be likely to practise. 
 
 We find Andrew now, to return to the poem, on the plain 
 near the city wall where two huge upright stones stand beaten 
 by the storms, and these are the two tables of the Law. To 
 one of them he speaks, and bids it let bubble forth from its 
 base overflowing, wide-sweeping waters, a weltering ocean, for 
 the death of these wicked men. The Stone behaved well; 
 there was no delay ; it opened, and a torrent flooded the plain. 
 And the poet seizes his opportunity. A great flood, slaughter- 
 ing men, is what an Englishman loved to describe. He does it 
 well, but some of his metaphors are too fantastic for good art. 
 I do not think that Cynewulf would have used them, but I 
 
424 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 give them in a note ' just because, from a literary point of view, 
 they point to a poet who had left the quietude of Cynewulf 
 behind, and was striving after odd and stran-ge effects. The 
 power shown is vigorous, but it is strained, and we may make 
 the same criticism concerning the whole of this interesting and 
 attractive poem. The constant use of phrases borrowed from 
 Beowulf, from Cynewulf himself, the effort to be specially 
 heroic in description, to import more of the heathen elements 
 of Saga into a Christian song than even the Elene dared to do 
 — the use of strange words, even the elaborate invention of 
 words — point to a poet who was departing from a temperate 
 style, and suggest, if. they do not prove, that he wrote at a time 
 when Cynewulf was growing old. If this be true, it puts us 
 again in mind of the fantastic poets who imitated and followed 
 the true Elizabethans, who retained much of the strength and 
 imagination of the great time, but who chose to develop the 
 artificial rather than the natural elements in the work of their 
 predecessors. Yet the writer of the Andreas has one power 
 Cynewulf had not, inventiveness in incident ; and it was a thing 
 sorely wanted in Anglo-Saxon poetry. Moreover, the fault I 
 find with him had, I may say, only begun. It is not carried 
 far, and had we more work from his hand, he would perhaps 
 have purged himself from it when he had grown older. The 
 fault is a fault of youth as well as of age. It belonged to Cole- 
 ridge, to Byron, to Browning, to Tennyson, when they were 
 young. 
 
 And now air and earth and fire join in the wrath which 
 falls on the folk and the town. The yellow waters waxed 
 more and more and men fled to the caves, but a mighty angel 
 there forstood them, and sprinkled gleaming fire over the burg. 
 The beating sea and torrents roared, the fire-flakes flew, the 
 flood boiled with waves, and in the houses rose the lay of sor- 
 row ; many a death-song was sung. Through the tremulous air 
 the roarings of the flame flung themselves upon the walls, and 
 still the waters greater grew. And one cried out, " 'Tis our 
 unriglitness to the stranger that brings this doom. Let us set 
 him free." And Andrew knew the mind of the folk was 
 changed ; wherefore he bade the stream-faring be still, and 
 
 iThe Stone "splits and the foaming billows cover the land, as when the 
 mead is spilled after a feast. The fated sank in the deep ; the war-charging of 
 the waters swept them away. This was a bitter beer-feast. No delay made 
 the cup-bearers, the attendant thegns. From break of day there was drink 
 enough prepared for every one of them." The whole of this comparison of the 
 Flood to a drinking feast is detestable. Fortunately it stands alone. But it 
 reveals the sensationalist who is searching for violent effects. 
 
XXV THE "DESCENT KJtO HELL" 425 
 
 the storms rest about the stony hills. The earth dries under 
 his feet. Then a fearful cavern is cleft in the hill and the fal- 
 low flood is engulfed, yet not the waters alone, but fourteen 
 eminent villains therewith. This settled the strife, and all 
 cry out " Hear Andrew, he is a messenger of the true God." 
 So the apostle prayed, and all the young folk who had been 
 drowned arose alive. They were baptized, and a church was 
 built on the spot. The nobles and their wives were then 
 christened, and a bishop chosen, Plato by name. 
 
 "Now I am going," cries Andrew, "to find a ship." So 
 great is their sorrow that God speaks again to his servant. 
 " Stay yet seven days in this city, Eefuge of warriors " — even 
 God takes the heroic note — " confirm them in the faith and then 
 depart." So he did, and the poem ends with the picture of 
 the departure, such as the poet might have drawn after read- 
 ing Baeda's description of the departure of Ceolfrid from the 
 shores of Tyne. 
 
 1712. Then by the Nesses of the sea they brought 
 The eager warrior to his wave-wood home, 
 And weeping after him, stood on the beach 
 As long as they could see that JEthelings' joy 
 Sail o'er the seals'-path, on the tumbling waves. 
 Then they gave glory to the glorious Lord, 
 Sang in their hosts, and this it was they sang — 
 " One only is the eternal God ! Of all 
 Created beings is his might and power 
 Lauded aloud ; and, over all, his Joy — 
 In high and holy splendour of the Heavens — 
 Shines through the everlasting ages far ; 
 In glory beautiful for evermore 
 With angel hosts — our JEtheling, our King." i 
 
 Thus ends the Andreas, a poem full, I think, of attractive 
 charm. 
 
 Connected with this poem by its imitation of heroic sagas, 
 and by transference of their phrases to Christianity and its 
 saints ; and connected with Cynewulf by, at least, an imita- 
 tion of his manner, is the Descent into Hell which is in the 
 Exeter Book. This is but a fragment, but it has inspiration. 
 Some have thought that it may have formed a portion of the 
 Christ of Cynewulf. As it stands, I do not see that we can, 
 
 1 1 have put this last passage also into Wank verse, though I have not 
 translated it before, for it may serve, together with the others, to show how 
 easy it is to put the short epic line of the English poets into that modern metre. 
 But I am glad to abandon it, for it has not to my ear any more likeness to the 
 real music of Anglo-Saxon verse than the stately march of gorgeous cavalry has 
 to the gallop of a troop of guerillas. 
 
426 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 "without violence, insert it into the Christ. It has its own 
 careful beginning, and were it not broken off, it would no 
 doubt have had its careful end, for the fragment suggests a 
 large and thoughtful composition. It is true it supplies, a 
 part of the history which is wanted in the Christ. But the 
 story of the descent into Hades did not, it seems, any more 
 than the Resurrection which is also left out, form a part of 
 the plan of the Christ. The simplest and most probable con- 
 jecture is that this is a separate poem, the end of which we 
 have lost, on this favourite subject. Wulker says, also, that 
 there is no trace in the Christ of any use of the pseudo-gospel 
 of Mcodemus, and that there are traces of its being used in 
 this Descent into Hell. This would agree on the whole with 
 Ten Brink's view that the poem was written some time after 
 the Christ. During that time Cynewulf might have become 
 acquainted with the gospel of Nicodemus. 
 
 There is no positive proof that Cynewulf was the author of 
 this piece, but every one almost has felt that it belongs to him. 
 It has all the manner of the first part of the Christ, the same 
 trick of dialogue, the same choric outbursts, the same lofty 
 note of poetic praise. There is a passage in which the poet 
 apostrophises Gabriel, Mary, Jerusalem, and Jordan, which is 
 almost parallel with a passage in the Christ, and of a kind 
 which stands alone in Anglo-Saxon poetry. It has the very- 
 cry of Cynewulf in it. Nevertheless, I cannot think that the 
 poem is contemporary with the Christ, but rather with that 
 time in Cynewulf's life in which, wholly at peace about his 
 salvation, he felt himself free to use elements introduced from 
 heroic Saga in his poetry, as he has done in the Elene. In- 
 deed, in this Descent into Hell, the imitation of the war-poem 
 is more remarkable than in the Elene. The women who go to 
 the tomb are ^Etheling women. Christ's tomb and death are 
 the tomb and death of an ^theling. He is himself the joy of 
 ^thelings. He is the victory child of God. The Patriarchs 
 are noble. Even the soldiers are heroes. The women wail 
 over the corse of Jesus as the English wailed over their Kings. 
 John the Baptist is a great captain, and he welcomes Jesus 
 into the Burg of Hell as a Norse captain would welcome his 
 King in the hour of victory. The poem is full of triumphant 
 passages. Here is one — 
 
 17. At the dawning of the day down a troop of angels came : 
 Stood the singing joy of hosts round the Saviour's burg.i 
 Open was the Earth-house, and the iEtheling's corse 
 
 1 That is, round his tomb. 
 
THE "PHCENIX" 427 
 
 Took tlie sprite of life 1 Shivered all the earth, 
 High rejoiced Hell's-burghers,i for the Hero had awakened, 
 I^iU of courage from the clay. Conquest-sure and wise, 
 Rose his glorious Majesty. Then the Hero, John, 
 Spoke exulting. 
 
 This is the full Saga note. It is even more remarkable 
 when Christ sets forth on his expedition to hell and breaks 
 dovra the gates of the burg.- I have already used the pas- 
 
 33. On his war-path hastened then the Prince of men, 
 Then the Helm of Heaven willed the walls of Hell 
 To break down and bow to ruin, and the Burg unclothe 
 Of its sturdy starkness ; he, the strongest of all kings ! 
 No helm-beariug heroes would he have for battle then ; 
 None of warriors wearing bymies did he wish to lead 
 To the doors of Hell ! Down before him fell the bars, 
 Down the hinges dashed, inwards drove the King his way ! 
 
 All the exiles throng to see him — Adam, Abraham, and the 
 rest — the high-fathers of the world, hosts of noble women, 
 uncounted multitudes. But of the great deeds done John the 
 Baptist saw the most. He beheld "how the gates of hell, that 
 darkness had garmented so long, gleamed in the glory of 
 Christ's, coming; and when he saw it, the great Thegn 
 rejoiced. Greeting, he welcomed the King," and his long 
 speech takes up the rest of this fragment, and breaks off in 
 the midst. It is of an excellent quality, written, I think, to be 
 sung, at least in parts, as a choric hymn. The whole poem is 
 worth a separate study by some careful scholar. 
 
 Of the same fine quality, but not built in an heroic mould, 
 is the Phoenix, which we may, and with much more certainty, 
 allot to Cynewulf. It is the last of the longer poems, and 
 when we have gone through it, there is nothing left, save the 
 Dream of the Rood, of any literary importance,. The Phoenix 
 is in the Exeter Book and runs to 677 lines. Its source is a 
 Latin poem on the same subject attributed to Lactantius, and 
 the Latin lines are printed under the Abglo-Saxon text by 
 Thorpe in his edition of the Exeter Book. The writer leaves 
 his original at verse 380 and composes the story of the Phoenix 
 into a Christian allegory»of the Resurrection. This is the 
 second part, and he has used in it the writings of Ambrose 
 and Baeda. As long as he draws on the so-called Lactantius 
 poem he follows it, in Cynewulf's fashion, sometimes expand- 
 
 1 The burghers of hell here are the Old Testament saints, the " spirits in 
 prison." 
 
428 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 ing, sometimes shortening the sense. The expansions are 
 chiefly when he is describing natural scenery, and when he is 
 breaking into praise. In the second part the outbursts of 
 laud and honour to God are entirely in Cynewulf s exulting 
 manner, and the description of the Last Judgment closely 
 resembles the descriptions of the same event in the Christ and 
 the Elene. There are but few of the critics who do not believe 
 in Cynewulf's authorship of this poem. If it be so, all the 
 probabilities go to prove that the poem was written by him 
 after the Christ and before the Elene. 
 
 I have said that the introduction of a strong personal 
 element is the special mark of all the signed poems of Cyne- 
 wulf, and that the signature is fancifully added to the personal 
 statement. There is no distinct personal element in the 
 Phoenix, iinless we say that he adopts as his own the quotation 
 he makes from Job "concerning the Resurrection to eternal 
 life," and which he introduces with the words, " Let no man 
 think that I sing this song with lying words ; hear now what 
 the wisdom of Job sang." Nor is there any signature, but 
 there is an ending of another kind which Cynewulf, in his 
 fantastic way, may have inserted in place of his runes. The 
 last eleven lines are a mixture of Anglo-Saxon and Latin. 
 The first half of each line is Anglo-Saxon, the last half Latin, 
 and the Latin is alliterated with the Anglo-Saxon. 
 
 The poem begins with that description of the paradisaical 
 land where the Phoenix dwells which I have translated (vol. 
 i. p. 296). The second canto describes the Phoenix and its 
 life. The bird lives alone a delightful life in his happy isle. 
 Death never harms him in that land of joy. 
 
 90. He shall of the Sun see and watch the voyaging, 
 
 And shall come right on 'gainst the candle of the Lord, 
 'Gainst the gladdening gem ! He shall gaze with eagerness 
 When upriseth clear that most -iEtheling of stars, 
 O'er the Ocean wave, from the East a-glitter,' 
 Gleaming with his glories, God the Father's work of old, 
 Beacon bright of God ! — Blind the stars shall be, 
 Wandered under waters to the western realms, 
 All bedimmed at dawn, when the dark of night, 
 Wan, away has gone. Then, o'er waves, the Bird, 
 Pirm and feather-proud, o'er the flowing ocean stream, 
 Under lift and over Lake, looketh eager-hearted 
 When upcometh fair, from the East a-gliding 
 O'er the spacious sea, the upshuiing of the Svm. 
 
 1 These lines are, with changes, repeated below. These descriptive passages 
 have, owing to their frequent refrains either of motive or description, some- 
 thing of a lyric strain. 
 
THE "PHOENIX" 429 
 
 The next lines repeat the same motive over again in other 
 words ; and as this is one of the characteristics of Anglo-Saxon 
 poetry, and a special characteristic of Gynewulf who manages 
 it with skill, I insert them here. Eepetitions of this kind 
 were not wearying when they were sung, and I believe that 
 when they were deliberately made, as here, for the heightening 
 of the impression, they were perhaps set to different music or 
 to the same music in a different key. 
 
 104. So the fair-born fowl at the fountain-head, 
 
 At the well-streams, wonneth' in a winsomeness unfailing ! 
 
 There a twelve of times, he, the joy-triumphant one, 
 
 In the bum doth bathe him, ere the beacon cometh. 
 
 Candle of the JEther ; and, as often, he 
 
 Of those softly-joyous springings of the Wells 
 
 Tastes at every bath — billow-cold they are ! — 
 
 Then he soars on high, when his swimming-play is done, 
 
 With uplifted heart on a lofty tree — 
 
 Whence across the Eastern paths, with an ease the greatest, 
 
 He may watch the Sun's outwending, when that Welkin-taper 
 
 O'er the battle of the billows brilliantly is blickering. 
 
 Flaming light of light ! All the land is fair-adorned ; 
 
 Lovely grows the world when the gem of glory. 
 
 O'er the going of great Ocean, glitters on the ground, 
 
 Over all the middle-earth — mightiest this of stars ! 
 
 This is the repetition, and very well done it is. Then 
 Gynewulf describes the life of the Bird till evening falls, and 
 I wonder that there are still folk who think that there is no 
 poetry in early England. I translate, as before, literally — 
 
 120. Soon as ere the Sun, o'er the salt sea-streamings. 
 Towers up on high, then the gray and golden fowl 
 Flieth forth, fair-shining, from the forest tree ; 
 Eareth, snell of feathers, in its flight along the lift ; 
 Sounds, and sings his way (ever) sunwards on. 
 
 Then as beautiful becomes all the bearing of the bird.; 
 Borne his breast is upwards in a blissfulness of joy ! 
 In his song-craft he makes changes, in his lucid voicing, 
 Far more wonderfully now than did ever bairn of man 
 Hear, the Heavens below ; ^nce the High-exalted King, 
 He the Worker of all glory, did the world establish. 
 Earth, and eke the Heaven. 
 
 The up-ringing of his voice 
 Than all other song-crafts sweeter is and lovelier ; 
 Far away more winsome than whatever winding lay. 
 Not alike to that clear sound may the clarion be, 
 Nor the horn nor harp-clang, nor the heroes' singing — 
 
430 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 Not of one of them on earth — nor the organ tone, 
 
 Nor the singing of the saokbut, nor sweet feathers of the swan, . 
 
 None of all the other joys that the Eternal shaped 
 
 Eor the mirthfulness of men in this mournful world. 
 
 So he sings and softly sounds, sweetly hlessed in joy. 
 
 Till within the southern sky doth the Sun become 
 
 Sunken to its setting — silent then is he. 
 
 Listening now he lends his ear, then uplifts his head, 
 
 Courage-thrilled and wise in thought 1 Thrioe he shaketh then 
 
 Feathers whet for flight — so the fowl is still. 
 
 Thus lives tlie Phoenix for a thousand years ; then, attended 
 by troops of birds, flies far to the Syrian land, where in a 
 desert place, on a high tree, he makes his nest for death. 
 
 182. Then the wind is stUl and the weather fair ; 
 Pure and holy there shines the Heaven's gem ; 
 Clouds are cleared away, and the glorious crowds of waters 
 Still are standing there ; every storm therein 
 Under Heaven is hushed. 
 
 In this sweet "weather the Phoenix builds his nest of noble 
 plants and odorous leaves ; and when at summer-time the sun 
 is brightest, the Some of the bird is heated and the fang of 
 fire devours bird and nest; but the ashes, balled together, 
 grow into an apple, and in the apple a wondrous worm waxes 
 till it becomes an eagle, and then a Phoenix as before. Only 
 honey-dew he eats that falls at midnight, and when he has 
 gathered all the relics of his old body and covered them with 
 sweet herbs, he takes them in his claws and, flying back to his 
 native land, buries them deep in its earth. AH men, all the 
 birds, flock to see his flight, but he outstrips their sight, and 
 comes alone to his happy isle, where once more he " dwells in 
 the grove, delighting in the welliug streams." 
 
 When Cynewulf has thus brought his bird back, he makes 
 out of its story two allegories, one of the life of the Saints, 
 and another of Christ who, after the Judgment, flies through 
 the air attended by all the worshipping souls like birds ; and 
 each soul becomes a Phoenix, and dwells for ever young where 
 joy never changes, praising God in the burg of life. Then 
 again he makes Christ the Phoenix who passed through the 
 fire of death to glorious life, " Therefore to hiijt be praise for 
 ever and ever. Hallelujah." 
 
 This allegorical treatment of the life of beasts and birds, 
 and also of the great tales of the world; the taking up of 
 the whole of natural history into the realm of the spiritual — 
 
XXV THE "PANTHER" AND THE "WHALE" 431 
 
 human thoughts and emotions being imputed to the animals ; 
 — is of great antiquity, and especially among Semitic peoples. 
 Through the Old Testament, through the Talmud, through the 
 parables of Christ, it descended to the early Christian writers 
 and was increased among them by their contact with Syria, 
 Arabia, and India ; but the taste for it may be said to have 
 been established by the Fathers of the Church. Ambrose, for 
 example, uses the Phoenix as the symbol of the Eesurrection. 
 It was common in the eighth century, the time of which we 
 are writing, and it steadily grew during the Middle Ages 
 among poets and preachers till it was carried to an extreme 
 height. In the catalogue, for example, of Duke Humphrey's 
 library we find the whole of Ovid's Metamorphoses moralised 
 in this allegorical fashion. This is not the place to discuss 
 so large and fruitful a subject, but the allegorical treatment of 
 the Phoenix by Cynewulf leads me to place here three other 
 English poems — the Wlmle, the Panther, and the Partridge, — 
 which are either intended to be a complete Physiologus by 
 their writer, or may be parts of a much more extended collec- 
 tion. 
 
 A Physiologus was a collection of descriptions of certain 
 Beasts, Birds, and Fishes, and of the legends connected with 
 them, with a religious allegory tacked on to them. The 
 earliest Physiologus was in Greek, and from it the ^Uthiopian 
 as well as the Latin Physiologus were translated. This Latin 
 one, it is conjectured, was the source of the three Anglo-Saxon 
 poems we possess, and also of two manuscripts of the ninth 
 century, discovered by Cahier {B and C), which agree for the 
 most part with one another. In B, after twenty-two other' 
 animals, the Panther, the Whale, and the Partridge follow one 
 another. In G the Panther precedes the Whale, and the Par- 
 tridge is left out. In the ancient Greek Physiologus also the Pan- 
 ther comes first of the three, and the Whale and the Partridge 
 follow. It is suggested by critics that the Anglo-Saxon writer 
 chose these three concluding animals, not at random, but with 
 the intention of making out of them — since each of them 
 represents one of the three kingdoms — a short but complete 
 Physiologus. At the close of the poem of .the Partridge, Finit 
 stands in the manuscript. The Partridge is a mere fragment, 
 but the Panther and the Whale are complete, and have some 
 literary interest. 
 
 In far lands, in deep hollows lives the Panther, glittering in 
 a coat as vari-coloured as Joseph's, lonely, gentle, harmless to 
 all, save to the dragon, that envenomed scather. When he has 
 
432 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 fed, he seeks a hidden place among the mountain dells and 
 slumbers for three nights. On the third day, when he wakes, 
 a lofty, sweet, ringing sound comes from his mouth, and with 
 the song a most delightful steam of sweet-smelling breath, 
 more grateful than all the blooms of herbs and blossoms of the 
 trees. Then from the burgs, and from the seats of kings, and 
 from castle halls, pour forth the troops of war-men and the 
 swift lance-brandishers, and all the animals, to hear the song 
 and meet the perfume. So is the Lord God, the Prince of 
 Joys, and so the hope of salvation which he gives. That is a 
 noble fragrance. 
 
 The Whale, since it has to do with the sea, is more wrought 
 out by the poet, and more interesting than the Panther. The 
 first part of the legend — of the sailors landing on the mon- 
 ster's back as on an island — comes perhaps originally from 
 the East. It is in the story of Sinbad the Sailor, but it con- 
 tinued for a long time in English literature, through Middle 
 English to Chaucer, and so on to Milton's simile. Our descrip- 
 tion here is the first English use of the tale. It is fairly done, 
 and filled in with special sea-phrases. I will tell, he says, of 
 the mickle whale whose name is 
 
 7. Eloater of the Elood-streams old, Eastitocalon. 
 Like it is in aspect to the unhewn stone, 
 Such as mov&d is at tlie margent of the sea, 
 By sand-hills surrounded, thickly set with sea- weeds ; 
 So that the surge-sailors ween (their souls within), 
 That upon some island with their eyes they look. 
 Then they hawser fast their high-stemmed ships 
 With the anchored cables on the Nq-land there ; 
 Moor their mares of ocean at this margin of the main ! 
 
 Thus the keels are standing 
 Close beside that stead, surged around by ocean' s-stream.i 
 
 1 Compare Milton — 
 
 Or that sear-beast 
 Leviathan, which God of all his works 
 Created hugest that swim the ocean-stream. 
 Him, haply slumbering on the Norway foam, 
 The pilot of some small night-foundered skiff, 
 Deeming some island, oft, as seamen tell, 
 With iixM anchor in his scaly rind, 
 Moors by his side under the lee, while night 
 Invests the sea, and wished morn delays. 
 So stretched out huge in length the Arch-Fiend lay, 
 Chained on the burning lake. 
 
 It is a whole lesson in art to contrast this with its predecessor of the eighth 
 century. " Ocean-stream " is pure Anglo-Saxon for sea. " Thickly set with 
 sea-weeds " is literally " greatest of sea-weeds or sea reeds." I take it to mean 
 that the stone looks as if it were itself the very greatest of sea-weeds, so thickly 
 is it covered with them. 
 
THE "WHALE" 433 
 
 The players of the sea climb ou the island, waken a fire, and 
 are joyous, but suddenly the Ocean-guest plunges down with 
 the bark, and in the hall of death makes fast with drowning 
 ship and seamen. So plays the Fiend with the souls of men. 
 Yet another fashion has this proud Eusher through the water. 
 When he is hungry this Ocean-ward opens his wide lips, and 
 so winsome an odour pours forth that the other fishes stream 
 into his mouth till it is filled ; ^ then quick together crash the 
 grim gums around his prey. So too it is with men and the 
 accursed one. When life is over, he claps his fierce jaws, 
 the gates of hell, behind them. This is the common image of 
 the entrance of hell — as seen, for example, in the rude pictures 
 of the Gaedmon manuscript, — like the gaping mouth of a 
 monstrous fish. 
 
 I think it probable that these three small poems, which a 
 literary connection has led me to link on to the Phoenix, were 
 collected together if not actually made at York during the 
 time when its great school was flourishing. The history of 
 that School will form the following and the last chapter of 
 this book. It was in full career during the whole time in 
 which we suppose Cynewulf was writing ; and though I do 
 not think that he wrote in that town, yet what he wrote was 
 read, we may be sure, at that central seat of Northumbrian 
 learning. Among all the Latin studies pursued there, it is not 
 likely that English would altogether be neglected. A few 
 scholars at least — and we know that Baeda did so — would 
 care for the native poetry of their own country, study it, and 
 collect it. The seats of great libraries become the home of 
 literary collections. I conjecture, then, that during the fifty 
 years or so when the School of York was famous over England 
 and on the Continent, the English poetry of the past, the lays 
 of Beowulf, the war-songs, the songs of Caedmon and many 
 others, were gathered at York, studied, and arranged. It is 
 likely enough that the Christian editing of Beowulf, and of 
 semi-heathen poems like the Wanderer and the Seafarer, was 
 done in the cloistered shades of the great School. 
 
 It is still more likely that the class of poems of which I now 
 briefly write — collections of proverbial folk-sayings, senten- 
 
 I I wonder if the ancient sailors had ever met the sperm-whale, for this part 
 of the legend contains things true hoth of it and of the Greenland whale. 
 When the sperm-whale dies of the disease which produces Ambergris, it leaves 
 behind it, lingering on the ocean, a sweet scent. The Right whale feeds on 
 small animalculae, which the whalers call Brit. It takes in with open mouth 
 the sea thick with these small beasts, and then closing its gates of whale-bone 
 ejects the water. The Brit are retained behind the fence of bone. 
 
434 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATUEE chap. 
 
 tious moral poems containing selected passages from the old or 
 the new poetry put together within a framework of the col- 
 lector's own writing — were made at York during the literary 
 leisure of the time, and received and heard with pleasure by 
 Eogberht, JSthelberht, and Alcuin. However that may be, it 
 is under this convenient and probable supposition that I place 
 the Gnomic Verses, the Grafts or Gifts of Men, and the Weirds 
 of Men, all of which are contained in the Exeter Book. 
 
 The Chiomic Verses are in four parts, three of which are in 
 the Exeter Book, and the fourth is in the Cotton MS. at Cam- 
 bridge. They consist of folk-proverbs, maxims, short descrip- 
 tions of human life and natural occurrences, thrown together 
 without any apparent arrangement in subjects. They vary in 
 length from half a line to six or eight lines. Some are of the 
 plainest simplicity, others show some knowledge of the world ; 
 some are quotations from the poets ; there is one at the eighty- 
 first line which is taken from Beowulf, 1387 ; there are two 
 others which seem to be extracted from the Seafarer. Some 
 of them relate to natural phenomena, some to the life of ani- 
 mals, many to the customs and manners of men and women ; 
 some may have come down from heathen times and be very 
 old,^ others have been Christianised ; others, as plainly, have 
 had their origin when Christianity had been well established ; 
 and some belong, I think, to a time long after the eighth cen- 
 tury. I think it probable that the original collector was some 
 literary person at York, during Ecgberht's or jEfchelberht's 
 time, who was interested in heathen verse and customs. The 
 lines from Beowulf suggest this, and the resemblances to the 
 Seafarer suggest that the collector was a ISTorthumbrian. Then 
 we may imagine that the collection, brought southward to 
 Wessex, was taken up again after the days of ^Elfred, new 
 matter added, the introduction of the first part written, the 
 close of the first, second, and third. The last line, for exam- 
 ple, of the first part is the wish of the editor to be thanked by 
 his readers for the trouble he has taken, " Let him have thanks 
 who got together for ns these pleasures." The last four lines 
 of the third part do not appear to me to belong to the lines 
 which precede them, but to be an ancient folk-saying concern- 
 ing weapons. I conjecture, then, that they formed part of the 
 
 1 These are of special interest. It is not improbable (and this has been fre- 
 quently said) that we have in some of them old folk'Verses which the English 
 used m the old England over the sea, and that they are specimens of the earliest 
 form of English verse. I have inserted a few of them into a note at the end of 
 this volume. 
 
XXV THE "GIFTS" AND "WEIRDS OF MEN" 435 
 
 body of the manuscript which the scribe was copying, and that, 
 finding he had omitted them as he wrote, he tagged them on 
 at the end. I give them here — 
 
 Yare be the "Warboard and lance-head on shaft, 
 Edge on the sword and point on the spear, 
 Brave heart in warriors ; a helm for the keen, 
 And the smallest of hoards to the coward in soul. 
 
 That has the heroic heathen ring. It belongs to the other 
 phrases in earlier parts of the Verses which treat of weapons 
 of war, such as " The bow must have its arrow." 
 
 Two other poems, somewhat related to each other in subject, 
 may also have been edited at the School of York. They are 
 writings which, in their contemplative view of human life, 
 would naturally attract the attention of retired and pensive 
 scholars, men like Gray, who looked from their college 
 windows on the vicissitudes of human affairs and turned them 
 into reflective odes. These are the Gifts of Men and the Fates 
 of Men. They have both, without ariy sufftcient proof, been 
 allotted to Cynewulf. They have also been made into two 
 separate treatments by the same poet of one subject. Who- 
 ever wrote, says Eieger, the Gifts of Men, wrote also the 
 Weirds of Men. Our gifts are often our fates. But few 
 support Eieger in this, and Wulker maintains that the art in 
 both poems is different, and the poets different, and that 
 Cynewulf had nothing to do with either. 
 
 The chief interest of the Gifts of Men is that some of it 
 may have come down from heathen times. The introduction 
 plainly belongs to a Christian editor, and so does the close ; 
 and it borrows its main theme either from Gregory's homily 
 on Job or from St. Paul's enumeration of the Gifts of the 
 Spirit in 1 Corinthians xii., "There are diversities of gifts, 
 but the same spirit." Half of the gifts are profane enough — 
 harp-playing, knowledge of the stars, building, running, arch- 
 ery, steering the war-ship through the sea, smithery of war- 
 weapons, the goldsmith's craft, companionship in the mead-hall, 
 skill in dice, in riding, in hunting, in drinking, in giving dooms 
 in council when wise men make national laws, in hawking, 
 in juggling. It is probable there was a heathen or semi- 
 heathen poem on the gifts of men which both Cynewulf in the 
 Christ and the writer of this poem had before them, and that 
 this writer mingled it up with a free adaptation of Gregory's 
 homily, of the xii. of 1 Corinthians, and perhaps of some 
 Latin hymn on the same matter. There is no poetic or liter- 
 
436 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 ary quality in this catalogue of gifts, or in the reflections on 
 them. 
 
 A different air breathes through the poem on the Weirds of 
 Men. It has some form ; the introduction of the poem is brief 
 and excellent ; the different fates of men are touched with a 
 poet's hand. It is a strange criticism which imagines that he 
 who composed this could have composed the Gifts of Men. It 
 belongs to the good time, and I should not be surprised if it 
 were written within the iirst three decades of the eighth 
 century, and perhaps by Cynewulf in his semi-heathen, semi- 
 Christian time. There is a manner of painting human life 
 in it which recalls some of the Biddies. But this is mere 
 conjecture. It begins with the birth of a child, its growth, its 
 education by its parents. "God only knows," it says, "what 
 the winters will bring to the grown-up man," — and then it 
 enumerates the different kinds of miserable deaths which may 
 befall him — death by the wolf, "the gray ganger of the 
 heath," death by hunger, from blindness, in war, by lameness, 
 by falling from a tree, iDy the gallows, by fire, by quarrel at 
 the feast; misery through exile and loss of friends, and 
 poverty. But others, by the might of God, will win through 
 all misfortune to a hoar old age,' happy and prosperous, and 
 with troops of friends, — so manifold are the dooms God gives 
 to men. Then he seems to slip into a telling of the gifts 
 rather than of the fates of men — and we have done over again, 
 only done by a poet, all that we have read of in the previous 
 poem, — the gifts of the warrior, the learned man, the boon- 
 companion, the harper, the falcon-trainer, and the goldsmith 
 who adorns with his art the man of the Britons' king (hrytev,- 
 cyninges beorn) a phrase which may help us to approach the 
 date of the poem. 
 
 As I have already used the most vigorous of the pictures of 
 English life contained in these poems in the chapters on the 
 Settlement and War in Poetry, I may, with this short sketch, 
 leave the poem behind me,^ and with it all the poetry which 
 ■preceded Alfred, except the Dream of the Rood. Other 
 verses, it is true, on various subjects, lie scattered through the 
 Exeter Book, and through the manuscripts in various libraries. 
 But they do not belong to this time, or might have been writ- 
 
 1 There are two other poems in the Exeter Book which have been somewhat 
 mixed up with these — one On the Spirit of Men (" Bi manna mode "), and the 
 other On the Leasing of Men ("Bi manna lease"). They have no literary- 
 value whatever. They are nothing more than fragments of sermons in verse, 
 and may have been written at any time. The first is on the glory of humility 
 and the baseness of pride, and the second is built on Psalm xxviii. 
 
XXV THE "DREAM OF THE ROOD" 437 
 
 ten at any time, and I may say by any monk, from the seventh 
 to the eleventh centuries. They belong to the next volume of 
 this book, and we turn, to end this long tale of our earliest 
 poetry, to the Dream of the Rood, the last, as it seems to me, 
 of the important poems of the eighth century. 
 
 One portion of this poem has been already discussed — ■ the 
 personal epilogue with which it closes. I have taken it to be 
 the last thing that Cynewulf wrote, and that it tells the tale 
 of his last days. It speaks his farewell to life, and seems to 
 sing the dirge of Northumbrian poetry. I place it here as the 
 epilogue to this history of Early English song. I believe the 
 position I give it to be historical, but I do not assert it to be 
 historical. It is not possible to say with any certainty that its 
 date falls within the last ten or twenty years of the eighth 
 century, or that it was even written by Cynewulf. A great 
 debate clashes round its authorship. A large number of Ger- 
 man and English scholars assert that Cynewulf was its writer, 
 but they have somewhat lessened the weight of their opinion 
 by fastening also on him many inferior poems which have 
 nothing of the artist in them from head to tail. Wulker, with 
 others, seems to think it most improbable, if not impossible, 
 that Cynewulf wrote the poem, and goes so far as to include 
 the discussion of it among the poems he classifies under the 
 name of Caedmon.^ Some have attributed it to Caedmon him- 
 self, partly backing their opinion by the supposed translation 
 of the runic title on the Euthwell Cross — Caedmon me famed 
 ("Caedmon made me"), and connecting this with the lines 
 carved on the Cross, which are almost identical with lines con- 
 tained in this Dream of the Rood. But the lines may have been 
 carved in the tenth century, and the assertion that " Caedmon 
 made me " be no more than the carver's opinion, or even the 
 name of the carver. No certainty can be gained on that 
 path. 
 
 A much stronger argument against Cynewulf's authorship 
 arises, I think, from the metre of the poem ; and the argument 
 is stronger against my own view that it was the last of the 
 poems of Cynewulf, than it would be against those who think 
 it to be one of his earliest poems. Almost the whole of the 
 story of the dream is written in the long-epic and Caedmonian 
 line, and though Cynewulf does use this line now and then in 
 his signed poems, he uses it with great rarity, and never in 
 any continuous narration. He does not use it at all in the 
 
 1 He has collected the reasons as yet given lor or against the authorship of 
 Cynewulf, in his Grundriss, at pp. 189-196. 
 
438 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 Elene which is his last signed poem ; and it is certainly very 
 much against my opinion that the Elene preceded the Dream, 
 of the Mood that Cynewulf, having iixed himself dcJWn in the 
 Elene to the short-epic line, should break loose from it, and 
 use in the Dream that solemn but various, dignified but rush- 
 ing long-epic line which is found in the Genesis, Exodus and 
 Judith, in the earlier German poems, such as Muspilli and the 
 Hildbrand Lay, and in Icelandic lays, such as those of Atli and 
 Harbard. I might say that Cynewulf was acquainted with 
 the line ; that he uses it now and then in the Christ and in 
 Gfuthlac, and that there is no reason why he should not use it 
 again, at the close of his life, if he liked it, and for a special 
 purpose, especially as the use of it continued after his death 
 in England,^ Germany, and Iceland, along with that of the 
 short-epic line ; but I must confess that the more I have read 
 the Dream of the Rood the more I have been impressed with 
 the feeling — arising from the archaic sentiment as well as 
 from the long-lined metre of the dream-part of the poem — 
 that this portion at least is older than CynewTilf and does 
 belong to the Caedmonian School. But I have been equally 
 impressed with the extreme unlikeness of the closing part of 
 the poem to the dream-part, and its extreme likeness to the 
 work of Cynewulf and to the way in which he thought and 
 felt. The introduction also is in Cynewulf's veritable manner, 
 and both the introduction and the close are written in the 
 short-epic line. The narration of the dream itself is with one 
 exception in the long line, and stands between the short-lined 
 beginning and end like the ancient centre and keep of a mediae- 
 val castle, now turned into a country house and flanked by two 
 wings built in the Tudor period. The conjecture then has 
 occurred to me that there was an older poem describing the 
 crucifixion of Jesus which may possibly have been written by 
 Caedmon or one of his school, and which Cynewulf took up 
 and worked at in his own fashion, adding to it where and how 
 he pleased, and changing its mode of presentation — making 
 it, for instance, into a dream, and adding the personification of 
 the Tree. Not only are the introduction and the conclusion 
 in his own metre, but also the description which the Tree gives 
 of itself as living once on the edge of the wood before its 
 enemies cut it down. The conjecture may be thought too bold, 
 but it accounts for the double metre of the poem; it does away 
 with the strongest argument against Cynewulf's authorship ; 
 
 1 In England, if Genesis B was written, as they say, in or about Alfred's 
 time. 
 
XXV THE "DUE AM OE THE SOOD " 439 
 
 it gets rid of the difficulty of the -want of unity of feeling 
 ■which exists between the dream and the rest on the supposi- 
 tion of both being by the same writer ; and it leaves to Cyne- 
 wulf a number of passages which are steeped in his peculiar 
 personality, and which it would be extremely hazardous to allot 
 to any one else but himself.^ It is true he has not signed the 
 poem, and it is said that, as he had imitators, he would have 
 signed it if he had written it, and that he has signed four 
 poems. But a man is not bound always to sign his poems, 
 even though it be his custom. We do not know that he signed 
 the Guthlac, but we believe he wrote it. The question of the 
 quasi-signature of the Biddies in the supposed charade of 
 Eiddle I. is still doubtful, but we allot to him the greater part 
 of the Riddles. The Phoenix which every one gives to him is 
 not signed ; and if this Dream was written, as I think, quite at 
 the close of his life, it is not improbable that he saw no need 
 to sign it, or never thought of signing it. I cannot see that 
 his not signing it is any convincing evidence that it is not his, 
 if the probabilities of his authorship are great. 
 
 And they are great. The introduction is, with the exception 
 of a few lines which I refer to the older poem, entirely in his 
 manner. The personal cry, " I, stained with sins, wounded 
 with my guilt," is almost a quotation from his phrases in the 
 Elene and Juliana. Then the impersonation of the Tree, the 
 account of its life in the wood, is exceedingly like the begin- 
 ning and the manner of some of the Riddles; and the vivid 
 fashion in which it is conceived as sorrowing and trembling, 
 as full of hate and love, as wounded like a warrior with shafts, 
 recalls the work and belongs to the imagination of him who 
 conceived the personality of the Sword and the Bow and the 
 Loom. Moreover, the personal, subjective element which is 
 found in his signed poems and which no other Anglo-Saxon 
 poet possesses, is greater in the latter part of this poem than 
 it is in any of his signed works. It is also of the same kind 
 as it is in the Christ, the Juliana, and the Elene, and sounds a 
 similar note. There are also similarities of expression, but 
 these have not much value, for there are also differences of 
 expression. Lastly, the worship paid in the poem to the Cross 
 
 ' A re-maklng of this kind is quite in accordance, I think, with Anglo-Saxon 
 custom. The Azarias in the Exeter Book is an instance, I believe, of the same 
 thing. It is a portion of the Daniel taken out, and worked up afterwards by 
 another poet. Nor did the custom die. Chaucer and Shakspere practised it. 
 It is in fact common to all ages of poetry, except perhaps to a time like our 
 own, when the plagiarism-hunters nave spoiled this interesting and pleasant 
 practice. 
 
440 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 and the glorification of it is a constant element in two of his 
 genuine poems. He speaks in the Christ of the Rood in much 
 the same manner as he does here. He speaks in the Elene of 
 the " Tree of glory which he had always in mind " before he 
 wrote of its discovery by Helena. We understand from the 
 Elene that his change from remorse to spiritual happiness was 
 bound up with the light-bringing office or appearance of the 
 Cross.' All these things are explained if we see in the Dream 
 a personal statement of Cynewulf in which he deliberately 
 refers to having seen long ago a Vision of the Cross, and the 
 story of which he now tells on the verge of the grave. It is 
 said that he would not have repeated in his last days so much of 
 what he said in the Elene. Why should he not repeat himself 
 in another form ? It is a common habit of the poets ; it is a 
 characteristic of old age ; and recapitulation is, moreover, a 
 mark of Cynewulf's work. To say that it is not natural or 
 probable that an old man, as he waits for death, would tell 
 over again the story of what happened long ago when first he 
 knew his Saviour, is not true. It is both probable and natural 
 that he would enshrine at the last, by means of his special art, 
 the most important moment of his life, and leave it as a legacy 
 to his few friends of whom he speaks so tenderly. These are 
 the reasons for my belief that the poem is by Cynewulf, and 
 his last work. 
 
 " Lo," it begins — 
 
 Listen — of all dreams I'll the dearest tell, 
 That at mid of night met me (while I slept), 
 When word-speaking folk wonnfed in their rest. 
 I methought I saw led into the lift, 
 
 1 Too much must not, however, be made of this, for the English Christians 
 of this time seem to have worshipped the Cross as much as the Spaniards ; and 
 I daresay the common worship was increased, as I think the Constantine and 
 Helena story became a favourite, by the remembrance of Oswald's planting of 
 the Cross in the sight of his warriors before the battle of Heavenfield. Lingard 
 quotes the words which Alcuin puts into Oswald's mouth — 
 
 Prosternite vestros 
 Vultus ante orucem, quam vertice mentis in isto 
 Erexi, rutilat Christi quae clara trophaeo, 
 Quae quoque nunc nobis praestabit ab hoste triumphum. 
 
 Alcuin, De Pont. Ebor. 
 
 Ceolfrid, leaving Wearmouth, "adorat crucem." " Tuam crucem adora- 
 mus," prays Alcuin. Ealdhelm and others were accustomed to call themselves 
 " orucicolae." The Cross stood in their minds for Him who died thereon. 
 Cynewulf's special worship for the Cross is not then remarkable — yet it is. 
 We do not find the same special direction of poetry anywhere else among the 
 verse of the earlier English. 
 
XXV THE "DREAM OE THE ROOD" 441 
 
 All enwreathed with light, wonderful, a Tree, 
 
 Brightest it of trees ! All that beacon was 
 
 Over-gushed with gold ; jewels were in it ; 
 
 At its foot were four,' five were also there 
 
 High upon the axle-span, and beheld it there, all the angels of the 
 
 Lord 2 
 Winsome for the world to come ! Surely that was not, of a wicked 
 
 man the gallows. 
 But the spirits of the saints saw it (shining) there, 
 And the men who walk the mould and this mighty Universe. 
 Strange that stem of Victory was ! Then I, spotted o'er with sins, 
 Wounded with my woeful guilts, saw the Wood of glory 
 All with joys a^shinmg, all adorned with weeds, 
 Gyred with gold around. Gems had worthily 
 Wandered in a wreath round this woodland Tree. 
 
 Nathless could I through the gold come to understand 
 How the sufferers strove of old ^ — since it now began 
 Blood to sweat on its right side. I was aU with sorrows vexed 
 Eearful then I was, 'fore that vision fair, for I saw that fleet fire- 
 beacon 
 Change in clothing and in colour ! Now it was with wet beclouded, 
 Now with running blood was red, then again enriched with gems. 
 Long the time I lay, lying where I was,* 
 Looking, heavy-hearted, on the Healer's Tree — ■ 
 Till at last I heard how it loudly cried. 
 These the words the best of woods now began to speak — 
 "Long ago it was, yet I ever think of it. 
 How that I was hewed down where the holt had end ! 
 Erom my stock I was dissevered ; strong the foes that seized me 
 
 there ; 
 Made of me a mocktng-stage, bade me lift their men outlawed.^ 
 So the men on shoulders moved me till upon a mount they set me ; 
 Many were the f oemen who did fix me there — • 
 
 Then I saw the Lord, Lord of Eolk-kin He, 
 Hastening march with mickle power since He would upmount on me. " 
 
 "But I — I dared not, against my Lord's word, bow myself 
 or burst asunder, though I saw all regions of earth trembling; 
 I might have felled his foes, but I stood fast." 
 
 1 " Four jewels were at the edges of the earth." 
 
 2 This line and the following — in the long metre — belong, I think, to the 
 original poem which I conjecture Cynewnlf was working on. 
 
 s "The long-past battle of the sufferers," i.e. of the Tree and of Him it 
 bore. 
 
 * Here CynewuU, as I think, having used with personal modifications the 
 long lines of the ancient poem, takes np his own work for a time. 
 
 °Waefer-syne = a scene, a spectacle, a theatre. The Cross is as it were a 
 stage on which the punishment and guilt of the criminal is displayed. Grein 
 translates, " bade their slaves lift me up," but I think that the translation in 
 the text is the most natural. It makes the Wood state simply, and at first, the 
 shameful uses to which it was put. 
 
442 EARLY ENGLISH LlTERATtJEE cHap. 
 
 Then the Hero young, armed Himself for war and Almighty God 
 
 He was ; 
 Strong and staid of mood stepped He on the gallows high, 
 Brave of soul in sight of many, for He would set free mankind. 
 Then I shivered there — when the Champion clipped me round ; 
 
 But I dared not then, cringe me to the earth.i 1. 39. 
 
 " A Eood -was I upreared, ricli the King I lifted up, Lord 
 of all the heavens, yet I dared not fall. With dark nails they 
 pierced me through, on me the dagger strokes are seen; 
 ■wounds they were of wickedness. Yet I dared not do them 
 scathe; they reviled us both together. Prom head to foot 
 was I drenched with blood, poured from this hero's side, when 
 he had sent forth His Spirit. A host of wrathful weirds I 
 bore upon that mount. I saw the Lord of peoples serve a 
 cruel service : thick darkness had enwreathed with clouds the 
 corse of the King. Shadow, wan under the welkin, pressed 
 down the clear shining of the sun. All creation wept, mourned 
 the fall of its King ; Christ was on the Eood. I beheld it all ; 
 I was crushed with sorrow. . . . Then they took Almighty 
 God ; from that heavy pain they lifted him ; but the warriors 
 left me there to stand streaming with blood. I was aU 
 wounded with shafts." Then he tells of the deposition, and 
 how he watched it — 
 
 So they laid him down, limb-wearied ; stood beside the head of his 
 
 lifeless corse. 
 Then they looked upon him, him and he rested there for a little 
 
 the Lord of Heaven, time 
 
 Sorely weary he, when the mickle Then before his Banes, in the 
 
 strife was done ! sight of them, 
 
 Did the men begin, here to make And they carved it there, of a 
 
 a grave for him. glittering stone. 
 
 Laid him low in it, him the Lord Over him poor folk sang a lav 
 
 of Victory! of sorrow 
 
 On that eventide. 1 g3_ 
 
 There he rested with a little company. But we stood on 
 the hill for a while, dropping blood, till men buried us deep, 
 and that was a dreadful Weird. And now far and wide, when 
 the servants of the Lord discovered me, men honour me. Now 
 I bid thee, Man beloved of me, tell this dream to men. 
 
 1 This line is not longer than the original, and the pauses are pretty much 
 the same Short lines follow it, and then the long line is taken up again. I 
 
 S'ih^stn &o hi' r land! °"^°*' ^"^^ °" "'^^''^ ^y"«^* ^°'''«''' 
 
THE "DREAM OE THE ROOD" 443 
 
 The Eood then speaks of judgment to come, and that whoso 
 beareth this best of signs in his heart will have no fear on that 
 day. It ceases speech ; and that personal part of the poem 
 follows on which I have already written. 
 
 This is the last of the important poems of the eighth cen- 
 tury. It is good, but not very good. The older part, if my 
 conjecture be right,^ is the best, and its reworking by Cyne- 
 wulf has so broken it up that its dignity is much damaged. 
 The shaping is rude, but the imagination has indeed shaped it. 
 The image of the towering Tree, now shining through a golden 
 light and overwrought like a Rood at Eipon or Hexham with 
 jewelled lines of ornament, now veiled in a crimson mist and 
 streaming with blood, is conceived with power, but it is not to 
 be compared with the image of the mighty Eood in the Christ 
 which illuminates with ruddy light the heavens and the earth 
 and all the hosts of angels and of men summoned from their 
 graves to judgment. The invention of the Tree, bringing its 
 soul from the far-off wood, alive and suffering with every pang 
 of the great Sufferer, shivering through every vein of it when 
 Christ, the young Hero, clasped it round, and mourning when 
 he lay beneath, and longing to fall on and slay his foes, and 
 conscious that on it, as on a field of battle. Death and Hell 
 were conquered, is also well worth praise, but the praise must 
 not be carried too far. The workmanship is not the workman- 
 ship of a fine artist. We cannot expect it, and the wonder is 
 that at this time it was so good. 
 
 1 1 have called it my conjecture, but I have since found that the writers of 
 the Corpus Poeticum Boreale, in their Excursus on Metres have had a some- 
 what similar opinion. They say " In the Lay of the Eood, attributed to Caed- 
 mon, as it seems, on the Ruthwell Cross, we have the purest piece of poetry in 
 this metre. In the Vereelli book in which it is preserved, there is tacked on to 
 it another poem on a somewhat similar subject, but wholly different in style 
 and metre, which may very possibly be Cynewulf's." I think the whole was 
 • reworked by Cynewulf. 
 
CHAPTER XXVI 
 
 THE School of tork 
 
 While Cynewulf and his imitators were making the poems 
 about which we have now written, the Collegiate School at 
 York, founded on a secure basis by Ecgberht while Baeda was 
 still alive, was steadily flourishing. Under its auspices not 
 only Latin but English literature was cared for, if I am right 
 in my gufess that it was at York that those collections of Eng- 
 lish verse were made, which were afterwards brought to Wes- 
 sex in the days of Mliied. That school began no doubt with 
 Wilfrid, but it did not become the notable school of England 
 till the days of Archbishop Ecgberht, and it ran a noble and 
 vigorous career of fifty years. After 782 it began to decay, 
 but with a certain stately slowness. When it was dead, — and 
 it finally died of the Danes, — its learning and its spirit, 
 having emigrated with Alcuin, went forth to animate the wide 
 empire of Charles the Great. It is the history of this school, 
 the last home of literature in the England of the eighth century, 
 which we have now to write, and the tale of it will conclude 
 this book. 
 
 After the death of Baeda in 735, the seat of letters was 
 transferred from Jarrow to York. Learning passed from a 
 provincial monastery to the centre of the life of Northumbria. 
 It passed from the guardianship of one man to the watchful 
 care of a number of trained scholars, acting together, and 
 teaching, like professors, their own special subjects, under the 
 rule of one Head. We may, with some Justice, call the School 
 of York the first English University. Canterbury, under 
 Theodore, was not more than a brilliant monastic school, and 
 at Theodore's death its literary influence died. But the Heads 
 of York provided for the continuance of the school, and for an 
 organisation of it which we might call corporate. The system 
 of teaching seems to have been subdivided, specialised, and 
 handed down intact for at least two generations. York became 
 444 
 
CHAP. XXVI THE SCHOOL OF YOEK 445 
 
 the storehouse and distributor of learning for civilised Europe. 
 Scholars flocked to it from all parts of Germany, Gaul, Italy, 
 and Ireland. The new European schools, desiring a teacher, 
 either sent one of their own men to take, as it were, a degree 
 at York,- or fetched to rule over them an Englishman who had 
 the York certificate. If we add to these things the Cathedral, 
 the great library, the collegiate buildings where the teachers 
 and the pupils lived together, something of the image of a 
 University is presented to our eyes. 
 
 The town itself was not unworthy of the fame it attained 
 in learning. It had been the capital of Roman Britain, and 
 Britain lay so outside of the Empire that York was called 
 altera Roma. It might have even been called an imperial 
 city. Constantius dwelt in it. When Baeda takes trouble to 
 record that Severus died and that Constantine was made 
 Emperor within its walls, we feel that the historic imagina- 
 tion of the learned English had cast around it, like a toga, 
 the dignity of Eome. Long before Baeda, the Northumbrians 
 made it their chief city. It was the centre of the supremacy 
 of Eadwine, and it finally became the royal seat of the Nor- 
 thumbrian kings. It was the first Christian King of Northum- 
 bria baptized, and he and PauUinus set up the little chapel of 
 wood which grew into the Minster. Its spiritual and ecclesi- 
 astical history equalled in interest its political history, and 
 now at the time of which we write, it became again the seat 
 of an archbishopric. No doubt, this addition to its ecclesias- 
 tical position gave its school a greater vogue in England and 
 in Europe. 
 
 Nor was its people or its situation unworthy of its memories. 
 It was thickly populated by a thriving, brave, and comfortable 
 folk. To the crowd of its own citizens were added a number of 
 foreigners who came to dwell in it for the sake of gain or edii- 
 cation. The landscape that surrounded it was lovely ; its air 
 healthy ; the Ouse flowed full beside its walls and was joined 
 by the Eoss, then a broad, deep and sluggish stream. In the 
 triangle the streams made lay the town, but it had extended 
 far beyond its walls, and the well-watered plains were covered 
 with houses. The flowery meadows which bordered the river, 
 the wooded hills beyond, earned the praise of Alcuin who loved 
 his Alma Mater well. Learning had here a softer clime and 
 dwelling-place than had nourished its hardy youth among the 
 rocky fields, and near the stormy tides of Jarrow.^ 
 
 1 Hanc pisoosa sule undis interfluit Usa, 
 Florigeros ripis praetendens undique oampos ; 
 
446 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 This was the city which, as the home of Letters, rose into 
 fame with Ecgberht who, at the date of Baeda's death, became 
 Archbishop of York. He had succeeded Wilfrid II. as Bishop 
 in 732. A year or two afterwards, and perhaps at Ecgherht's 
 own urging,-' Baeda had sent to York his Epistola ad Egbertum, 
 of the form and style of which I hare already written. A brief 
 abstract of its contents will now show us the state of !N"orthum- 
 bria and the work which lay before Ecgberht. " Be good," it 
 said, " let your language and life be decent and your doctrine 
 sound. Study the Scriptures, ordain more priests, translate the 
 Lord's Prayer and the Creed into English, look after your dio- 
 cese, there are hamlets in the mountains which have never seen 
 a bishop. The greed of bishops has prevented the subdivision 
 of dioceses. Let there be twelve bishoprics in E"orthumbria, 
 and do you get the pallium. As to the monasteries, they are 
 in an evil way. There is no proper discipline, and a host of 
 abuses. Lay folk, for thirty years past, have purchased lands 
 for monasteries which, freed from secular jurisdiction, have 
 become their own property. Almost every praefectus has done 
 this ; the officers of the King have followed their example ; 
 their wives are lodged in their houses; and all of them do 
 what they like. Hence the whole diocese is filled with luxury, 
 corruption, and disorder. Reform, reform." This was the 
 ecclesiastical condition, and it is plain that in monasteries of 
 this type, and in the midst of such abuses, learning was not 
 likely to continue to flourish. Ecgberht took them in hand 
 and did all he could, not all he wished. At least, if they could 
 not be bettered, he bettered his own house. The communi'ty 
 at York was lifted into an example for the whole diocese. 
 
 The political condition, as well as the ecclesiastical, had 
 some influence on the literary history of the school of York, 
 and at two points. First, a certain renewed glory and peace 
 in ISTorthumbria now accompanied for too brief a period the 
 effort Ecgberht was making at York, and enabled his school to 
 develop itself in a quiet safety. King Eadberht, who succeeded 
 
 CoUibus et silvis tellus hinc inde decora 
 Nobilibusque locis habitatio pulchra, salubris, 
 Fertilitate sui multos habitura colonos, 
 Quo variis populis et reguis undique lecti 
 Sjpe lucri veniunt, quaerentes divite terra 
 Divitias, sedem sibimet, luorumque laremque. 
 
 Alcuin, De Pont. Ehor. 30. 
 
 1 1 believe that Ecgberht and Baeda concocted this letter together. The 
 warnings given to Ecgberht about decent language and other matters in which 
 Baeda knew Ecgberht did not sin, appear to be directed to others through 
 Ecgberht, and this seems a pious and courteous way of blame. 
 
XXVI THE SCHOOL OF YORK 447 
 
 Baeda's friend Ceolwulf in 737 or 738, brought Northumbria 
 into better order and recovered some of the dominion it had 
 lost. This peace with honour would help the work at York. 
 It only lasted till 756, when a dreadful disaster at Niwan^fig 
 was the cause that two years afterwards Eadberht abdicateAand 
 
 settled at York for the rest of his life. Secondly, we must — 
 
 remember that Eadberht was brother of Ecgberht, and that 
 from 737 to 758 the King gave his brother full royal patronage. 
 It is plain they were on good terms, for .when the King ab- 
 dicated he went at once to live with the Archbishop. I 
 cannot but think that his presence, even as a retired monarch, 
 gave support and prestige to the school. He died in the year 
 768, two years after Ecgberht. Between them, I imagine, 
 they practically ruled the city. 
 
 Ecgberht then had external support, and he was worthy of 
 it, both as prince and scholar. He was a splendid and gen- 
 erous man, with fine tastes. Eichly carved vessels, richly 
 figured silks, elaborate music were used and cherished in the 
 Minster.' Eound about the Cathedral and in connection with 
 it rose the schools, filled, as I have said, with students from 
 England, Ireland, Gaul, Germany, and Italy. Ecgberht as the 
 Head, undertook the finishing course of religious and theo- 
 logical instruction. The other branches of learning were put 
 into the hands of his assistants. The education began with 
 grammar and continued through literature and philosophy and 
 such other subjects as Theodore and Hadrian had taught at 
 Canterbury. The pupils gained a fair acquaintance with the 
 Latin poets, some knowledge of the Greek fathers, and as 
 much natural philosophy as could be learned from Pliny. The 
 study of the Scriptures was carried on during the whole course. 
 Ecgberht finished the education of the students, but he kept 
 always in touch with them. We are told that he spent the 
 morning with the young clerks, sitting on his couch, teaching 
 and lecturing. At noon he celebrated mass in his private 
 chapel ; his dinner was meagre. During the meal and after- 
 wards he discussed literary questions with the students. At 
 
 1 The arts of embroidery and illumination, of working in gold, silver, and 
 precious stones had steadily grown in Northumbria. Monks, even the ancho- 
 rite in his cell, wrought at vessels and bindings for the sacred offices. The 
 best instance out of many is the famous " Evangeliarium," called also the Dur- 
 ham Book, or the Lindisfarne Gospels, which, after a long and curious history, 
 now rests in the British Museum. Eadfrith, Bishop of Lindisfarne, had written 
 and illuminated it. It was begun during Cuthbert's life, ^thelwald, who 
 succeeded Eadfrith, and who caused to be made " a lovely cross " of wrought 
 stone as a memorial of Cuthbert, gave also a cover to the Manuscript which 
 Bilfrid, an anchorite and goldsmith, decorated with silver, gold, and gems. 
 
448 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 evening, after the service, lie dismissed them, as they knelt 
 one by one before him, with his blessing. ISTo life could be 
 more gentle and simple. Splendid in public, he was sparing 
 in private affairs. His chief work was, therefore, educational, 
 but he wrote a few books — a volume of Episcopal Offices, 
 Extracts on Church Discipline, a Penitentiale and Confession- 
 ale, standard authorities in the Anglo-Saxon Church. It is 
 probable that these were written both in English and Latin, 
 and, if this be true, we may class him among English writers.^ 
 When he died, in 766, he was succeeded by JEthelberht or 
 ^Elberht, his friend, his chief assistant in the school, and a better 
 scholar than himself. It was jSlthelberht who taught, under 
 Ecgberht, grammar, law, poetry, rhetoric, astronomy, natural 
 philosophy, and all the matters Alcuin collects under Physica, 
 Logica, and Ethica. We may well call him, not only a great 
 ecclesiastic, but a great Public Schoolmaster. jEthelberht was 
 the chief collector and administrator of the famous library. 
 Alcuin, his fellow-scholar, who assisted him in the teaching of 
 the schools, travelled also with him, seeking for books and 
 manuscripts in Gaul and Rome, and in 770 no library outside of 
 Eome was to be compared with that at York.^ Under his rule, 
 and he was equally remarkable, Alcuin says, for activity of 
 mind, tact in administration, and lovingness of heart, learn- 
 ing radiated from York even more lucidly than under Ecgberht ; 
 a greater number of students poured into the city, and mission- 
 ary enterprise was not forgotten. The Church in Germany was 
 deeply indebted to him. Nor in other matters were his interests 
 only English. He was in constant correspondence with Rome and 
 the great monastic centres. York knew all that was doing and 
 
 1 Wright, Biog. lAteraria, vol. i. p. 302. 
 
 2 Here is Alcuin's description of the studies ^thelberht directed at York — 
 
 Indolis egregiae juvenes quoscunque videbat, 
 Hos sibi conjvmxit, docuit, nutrivit, amavit ; 
 His dans grammaticae rationis gnaviter artes, 
 Illis rhetoricae iufundens refluamina linguae ; 
 Illos juridioa ouravit cote polire ; 
 Illos Aonio docuit concinnere cantu, 
 Et juga Parnassi lyricis percnrrere plantis. 
 Ast aflos fecit praef atus nosse magister 
 Harmouiam coeli, solis lunaeque labores, 
 Quinque poli zonas, errantia sydera septem, 
 Astrorum leges, ortus simul atque recessus, 
 Aerios motus pelagi, terraeque tremorem, 
 Naturas hominum, pecudum, voluorumque ferarum, 
 Diversas numeri species variasque figuras. 
 Paschalique dedit solemnia certa recursu, 
 Maxime Scripturae pandens mysteria sacrao. 
 
 De Pont. Mor. 
 
XXVI THE SCHOOL OF YORK 449 
 
 was an impulse over the whole of Christendom. Art also was 
 not neglected. In 741 the Minster at York was burnt. ^Ethel- 
 berht remade it ; he preserved and embellished the little orar 
 tory in which Eadwine was baptized in 627, and set up in it 
 an altar dedicated to St. Paul, enriched with gold, silver, and 
 gems. A huge candelabrum of three branches hung over it, 
 and a Eood embossed with gold and silver. Another altar 
 to the Martyrs and the Holy Cross was ornamented with equal 
 richness. Eanbald, the next Archbishop, and Alcuin super- 
 intended the building. Alcuin describes it as a lofty temple, 
 set on pillars over the crypts, bright with ceilings and win- 
 dows, apsidal chapels round, and containing thirty altars. It is 
 pleasant to think that .^thelberht saw it finished, and blessed 
 his work. He had retired from his duties in 780, but ten days 
 before his death in 782 he emerged from his rooms and dedi- 
 cated the Mmster he had raised. Well might he have said, 
 " Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace," for he 
 had not only written his epistle on the hearts of the many 
 scholars he had trained, and especially on Alcuin, whose work 
 transfused Europe with the new learning, but he had now writ- 
 ten in stone a noble memorial of his love of God and man. Wise, 
 eager in learning as teaching, a greater traveller and searcher 
 for books than even his predecessor Ecgberht,^ a better libra- 
 rian, a passionate lover of the books he had collected (caras 
 super omnia gazas, he calls them), safe in advice, ready in 
 sympathy, his praise was tenderly sung by his finest scholar — 
 
 O pater, pastor, vitae spes maxima nostras, 
 Te sine nos f erimur turbata per aequora mundi, 
 Te duce deserti variis involvimur undis, 
 Incerti qualem mereamur tangere portum. 
 Sidera dum lucent, trudit dum nubila ventus. 
 Semper hones, nomenque tuum, laudesque manebunt. 
 
 De Font. Ebor. 1596. 
 
 During ^thelberht's life Alcuin had taught the school, and 
 raised its fame and use to a higher level; but the date of 
 jEthelberht's death is also the date of the beginning of the 
 decay of the learning of York. Not only did Eanbald, his 
 successor, become involved in the political anarchy of Northum- 
 
 1 Alcuin says of Ecgberht — 
 
 Non semel externas peregrine tramite terras 
 Jam peragravit ovans, Sophiae ductus amore ; 
 Si quid forte novi librorum aut studiorum 
 Quod secum ferret, terris reperiret in illis. 
 
 De Pont. Ebor. 1454. 
 
450 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 bria, and neglected, or could not direct, the school; but in 
 the very year of jEthelberht's death Alcuin left the school. 
 Up to 782 Alcuin belongs to literature in England. The 
 literary child of Baeda, his birth almost coincides with Baeda's 
 death. A greater scholar than either Ecgberht or jEthelberht, 
 he was the pupil of both. He not only, as we have seen, took 
 charge of the school when ^thelberht became Archbishop, but 
 he was entrusted with the care and increase of the library.* 
 In these earlier duties he learnt to be the great administrator, 
 organiser, and teacher he afterwards became. He met Charles 
 for the first time at Pavia, about 780, and pleased the King. 
 He met him again at Parma, in 781, joined his court in 782, 
 and remained eight years, taking charge of the Palatine Schools. 
 All this time he was eagerly at work, teaching and establishing 
 fresh schools, " restoring the knowledge," says Bishop Stubbs, 
 " of the sacred languages, of the text of the Bible and Service 
 Books, and the moral rigour of ecclesiastical discipline. How 
 laboriously Alcuin did these duties, the list of his works will 
 show. The extent of his influence is proved by his letters, 
 and the success of his work by the literary history of the 
 following century." 
 
 In 790 he was again in Northumbria, and the love of his 
 country urged him to remain, but in 792 he rejoined Charles 
 and never again visited England. Thus we may say that from 
 this year, or more truly from 782, Alcuin does not belong to 
 the history of literature in England, but to the history of the 
 new planting of literature on the Continent by the hands of 
 English scholars.^ He took with him a number of men who 
 had been educated at York, both English and foreign,' and 
 
 1 He writes to Charles the Great from Tours in 796 : "I feel bitterly here the 
 need of those priceless books of learning which I had in my own country, by 
 the loving industry of my master, and in some measure by my own humble 
 labours. Let me send some of my youth over to bring back to France the 
 flowers of Britain." 
 
 2 Baeda remained the specially English scholar. Alcuiu's questions on 
 Genesis, and it may be a few other of his works, were translated into Anglo- 
 Saxon in the tenth century, and Wright says that the number of manuscripts 
 of it which are still extant suggests that it was a popular book. 
 
 ' Liudger, a Frieslander, Sigibodus, and Alubert, an English missionary, 
 were sent by Gregory of Utrecht to study at York with Alcuin. Liudger stayed 
 a year and returned, but again lived in England for three years and a half, 
 and finally bore back with him a large store of books. His history is the his- 
 tory of many. Wizo, Fridugis, and Sigulf went abroad with Alcuin. We 
 hear, however, by name of few native English scholars as assistants of Alcuin. 
 Nevertheless a host of his countrymen crowded to see him at Tours. Lingard 
 quotes a story from his biographer : " As Algulf , an English priest, entered the 
 monastery at Tours, four of the French clergy were standing at the gate, and 
 one of them exclaimed in his own language — 'Good God ! when will this house 
 be delivered from the crowds of Britons who swarm to that old fellow like so 
 many bees?'" 
 
XXVI THE SCHOOL OF YORK 451 
 
 with their assistance set up higher schools in Gaul and 
 Germany. He constantly sent to York for books and fresh 
 helpers. English scholars visited him, wherever he was, in 
 large numbers, and many remained with him. Northumbria 
 was in too unsettled a state to suit scholars who wished to get 
 on in life. They preferred a growing to a decaying kingdom, 
 and it is not too much to say that Alcuin drained York of its 
 best scholars, and hastened the paralysis of its literature. 
 
 He died in 804, and left behind him an extensive series of 
 books, many of which did their work of kindling the new fires 
 of learning in Europe, and then were exhausted, or superseded. 
 His numerous exegetical, dogmatic, and liturgical works are of 
 no value as literature. A few biographies remain, of which 
 the most interesting is that of St. Willibrord, the apostle 
 of the Frisians, of whose noble house he was himself a scion. 
 The longest of his many Latin poems (of which the most 
 heartfelt is that on the destruction of Lindisfarne) is also the 
 most attractive — De Pontificibus et Sanctis Ecclesiae Eboracen- 
 sis. It is our best contemporary authority for the history of 
 the Church and School of York from the consecration of 
 Ecgberht to the accession of Eanbald, and is full of pleasant 
 details. But the most important of his writings, both as 
 literature and for the use of history, is the collection of his 
 letters, nearly three hundred t)f which exist. Many are writ- 
 ten to his correspondents in England, to English kings, bishops, 
 abbots, and monks ; many of a gayer kind to his pupils and 
 friends, and to the women he reverenced. Others are sent to 
 Charles the Great, to Adrian I., to the Patriarchs of Jerusalem 
 and Aquileia, to his fellow-workers in the renaissance of learn- 
 ing in Gaul and Germany ; and they form together a body of 
 materials of great importance for the history of the time. 
 
 None of this work belongs to English literature in England ; 
 but it belongs to the glory of England to say that it was an 
 English scholar of York who exactly at the right time bore off 
 to the Continent the whole of English learning, and out of 
 English learning built up a new world. Had Alcuin remained 
 in England, had learning been confined to our shores, it would 
 have perished in a few years under the destroying flood of the 
 Danish invasions. It lived and flourished and brought forth 
 a noble harvest in the new empire. Instead of a little and 
 dying kingdom in the north of England the huge Frankish 
 dominion became the home of literature. The patron of learn- 
 ing was no longer a small provincial king, like Eadberht, with 
 his power trembling to its fall, but the man who in a few years 
 
452 EAELY ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 became the Head of the Holy Roman Empire ; and the glory 
 of that great title and of all it meant threw its glamour and its 
 dignity over letters. They marched with the Empire's march 
 and took of its youth and energy. Alcuin led them, nourished 
 and established them. The seat of learning was thus no longer 
 England, but the new city was built with living stones from 
 England. This is one of our glories, and York may well boast 
 of being its fount and origin. But this glory was now no 
 longer in York itself. The death of .iEthelberht and the 
 departure of Alcuin in the same year place us at the point when 
 the decay of the school of York began. Learning sickened 
 from within, afflicted by the anarchy in Northumbria, and when 
 she was far gone in disease she was finally smitten to death 
 by the Danes. The history of this double woe, and the 
 destruction in which it ended, will close this book. 
 
 In 780 ^thelberht, retiring from active life, associated with 
 himself Eanbald, who, two years afterwards, succeeded him as 
 Archbishop, and came to his death in 796. During these 
 fourteen stormy years the School at York lived on, but it lived 
 in trouble and in fear. King after king of Northumbria was 
 dethroned, exiled or murdered. Four of them perished before 
 the Archbishop's death. Alfwold, who became king in 778, 
 was slain in 789. Osred, who succeeded him, was betrayed 
 and driven away in 790, and .^Ethelred, now king, had himself 
 been banished by Alfwold. Two years afterwards .^thelred 
 slew Osred who had tried to regain the kingdom. In his turn, 
 jEthelred was slaughtered by his own people in 794, and 
 Eardulf succeeded him in 795, the year before Archbishop 
 Eanbald died. In these fierce tempests of anarchy no assist- 
 ance could be given by the kings to the school at York, and 
 the political troubles probably disturbed the lives and work 
 of its teachers; Indeed, with the exception of a few letters 
 addressed to Eanbald by his friend Alcuin, there is no literary 
 news belonging to his archbishopric. Affairs were no better, 
 but rather worse during the years of his successor, Eanbald II. 
 A fierce revolt, led by Alric, was finally subdued by Eardulf at 
 the battle of Whalley in 798. The next year Eardulf slew 
 another pretender to the kingdom, and the year after he 
 murdered Alchmund, the legitimate heir to the Northumbrian 
 throne. Six years of comparative quiet followed, and then 
 Eardulf was driven away by another Alfwold who apparently 
 held a precarious kingship for four years. Eanred then, the 
 son of Eardulf, seized the throne in 810, and reigned over an 
 expiring Northumbria. The Chronicle takes no notice of him 
 
XXVI THE SCHOOL 0^ YORK 453 
 
 or of any one after Eardulf ; and it tells of the close of the 
 independent Northumbrian kingdom, when Ecgberht of Wessex 
 became its overlord, in terms almost contemptuous in their 
 brevity. " 827. And Ecgberht led an army to Dore against the 
 North Humbrians and they offered him there obedience and 
 allegiance, and with that, they separated." This was the state 
 of things during the archbishopric of Eanbald II. ; and it 
 accounts for the increasing sickness of the school of York. It 
 was not met by any noble sacrifice on the part of the clergy. 
 They became more and more luxurious ; the monasteries went 
 from bad to worse ; the parish priests lost all learning. Even 
 the Archbishop lived more like a temporal than a spiritual 
 prince. Troops of soldiers attended him and troops of court- 
 iers, as he went from place to place through his diocese. 
 Alcuin was greatly distressed by all he heard ; he hopes, and 
 the hope is like a reproach, " that sacred studies will not be 
 neglected at York, and all the pains I took in collecting books 
 be labour lost." It was labour lost for Northumbria now, but 
 it was not altogether Eanbald's fault that he could not attend 
 to the school at York. He had quarrelled with the court ; the 
 political whirlpool had sucked him in. King Eardulf com- 
 plained that he sheltered his enemies and joined the plots 
 against his throne. Hence, the Archbishop was seldom or never 
 at York, and the School naturally ebbed away. In addition to 
 this, we understand from the records of the Synod of Pincan- 
 halth held in 790 — the first and last synod of doctrinal note 
 since that of Whitby — that the old Celtic party had not quite 
 died out, and that there was a reaction in York itself against 
 the Latin authority represented by the Archbishop, at least 
 this is Mr. Raine's opinion. Of greater interest than this 
 supposition is a sentence in one of the decrees of this synod 
 the mournful cry of which makes us feel that the days of 
 Northumbria's religious and literary glory had passed away. 
 "There were days," it says, "when we had righteous kings and 
 dukes and bishops, of whose wisdom Northumbria still smells 
 sweetly." Fuimus Troes. It is the epitaph of Northumbria, 
 of her poetry, her literature, and her great school. All is now 
 weakness, indifference, and darkness. 
 
 This is the internal decay. Meanwhile, from without a 
 dreadful blow had been given to literature and knowledge. In 
 793, while Eanbald I. was Archbishop of York, the Vikings 
 dashed for the first time upon the coasts of Northumbria. So 
 terrible seemed the blow, the very heavens and earth were 
 thought to have presaged it. " This year," says the Chronicle, 
 
454 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 " dire forewarnings came on the land of the Northumbrians 
 and brought wretchedness and fear upon the folk. There were 
 mickle whirlwinds and lightnings, and fiery dragons were seen 
 flying in the air. A great famine followed these tokens, and 
 a little after that in the same year, on the 6th before the Ides 
 of January, the rayaging of heathen men mournfully overthrew 
 God's Church at Lindisfarne with rapine and slaughter." Nor 
 was this the only warning. Alcuin saw, in 790, when he was 
 on a visit to Ethelred, " a rain of blood at a time when the 
 sky was cloudless fall from the high roof of the northern aisle 
 of St. Peter in York, the capital of the kingdom. Did it not 
 denote," he writes to the-King',. "that carnage would come upon 
 us and from the North ? " These are words which only express 
 half his horror and distress.' He cries out elsewhere that the 
 sanctuaries were defiled at Lindisfarne, the priests slain at the 
 altar, that St. Cuthbert could not save his own. " The most 
 venerable place in Britain, where Christianity first took root 
 among us after PauUinus went away from York, is a prey to 
 heathen men. Who thinks of this calamity and does not cry 
 out to God to spare his country, has a heart of stone and not 
 of flesh." He wrote, however, from his safe retreat on the 
 Continent, and he could not avoid preaching a somewhat elab- 
 orate sermon on luxury to the monastery. " This is," he says, 
 " the beginning of a greater trouble to come, or a punishment 
 for their sins." The flrst supposition was true, and he might 
 have spared them the second. Afterwards, when the horror 
 of it had lessened, he was able to compose on the tempting 
 subject one of his best Latin poems. 
 
 The year after he had another opportunity, for " the heathen 
 ravaged among the North Humbrians again, and plundered 
 Ecgferth's monastery at the mouth of the Wear." When 
 Jarrow and Wearmouth thus suffered, Alcuin was even more 
 grieved. The mother church of Northumbria was smitten at 
 Lindisfarne ; but the mother of all Northumbrian learning was 
 smitten at Jarrow, and this struck the scholar a still heavier 
 blow. What would become of knowledge, of all the materials 
 of knowledge, of the libraries, of the school at the capital, if 
 the heathen prevailed still more ? But Northumbria had yet 
 a breathing time before the full wrath of the tempest broke 
 upon her. Wearmouth and Jarrow, warned by Lindisfarne, 
 were not surprised. They were defended, and it is probable 
 
 1 1 am not sure of the date of this letter. It it was written before 793, the 
 phrase and from the North" would have nothing to do with the attack on 
 Lmdisfarne. 
 
XXVI THE SCHOOL OF YORK 455 
 
 that the libraries were saved for a time. One of the Danish 
 leaders was slain. Some of their ships were wrecked by a 
 storm. Many of their crews were drowned, and those who 
 swam to shore alive were slain at the mouth of the river. It 
 may be that this repulse kept the coast somewhat free from 
 roving piracy ; for we do not hear of more than a few attacks 
 made on the Northumbrian shores ; and it is probable that the 
 monastic life went on, undisturbed save by fear, in Tynemouth 
 and Jarrow, at Coldingham and Whitby. 
 
 It was a different story later on when the Danish fury came 
 upon the Northumbrian monasteries, not from the sea, but 
 from the inland ; not with a few ships led by single rovers, 
 but with a well-horsed and complete army. This took place in 
 867. There was an interval then of seventy-four years between 
 the attack on Lindisfarne and the final destruction of the 
 Northumbrian seats of learning. During that time uneasiness, 
 dread, preparations for defence, absence of quiet and of hope, 
 weakened at every point the growth of learning. Whenever 
 an attack was made on a coast-monastery, its treasures and 
 its books would probably be sent into the interior, and I 
 believe that, as the Danes pressed harder on the East Anglian 
 coasts, and as their terror grew in the North, York became 
 the refuge and the receiver of the best of the books and 
 learned men of Northumbria. This was the centre which was 
 now attacked. "The Army," having wintered and horsed 
 itself in East Anglia, passed over the mouth of the Humber 
 into Northumbria and, assisted by the anarchy in the king- 
 dom, for two rivals were fighting for the throne, had an easy 
 conquest of York. Late in the year the two kings united 
 their forces against the common foe, drove the Danes from 
 the fortifications, burst into the town and all but won it back. 
 But the Danes rallied and drove the English out in turn, slew 
 both kings, and the remainder made peace with the army of 
 the heathen. With the fall of the capital Northumbria became 
 Danish. But the rest of the province was still unplundered, 
 and the Danes, setting out from York, burned and utterly 
 destroyed all the monastic establishments of Deira. A few 
 years after, "the Army," under Half dene, rooted out all the 
 Abbeys of Bernicia. There was not one house of learning left 
 from the Humber to the Forth. Bishoprics perished, even so 
 great a one as Hexham ; all the libraries, all the schools, all 
 the stored-up knowledge of two hundred years were swept 
 away ; and the same fate about the same time befel the great 
 monastic houses of Mercia and East Anglia. Amid this vast 
 
m EARLY English LifEUATURE m^r. 
 
 destruction, so overwhelming that Northumbria did not recover 
 from it till long after the Norman Conquest, York, it appears 
 to me, still retained some learning. As it seems partly to 
 have escaped destruction when the English took it, so it 
 seems to have been partly spared by the Danes. They made 
 a peace with its people in 867 ; they sat there a whole year 
 in 869. It was the headquarters of "the Army," and it is 
 likely that the School, so far as it existed at all, was let alone. 
 If it was let alone, it would save its most precious manuscripts ; 
 and all the men who succeeded in escaping from Wearmouth, 
 Whitby, Tynemouth, Lastingham, Eipon, Hexham, and the 
 rest, would find some shelter there for themselves and for 
 whatever books they had saved. There would be then at York 
 enough of Northumbrian literature left to supply Wessex in 
 Alfred's reign with English war-poems like Beowulf, and with 
 collections of religious poems like those in the Exeter Book. 
 This possibility, to which I draw attention, of York having as 
 a seat of literature escaped the absolute destruction which fell 
 upon the other schools and libraries of the North seems some- 
 what supported by the fact of the great increase not long after 
 this time of the power of the See of York. Moreover, if the 
 School was not utterly destroyed at first, it would be likely 
 to drag on an existence ; for only nine years after the capture 
 of York by the Danes the invaders settled down, and York 
 became the capital under a constituted government of a Danish 
 kingdom. Halfdene in 876 apportioned the lands of South 
 Northumbria among his followers. They began to live as 
 ploughers and tillers of the soil. The city again sat as Queen 
 upon her river ; merchants again took up their quarters in her 
 streets, the place was quiet; the Archbishop still governed 
 the churches. Amid the gloom which hangs over history at 
 this time we distinguish nothing of the School, but if anything 
 was saved of the library, the letters and the manuscripts in 
 the buildings about the Minster, it now continued safe ; and 
 when it became known in the North that j3Elfred welcomed 
 to his court all who could bring him a book or a manuscript 
 to add to the library at Winchester, the remnants of literature 
 left at York would be carried southward. It was thus, I sug- 
 gest, that the Northumbrian poetry reached Wessex, and 
 reaching it, was put into the Wessex dialect.' 
 
 1 Mercia may, however, have had something to do with this. The western 
 part ol Mercia had been saved at the peace of Wedmore from the Danes, and 
 Bishop Werf rith had Icept some learning and teaching together in the school he 
 set up at Worcester. Worcester may then have been the half-way house in 
 
XxVi THE SCHOOL Of YOftK i&l 
 
 This is the last word of the first act of English literature 
 which we have followed for so long. The curtain falls on the 
 scenes the action of which moved with Theodore and Eald- 
 helm in Canterbury and Wessex ; on those which in a wilder 
 land brought before our eyes the cliffs of Whitby, the island 
 rock of Lindisfarne, the Wear where it opens towards the 
 sea, the lonely moors of the border, the peopled vales of York- 
 shire, the school beside the Minster. All has passed away, 
 and with the scenery the great iigures that went to and fro 
 through it — Eadwine and Oswald, Caedmon and Hild, Bene- 
 dict "and Baeda, Ecgberht, ^thelberht, and Alcuin, Cynewulf 
 and his fellows ; and behind them, in the mists of the distant 
 ground, and in another England, the giant shapes of Beowulf 
 and Hygelac, of Grendel and his dam, of Finn and Scyld. 
 The first Act is played out ; when the curtain rises again, it 
 will rise on a different scene, and in a different land. Wessex 
 will take the place of Northumbria. We shall then look on 
 the royal figure of jElfred, his sword laid down for a time, his 
 pen in his hand, sitting in his king's houses or in his town of 
 Winchester, and grouped around him the scholars of a new 
 time ; and the fashion of their speech will have changed. As 
 the characters of the first Act of English Literature spoke in 
 poetry, so those of the second will speak in prose. 
 
 which many of the poor scholars, bearing manuscripts from York, took refuge, 
 before they made their way to Alfred. It was in western Mercia that Alfred 
 sought for help when he began his literary work. But the story of this 
 belongs properly to the next volume of this book. 
 
NOTES 
 
 A. — (CHAPTER I) 
 
 The introduction may have been written on the continent by a poet 
 of the Angles, for "the poet clearly refers to the old country under the 
 title of Ongle." The country of Eormanric was, he says, "east from 
 Ongle." This is the view of Dr. Guest, and he thinks that this part of 
 the poem belongs to the time after the Ostrogoths had left the Vistula, 
 probably between the years 480 and 547, the date of Ida's occupation of 
 Bamborough. This would put the original poem, which begins at line 10, 
 back into an earlier part of the fifth century, between the years, as Guest 
 conjectures, 433 and 440. If we take, with him, the poem as genuine, 
 the poet was contemporary in his youth with Eormanric, and must have 
 sung in his court before the year 375, when this King of the Goten died. 
 But the poet also mentions ^tla (Attila) as king. But Attila was not 
 king till 433. The poem then, to include these two dates, must have 
 been written in Widsith's old age, and after 433. Moreover, Guest con- 
 tinues, "the Goths appear in the poem as the enemies, still independent, 
 of Attila" ; and he makes a criticism which, coming from so careful an 
 historian, must not be omitted. " Eormanric and his generals are 
 spoken of in the poem in a sober manner. "We see none of the fable 
 which afterwards enveloped their names ; they are still the mere creat- 
 ures of history." 
 
 But all this is subject to other explanations, and we can come to no 
 certainty about it. The most that critics can dare to suggest is, first: 
 "That the theory which maintains the genuineness of the poem is the 
 theory which is beset with the fewest difaculties " (Guest) ; and secondly, 
 that the kernel of the poem, from verse 10 to verse 75, and from verse 87 
 to the close (verses 131-134 being excepted) is very old, the oldest Eng- 
 lish poetry we possess.^ Originally written by a Myrging, it was adopted 
 by the Angles, to whom the Myrgings, if we may conjecture this from a 
 passage in the poem, were tributary in the days of Offa of Ongle. 
 
 The poet represents himself as contemporary with Hermanric, Attila, 
 the Visigoth Wallia, the Burgundian Gibica, and these kings range from 
 the year 375 to 435. He also speaks of Offa of Ongle, Ongentheow, 
 Hrothgar, Finn and Hnaef as known of by him, and as historical rather 
 than legendary personages. 
 
 1 This great age is agreed to by Leo, Miillenhof, Ten Brink, MoUer, and 
 Wiilker, to speak of the Germans alone. 
 
 469 
 
460 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 But this theory of the genuineness of the poem is not so easily settled. 
 In the midst of the list, other kings are mentioned whose reigns extend 
 beyond 440, and whose names, il we accept the visit to Eormanric as 
 genuine, must have been afterwards interpolated. This is certainly the 
 case if we are to take iElfwine, whom Widsith says he met, as identical 
 with Alboin, who was not king in Italy till the year 568. Guest avoids 
 this difBoulty by making the ^Ifwine of the poem one of the chiefs who 
 followed Alaric in his inroad, 401 a.d. 
 
 The editors of the Corpus Poeticum Boreale assume at once, without 
 expressing a shade of doubt on the matter, that the Traveller's Song was 
 written after the death of Alboin, 572 a.d. They quote a passage con- 
 cerning iElfwine's (Alboin's) fame from Paul the Deacon, and say, " This 
 passage is strikingly confirmed by the fame of ^Ifwine having reached 
 even the English author of the Traveller's Song." This opinion makes 
 the poem to be written in our England, and .probably not earlier than 
 the seventh century, .a view which is not without its critical supporters. 
 Maurer, referring to the mention of the Csesar in it, places it still later, 
 after the time of Charles the Great, and suggests that the name Vikingas 
 which occurs in the list of tribes, points to a time when the English had 
 made acquaintance with the northern rovers. 
 
 On the other hand, it has been held, and by a number of commenta^ 
 tors, that the insertion of names later than the fifth century is due to the 
 work of an interpolator, who probably lived in England in the seventh 
 century, and that the total absence of any mention of our England as 
 England goes far to prove — independent altogether of the directness and 
 simplicity of the personal portion — that the body of the poem was com- 
 posed upon the continent. The English editor of the seventh centvuy 
 would then have used the ancient poem as a frame into which he inserted 
 what men had come to know (a hundred years let us say after the death 
 of Alboin), of other countries and their rulers, introducing also, from his 
 own knowledge, the passage concerning the Picts and Scots and the Ar- 
 morioans. We should then have a poem, the body of which was com- 
 posed by a man who in his youth may have been a contemporary of 
 Eormanric in the fourth century, but who did not write his verses till the 
 fifth century, 435-440, and which, brought to Britain by the Angles, was 
 taken up, added to, and produced in its present form in the seventh or 
 eighth century. 
 
 A word remains to be said about some names interesting to us. The 
 poet stays his hand in the middle of his list to speak at some length of 
 Off a who ruled Ongle, as if Offa's history were specially bound up vrith 
 his own tribe. " Ofia," he says, " set up, while yet a youth, the greatest 
 of kingdoms. With his sword alone he widened his marches against the 
 Myrgings, by Eifeldor. And as Of£a fixed it, so Engle and Swaefe held 
 their place." We only know Offa as a legendary hero, whose story gets 
 mixed up afterwards with that of Ofia of Mercia. But this sober men- 
 tion of him has the air of history rather than of legend, and the fight at 
 Eifeldor, which in after saga is clothed with imaginative details, is here 
 wholly free from them. We seem to touch a piece of reality concerning 
 a king who was in ancient days, one of ourselves, a great Englishman who 
 fought the battles of the Angles in the lands about the Elbe. Whether 
 this is really so will, I suppose, be discussed till every possible theory is 
 exhausted. The reference to the Engle and Swaefe as neighbouring na- 
 tions is also to the point. " It is clear from this," says Guest, " that the 
 
NOTES 461 
 
 latter had not as yet left the shores of the Baltic. This is one of the 
 many circumstances which prove the great antiquity of the poem." 
 
 Another passage of interest is that in which the writer also interrupts 
 his mere catalogue oi names to tell a piece of history or of what seems 
 history. It contains names well known to us from the poem of Beowulf. 
 He speaks of Hrothgar, and of his famous Hall, Heorot, and he speaks of 
 both without any allusion whatever to the legend of Beowulf and Grendel. 
 It seems as if this poem had been written before the legend of Beowulf 
 had been connected with Hrothgar and Heorot. So also he speaks of 
 Finn and Hnaef , who occur in one of the episodes of Beowulf and in the 
 fragment we have in English of the Mght at Finnsburg. 
 
 Still more curious is another coincidence which I have already noticed. 
 In one of the episodes introduced into Beowulf there is an account of a 
 feud which arose between Hrothgar and Eroda, and of the way the feud 
 was healed by the marriage of Hrothgar' s daughter Ereaware to Ingeld, 
 the son of Froda. But the slayer of Eroda comes as attendant on Erea^ 
 ware to the hall of Ingeld, and Ingeld slays his father's murderer. In 
 the trouble that follows, his love for his wife grows cold. There the epi- 
 sode ends, but the hero Beowulf, who tells the story, prophesies that evil 
 will flow from it, that war will arise between Hrothgar and Ingeld. We 
 hear nothing of the result in the poem of Beowulf. But the result is 
 given us in the Traveller's Song. Widsith tells us that Heorot was attacked 
 by Ingeld, and that he was beaten back and slain. " They " (Hrothgar, 
 and Hrothulf his brother) "bowed down at-Heorot the sword of Ingeld, 
 hewed down at Heorot the host of the Heathobeards." 
 
 This is what Paley would have called an undesigned coincidence, and 
 it seems to bring Hrothgar and Heorot and Ingeld, that is, some of the 
 names in Beowulf, into the realm of history. 
 
 B.— (CHAPTER I) 
 
 THE LAMENT OF DEOR 
 
 Weyland, Egil, and Slagfin entrap three swan maidens who came fly- 
 ing through the mirkwood. Of these Lathgund clasped the white neck of 
 Weyland. But when nine winters had gone she left him, and he stayed 
 in Wolfdale hammering the red gold, for he was the first of smiths. 
 Then Nidad, King of the Niars, came on him by stealth and bound him and 
 bore him to the palace, and the queen, seeing him and his eyes like the 
 flashing snake, was afraid, and said, "Sever the might of his sinews and 
 set him down at Seastead ; " and there Weyland, lame as the Greek 
 smith, wrought many treasures, and thought of vengeance. And the 
 sons of Nidad, young boys, came to Wolfmere in Seastead to see the red 
 gold and jewels, and Weyland seized them and made cups for Nidad out 
 of their skulls, and out of their eyeballs gems for the queen, and out of 
 their teeth brooches for Eodwild (Beadohild). And Bodwild broke her 
 ring and came to Weyland to get it mended, and he gave her a drink and 
 took his will of her. And when he had so wrought his wrath he made 
 himself vrings and flew over the palace and mocked Nidad, and citing out 
 all that he had done, rose laughing into the air, but Nidad and Bodwild 
 sat behind with many sorrows, 
 
462 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 This is the drift of the version in the Edda. It is the most poetical 
 of all. The version in Dear is perhaps older, and it is not apparently 
 derived from Scandinavia, but from German saga ; from sagas " of which 
 the Edda knows nothing." The names are not names of the Edda, but of 
 German saga. England, France, and Germany know the old Scandina- 
 vian smith. Beowulf mentions him ; Alfred translates, by a pleasant 
 mistake, Fabricius by his name ; he appears in the " Weyland smithy" 
 of the 0. E. Berkshire charter, in the " Weyland's houses" or labyrinths 
 of northern Europe, and in the Oalant of the French Chansons de Gestes. 
 His son by Bodwild is the Wade of the Wilkina Saga whose magic boat 
 Wingelock was known till almost modem times in northern England, i 
 
 The legend of Geat and Maethhild — or of Hild and Geat, if we trans- 
 late with Walker's reading — exists only in this Anglo-Saxon song ; but I 
 would like to suggest that it may be from the same root as the story 
 which is told in Iceland of Frey and Gerda in the lay of Skimi. Frey 
 sits all day alone in the hall, with heavy heart-sorrow, for he saw a maid 
 in Gymir's croft whose arms beamed so brightly that sky and sea were 
 lit by them. Skimi, Frey's page, goes to giantland to win Gerda and 
 bring back her consent. In three nights' time she will meet Frey at 
 Barra, a peaceful copse, and grant her love ; and Frey, when he hears, 
 cries out, " One night is long ; two nights are longer, how can I endure 
 three ? A month has often seemed shorter to me than this half bridal 
 night." This is a close parallel of circumstance — but infinite has been 
 such circumstance. Yet there is no reason why Geat should not have 
 the same mythical origin as Frea (as an Angle, if he knew of him, would 
 call Frey) ; though Grimm has said that he is Woden. We know Geat 
 was one of our ancestral deities, and if his name be derived from geotan, 
 " to pour," it harmonises with the character of Frey who was the bounte- 
 ous summer god — the God of Love and Fruitfulness. 
 
 But who can decide aright concerning the first line of the stanza? 
 There are at least six conjectures concerning the words maeS hilde. Is 
 it a proper name, Maethhild; or is it the "dishonour, or the miserable 
 ill-fortune of Hild" (I have left it meed, that which was measured to 
 her); or are both the words to be taken as simple substantives — "this 
 reward, or this shame, of battle " — no proper name being there ? 
 
 I am myself inclined to think that there may have been a full stanza 
 about HUd, and another about Geat, and that these two persons are not 
 connected at all, but have here got together by the loss of four or five 
 lines. The dishonour or the dreadful fate of Hild would then be, I 
 suggest, an allusion to that story which afterwards, in Icelandic saga, 
 became the tale of Hogni and Hedinn, in which Hild, the daughter of 
 Hogni, is basely ravished away by Hedinn, to the fearful travail and 
 torment of the two heroes, who fight together and slay one another night 
 after night for a hundred and forty-three years, while Hild sits still in a 
 grove hard by and looks upon the play. But this is a guess and no more. 
 
 The passage about Theodric may refer to the fable of his thirty years' 
 exile among the Huns, but it may also refer to something which is not 
 contained in the later myths about Theodric, and of which we have no 
 knowledge. In explaining this and other historical and mythical allusions 
 in Anglo-Saxon poems, Guest says, "That we must not pay too much 
 
 1 See the " Lay of Weyland " and notes thereon in the Corp. Poet. Boreale 
 vol. i. p. 108. 
 
NOTES 463 
 
 attention to the later myths of the Icelander and the German." There 
 is, however, a fragment which is assumed to concern Theodrio and the 
 Maerings which is quoted in the Corp. Poet. Bor., vol. i. p. 69. " It was 
 found on an ancient Runic stone (early tenth century ?) known as the 
 Eokstone, ia East Gothland, Sweden. This stone stands in the same 
 relation to the Deor lay as does the Euthwell Cross to the Lay of the 
 Rood. The identity we assume from the correspondence of the name 
 Theodrick and the Maeringa with the Maeringa-burg where, according 
 to the old English Deor's Lay, Theodric ruled." " Theodrich the daring 
 in mood, the lord of seamen, ruled Redmere's strand. He, the Prince 
 of the Maerings, sitteth now in full war-gear on his steed, shield-girt." 
 
 Waiting like Barbarossa and all the other heroes who sit armed in 
 caves — in that frequently recurring folk legend ! 
 
 C. — (CHAPTER IV) "•'■:^ 
 
 WALRnS OK SPERM WHALE ? 
 
 The common explanation of the Hronaes han — the Whale's hone in 
 the text — is that (since the casket is of ivory) it belonged to the walrus 
 which was hunted in the North Sea at and before the time of JElfred. 
 Ohthere mentions its ivory, but calls the animal the Sors-hwaet But 
 the walrus, unless the weather was much colder than now in earlier times, 
 did not come below the North Cape, and our hunter may have slain his 
 quarry in the icy seas beyond Archangel. However, I see no reason why 
 the walrus should not, in the eighth or the tenth century, have haunted 
 the Shetlands or the Faroes, or the northern coasts of Norway or Scotland. 
 If the reindeer was hunted in Caithness, the walrus may have visited the 
 Shetlands in winter ; and whether or no, as the ivory tusk of the walrus 
 was, to our knowledge, an article of commerce in -Alfred's time, it is the 
 most natural supposition to make our hunter's Hronaes ban a walrus 
 tusk. 
 
 I have, however, made the guess (at p. 84), that it was the ivory jaw 
 of the sperm whale, and the guess is not devoid of probability. Pirst, I 
 am not sure that the word Sron is ever used in the loose generic sense in 
 which Hwael was used. Hwael meant any great beast that tumbled about 
 in the sea, — a whale, a porpoise, or a seal ; but when the walrus was 
 meant, Hors was added to it to distinguish it from the rest. Eron may 
 have been kept for the whales, as apart from the seals. 
 
 Then the whole description suits a whale-hunt better than a walrus- 
 hunt. The mountain of water the huge head makes as it moves through 
 the sea, the groaning of the ocean under the monster, the great distress 
 of the beast in the shallows (a walrus would have been much more at ease 
 among the rooks) , belong to a whale driven ashore or caught in a bight of 
 land. 
 
 Moreover, it was as easy to meet a sperm whale as to meet a walrus. 
 If the writer, who describes the way he got his ivory, was an English sea- 
 rover in a Viking galley, as I think very likely to be the case from the 
 runes about Egil and Siegfried, he might come across sperm whales in the 
 Mediterranean, or outside the Straits of Gibraltar ; nor is it at all im- 
 possible that some gipsy of a sperm whale might have wan<3le?ed north:^ 
 
464 EAELY ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 ward as far as the west coast of Scotland. There are at least two instances 
 known of this whale being killed on the coasts of the British Isles within 
 the last century. 
 
 When Spenser uses Whale's-bone, he is said to certainly mean the 
 walrus tusk. It does not follow at all. The ivory "jaw and teeth of the 
 sperm whale were certainly known to the Elizabethans, — and the 
 Norsemen must have also met and killed it. 
 
 D.— (CHAPTER V) 
 
 ON THE WOKSHIP OP WODEN BY THE ENGLISH, AND ON SCEAF 
 
 It is a remarkable thing that there is no mention whatever in the whole 
 of Anglo-Saxon literature before .ffilfred of Woden being the god of the 
 English. This is scarcely accounted for by the desire of Christian writers 
 to suppress the name of heathen gods. In the seventh century, when 
 many suppose that the legends of Beowulf were given, on the whole, their 
 present form, a Christian poet would not be so particular ; and it is as- 
 tonishing that not the faintest allusion is made to Woden in Beowulf, if 
 his was the name of the supreme god of the English. Baeda himself has 
 no objection to speak of two heathen goddesses by name, and to trace the 
 name of Easter to Eostra. Moreover, if Woden had been ever of the 
 same importance in England as he became in Germany proper, in 
 Scandinavia in later times, or in England after the Danish invasion, some 
 hint of his existence, some words derived from his attributes, would, we 
 should think, have stolen into the large body of poetry which we owe to 
 Cynewulf ; or into poems like the Wanderer or the Wife^s Complaint and 
 a few others, the bulk of which seems either pagan or semi-pagan, 
 written on the border-line between Christianity and heathendom. But 
 not one word appears ; and Baeda and Ealdhelm are just as silent. 
 When Grimm tries to get Woden into early English poetry, all he can do 
 is to say that woma ("clamor, sonitus ") is connected with Omi, which 
 is, he thinks, another name for the Norse Odinn. There is not much in 
 that ; and this absence of the slightest allusion to Woden as a god 
 suggests the question — "Whether the Angles, when they came over, 
 worshipped Woden, whether he was ever their god in England before 
 the Danish invasion?" and the further question, "whether any of the 
 tribes north of the Elbe — Danes, Angles, Jutes, or any of the Scandi- 
 navians, at the time of the invasion of England — worshipped the Heaven 
 under the name of Woden, or even thought of him as one of their 
 ancestor-gods?" I do not think, though I speak with great diffidence, 
 that there is any sure proof of the affirmative, and I think that there is a 
 good deal to be said on the side of the negative. Nevertheless, I put 
 forward the following considerations only as a guess, a conjecture. If 
 they are worth nothing, they may at least amuse the reader. 
 
 It is plain enough that Woden (Wuotan) was the name which the 
 tribes of Germany proper came, in process of time, to give to the supreme 
 being. " Wodan," says Paul the Deacon, "qui ab universis Germaniae 
 gentibus ut deus adoratur ! " Jonas of Bobbio, Paul's elder countryman, 
 also mentions Mm — " illi aiunt, deo suo Vodano, se velle litare" — 
 testimonies which, however, belong only to the seventh century. It is 
 
NOTES 465 
 
 also plain from the Abjuration of idolatry and declaration of faith 
 imposed by Boniface on his converts in Thuringia that Woden was 
 worshipped in these forest regions in the eighth century. Here is the 
 phrase in the Abrenuntiatio : "I forsake all works and words of the 
 devil, the worship of groves, Woden and Saxnote, and all evil spirits that 
 are their companions." None, however, of these and kindred passages 
 proves that in the fifth century the English worshipped him as God ; or 
 that even when Boniface was writing in the eighth century, Woden was 
 remembered as an English god by the Englishmen with whom Boniface 
 corresponded. It is most probable, I think, that the central German 
 tribes did worship Woden as their tribal deity in the fifth century, and if 
 so, he would have been known as such to the Saxons who came to 
 England ; but the Wessex genealogy which goes back to Sceaf through 
 Woden does not suggest that Woden was supreme in the West Saxon 
 mind, and ^thelweard, himself a West Saxon, knows nothing of his 
 godhead. Even if those Saxons who came to England from the inland of 
 Saxony worshipped him as an ancestor, it does not prove that the Angles 
 did so ; and all the vernacular literature we have before .Alfred is Angle. 
 In that literature there is not a trace of Woden- worship. Whatever we 
 may say then of a certain element of Woden-worship existing among 
 some of the Saxon invaders, it may be conjectured that this worship had 
 not extended northward among the Angles, Jutes, or Danes at the time of 
 the English migration. After their departure, and a good time after it, I 
 conjecture that Woden-worship got to the North, seized on the Danes, on 
 Sweden and Norway ; and I have often thought that the late legend of 
 Woden's wandering from the East and taking refuge in the North contains 
 in it some faint record of this Northern drift of his worship. 
 
 These are the matters I think probable. After all, it is only an 
 inference that Woden was the English god, and an inference based on 
 somewhat shadowy arguments. If we do not make that inference, much 
 which is strange in the silence concerning Woden in Anglo-Saxon 
 literature is explicable. Have we any right to make it at all ? That is 
 the question. 
 
 There is the argument for Woden's worship derived from the place- 
 names in England compounded with his name, a number of which, more 
 or less certain, are given by Kemble ; i and from the trees, stones, and 
 posts which in the charters bear traces of his name. But this is no proof 
 of his worship, unless we first assume that he was worshipped. Those 
 names may have been given by the Danes ; and those which existed before 
 the Danish invasion only prove that Woden was a name known to the 
 English as one of their ancestors, or as one of the heroes of their kinsmen 
 — and this nobody denies — but not that he was believed to be the supreme 
 god. Place-names only prove that the name they take was famous. 
 
 Secondly, the mention of Woden as a god occurs in Anglo-Saxon poetry 
 and prose. In every case this mention of his divinity is confined to writ- 
 ings which are subsequent to the invasion of the Danes, a time when it is 
 plain that Woden-worship had become extensive; and when English 
 writers would not hesitate, for the sake of clearness, to give his name to 
 the supreme being whom their ancestors worshipped as the Heaven. We 
 see this custom fully carried out in the Norman chroniclers who, one and 
 
 1 Saxons in Enqland, vol. 1. p. 344, etc. The whole question of Woden's 
 worship in England is debated in those yages, and what does it come to ? 
 
466 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 all, call the English god by the name of 'Woden. But we do not see it 
 done hy the Latin writers before the Conquest, as I shall afterwards make 
 clear. 
 
 To return however to the poetry, Woden's name is mentioned in one 
 of the G-nomic Verses : Woden worhte weos ; wuldor-alwalda rume roderas 
 — " Woden made altars, but the glorious AUwielder the spacious skies " ; 
 but I suppose no one will maintain that this is one of the early sentences 
 in that various collection. He is also mentioned by Homilists after 
 Alfred ; and in one metrical homily Mercury is said to have been honour- 
 able among all the heathen, " and to be called Odinn in Danish," but the 
 identification of Mercury with Woden, i whether here or in the Norman 
 chroniclers, does not prove that the English worshipped him before they 
 were Christians. It only proves that when the homily was made, and 
 the Chronicles written, Woden was considered as the supreme god of the 
 pagans, and this is not denied. 
 
 When we look however, and this is a third point, at earlier writings, at 
 Nennius, at Baeda, at the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, even at the Chronicle 
 of JSthelweard in the tenth century — that is, when we consider writings 
 nearer to the times of English heathendom — we find nothing which 
 should make us suppose that the English pagans adored Woden as their 
 great god. I take -<Ethelweard first. He wrote after Woden-worship had 
 certainly entered into England with the Danes ; and he knew that the 
 Chronicle, from which he took his history, looked on Woden as one of the 
 ancestors of the English kings. It seems almost impossible, if he was 
 aware that the English had once worshipped Woden as the supreme god, 
 or as a god at all, that he should speak as he does. " Woden was king," 
 he says, " of a multitude of barbarians. But the unbelievers of the North 
 are overwhelmed with so great a delusion that they even now worship him 
 as a god — the Danes, the Northmen, and the Suevi." "Hengist and 
 Horsa," he says again, " were the nepotes" — he means the descendants, 
 for, according to his own genealogy of them, they were the great-great- 
 grandsons of Woden — "of Woden, king of the barbarians, quem post, 
 infanda dignitate, ut deum honorantes, sacrificium obtulerunt pagani, 
 victoriae causa sive virtutis." And again — "Woden, king of the bar- 
 barians, whom some pagans now still worship as a god" (Books i., ii.). 
 No doubt a Christian chronicler of the tenth century would be glad to 
 leave out Woden's name, but, having used it, the way in which the 
 
 1 The Mercury of Tacitus has been identified with Woden, but if the iden- 
 tification be correct, it is evidence that the dwellers in Germania worshipped 
 him, but not that his worship went north of the Elbe. When Tacitus comes 
 to speak of the divine ancestors of the Germans, he speaks of them under 
 their native names, ancient grayhaired personages — Tuisco, Mannus — ances- 
 tral gods, and when he gets more north, the worship of Nerthus swallows up 
 the rest. She is Mother Earth, and is the only divine Being of whom we have 
 any direct evidence in Anglo-Saxon literature. Whether in the line Erce, 
 Erce, Erce, eor\>an modor, mother of Earth — we have a goddess who is an 
 older Being even than Earth herself, we cannot teU, but at least the phrase 
 suggests a primeval deity older far than Woden. Moreover, there is a kind of 
 bidding prayer for or to the Earth in the same Charm in which the enigmatic 
 Erce occurs — " Hale be Thou, Earth, mother of men I " ffal wes Jnt, folde, 
 flra modor ; but I doubt whether this is more than the conventional phrase of 
 a farmer. " Earth, be in good fettle for me " — and the flra modor, may also 
 be a mere phrase, and have nothing to do with any conception of the Earth as 
 divine. 
 
NOTES 467 
 
 phrases about him are put is not the way in wliich a writer would natu- 
 rally speak who was aware that in old times Woden was the supreme god 
 of his folk. He knows Woden as one of the ancestors of the English 
 kings, whose worship in after years became prevalent among the 
 Northerns. And this is the very thing I conjecture to be true. 
 
 Now as ^thelweard is of the tenth, so the book compiled under the 
 name of Nennius is probably of the eighth century. Its materials were 
 then gathered when the traditions of the English heathendom were fresher 
 than in the tenth century, and before the Danish invasion. What does 
 Nennius say ? Does this book know anything about Woden's deity ? 
 Nothing at all ! It speaks of Woden as one of the ancestors of Hengest 
 and Horsa, but when it comes to talk of the god of the invaders, it is of 
 Geat and his divine father it tells, — " Geat, who, as they say, was the son 
 of a god." I have italicisj(i as they say, because this phrase gives the 
 quotation about Geat an importance it would not have otherwise had in so 
 loose and corrupt a compilation as Nennius. It marlis this passage as one 
 of those he collected " de soriptis Scotorum Anglorumque, et ex traditione 
 veterum nostrorum ; " from the ancient registers of our history from 
 which Baeda also learned the facts of the English story before the en- 
 trance of Christianity — "ex priorum maxime soriptis, hie inde coUectis.' ' 
 It is Dr. Guest,! ^rho says that when Baeda states a fact on the apparent 
 authority of these ancient chronicles, he sometimes adds, " ut perhibent," 
 " perhibetur ; " and the phrase "as they say," used here in this book of 
 Nennius, isolates into importance the statement about Geat. 
 
 Asser seems to take up the same view. In his history of jElfred 
 Woden is not an Enghsh god. He is the great-great-great-great-grandson 
 of " Geat whom the pagans long worshipped as a god." Geat, who is in 
 Nennius the son of a god, is here a god of the English — the ancestor god, 
 as I should say, of the Geatas, just as Taetwa, Beaw, Sceldi' — who are 
 the father, grandfather, and great-grandfather of Geat in the Wessex 
 genealogy — may be ancestor gods of other Northern tribes who one by 
 one separated from the original tribe ruled by Sceaf from whom they all 
 descended. But, leaving this aside, it is at least a little curious that 
 neither Asser nor Nennius, who founded their special statement about the 
 English god on ancient documents, knew anything at all about Woden as 
 an English deity. 
 
 Now take Baeda ; does he seem to be aware of Woden's importance ? 
 When he does mention two of the goddesses of his heathen ancestors, 
 Eheda and Eostra, he is whoUy silent about him who is declared by so 
 many to have been the supreme god of the English. When, on the other 
 hand, he does speak of Woden, it is not as a god, but as the ancestor of 
 English kings. " Hengest and Horsa," he says, " were the sons of Vict- 
 gilsus, whose father was Vecta, son of Woden, from whose stock the 
 royal race of many provinces deduce their original." 
 
 Baeda got this, no doubt, from the same ancient sources from which 
 the similar entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is derived, and I appeal 
 now to the witness of the Chronicle. " Prom this Woden," it says (add- 
 ing, however, one generation more than Baeda contains to Hengest's 
 descent from Woden), " sprang all our royal " (i.e. West Saxon) " fami- 
 lies and those of the South-humbrians also." A little farther on and the 
 Northumbrian princes are also traced back to Woden, and afterwards the 
 
 ■ Origines Celticse, vol. li. pp. 157-163, 
 
EARLY ENGLISH LITERATUEE 
 
 Mercians Penda and Ofia. But nothing that the Chronicle or Baeda says 
 would suggest to their readers that Woden was a god of the English, much 
 less their supreme god. This might, however, be a possible inference if 
 . the other full genealogies in the Chronicle ended with "Woden, but this is 
 not the case. The complete genealogies given in the Chronicle of 855 or 
 891 are those of the Northumbrian, Mercian, and West Saxon princes. 
 The two Mercian genealogies, those of Penda and Offa, go back to Woden, 
 and no farther. The two Northumbrian genealogies, those of Ida and 
 Ml\a, both go back to Woden, but in Ida's genealogy, Woden has five 
 ancestors, the last of whom is Geat, and in JEUa's genealogy, Woden has 
 one ancestor, Eriduwulf. The Wessex genealogy, made either after 
 ^thelwulf's death or in jElfred's reign, goes back beyond Woden for 
 twelve generations to Sceaf. The genealogies are also, with differences, 
 given in Nennius, Asser, and ^thelweard during Anglo-Saxon times, and 
 they attribute many ancestors to Woden. wFany of the Norman chroni- 
 clers give them also ; and Woden never closes their lists. He has, 
 variously, four, eight, or even sixteen ancestors. Generally speaking, 
 Sceaf is the oldest heathen name in any of the pedigrees. It is so in the 
 Wessex genealogy, which, for many reasons, may be looked on, as Grimm 
 allows, " to be the complete and correct thing." It is so, also, in ^thel- 
 weard, who repeats the Chronicle, but was also a special authority on 
 this matter, for he was of the house of JElfred, and knew his own lineage. 
 Except in Mercia then (in, that is, the full genealogies, for there are sev- 
 eral incomplete ones which only go back to Woden), Woden does not 
 take the closing place ; and though in the Chronicle he does close 
 the Mercian line, he does not close it in the Mercian genealogy of Mat- 
 thew of Westminster, who gives thirteen ancestors to the Woden of 
 Mercia. Woden's position then is not of first-rate importance in the 
 genealogies. He is one only of a host of ancestors. Had he been the 
 supreme god of the English, he would, I conjecture, have been more 
 isolated. Nor, if we take the generations which lead up to him from Cer- 
 dic, in the Wessex genealogy, does he get back into any remote antiquity. 
 Cerdic died in 534. Woden precedes him by nine generations, which (if 
 we give thirty years to a generation) proves that the West Saxons thought 
 that he lived in the midst of the third century — not a very ancient lin- 
 eage for their supreme being ! In fact, if we are to take the genealogies 
 as any evidence of the way in which the English thought of Woden, it is 
 difficult to give Woden any other place than that of an ancestor, whose 
 force and heroism had made him important. A nation would scarcely 
 imagine that their supreme god had twelve or fourteen ancestors. Of 
 course, the lists have no backward historical value beyond the names of 
 Cerdic, Ida, or Penda, but they have a value as showing how the English 
 thought about personages like Woden or Sceaf. They do show that 
 Woden did not occupy a supreme position in their minds.i 
 
 1 Grimm, who is somewhat collared by his belief that Woden was the name 
 of the god whom all the Teutonic races adored as supreme and naturalljr iden- 
 tifies him with the Mercury of Tacitus, declares that because Woden is in the 
 centre (which he la not always) of the Anglo-Saxon genealogies, his pre- 
 eminence is evident. This is a curious argument. 
 
 Troubled too with the statement that the English worshipped Geat, he says 
 that Geat is another name for Woden. This is mere assertion. Geat was 
 probably the semi-divine tribal father of the Geatas, and worshipped as such 
 by the tribe and its emigrants ; and Wuotan, as it seems to me, occupied the 
 
NOTES 469 
 
 If we are to choose any name as of first-rate importance in the English 
 mind, not as a great god like Heaven or Earth, hut as an ancestral 
 divine Person, the name vfe ought to choose is Sceaf — the father of the 
 Scyld of Beowulf — the name of the boy vrho came out of the deep to 
 Scania, and became, in the myth, king of all the folk round about Sles- 
 wick. And, independent of the story told of him by three of the Norman 
 chroniclers, we have the best witness to his importance in the West Saxon 
 genealogy given in the Chronicle, and in the pre-eminence which his 
 story taJkes in jEthelweard. It is scarcely possible to doubt but that 
 iElfred himself drew up or carefully superintended the account of the 
 West Saxon lineage in the Chronicle. We have, if this was the case, 
 his own view, in the genealogy, of the question. Who was the root, the 
 founder, the remotest ancestor of the West Saxon folk, and indeed of all 
 the English ; for the place jElfred elsewhere brings the English people 
 from is the very place where this remote ancestor was said by tradition 
 to have set up his capital town, Sleswick, which the Danes called Haith- 
 aby. This primeval ancestor of the English, according to -lElfred, was 
 Soeaf. (The derivation of Sceaf from Noah, and so from Adam, has 
 plainly nothing to do with the question.) Through twelve generations 
 then, anterior to Woden, Alfred looked back to his origins. Moreover, 
 it seems also pretty plain that .Alfred knew of the legend of Sceaf, though 
 he took care not to introduce such a matter into the Anglo-Saxon Chron- 
 icle. The legend is told by -iEthelweard, and with remarks attached 
 which, considering who ^thelweard was, force us to believe that the 
 house of JElfred knew the tale. jEthelweard was extremely particular 
 about his lineage, and he wrote his Chronicle not only to tell his cousin 
 Matilda the story of the English in England (it is taken chiefly from the 
 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle'), but also, as he says, to make her thoroughly 
 acquainted "with the origin of our family, who were our relations, and 
 how and where they came from, as far as our memory can go, and as our 
 parents taught us." He and his cousin were both of the royal West 
 Saxon line. JEthelred, son of ^thelwulf, and brother of Alfred, was 
 his direct ancestor, and Alfred himself was the direct ancestor of his 
 cousin Matilda. Being thus connected with the West Saxon kings, and 
 himself an eager genealogist, he would be sure to preserve carefully the 
 views held by his ancestors as to their origin, and we hear from him — 
 and the testimony is of worth — that jEthelwulf, JElfred's father, traced 
 his descent to Sceaf, as we infer from the Chronicle that JElfred also did. 
 There is then, I think, clear evidence that the West Saxon House — and 
 
 same position among the Central German tribes, and especially, I conjecture, 
 among the Franks, whose great influence would tend to make the name of 
 their tribal deity the name of the supreme god, and send his worship all over 
 the Teutonic peoples, but not till long after the English migration. 
 
 A memory, a tradition, of these different tribal worships lingers in the 
 phrase used in the St. Olaf Saga — " Thor is the God of the Englishmen, Odinn 
 of the Saxons, Skiold of the Scanians, and Freyr of the Swedes." " I won- 
 der," says Grimm, " why the writer gives Thor to the English, who were 
 votaries of Woden." He may well wonder why. 
 
 As to the names of the days of the week which are alleged as proving the 
 English worship of Woden and the rest, these names were made long after the 
 English migration, and prove nothing at all as to whom the English worshipped 
 before Christianity. " Their very forms," Vigfusson and Powell say, " prove 
 them to be loan words." — C. P. B., vol. i. p. 428. 
 
470 EARLY ENGLISH LITEKATURE 
 
 at the time of its greatest importance, -when it would be most jealous of 
 its ancestry, from the time of JSthelwulf to that of Eadgar — held that 
 Woden was but one in a long series of their ancestors, and that Sceaf 
 was their most ancient and venerable father. Here is the passage in 
 -(Ethelweard. He has brought King ^thelwulf back through Ina and 
 Kenred to Cerdio, and Cerdic through eight generations to Woden — 
 "And Woden was son of Frithowald, son of Frealaf, son of Frithuwulf, 
 son of Finn, son of Godwulf, son of Geat, son of Taetwa, son of Beaw, 
 son of Soeldi, son of Sceaf. This Sceaf came with one bark to an island 
 of the ocean, named Scani ; surrounded with arms, and he was a young 
 boy, and unknown to the people of that land ; but he was received by 
 them, and they guarded him as their own with much care, and af terwarci 
 chose him for their king. It is from him that King JEthelwulf derives his 
 descent." If we are to choose then the oldest ancestor-god of all the 
 English tribes, the one whom the consistent English tradition lodges in 
 Sleswick whence jElfred derives the original English ; if we are to select 
 the mythical ancestor, through Cerdic, of our own Eoyal House, we look 
 back beyond Geat or Beaw or the rest (who may have been worshipped 
 by separate tribes), and far beyond Woden, in a straight line to Sceaf, 
 who, fatherless, motherless, came out of the mists of myth, out of the 
 unknown deep, out of the secret hiding-places of the gods, to Scania; 
 and whose story — inserted into the poem of Beowulf — we possess under 
 the name of his son Scyld, in perhaps the most ancient song in the 
 English language. 
 
 I put forward these considerations with no impertinent assertion. 
 They are no more than a conjecture which seems to have enough support 
 to render it perhaps worthy of being called a theory. They are consider- 
 ations which account for the silence of early English literature on the 
 gods who have been transferred to the English from the later Viking 
 creed, and whom Kemble and others discover hidden away like shadows 
 in allusive words and phrases. They mean to suggest that the worship 
 of Woden as the supreme being had not reached the older England of the 
 mainland at the time of the migration ; that it did not get into the lands 
 about the mouth of Elbe, or into Denmark and Sweden until a good time 
 after the fifth century ; that then it did drift northward and seized on the 
 Danes, and was brought by them to England ; that the Vikings took it 
 up, mingled it up with Christian myths, and sent it over other regions of 
 Europe than Germany ; and that then Woden's name became of so much 
 importance that writers in England transferred it backwards to the 
 supreme god whom the pagan English worshipped, but that the pagan 
 English did not use that name for their god. Woden was no more to 
 them than one of the heroic ancestors of their kings. 
 
 I repeat that this is only a suggestion ; but that the religion of our 
 fathers was a simple and homely affair, and had nothing to do with the 
 complicated theology of the Norsemen, is not a theory. It was a nature- 
 worship of father Heaven, and mother Earth, and of their benignant 
 summer children, and to these we may perhaps add a war-god of some 
 kind. Underneath these deities there were semi-divine ancestors of the 
 folk who were worshipped, and each family had probably their ovm 
 household spirits as well. The rites of these worships were conducted 
 partly in the households, and partly in temples belonging to the tribe or 
 the royal house, and without idols. Below these venerable personages, 
 reverence, founded on fear, was given to the destroying and dark powers 
 
NOTES 471 
 
 of nature, embodied as giants, elves, and monsters, and also to the ele- 
 ments, places, and things in which the gods, the ancestors, and the lower 
 order of beings were supposed to take up their dwelling — the air, the fire, 
 the great water, the burial barrows and howes, the hills, the islands in the 
 river, the groves, the great trees, the wells, the ancient pillars of stone 
 they found on plain or moor.' Around these latter things, and round the 
 evil forces of nature, superstitions, evil and innocent, gathered ; but the 
 foundation of the religion — the worship of the semi-divine spirits of 
 the forefathers of the tribe or the family, and of the great nature-deities 
 from whom they sprang — was at once homely and noble, reverent and 
 simple. I may add that this simplicity of religion would account for the 
 comparative ease with which Christianity was introduced among the 
 English, and for the wisdom and tolerance with which, for example, 
 ^thelberht and Eadwine considered and carried out the change of re- 
 ligion. 
 
 E. — (CHAPTER IX) 
 
 THE CHARMS 
 
 The Charms, of which some are here given, were kept in the mouths 
 of the people, and, after the introduction of Christianity, their heathen 
 elements were modified by Christian elements. They are like an ill- 
 rubbed Palimpsest. The old writing continually appears from under the 
 new ; the new is blurred by the old, and the old by the new. Sometimes 
 they both mingle into the strangest jumble, in which the heathen super- 
 stitions have Christian clothing, and the Christian heathen. This is true 
 concerning the charms mentioned in the chapter on the Settlement. 
 Those which follow here are more decidedly Christian, and are partly 
 prose and partly verse. I translate such portions of them as have some 
 poetical value. They have the literary interest which belongs to rude 
 folk-rhymes. The first is the Nine Serbs' Charm. In Sweden nine 
 sorts of flowers made the midsummer nosegay for a maiden to sleep and 
 dream upon. Nine is the mystic number (rather three or a multiple of 
 it) which is most popular in Britain, but of course this is not peculiar to 
 Britain. The charm starts with the Mugwort — ^ " 
 
 1 1 am sorry that some of this has been already said in the chapter to which 
 this note is attached, but the repetition seems to be necessary in this t)lace. 
 
 2 The Mugwort is the Artemisia,, the German beifuss. The tradition that 
 whoso wears it does not weary on the way comes down from Pliny. But 
 among all German tribes it is good in a house against fiends and diseases, 
 " against poison and flying things," that is, fevers ; and " against the loathly 
 things that fare through the land," that is, against witches and their con- 
 geners. Grimm quotes a Galloway song which a mermaid sings to the sorrow- 
 ful relations of a girl dying with consumption — 
 
 Wad ye let the bonnie May die i' your hand 
 And the Mugwort flowering in the land! 
 
 As to the " loathly things," compare Grimm's quotation, which is too amusing 
 to leave out, and illustrates the transference of disease : " God the Lord went 
 over the land and there met him 70 sorts of Gouts and Goutesses. Then spake 
 the Lord, Ye 70 Gouts and Goutesses, whither would ye? Then spake the 70 
 (Jouts and Goutesses, We go over land and take from men their health and 
 limbs. Then spake the Lord, Ye shall go to an elder bush and break off all 
 his boughs and leave unto this man his straight limbs." 
 
472 EAKLY ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 EememlDer thou, Mugwort, what thou declaredst, 
 
 What thou preparedst at the great declaration ! 
 
 Thou art called Una, oldest of worts, 
 
 Thou hast might against three, and also 'gainst thirty ; 
 
 Thou hast might against poison, and against flying things, 
 
 And against the loathly ones which through the land are faring. 
 
 Thou, too, Way broad,' mother of worts, 
 
 Open to Eastward, inwardly mighty, 
 
 O'er thee ran the Chariots, over thee queens rode, 
 
 O'er thee Brides have brided, o'er thee bulls have panted ; 
 
 All hast thou withstounded, all hast thou withstood, 
 
 As thou now withstandest venom and the ills that fly, 
 
 And the loathly kin that o'er the land are faring. 
 
 The next four lines are full of questions for critics. The lines which 
 follow, and which have more interest, belong to the plant which is after- 
 wards named AttorloS — 
 
 This is here the wort that against the Worm fought, 
 
 This has power 'gainst the poison, it prevails 'gainst flying ill ; 
 
 It prevails o'er loathly things that the land are faring through ! 
 
 Flee thee, Attorlath, less flee from the greater, 
 
 Greater from the less, till a boot from both arrive. 
 
 Thou, remember, Mayweed, what thou didst declare, 
 
 What thou didst end up, at Alorforda.^ 
 
 So that ne'er for flying ill was there life e'er taken, 
 
 Since a man did make Mayweed to himself for meat. 
 
 The next herb, Wergulu, does business which is very curious — 
 
 This is the wort that is Wergulu called ; 
 This sent the seal o'er the ridge of the sea, 
 Of other poison to better the hurt. 
 
 Then some strange lines occur about Woden, concerning which I have 
 nothmg to say except that they seem to put the charm forward into 
 times after the Danish invasion. The wuldor-tanas, the " magic-twigs," 
 sound far more Norse than English — -o b i 
 
 These nine herbs did work nine poisons against. 
 A worm came sneaking, and with teeth tore the man I 
 Then Woden in hand took nine wonder-twigs • 
 There he slew the adder, that it flew in pieces nine. 
 
 ^.^wI^Yi'jHo^r,*^ ^^'""*7''~/A-S- wegbraede; German, wegerich, wege- 
 warte) has its Latin name from being exposed to the tread (plantae) of pas- 
 sengers and Its English name from growing on the wayside. I wonder if the 
 }hft°i^-iT,'P?^' °\ (""^"P'^' on Herbs! -of the herb being once a maiden 
 Ihies llnd 10? ^ ^^ wayside -has anything to do ^th the strange 
 
 inA^t^n^^n^w "^ r ^l™'"'''''' and what Alorforda is, it is almost too distress- 
 ing not to know. Cockayne says there is an Alderf ord in Norfolk ? 
 
NOTES 473 
 
 There are three charms to bring back lost or stolen cattle, one of 
 which I have already used. The other two are almost identical, and 
 contain each three verses — 
 
 Bethelehem the Burg was hight, where was born the Christ, 
 It is famous far over all the middle Earth ! 
 So this deed be known in the sight of men. 
 
 " Per crucem Chnsti. So pray three times to the East, and say 
 thrice, ' May the cross of Christ bring it back from the East ; ' then to 
 the West and say, ' May the cross of Christ bring it back from the 
 West ; ' and to the South, etc. ; and to the North and say, ' The cross 
 of Christ was hidden, and has been found.' The Jews hanged Christ ; 
 they did the worst of deeds to him. They hid what they could 
 not hide ; so may this deed never be hidden. Per crucem ChristV 
 This is curious enough, but the next is more curious. "If cattle be 
 privily taken away ; if it be a horse, sing this over his foot-shackles or 
 over his bridle ; if it be another kind of cattle, sing over the hoof -track, 
 and light three candles and drip the wax three times into the hoof -track. 
 No man will be able to conceal it," i.e. the stealing.^ 
 
 The next three are, like that against the Stitch, against illness. The 
 first is against the Dweorh, that is, "against the Dwarf" (or we may 
 read Weorh — a warty eruption). If it be the Dwarf, ^ this charm takes 
 us into heathendom. The Dwarf's breath and touch may bring sickness 
 and death. Cattle bewitched in Norway are dverg-slagen. Blowing, 
 puffing beings they are, wind spirits of harm, full of mischief, who 
 tangle the hair in knots (Grimm, chapter on Dwarfs). They were 
 thought by the English to tangle the body in knots, to be the source 
 of agues, of convulsions, of all diseases which seem to leap suddenly 
 on a man. Or they took possession of the body and went roving about 
 therein. 
 
 "One must take seven little wafers, such as one ofiers with, and write 
 these names on each wafer — Maximianus, Malchus, Johannes, Martin- 
 ianus, Dionysius, Constantinus, Serapion ; then must one afterwards 
 sing the charm hereafter mentioned, first into the left ear, then into 
 the right, then above the man's head. Then let a maiden go and hang 
 it on his neck, and let one do this for three days : he will soon be better." 
 
 1 This belongs to the sphere of the. ancient superstition that the footprints 
 were so far bound up with the man or animal that made them that an injury 
 done to them is transferred to the man, or that some meddling with the spoor 
 of an animal detains it. The Australian blacks put hot embers in the track 
 of the hunted beast ; the Ojibway Indians place " medicine " on the prints of 
 the deer and bear, supposing that this will bring them within reach. The 
 Zulus (and this is a curiously close parallel to the text) resort to a similar 
 device to recover strayed cattle. Earth, taken from the footprints of the miss- 
 ing beasts, is placed in the chief's vessel, etc. Then the chief says : " I have 
 now conquered them. These cattle are now here. I am sitting upon them. / 
 know not how they will escape." —-Frskzei, "Popular Superstitions of the 
 Ancients," Folk-Lore, vol. 1. 
 
 2 Every one knows that in all folk medicine the most frequent source of 
 disease is the anger or the mischief of an external spirit ; and the several 
 diseases had each their own spirit. Grimm quotes a Finnish Song which 
 condenses this opinion : " Einen alten Frau neun knaben geboren werden : 
 werwolf, sehlange, risi? eidechse, nachtmar, gliedschmerz, gichtschraerz, 
 milzstechen, bauchgrimmen." 
 
474 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Here a spider wight came a-ganging in, 
 He his hands had laid hard upon his belly. 
 Quoth he then that thou now his Haencgest wert ; 
 Lay thyself against Ms neck. 
 
 Now began they then off the land to sail. 
 And as soon as they came off the land they began to cool ; 
 Then came in a wild beast's sister — then she ended all, 
 And she swore her oaths that never this should harm the sick, 
 Neither him who could of this charm get hold. 
 Nor the man who knew how this charm to sing.i 
 Amen. Fiat. 
 
 The charm for a pregnant woman which follows is full of folk 
 fancies, but none of them, save the allusion to the fairy changeling, has 
 more than a passing interest. And the charm against a Wen ^ is another 
 instance of the transference of the disease to some inanimate object, and 
 the passing away of the disease as the object decays. 
 
 The last charm of importance is that sung on departing for a journey. 
 Many of the lines have an air of antiquity, but even these, as the whole 
 body of the poem, are Christian or have been made so. The gyrd, the 
 rod of the beginning, and its works of defence, is very like an ancient 
 rune-stick, and the phrases sige-gealdor ("a victorious charm"), sige- 
 gyrd ("a victorious rod"), seem to me also heathen. So also the evils 
 from which the charm guards the traveller belong to the indefinite terrors 
 of heathendom, the nameless horrors of elves and wandering sprites and 
 gangers of the night, or of the bloodthirsty river-spirits that spring upon 
 the traveller. Here is the Spell — 
 
 In this rod I guard myself, and to God's grace trust myself, 
 'Gainst the stitch that sore is, and against the sore blow. 
 And against the grim, 'gainst the grisly terror, 
 And against the mickle horror that to every one is loathly ; 
 
 1 The verses from 5 to the end read like a nonsense song, like the wise men 
 who went to sea in a sieve. Haencgest appears nowhere else. Cockayne 
 translates it " hackney." 
 
 The spider is imprisoned in a hag and hung around the swollen part. This 
 is a common form of cure. 
 
 Only beware ol the fever, my friends ! Beware of the fever ! 
 
 For it is not, like that of our cold Acadian climate. 
 
 Cured by wearing a spider hung round one's neck In a nutsheU. 
 
 Evangeline. 
 
 EUas Ashmole, May 11, 1681, writes in his diary: "I took early in the 
 morning a good dose of elixir, and hung 3 spiders about my neck, and they 
 drove my ague away. Deo gratias ! " In Worcestershire the same remedy is 
 good for toothache. In Norfolk a spider, tied up in muslin and pinned over 
 the mantelpiece, is good for whooping-cough. When the spider dies the cough 
 will go. It is inferred from these instances either that the spider, being poison- 
 ous, IS supposed to draw the poison of the swelling into itself, or, which is most 
 likely, the disease is transferred to the spider and dies with the spider. Toads 
 are often used in the same way. 
 
 2 It is given in full by Mr. de Grey Birch who discovered it, in the Trans- 
 actions of the Royal Society of Literature, vol. xi. p. 29. 
 
NOTES 475 
 
 And 'gainst all the loathly things that into the land may come I 
 A victorious spell I sing, a victorious stafi I bear, 
 Word of victory, work of victory, so may this avail me 1 
 May no spirit mar me nor the mighty man afflict me. 
 
 Then he calls on the Trinity to keep him hale; on holy men and 
 women and the angels to guard him against the fiends, to keep him in 
 peace, to give him the hope of glory of the hall of Heaven I 
 
 Matthew be my helm, Mark my bymie be ; 
 
 Of my life the shining strength ; let my sword be Luke, 
 
 Sharp and edged sheer ; and my shield be John. 
 
 Winds be smooth and light to me, and in God's peace may I dwell, 
 guarded against the loathly One who my life afflicts. 
 
 This seems the place for the Bune Song, in which, midst of a gen- 
 eral Christian form, many heathen elements appear. Moreover, the 
 Runes themselves have a close connection with charms, spells, and magic. 
 
 Each rune is taken — and there are twenty-nine — according to the 
 meaning of the word given to it as name. Two, three, or four lines are 
 given to each subject. The poem is, in fact, a poetical alphabet, like "A 
 was an Archer that shot at a frog ; B was a Butcher that kept- a big dog." 
 Here, for example, are the first and second runes — 
 
 n Bull is a fierce beast and broad are his horns, 
 A full-furious deer ; and fighteth with horns ! 
 A mighty moor-stepper ! 'Tis a high-mooded creature. 
 
 I Ice is over-cold, immeasurably slippy ; 
 Glistens bright as glass, unto gems most like : 
 'Tis a floor frost-wrought, fair unto the sight. 
 
 Most of the verses are of the same type as these. They can scarcely 
 be said to belong to literature. A few, however, which describe natural 
 objects, like hail and the birch-tree, have some poetical feeling. There 
 are one or two,' also, which seem to come down from ancient, even 
 heathen times. Of these there are three. The first is the foiirth Rune 
 p Os ; the second is the sixteenth Rune \^ Sigel ; the third is the 
 twenty-second J Ing. 
 
 Os, called in the poem the beginner of all speech, the upholder of 
 wisdom, is not an Anglo-Saxon word. The late editor of the poem did 
 not understand it. Grimm explained it by the Latin os. Grein, Rieger, 
 and others make it the equivalent of the Gothic ans, and the Northern 
 as = " God " ; but it is still doubtful whether the word os, in the sense of 
 God, ever occurs independently. If it have that meaning the verse is 
 heathen, and the editor did not understand it — a supposition which puts 
 the Christian redaction of the poem forward to a late period. 
 
 The same kind of mistake seems made about sigel. Sigel is used 
 metaphorically for the sun. But the editor of the verse uses it as if it 
 were segel, a "sail." 
 
 These two errors induce the critics to conjecture that this was an old 
 Northern alphabet of Runes with explanations, probably Danish ; and 
 that it was translated and greatly changed by an Anglo-Saxon in the 
 eleventh or twelfth century. 
 
476 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 A verse, the 22nd, on the Rune Ing is much more clearly ancient. 
 " Iiig " is the divine ancestor of the Ingaevones, one of the names of the 
 many-named hero from vfhom the Northern tribes of Scandia and Angeln 
 sprang. The verse is the only one in the whole poem that seems to be- 
 long purely to the original document — 
 
 Ing was the first amid the East Danes, 
 Of heroes beheld, till Eastward he then 
 Went over the wave ; his wain followed him ! 
 Thus by the Heardings this hero was named.i 
 
 In the explanation of this given by Grimm, Ing and the Wain (a dis- 
 tinctive mark, he says, of ancient gods, heroes, and kings) are mixed up 
 with the Norse gods. Ten Brink says the chariot was the emblem of the 
 god Ing, or Frea, as well as of the goddess Nerthus. But the passage 
 puzzles them, and their explanation is vague. V. Rydberg, in his Teutonic 
 Mythology (English translation, p. 180), claims to have solved the diffi- 
 culty, and he makes the waen of the third line not a waggon, but the 
 proper name of the hero Vagn, Hadding's giant foster-father, who is also 
 called Vagnhofde. He is so called by the Haddings, the Heardings of 
 the Anglo-Saxon text. The lines will now read, and the difference is 
 great — 
 
 Ing was first seen among the East Danemen ; 
 Then he betook himself eastward over the sea. 
 Vagn hastened to follow ; 
 Thus the Heardings called this hero. 
 
 This strophe then is said to enshrine an episode in the first Northern 
 Epic, broken fragments of which only remain scattered here and there in 
 Sagas, the epic of the "first great war in the world," as it is called by the 
 seeress in Volospa. 
 
 That mythic war began between the Asas and the Vans, the two great 
 god-clans, and had its counterpart in a war between the three great Teu- 
 tonic races, but the main contest is between Ing (Yngwe or Swijidaeg) 
 and Hoarding (Hadding). In this contest, as in the Trojan war, the 
 gods join. All the Vans who had now driven the Asas into exile favour 
 Ing, but Odin, Thor, and Heimdal are on the side of Hadding. In his 
 early youth Hadding has been carried to Jotunheim by Thor, and brought 
 up there by Vagnhofde, one of the giants ; and during his stay is saved 
 again from great danger by Odin himself, who rides away with him over 
 sea and land on Sleipnir. When he grows up he becomes the chief of the 
 tribes of Eastern Teutondom, and makes war on the tribes of Northern 
 and Western Teutondom. Ing comes forth from Asgard on the Scandian 
 peninsula, and calls on all the dwellers and on the Danes to follow him 
 against the Eastern Teutons over the sea. "Ing was first seen among 
 
 1 1 insert the Anglo-Saxon — 
 
 ^ (Ing) waes aerest mid East denum 
 gesewen secgun, o\> he siifSan est 
 
 of er waeg gewat, waen aefter ran ! 
 Sus Heardingas tSone haele nemdun. 
 
 liune Song, 11. 67-70. 
 
NOTES 477 
 
 the East Danemen, and then went eastward over the wave." The Danes 
 and Swedes thus go across the Baltic with Ing to the seat of war. A 
 great battle takes place with Hadding, and Hadding is on the point of 
 perishing, when Odin suddenly brings Vagnhofde to Hadding' s help, and 
 places him in the battle beside his foster-son. This is expressed in the 
 Eune strophe by the phrase " Vagn made haste to follow. So the Heard- 
 ings (the followers of Hadding) called the hero." Hadding, all the same, 
 is utterly defeated. 
 
 This is V. Rydberg's explanation, and, if we may accept his upbuild- 
 ing of the myth out of Saxo and the Northern Sagas, it sounds well, and 
 is a literary curiosity. It is as strange to find this single verse lost as it 
 were in an Anglo-Saxon poem, and referring to a mythic epic which con- 
 cerns the Teutons, as it is to find the equally ancient piece about Scyld in 
 the beginning of Beowulf. 
 
NOTES 
 
 A.— (CHAPTER XXII) 
 
 THE "WANDEEER" AND THE " SEAFARER " IN BLANK TERSE 
 
 The Prologue 
 
 A lonely man full often finds his grace, 
 God's tender pity : though in care of mind 
 Need drive him many days o'er ocean's path 
 To push with hands the frost-cold sea, and sail 
 The exile-tracks ! "Wyrd is fully wrought ! 
 Thus quoth a Wanderer, mindful of his woes. 
 Of direful slaughters, and of kinsman's death. 
 
 THE WANDERER 
 
 " Oft must I, lonely, at each early dawn 
 Bewail my care. There's not one living man 
 
 10. To whom I now dare tell my hidden heart 
 With open freedom — full well I know. 
 It is a noble habit in an earl, 
 To lock the cupboard of his soul, and safe 
 Keep his thought-hoard, while, as he will, he thinks. 
 A wearied mindmay not vrithstand the Wyrd, 
 Nor any troubled spirit plan its aid ; 
 Wherefore those eager for their Honour bind, 
 Close-locked within the coffer of their breast, 
 Their dreary thought — and so must I tie up 
 
 20. My soul in fetters ; I, so poor, careworn, 
 Cut ofi from home, from all my kinsman far. 
 Since, long, long years ago, the dark of earth 
 Wrapt my Gold-friend ; and I have ever since 
 Gone winter- woeful o'er the woven seas I 
 Sad then, I sought a treasure-giver's hall, 
 Where I might find, or far or near, some Lord, 
 Who in the mead-hall would my memory know. 
 Or will to comfort me a friendless man, 
 Or pleasure me with joys 1 ^ 
 
 Who tries it, knows 
 
 30. How cruel sorrow for a comrade is 
 
 To him who few of loved f ore-standers has 1 
 
 478 
 
NOTES 479 
 
 He holds the exile's path, not plaited gold ; 
 A frozen hosom, not the fruits of earth ! 
 He minds him of the hall, of heroes there, 
 Of taking gifts, and how his golden friend 
 Feasted his youth. Fallen, fallen is all that joy I 
 well he knows this, who must long forego 
 The wise redes of his loved, his friendly Lord, 
 But most when sleep and sorrow, both at one, 
 
 40. Bind up the poor, the lonely wanderer's soul ! 
 Him dreameth then that he doth clip and kiss 
 His Man-lord, and together head and hands 
 Lay on his knee, as once, when at his will. 
 In days gone hy the Gift-stool he enjoyed. 
 Then doth the friendless man awake again. 
 And sees before him. heave the fallow waves, 
 The foam-hirds bathe, and broaden out their wings. 
 And falling sleet and snow, shot through with hail : 
 Then all the heavier is his wound of heart, 
 
 50. Sore for its own, and sorrow is renewed. 
 In dreams, his kinsmen flit across his mind, 
 With songs he greets them, glad, he watches them ; 
 But these heroic comrades swim away ! 
 The ghost of these air-floaters brings to him 
 Few well-known words ! Once more his grief is new, 
 Who now must send, again and yet again, 
 His weary spirit o'er, the binding seas'! 
 So in this world I may not understand 
 Wherefore my mind does not grow black as night, 
 
 60. Whene'er I think all on the life of men. 
 
 How suddenly they gave their house-floor up. 
 
 These mighty-mooded Thegns ! Thus doth Mid-Garth, 
 
 Day after day, droop down and fall to nought. 
 
 Wherefore no man is wise, till he has owned 
 
 His share of years on earth ! The wise must be 
 
 Patient, not too hot-hearted, nor of words 
 
 Too quick, nor heedless, nor too weak in war. 
 
 Too fearful, or too fain, nor yet of goods 
 
 Too greedy, nor too keen to boast, until 
 
 70. He know his way ! A man must wait, whene'er 
 He make a vow, till, bold, he surely know 
 Whither will turn the thought within his heart. 
 Grave men should feel how phantom-like it is, 
 When all this world's weal stands awaste ; as now, 
 Unnumbered, o'er this land, are ruined towns. 
 Swept by the storm, thick covered by white frost, 
 Dismantled all their courtyards, and the Hall 
 Where wine was drunk, in dust ! Low lies its Lord, 
 Bereft of joy ; and all the peers have fallen, 
 
 80. Haughty, before the rampart. War seized some 
 And bore them on death-paths ;■ and one a ship 
 Took o'er the towering wave ! The hoary wolf 
 Another tore when dead ; and one an earl 
 Hid in the hollowed earth with dreary face. 
 
480 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 So hath men's Maker wasted this Earth's home, 
 
 Until the work of elder giants stood 
 
 Void of its Burghers, all bereft of joys ! 
 
 Who wisely has thought o'er this ruined Stead, 
 
 And this dark life doth deeply muse upon ; — 
 90. Gray-haired in soul — in exile oft recalls 
 
 Uncounted slaughters, and this Word cries out — 
 ' Where went the horse, where went the Man ? Where went the 
 
 Treasure-giver ? 
 Where have the seats of feasting gone ? and where the joys in hall ? 
 Alas, the heaker bright ! alas, the byrnied warrior ! 
 Alas, the people's pride ! how is fled that time. 
 Beneath the Night-helm gloomed, as if it ne'er had been. 
 
 Alone is left, to tell of those loved peers. 
 
 This wall huge-high, 'spotted with carven snakes ! 
 
 The strength of ashen spears took off the earls, 
 100. Blood-thirsty weapons, and the far-famed Wyrd ! 
 
 Lo ! these hewn cliffs are beaten by the storms, 
 
 The snow-drift driving down binds up the earth. 
 
 Winter's wild terror, when It oometh wan ! 
 
 Night's shadow blackens, sending from the North 
 
 Fierce slants of hail for harmfulness to men ! 
 
 Wyrd's dooming changes all beneath the heaven ; 
 
 Here fleets our wealth, and here is fleeting friend. 
 
 Here fleets the kinsman, here is fleeting man ; 
 110. The roots of all this earth are idle made.' " 
 
 So quoth the Wise of mood ! Apart 
 
 He sat, and made his runes. 
 
 Who keeps his troth. Is brave of soul. 
 
 Nor shall he, over-rash. 
 
 Ever give voice to woe of heart 
 
 Till first its cure he knows ; 
 
 So acts a man of fortitude ! 
 
 Yet, well for him who seeks 
 
 Strength, mercy from the Father, where 
 
 Our fortress standeth sure. 
 
 THE SEAFARER 
 
 The Old Sailor — 
 
 Sooth is the song that I shall sing, and tell 
 Of sailing on the sea ! 0, oft have I 
 Endured in woeful days the painful hours. 
 And bitter care of heart have borne, and knovra 
 Unnumbered seats of sorrow in my ship ! 
 Fearful the weltering waves, when 'twas my part 
 Strait watch to keep at night upon the prow. 
 When onward drove my bark beside the cliffs. 
 Frost pinched my feet fettered with clamps of ice ; 
 
NOTES 481 
 
 10. But hot about my heart was sighing Care, 
 And Hunger took my fortitude from me, — 
 Sea-wearied me ! little knows the man 
 To whom it haps most happUy on earth. 
 How, carked with care, on frozen sess I lived 
 Dark Winter through upon a Wander.'er's ways ; 
 Forlorn of joys, of kinsmen loved bereft. 
 Icicle-hung, while flew the hail in showers ! 
 Nought heard I but the thunder-roto of seas. 
 Of ice-chilled waves, and whiles, the whooping swan ! 
 
 20. The gannet's scream was all the joy I knew, 
 I heard the seal swough 'stead of mirth of men ; 
 And for mead-drinking heard the sea-mew cry ! 
 The storm-winds lashed the crags, the ocean-tern 
 Answered them, icy-plumed ; and oft the Earn, 
 Her wet wings dripping rain, barked her reply. 
 . . . O none of kinsfolk then 
 Might stir to joy my solitary soul ! 
 Wherefore he little thinks, who, in the burgs. 
 Owns only life's delight and little bale, 
 Haughty and insolent with wine, how I, 
 
 30. Weary, must on the ocean-paths outstay ! 
 
 Dark grew Night's shadow ; from the North it snowed ; 
 Frost bound the field ; hail fell upon the earth. 
 Coldest of grains ! 
 
 7%e Toung Sailor — 
 
 Why crash together then 
 Thoughts in my heart that I myself should tempt 
 The high-tossed seas,, the sport of the salt waves ? 
 A lust doth hour by hour prick on my soul, 
 To set my life sea^-faring, and to seek 
 Far off from hence the shores of outland men. 
 
 The Old Sailor— 
 
 Lives no man on the earth so proud of heart, 
 40. So generous in youth, so good at gifts, 
 In deeds so daring, to his Lord so dear, 
 But to the Deep is ever his desire 
 To find the work his Lord may will for him. 
 Not for the harp or spending rings his heart ; 
 Woman delights him not, nor yet the world ; 
 Nothing he cares for save the heaving waves ; 
 Whom the Sea urges, longs for evermore I 
 
 The Toung Sailor — 
 
 The trees rebloom ; again the burgs grow fair ; 
 Winsome the wide plains, and the earth is gay - 
 50. But all doth challenge the impassioned life 
 Of his brave spirit to sea^ voyage, who 
 Thinks to sail far across the ocean surge. 
 
482 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 The Old Sailor — 
 
 The cuckoo warns you with his fateful song, 
 
 That summer's watchman sings, hut woe he hodes. 
 
 Bitter the hreast within ! No happy man, 
 
 No hero knows what he must hear, who sets 
 
 His exUe-wanderings furthest on the sea. 
 
 Tlie Young Sailor — 
 
 Wherefore my Thought now hovers o'er my heart, 
 Ahove the surging flood, the whale's homeland, 
 60. My Spirit flies away ; and hovers then 
 
 Far o'er the lap of earth ; and now wings back, 
 Greedy and hungering, again to me. 
 That lonely Flier yells, and drives me forth 
 Across the Whale's path, irresistibly. 
 Along high-leaping seas ; for sweeter far 
 The joys of God are there than this dead life 
 That swoons away on land. 
 
 B. — (CHAPTER XXIV) 
 
 THE SO0ECE3 OF THE " CHKIST " 
 
 The extracts from the two Homilies which follow, and the Hymn 
 De Die Judicii, are printed from Mr. GoUancz's edition of the Christ- 
 Every critic has pointed out these homiletio sources, but Professor Cook 
 {Modern Language, Notes, June 1889) was the first, I think, to show that 
 this ancient Latin Hymn was probably used by Cynewulf . I say proba- 
 bly, because there must have been, before the eighth century, a great 
 number of Hymns on this subject ; and no doubt a similar treatment and 
 similar phrases ran through them all. When it is said, then, that this 
 was one of Cynewulf's sources, we do not mean that Cynewulf used this 
 or that which was not fairly his own. The phrases were common prop- 
 erty ; every preacher used them. The originality of any poet or preacher 
 consisted, not in the invention of a new treatment of the subject or a 
 new phrase, but in the way he filled up the old treatment, or in the 
 way lie turned an old phrase so as to dignify it. Cynewulf has made 
 the things he has taken from the Hymn — if it was this special Hymn 
 which lay before him — quite distinct in manner and feeling. Take the 
 phrase, 
 
 Erubescet orbis lunae, sol et obscurabitur 
 Stellae cadent pallesoentes. 
 
 As blood shall be the Moones sphere and dark shall grow the Sun ; 
 The stars shall pale their light and fall. 
 
 This is the Latin. It may be better, in the opinion of many, than Cyne- 
 wulf's work ; but that is not the point. The point is that Cynewulf has 
 passed it through the furnace of his own imagination, and made it another 
 thing altogether. It is no longer Latin, it is Northumbrian ; and it illus- 
 
NOTES 483 
 
 trates all I have said in the Chapter on the distinctiveness of native Nor- 
 thumbrian poetry. When the Latin traditions did enter Northumbria, 
 they -were vitally altered. They lost their Latin note and sounded an 
 English note. Here is the English — 
 
 ponne weort)e'5 sunne sweart gewended 
 
 On blodes hiw seo ISe beorhte scan 
 
 Ofer aer-woruld aelda bearnum. 
 
 Mona Jjaet sylfe Jjc aer mon-cynne 
 
 Nihtes lyhte niber gehreose'S 
 
 And steorran swa some stredaS of heofone 
 
 purh iSa strongan lyft stormum abeatne. 
 
 Then shall the Sun, all dusky turned, be changed 
 To hue of blood, that once so brightly shone 
 Above the Ere-world for the bairns of men : 
 So too the Moon that erst herself by night 
 Lighted mankind, precipitately falls, 
 Likewise the stars from heaven hurtle down. 
 Through the strong Lift lashed to and fro by storms. 
 
 It is expanded, no doubt ; but it is English, not Latin. 
 
 Moreover, it is worth while to compare Gregory's phrase, "Quis enim 
 soils nomine nisi Dominus, et quae lunae nomine nisi ecolesia designa^ 
 tur?" with Cynewulf's expansion of it into a simile which I have given 
 in the note on p. 229. How much tenderness, how much delight, in the 
 nature of the sun and moon themselves is added to the Latin ! The 
 prose has become soft poetry. The passage which concerns the leaps of 
 Christ may also be compared. It is said that the words, " Quamvis adhuc 
 rerum perturbationibus animus iluctuet, jam tamen spei vestrae anchoram 
 in aetemam patriam figite," is the source of the sea-simile beginning — 
 
 Nu is ton gelicost swa we on lagu-flode, 
 
 which is translated at p. 231 ; but, if so, what a change ; what an illus- 
 tration it is of what a poet can do with a well-worn thought ! How little 
 of the Latin convention is in it, how much of Northumbrian individuality 
 and of Cynewulf's distinctive feeling ! See, too, all that he has added in 
 his working up (p. 234) of the passage in the Homily in Die Mpiphaniae 
 about the sorrow of the universe at the death of Jesus. 
 
 C — (CHAPTER XXIV) 
 
 LATIN SOBECES OP THE " CHRIST " 
 
 (Cf. passus secundus) 
 
 Homilia in Ascensio ne Domini 
 
 § 9. Hoc autem nobis primum quaerendum est, quidnam fit quod Albae 
 nato Domino apparuerunt Angeli, et tamen non leguntur in albis vestibus ™etmae 
 apparuisse : ascendente autem Domino missi Angeli in albis leguntur indicia. 
 
484 
 
 EAKLY ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Acti. 9. 
 
 Er Ascen- 
 sione 
 
 Christ! quid 
 proficiamus. 
 Gen. ili. 19. 
 
 Job xxviii.7. 
 
 Peal. Tiii. 2. 
 Psal. xlvi. 6. 
 Psal. Ixvii. 
 19. 
 
 1 Cor. xii. 8. 
 
 Habac. iii. 
 
 11. 
 
 Cant. ii. 8. 
 
 Psal. xvii. 6. 
 Cant. i. 3. 
 
 Dominum 
 asceuden- 
 tem in 
 coelutn 
 sequi fes- 
 tioemus. 
 
 vestibus apparuisse. Sic etenim scriptum est : Videntihus illis elevatus 
 est, et nubes suscepit eum ab oculis eorum. Cumque intuerentur in 
 caelum euntem ilium, ecce duo viri steterunt juxta illos in vestibus albis. 
 In albis autem vestibus gaudium et solemnitas mentis ostenditur. Quid 
 est ergo quod nato Domino, non in albis vestibus ; ascendente autem 
 Domino, in albis vestibus Angeli apparent : nisi quod tunc magna solem- 
 nitas Angelis facta est, cum coelum Deus homo penetravit ? Quia nas- 
 cente Domino videbatur divinitas humiliata : ascendente vero Domino, 
 est humanitas exaltata. Albae etenim vestes exaltationi magis con- 
 gruunt quam humiliationi. In assumtione ergo ejus Angeli in albis ves- 
 tibus videri debuerunt : quia qui in nativitate sua apparuit Deus humilis, 
 in Ascensionp sua ostensus est homo sublimis. 
 
 § 10. Sed hoc nobis magnopere, fratres carissimi, in hac solemnitate 
 pensandum est : quia deletum est hodiema die chirographum damna^ 
 tionis nostrae, mutata est sententia corruptionis nostrae. Ilia enim natura 
 cui dictum est : Terra es, et in terram ibis, hodie in coelum ivit. Pro 
 hac ipsa namque carnis nostrae sublevatione per figuram beatus Job 
 Dominum avem vocat. Quia enim Asoensionis ejus mysterium Judaeam 
 non Intel ligere conspexit, de infidelitate ejus sententiam protulit, dicens : 
 Semitam ignoravit avis. Avis enim recte appellatus est Dominus ; quia 
 corpus carneum ad aethera libravit. Cujus avis semitam ignoravit quis- 
 quis eum ad coelum ascendisse non credidit. De hac solemnitate per 
 Psalmistam dicitur : Elevata est magnificentia tua super coelos. De hac 
 rursus ait : Ascendit Deus in jubilatione, et Dominus in voce tubae. De 
 hac iterum dicit : Ascendens in altum, captivam duxit captivitatem, dedit 
 dona hominibus. Ascendens quippe in altum, captivam duxit captivi- 
 tatem : quia corruptionem nostram virtute suae incorruptionis absorbuit. 
 Dedit vero dona hominibus ; quia misso desuper Spiritu, alii sermonem 
 sapientiae, alii sermonem scientiae, alii gratiam virtutum, alii gratiam 
 curationum, alii genera linguarum, alii interpretationem tribuit sermonum. 
 Dedit ergo dona hominibus. De hac Ascensionis ejus gloria etiam Haba^ 
 cue ait : Elevatus est sol, luna stetit in ordine sua. Quis enim solis 
 nomine nisi Dominus, et quae lunae nomine nisi ecclesia designatur ? 
 Quousque enim Dominus ascendit ad coelos, sancta ejus Ecclesia adversa 
 mundi omnimodo formidavit : at postquam ejus Ascensione roborata est, 
 aperte praedicavit, quod occulte credidit. Elevatus est ergo sol, et luna 
 stetit in ordine suo : quia cum Dominus coelum petiit, sancta ejus Eccle- 
 sia in auctoritate praedicationis excrevit. Hinc ejusdem Ecclesiae voce 
 per Salomonem dicitur : Ecce iste venit saliens in montibus, et transiliens 
 colles. Consideravit namque tantorum operum culmina, et ait : Ecce iste 
 venit saliens in montibus. Veniendo quippe ad redemtionem nostram, 
 quosdam, ut ita dixerim, saltus dedit. Vultis, fratres carissimi, ipsos 
 ejus saltus agnoscere 1 De coelo venit in uterum, de utero venit in 
 praesepe, de praesepe venit in crucem, de cruce venit in sepulcrum, de 
 sepulcro rediit in coelum. Ecce ut nos post se currere faceret, quosdam 
 pro nobis saltus manifestata per carnem Veritas dedit : quia exultavit ut 
 gigas ad currendam viam suam, ut nos ei diceremus ex corde : Trahe nos 
 post te, curremus in odorem unguentorum tuorum. 
 
 § 11. XJnde, fratres carissimi, oportet ut illuc sequamur corde, ubi 
 eum corpore ascendisse credimus. Desideria terrena fugiamus, nihil nos 
 jam delectet in infimus, qui patrem habemus in coelis. Et hoc nobis est 
 magnopere perpendendum ; quia is qui placidus ascendit, terribilis redi- 
 bit : et quidquid nobis cum mansuetudine praecepit, hoc a nobis cum dis- 
 
NOTES 485 
 
 trictione exiget. Nemo ergo indulta poenitentiae tempera parvipendat ; 
 nemo curam sui, dum valet, agere negligat : quia Redemtor noster tanto 
 tunc in judicium districtior veniet, quanto nobis ante judicium magnam 
 patientiam praerogavit. Haec itaque vobiscum, fratres, agite : haec in 
 mente coelinesse cognoverunt, quia sub plantis ejus se calcabile praebuit. 
 Terra cognovit, quia eo moriente contremuit. Sol cognovit, quia lucis 
 suae radios abscoudit. Saxa et parietes cognoverunt, quia tempore mortis 
 ejus scissa sunt. Infernus agnovit, quia bos quos tenebat mortuos reddi- 
 dit. Et tamen bunc, quern Dominum omnia insensibilia elementa sense- 
 runt, adhuc infidelium Judaeorum corda Deum esse minime cognoscunt, 
 et, duriora saxis, scindi ad poenitendum nolunt : eumque confiteri abne- 
 gant, quern elementa, ut diximus, aut signis aut soissionibus Deum 
 
 clamabant. 
 
 (In Evang. Lib. 1 Homilia x.) 
 
 D. — (CHAPTERS XXIII, XXV) 
 
 THE "fates of the APOSTLES " AND THE " ANDREAS " 
 
 I have treated in the text of the Fates of the Apostles as a separate 
 poem, signed by Cynewulf, and I have assigned the Andreas to another 
 poet than Cynewulf. I did not dwell on the critical reasons for depriving 
 Cynewulf of the Andreas. The reasons I assigned were literary, and I 
 think they had some weight. Since th^n, Mr. Gollancz's book on the 
 Christ has appeared, and he makes, in his Excursus on the Gynewulf- 
 runes, a suggestion with regard to both the Fates of the Apostles and the 
 Andreas which is well worth consideration. The Fates of the Apostles 
 is a short, abrupt poem of about a hundred lines, in which the work and 
 death of the Twelve Apostles are, as it were, catalogued ; about eight 
 lines being assigned to each. The poem is as marrowless as a bleached 
 bone. Not a trace of Cynewulf's tenderness or imagination is to be 
 found in it, till we come to the personal statement at the end. 
 
 Mr. GoUancz, reading the poem with the newly-discovered runes of 
 Cynewulf's name, thought that it was scarcely worth while to add to so 
 short and lifeless a poem an elaborate epilogue containing the poet's 
 signature ; and has been led to the conjecture which I give now in his 
 own words — 
 
 " The Fates of the Apostles consists of little more than a hundred 
 lines: it is certainly no very meritorious piece of work, and it seems 
 strange that the poet should have been so anxious to attest his author- 
 ship thereof by a long runic passage. In the MS. the poem immediately 
 follows the Legend of Andreas, and I am more and more mclined to 
 regard it as a mere epUogue to this more ambitious epic, standing in 
 exactly the same relationship therefore to it that the tenth passus of 
 Elene does to the whole poem. Its relationship is perhaps even closer, 
 for whereas the ninth passus of Flene ends with " flnit," there is no such 
 ending of the poem in the case of Andreas. At the present moment I 
 can see nothing that militates against this view of the Cynewulfian 
 authorship of this latter poem, and further investigation will enable 
 us, I think, to claim that Cynewulf inserted his name in his four most 
 important works — the epics on Christ, Elene, Juliana, and Andreas.^'' 
 
486 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 This is a very interesting suggestion, and I would gladly subscribe 
 to it, but its very pleasantness makes me feel that it needs further 
 evidence than we have at present. When I first read the Andreas some 
 years ago along with the Elene, I was nearly certain it was by Cynewulf, 
 but I was as nearly certain that the Seafarer and the Wanderer were 
 also by him. But as time went on I gave up his authorship of the Wan- 
 derer. Then I surrendered the Seafarer, but I was not so sure of this 
 surrender as I was of that of the Wanderer; and if Mr. GoUancz be here- 
 after proved to be right in his belief that the Andreas is Cynewulf's, 
 I think we shall also have to give the Seafarer to Cynewulf. Then I 
 finally, but with great reluctance, gave up the Andreas, and allotted it 
 to some unknown poet who was a scholar or friend of Cynewulf, and 
 now Mr. Gollancz asks me to restore it again to Cynewulf. It vfould be 
 a real pleasure if I could get sufficient evidence for this. I am fond of 
 Cynewulf's nature, character, and work, and he would stand out much 
 more clearly and be a more various and greater poet if he wrote the 
 Andreas ; for the poem is quite different from his other works, more gay, 
 more outward, more the work of a man of the world, more concise and 
 clear in description both of events and of the natural world. It was the 
 presence of this outwardness and the absence of any inward personal cry 
 in the poem which especially led me to doubt that Cynewulf had written 
 the poem. This literary argument would cease to have weight if it could 
 be proved that the Fates of the Apostles was the epilogue of the poem, 
 because the personal cry would then be added to the Andreas. Then, 
 too, all the sea-passages in the Andreas would be in harmony with the 
 known passion of Cynewulf for the sea. Other things also, such as the 
 resemblances in the Andreas to the Elene and to some of the Biddies, 
 would fall into a better order. Moreover, those who deny the Andreas to 
 Cynewulf are forced to invent an imitator of Cynevralf who was as good 
 a poet as himself ; and the invention of an imitator, when we have a 
 known poet at hand to whom we may with much probability allot a poein, 
 is always a harsh proceeding ; to say nothing of the argument — also of 
 some weight — that the imitator must have been contemporary with 
 Cynewulf, for with the Danes threatening Northumbria, poetry was not 
 likely to have been written after Cynewulf's death. Now fine imitators 
 are generally of a new generation, not of the same time in which the 
 imitated poet is writing. 
 
 But when all this has been said, it must be confessed that the view 
 that the Fates of the Apostles is the epilogue of the Andreas, and, there- 
 fore, that the Andreas is Cynewulf's, is at present a happy suggestion 
 and no more. It is really just as probable that Cynewulf should write 
 his name in runes at the end of a short poem like the Fates of the Apostles 
 as that he should write it at the end of a long one like the Elene. That 
 the Fates of the Apostles follows the Andreas in the MS. of the Vercelli 
 Book does supply a probabOity that it may have been the epilogue of 
 the Andreas, provided some confirmatory evidence is brought of this from 
 some other quarter. But without such evidence, the probability of the 
 Fates of the Apostles being a separate poem is at present the stronger. 
 It is said by Mr. Gollancz that before the epilogue in the Elene the word 
 Finit stands, but that there is no Finit after the Andreas. The relation- 
 ship to the Andreas of the Fates of the Apostles may then, he thinks, be 
 even closer than the relationship of the epilogue of the Elene to the Elene. 
 Tills proves too much. Moreover, the Fates of the Apostles begins with 
 
NOTES 487 
 
 the usual beginning of a separate poem, with the word Hwaet — which 
 was, so to speak, the call of the poet, accompanied by a sharp twang of 
 the harp-strings, to the audience to be silent and to listen to him. This 
 beginning more than balances any argument derived from the absence of 
 Mnit at the end of the Andreas and before the Fates of the Apostles. 
 
 In the epilogue to the Elene there is a plain reference to the rest of the 
 poem which precedes it. " Thus" Cynewulf says, " I wove within my- 
 self Wordcraft, and gave voice to my thought." In the Fates of the 
 Apostles there is no reference in the first lines to the Andreas. The be- 
 ginning — " So, sad of mood, I found this song," might be such a refer- 
 ence, were it not that it is followed by words which look forward to the 
 poem which ensues, not to any poem which has gone before. " In my 
 sick soul from far and wide I collected in what ways the JSthelings made 
 proof of their courage " — and the iEthelings are the twelve Apostles. 
 Moreover, when he comes to Andrew among the rest, there is no allusion 
 whatever to him as the subject of the poem to which this Fates of the 
 Apostles is supposed to be the epilogue. We might say that if it were 
 really the epilogue of the Andreas, this silence would scarcely have been 
 maintained. It is true that the beginning of the Andreas, in its use of 
 heroic terms, much resembles the poet's usage in the Fates of the Apostles ; 
 and, moreover, there is in both the Andreas and the Fates a sparse and 
 pale imitation of parts of Beowulf, but then likenesses have little weight. 
 On the whole, though I think it extremely likely that the Andreas is by 
 Cynevyulf , we have as yet no evidence for that opinion. 
 
 E. — (CHAPTER XXIII) 
 
 THE KUIflC PASSAGES IS CYNEWULF'S POEMS 
 
 A.— Christ (796-806) 
 
 Jjonne • C • cwacaiS gehyre« cynmg maelSlan 
 
 rodera ryhtend sprecan rejpe word 
 
 Jjam \>& him aer in worulde wace hyrdon 
 
 >)endan ■ Y • and • N ■ y^ast meahtan 
 
 frofre findan • J>aer sceal forht monig 
 
 on l>am wong-stede werig bidan 
 
 hwaet him aefter daedum deman wille 
 
 wra>ra wita • Bi> se ■ W- scaecen 
 
 eorJ>an fraetwa • U • was longe 
 
 - L • flodum bilocen lif-wynna dael 
 
 . F • on foldan l^onne fraetwe sculon 
 
 byman on baele. 
 
 B. -Mene (1257-1271) 
 
 A waes saecc o^ ISaet 
 cnyssed cearwelmum • C • drusende 
 J)eah he in medohealle malSmas bege 
 aeplede gold • Y • gnomode 
 . N • gefera nearusorge dreah 
 enge rune baer him • B • fore 
 milpa^as maet modig J>raegde 
 
488 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 ■wirum gewlenoed ■ W • is geswWrad 
 gomen aefter gearum geogotS is gecyrred 
 aid onmedla • IJ • waes geara 
 geogcShades glaem nu synt geardagas 
 aefter fyrstmearoe forS gewitene 
 lifwynne geliden swa • L • toglide'S 
 flodas gefysde • F • aeghwam bits 
 laene under lyfte landes fraetwe 
 gewitaj) under wolcnum winde geliocost. 
 
 C. — Fata Apostolorum (96-106) 
 
 Her maeg findan forebances gleaw 
 
 SB ^e hine lysle'S leoiSgiddunga 
 
 hwa })as fitte fegde' • F • (laer on ende standee 
 
 eorlas ^aes on eorSan br[u]ca> ue moton hie awa aetsomne 
 
 woruldwunigende • W • sceal gedreosan 
 
 • U • on e'Sle aefter to-h[reosan] 
 
 laene lices fraetewa efne swa ■ L • toglidetS 
 [Jionne] • C • [and • Y •] craeftes neosa* 
 nihtes nearowe on him [■ N • lige'S] 
 [cy]nlnges ))eodom, nu ISu cunnan miht 
 hwa on jiaem wordum waes werum oncytSig. 
 
 D. — Juliana (704-711) 
 
 Geomor hweorfe* 
 
 • C • Y- and • N • cyning bij> rejje 
 sigora syllend Jionne synnum fah 
 
 • E • W- and . U • acle bida« 
 
 hwaet him aefter daedum deman wille 
 lifes to leane ■ L • F • beofatS 
 seomatS sorgcearig sar eal genom 
 synna wunde he ic sHS oStJe aer 
 geworhte in worulde. 
 
 F. — (CHAPTER XXV) 
 
 GNOMIC VERSES 
 
 Cotton MS. 
 
 , He, the King, shall hold the kingdom. Cities shall afar be seen ; 
 Those that are upon this earth — artful work of giants. 
 Wondrous work of Wall-stones ! Wind in air is swiftest, 
 Thunder on its path the loudest. Mighty are the powers of Christ ! 
 Wyrd is strongest! Winter coldest, 
 Most hoar-frosts has Spring, he is cold the longest ! 
 Summer is sun-loveliest ; then the sky is hottest ! 
 Autumn above all is glorious ; unto men it brings 
 All the graining of the year God doth send to them, 
 
NOTES 489 
 
 13. Woe is wonderfully clinging. Onward wend the clouds ; 
 Valiant comrades ever shall their youthful iEtheling 
 Bolden to the battle and the bracelet^giving ! 
 Courage in the earl, edge shall on the helm 
 Bide the battle through! On the cliff the hawk, 
 "Wild, shall won at home. In the wood the wolf, 
 Wretched one, apart shall dwell; in the holt the boar, 
 Strong with strength of teeth abides. 
 
 50. Good shall with evil, youth shall with eld. 
 Life shall with death, light shall with darkness, 
 Army with army, one foe with another. 
 Wrong against wrong — strive o'er the land. 
 Fight out their feud; and the wise man shall ever 
 Think on the strife of the world. 
 
 Exeter MS. B. 
 
 1. Frost shall freeze ; fire melt wood. 
 
 Earth shall be growing, ice make a bridge, 
 The Water-helm bear, lock wondrously up 
 The seedlings of earth. One shall unbind 
 The fetters of frost — God the Almighty . 
 Winter shall pass, fair weather return; 
 Summer is sun-hot, the sea is unstill. 
 The dead depth of ocean for ever is dark.i 
 
 82. A king shall with cattle, with armlets and beakers, 
 Purchase his Queen; and both, from the first, 
 With their gifts shall be free. The spirit of battle 
 Shall grow in the man, but the woman shall thrive. 
 Beloved, mid her folk ; shall light-hearted live. 
 Counsel shall keep, shall large-hearted be ! 
 With horses and treasure, and at giving of mead, 
 Everywhere, always — she shall earliest greet 
 The prince of the nobles, before his companions. 
 To the hand of her lord, the first cup of all 
 Straightway she shall give ; and they both shall take rede, 
 House-owners, together. 
 
 126. Gold is befitting upon a man's sword; 
 Good victory-gear ! Gems on a Queen ; 
 A good sc6p for men; for warriors the war-dart 
 To hold in the fight the defences of home ! 
 A shield "for the striver, a shaft for the thief, 
 A ring for the bride, a book for the learner, 
 Por holy men Housel, and sms for the heathen. 
 
 These are enough to show the type. Many others, worth insertion, 
 are already used throughout this volume. 
 
 1 " The dead deep wave is longest dark." The above is, I think, the mean- 
 ing of this much disputed line. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Abingdon, 242. 
 
 Acca, Bishop of Hexham, encourages 
 
 art and learning in Northumbria, 
 
 226, 344, 345 n. 
 Adamnau, his account of Arculf's 
 
 voyage, 343 : his Life of St. Columba, 
 
 343. 
 Aedau, King of Dalriada, wars against 
 
 jEthelfrith, 267. 
 ^Ifleda, daughter of Oswiu of Nor- 
 thumbria, Abbess of Whitby, 200, 
 
 276, 277. 
 .ffilfwiue (Alboin), sou of Eadwine, 2; 
 
 discussion of his identity, 2 n. ; Note 
 
 A, 99, 460. 
 ^sc, son of Hengest, defeats the 
 
 Welsh, 103. 
 JEschere, thegn of Hrothgar, slain by 
 
 Grendel's mother, -41, 42, 44. 
 .ffithelbald. King of Mercia, builds 
 
 church at Crowland, 227; his life 
 
 and influence on literature, 250, 
 
 251. 
 .aithelberht, King of Kent, receives 
 
 Christianity, 190, 191 . 
 -(iElberht), Archbishop of Yorii, 
 
 his influence on art and literature, 
 
 448-450. 
 .a;theldreda, Abbess of Ely, 200. 
 .Ethelfrith, King of Northumbria, be- 
 comes supreme in England, 116, 257 ; 
 
 his warfare with Scots and Welsh, 
 
 103, 116-118; verse on his battle 
 
 with Raedwald, 118. 
 ^thelhard. Archbishop of Canterbury, 
 
 248. 
 JEthelheard, King of Wessex, 242. 
 iEthelhuu, Alderman, leader of West 
 
 Saxons in battle of Burford, 242. 
 ^thelred. King of Mercia, organises 
 
 Mercian Church, 250. 
 
 King of Northumbria, 452. 
 
 King of Wessex, 242. 
 
 .^thelweard, chronicler, his account 
 
 of Sceaf, 78, 79; Note D, 459. 
 
 Jithelwulf , King of Wessex, his gene- 
 alogy, 197; Note D, 469; defeats 
 Vikings, 249. 
 
 .Etla. [See Attila] 
 
 (Hedda) , Bishop of Dorchester, 276. 
 
 Agilberht, Bishop of West Saxons, 
 present at Synod of Whitby, 277. 
 
 Aidan, Bishop of Lindisfarne, evangel- 
 ises the North, 191. 
 
 Alaric, 2 n. 
 
 Albinus, gives Baeda information for 
 JSccles. Hist, 230, 345 n. 
 
 Alboin. [See jElfwine] 
 
 Alchfrith, son of Oswiu, founds monas- 
 tery at Ripon, 272 n.; is present at 
 Synod of Whitby, 276. 
 
 Alchmund, 452. 
 
 Alcuin, life, literary influence, and 
 works, 449-451 ; his Be Pontificibus 
 (quoted) , 440, 446, 448, 449. 
 
 Aldfrith, King of Northumbria, de- 
 velops his kingdom, 258; supports 
 nationality of church, 263; encour- 
 ages literature, 342 ; friend of Baeda, 
 345 n.\ Ealdhelm sends him treatise 
 on Prosody, 240; buys Codex from 
 Ceolfrid, 225. 
 
 Alfwold, King of East Anglia, Life of 
 Guthlac dedicated to, 250. 
 
 ■ King of Northumbria, 452. 
 
 Amesbury, 103, 104. 
 
 Anderida (Andredesceaster), 103. 
 
 " Andreas," poem of, its authorship 
 discussed, 414; Note D, 485; de- 
 scribed and translated, 414r-425; 
 passages quoted, 170-174, 179, 181. 
 
 Aneurin, 266 n. 
 
 Angles, connected with Geats and 
 Danes, 17; their ancestor worship, 
 80 ; Note D, 464 ; their conquests in 
 Britain, 113-117 ; literary interest of 
 their early wars, 117, 119. [See also 
 Sea, Forests] 
 
 Animals in Early English Poetry, 140- 
 142, 269. [See Riddles] 
 491 
 
492 
 
 EARLY ENGLISH LITEKATUKE 
 
 Arminiua, suggested identity with 
 . Siegfried, 11 n. 
 
 Armour, in Early English Poetry, 120- 
 128. [See also Riddles] 
 
 Arthur, King, mythic or historic? 104 
 n. ; first mentioned at Mount Badon, 
 104; influence of his story on Eng- 
 lish poetry, 104 n. ; site of. his battles, 
 266. 
 
 Arts.the.in early England,226-229,447». 
 
 Ashdown, battle of, 249. 
 
 Attila (JLtla), 3, 11 n., 96; songs at a 
 banquet of, 40 n. 
 
 Attuarii (Hetware), the, conquer 
 Hygelae, 14. 
 
 Augustine, St., brings Christianity to 
 Kent, 190; establishes library and 
 schools, 235 ; his monastery occupied 
 by Theodore, 237. 
 
 Aylesford, battle of, 102. 
 
 " Azarias," poem of (quoted), 212-214; 
 supposition of its origin, 325, 439 n. 
 
 Baeda, charm of his stories, 218 ; his 
 literary friendships, 230, 231 ; his life 
 and work, 344-351; story of his 
 death, 338-340 ; his dying verses, 339. 
 [See also Ooifi, Cuthbert, Paullinus] 
 
 Balder, burial of, 27 ; worship of, 81. 
 
 Bamborough, 222. 
 
 Barking, nuns of, 225-226. 
 
 Bath, taken by West Saxons, 106 ; its 
 importance under Romans, 107 ; its 
 ruins described in Buined Burg, 
 108, 109; its baths, 109 n. 
 
 Beadohild (Bodwild), her story in 
 Dear's Lament, 5 ; Edda version of 
 the legend. Note B, 461-462. 
 
 Beanstan,"60 n„, 62. 
 
 Beaw. [See Beowulf (3)] 
 
 Begu, St., 288. 
 
 Benedict Biscop, founds monasteries, 
 sets up libraries, 225; encourages 
 art, 226-229 ; set over St. Augustine's 
 monastery, 237. 
 
 Beowa. [See Beowulf (3)] 
 
 Beowulf (1), the hero, perhaps his- 
 torical, 18; his early history and 
 character, 21-25. 
 
 (2) , the poem, history of MSS. and 
 
 editions, 14, 15; its divisions, 15 ; the- 
 ories of its composition, 15, 16; Its 
 date and birthplace, 16-18; theories 
 of its origin and growth, 18-20; its 
 value as history, 18; its scenery, 
 31-33, 42-45, 45 n., 52, 53; descrip- 
 tion and translation of, 26-69 ; man- 
 ners in, 69, 70; Christian elements 
 of, 70-72; its literary merit, 72-74; 
 mythical elements of, 74-92; story 
 did not enter Norse-German cycle. 
 
 93-95; passages quoted, 127-132, 
 
 165-168, 169-187. 
 (3) (Beaw, Beowa) , son of Scyld, 
 
 16, 17, 26, 81. 
 Berhtwulf, King of Mercla, defeated 
 
 by Vikings, 249. 
 Bernicia, kmgdom of, 116. 
 "Bi manna mode." [See "Spirit of 
 
 Men "] 
 Boniface (Winfrid), friendship with 
 
 nuns, 200, 226; his life and work, 
 
 244-246; Anglo-Saxon verse quoted 
 
 in Epistle of, 336 n. 
 Bosa, Bishop of Deira, 262, 276. 
 Bradf ord-on-Avon, Old-English Church 
 
 at, 228, 239, 242. 
 Breca, Beowulf's swimming match 
 
 with, 20, 59-62. 
 Bregwln, Archbishop of Canterbury, 
 
 247. 
 Brihtwald, Archbishop of Canterbury, 
 
 his learning, 237. 
 Brisin^a-men, Freyja's necklace, 39 n. 
 Brondmgs, tribe of the, 61. 
 Brunanbnrh, poem on the battle of 
 
 (quoted), 132. 
 Burford, battle of, 242, 243. 
 
 Cadwallon, Welsh king, allies with 
 Peuda, 112 ; slays Eadwine, 118 ; de- 
 feated by Oswald, 118. 
 
 Caedmon, the poet, encouraged to 
 write in English, 260; his life and 
 surroundings in Northumbria, 274- 
 278, 284r-287 ; Baeda's story of, 281- 
 284 ; set of poems connected with his 
 name, 280; the Junian MS. of, 280; 
 did Caedmon write it? 280; Milton 
 and Caedmon, 281, 282; other poems 
 of the Caedmon cycle, 330-338. [See 
 also Genesis A and B, Exodus, 
 Daniel] 
 
 Caedwalla, King of Wessex, conquers 
 Isle of Wight, 193. 
 
 Canterbury, 236, 237. 
 
 Cave, the sea-, in Beowulf, 45 n.; 
 similar caves elsewhere, 45 n. 
 
 Ceadda (Chad), Bishop of Lichfield, 
 Baeda's stories of his death, 207; 
 trained by Aidan, 219, 220, 262 n. 
 
 Ceawlin, West Saxon chief, defeats 
 Welsh at Deorham, 107 ; is defeated 
 at Fethanleag, ib.; defeated by 
 Welsh and Hwiccas, 112. 
 
 Cedda, preaches to East Saxons, 192; 
 legend of his descent from heaven, 
 207; sets up Lastingham, 271; is 
 present at Synod of Whitby, 277. 
 
 Cenwealh, King of Wessex, defeats 
 Welsh at Pen, 118. 
 
 Ceolfrid, 226. 
 
INDEX 
 
 493 
 
 Ceolwulf, King of Northumbria, 259 ; 
 friend of Baeda, 345 n. 
 
 Cerdic, Saxon chief, founds Wessex, 
 103. 
 
 Chapman, A., his Bird Life of the 
 Borders (qnoted), 372 n. 
 
 Charford, battle of, 103. 
 
 Charles the Great, his correspondence 
 with England, 232; Alcuiu joins his 
 court, 450. 
 
 Charms, for Water Elf disease, 138 n. ; 
 to do away a dwarf, 139 n. ; for 
 catching a swarm of bees, 155, 156; 
 for finding lost cattle, 156, 157 ; for 
 bewitched laud, 157-160 ; for a stitch, 
 161,162. For others, see Note E, 471. 
 
 Chester, battle of, 112, 117. 
 
 Chochilalcus (Hygelac) , his expedition 
 against the Attuarii, 13, 14. 
 
 "Christ," Cynewulf's poem of, its 
 divisions, 390 ; its sources, 390 ; Notes 
 B, 482, C, 484; described and trans- 
 lated, 390-404 ; passages quoted also, 
 183-187, 209, 210, 379. 
 
 " Christ and Satan," collection of 
 poems known as, theories of author- 
 ship and date, 325-328; described 
 and translated, 328-S31. 
 
 Christianity, its struggle with heathen- 
 ism in England, 101, 102 ; manner of 
 its propagation in England, 189, 190, 
 204, 205 ; introduced into Kent, 190, 
 191; among East Saxons, 191, 193; 
 into Northumbria, 192; Baeda's 
 story of conversion of Northumbria, 
 201-204; introduced into Wessex, 
 192; into East Anglia, ib.; into 
 Mercia, 193; among South Saxons, 
 193; and Jutes of Wight, ib. ; end of 
 Celtic Christianity in England, ib. ; 
 changes, but does not expel, heathen 
 belief and feeling, 194-200, 204r-207 ; 
 brings new poetic elements, 201-206, 
 207-217. 
 
 Chronicle, Anglo-Saxon, the, its ac- 
 count of death of Cynewulf , 243-244 ; 
 quoted alsOj 103, etc. 
 
 Cirencester, 107. 
 
 Clovesho, Council of, 228, 250. 
 
 Cockayne, Oswald, his Leechdoms (re- 
 ferred to), 155 «., etc. 
 
 Coenred, King of Northumbria, 258. 
 
 Coenwaloh, King of Wessex, 192. 
 
 Coifi, his speech on Christianity, 202- 
 204. 
 
 Coldingham, 228, 271. 
 
 Colman, Bishop of Lindisfarne, pres- 
 ent at Synod of Whitby, 277. 
 
 Columba, St., legend of his appearance 
 to Oswald, 220; his character and 
 influence, 267-270; Life of, 343. 
 
 Commagil, Welsh king, slain by West 
 Saxons, 107. 
 
 Condidan, Welsh king, slain by West 
 SaxonSj 107. 
 
 Constantino, his battle with the Huns 
 described in JSlene, 130, 131. 
 
 Conybeare's account of Beowulf 
 (alluded to), 12. 
 
 Cook, Professor, his Judith (referred 
 to), 333. 
 
 " Crafts of Men," poem on the, its 
 origin, 398; described, 436, 437; 
 quoted, 121. 
 
 Crowland, 227, 250. 
 
 Cumbria^ [See Strathclyde] 
 
 Cunibert (Cfynibert) , Bishop of Sidna- 
 cester, gives Baeda information for 
 the Ecctes. Hist., 230, 245 n. 
 
 Curtin's Myths and Folh-Lore of Ire- 
 land (referred to) , 85. 
 
 Cuthbert, St., his friendship with Her- 
 bert, 207; his life and influence, 
 221-224 ; anonymous Life of, 343 n. ; 
 Baeda's Life of, 195, 348. 
 
 Archbishop of Canterbury, his 
 
 Latin verses, 248 n. 
 
 pupil of Baeda, his letter on 
 
 Baeda's death, 339, 340. 
 
 Cuthred, King of Wessex, 242, 243. 
 
 Cynegils, King of Wessex, 192. 
 
 Cynewulf, the poet, a roving singer 
 and a Scop, 8 ; his nature-poetry 
 compared with Shelley's, 183 ; runes 
 of his name, 208, 377-381 ; Note D, 
 482; his date and dwelling place, 
 371-377; his life and character, 377- 
 386; his signed poems (^Juliana, 
 Christ, Elene, Fates of the Apos- 
 tles), 387-406; other poems by him 
 or by men of his school, 408-443. 
 
 King of Wessex, accoupt of his 
 
 death In Chronicle, 244. ■• 
 
 Cynric, a Saxon chief, 103, 107. 
 
 Cyriacus, Bishop of Jerusalem, his 
 Life the source of the Elene, 405. 
 
 Daeghbefn, 48. 
 
 Daegsastan (Dawston) , battle of, 266 n. 
 
 Dalriada, kingdom of, 267. 
 
 Danes, their home in Seeland, 15; 
 first lays of Beowulf among, ib. ; 
 settle in England, 249; attack Nor- 
 thumbria, 454r-456. 
 
 Daniel, Archbishop of Canterbury, 
 gives Baeda information for the 
 Eccles. Hist., 230, 345 n. ; his educa- 
 tional work, 238-240; "Daniel," 
 poem of, 325, 326; passages quoted 
 also, 214, 215. 
 
 Dawkins, Boyd, his Early Man in 
 Britain (quoted), 139, 
 
494 
 
 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Deira, kingdom of, 114, 115. 
 
 Dennisburn, battle of, 118. 
 
 Deor. [See Lament of Deor] 
 
 Deorham, battle of, 106. 
 
 " Descent into Hell," poem on the, 
 
 425-427. 
 Dietrich, F., his theory of authorship 
 
 of the Riddles, 369, 372. 
 " Discourse of the Soul to the Body," 
 
 poem of, 353-354. 
 Dorchester, 192. 
 Dragon, the, in Beowulf, 60-53; Cyne- 
 
 wulf's Riddle on, 52 n.; myth of, 
 
 82, 83. 
 " Dream of the Rood," poem of the, 
 
 its authorship, 436-441; described 
 
 and translated, 441-443 ; passages in 
 
 it compared with runes on RuthweU 
 
 Cross, 336, 337. 
 Durham, 223. 
 
 Eadbald, King of Ken*,, 192. 
 
 Eadberht, King of Northumbria, his 
 rule, 446, 447. 
 
 Eadfrith, 347. 
 
 Eadgils, King of the Myrgings, 2, 3. 
 
 grandson of Ongentheow, 23 ; 
 
 slain by Beowulf, 49. 
 
 Eadwine, King of Northumbria, his 
 vision, 202; considers Christianity 
 with his Witan, 202-204; baptized, 
 191; slain at Heathfield, 118; verse 
 on his death, 118; his power and 
 government, 257. 
 
 father of jEUwiue, 2. 
 
 Eaha, 64. 
 
 Ealdlielm, his Riddles (quoted), 122 n. ; 
 123 n., 125 n., 126, 149 «., 183, 195 n., 
 211 ». ; builds church at Malmes- 
 bury, 227; his literary friendships, 
 230; his life, work, and character, 
 238-240.. 
 
 Ealdhild, wife of Eadgils, 3. 
 
 Eanbald I., Archbishop of York, 452. 
 
 II., Archbishop of York, 453. 
 
 EanfJeda, wife of Oswiu, founds Gill- 
 ing, 271. 
 
 Eanmund, grandson of Ongentheow, 
 23 ; murders Heardred, 49. 
 
 Eanred, King of Northumhria, 452. 
 
 Earcombert, King of Northumbria, 
 192. 
 
 Eardulf , King of Northumbria, 452. 
 
 Earle, Professor, his theory of the ori- 
 gin of Beowulf, 14 n., 17 n., 22 n,, 
 his Deeds of Beowulf (referred to) , 
 15 n. ; his Land Charters (quoted), 
 144 »., etc. ; liis Anglo-Saxon Litera- 
 ture (quoted), 261, etc.; his Two 
 Anglo-Saxon Chronicles (referred 
 to), 244 n. 
 
 East Anglia, 114; Christianity in, 192. 
 
 East Saxons, receive Christianity, 191, 
 192. 
 
 Eata, Bishop of Hexham, 262, 272 n. 
 
 Ebba, sister of Oswald, founds monas- 
 teries of Coldingham and Ebbchester, 
 271. 
 
 Ebbchester, 272. 
 
 Ebbsfleet, 102. 
 
 " Ecclesiastical History," Baeda's, 
 344-347. 
 
 Ecgberht, King of Wessex, literature 
 under, 248; subdues Northumbria, 
 453. 
 
 ■ Archbishop of York, Baeda's 
 
 Mpistle to, 446 ; his influence on edu- 
 cation and literature, 447, 448. 
 
 Ecgferth, son of Offa of Mercia, con- 
 nected with Beowulf (?) , 17. 
 
 Ecgfrith, King of Northumbria, char- 
 acter of his reign, 258. 
 
 Ecgtheow, father of Beowulf, 19, 20. 
 
 Ecgwine (Ecgwin) , Bishop of "Worces- 
 ter, legend of, 199 ; founds Evesham, 
 250; writes his own life (?), ib. 
 
 Eddius Stephanus, his Biography of 
 Wilfrid, 343. 
 
 Ekkehard of St. Gall, 96. 
 
 Elegiac poems. Early English, 353-367. 
 
 " Elene," Cynewulf's poem of, its 
 source, 405, 406 ; the poem discussed 
 and described, 380-384, 405-407; pas- 
 sages quoted also, 128-131, 173, 174, 
 186. 
 
 Elmet, forest of, 114 ; kingdom of the 
 Welsh, 265. 
 
 Eofor, 23. 
 
 Eormanric (Hermanric), King of the 
 Ostrogoths, visited by Widsith, 2; 
 his legend in Lament of Deor, 5; 
 Note A, 458. 
 
 Eorpwald, King of East Anglia, 192. 
 
 Eostra, a nature goddess, mentioned 
 by Baeda, 81. 
 
 Epinal Glossary, tlie, 236 n. 
 
 Esius (Esi),231. 
 
 Ettmiiiler, L., his theory of origin of 
 Beoioulf, 15. 
 
 Eusebius, his Riddles, 122 n., 137, 183. 
 
 Evesham, 250. 
 
 " Exeter Book," the, 255, 370, 408. 
 
 " Exodus," the poem of, its author- 
 ship and character, 315-317; de- 
 scribed and translated, 317-324; 
 quoted also, 128, 129, 130. 
 
 Fafnir, 50. 
 
 " Kail of the Angels," poem of the, 
 
 328, 329. 
 Farinmagil, Welsh king, slain by West 
 
 Saxons, 106. 
 
INDEX 
 
 496 
 
 Fame, the island of, 221, 222. 
 
 " Fates of Men," poem of the. [See 
 
 " Weirds of Men "] 
 "Fates of the Apostles," Cynewnlf's 
 
 poem on the, 196, 371, 374; runic 
 
 passage in, 380; its relation to the 
 
 Andreas discussed. Note D, 485. 
 Fethanleag (Faddilay), victory of 
 
 Welsh at, 107. 
 "Fight at Fiunsburg," poem of the, 
 
 63-«5. 
 Finan, 272, 286 n. 
 Finn, King of North Frisians and 
 
 Jutes, 2; his story sung in Heorot, 
 
 62. [See also " Fight at Fiuns- 
 burg"] 
 Fitela, 61. 
 Folcwalda, 63. 
 Forests, of Early England, 136, 137, 
 
 138; giants and elves of the, 138, 
 
 139; the outlaw of the, 140; beasts 
 
 in the, 140, 141. 
 Forthhere, gives Baeda information 
 
 for Eccles. Hist., 345. 
 Franks, the, their literary connection 
 
 with England, 232. 
 Freaware, daughter of Hrothgar, 34, 
 
 35,68. 
 Freeman, Professor, his English Towns 
 
 (referred to), 228 n. 
 Freyr, his worship connected with the 
 
 Boar-sign, 128 n. 
 Friesland, its conversion influences 
 
 English Literature, 232. 
 Frithona (Deus Dedit), Archbishop of 
 
 Canterbury, 236. 
 Froda, King of the Heathobeards, 68. 
 Frome, 227, 239, 242. 
 
 Gabulf, 05. 
 
 Geat, the legend of, 5 ; Note B, 462. 
 
 Geats (Geatas), 15. 
 
 " Genesis A," poem of, 290-293 ; quoted 
 also, 130, 132, 177, 212. 
 
 " Genesis B," poem of, theories of its 
 origin, 301-303, 304; its metre, 303; 
 described and translated, 304-314. 
 
 Gerard e's "Herball" (quoted) , 179 ra. 
 
 Gerontius, King of Damnouian Brit- 
 ons, Ealdhelm's letter to, 241. 
 
 "GiftsofMen." [See "Crafts of Men"] 
 
 Gildas, his view of the English inva- 
 sion, 105, 106; his account of their 
 attack on a town, 110. 
 
 Gilling, 271. 
 
 Glastonbury, 192, 242. 
 
 Gloucester, 107. 
 
 "Gnomic Verses," described, 434; 
 specimens of, Note F, 488; quoted 
 also, 136 n., 138, 140, 140 n., 153, 169, 
 175, 180, 187 «., 205. 
 
 Godmundingham, 204. 
 
 "Gododin," poem of the, describes 
 wars in Northumbria, 266 n. 
 
 GoUancz, I., his explanation of the 
 Cynewulf-runes, 378 n. ; his theory 
 of the authorship of Andreas, Note 
 D, 485-487 ; and of the introduction 
 to Guthlac, 409. 
 
 Gotlis (orGoten),3. 
 
 Green, J. E., his History (quoted), 
 103, etc. 
 
 Gregory of Tours, 13. 
 
 Grein, 0. W. M. (alluded to), 174, etc. 
 
 Grendel, description of, 35-38; his 
 struggle with Beowulf, 38, 39; his 
 mother, 41; her raid, pursuit, and 
 death, 42, 43, 45-48; meaning of the 
 name, 83, 84; resemblances to the 
 Grendel story elsewhere in litera- 
 ture, 84-92. 
 
 Grettis Saga, resembles story of Seo- 
 wulf, 89-92. 
 
 Grimm, J., his Teutonic Mythology 
 (quoted), 157 n., etc. 
 
 Groschopp, F., his theory concerning 
 the Christ and Satan, 326. 
 
 Gudrun Saga (referred to) , 6, 7. 
 
 Guest, Dr. E., his Origines Celticae 
 (referred to) , 105, etc. ; his transla^ 
 tion of poem on Uriconium, 110 ; his 
 theory of authorship of Caedmonic 
 poems, 303. 
 
 Guthhere, the Burgundian, 2. 
 
 a warrior in Finnsburg, 65. 
 
 (Gunther), King of the Franks, 
 
 96. 
 
 Guthlac, St., Life of, 250-252; poem 
 of, described and translated, 408- 
 413 ; quoted also, 176, 207. 
 
 Guthlaf , 66. 
 
 Gwynedd, Welsh kingdom of, 112. 
 
 Gyrwas, the, a tribe of Angles, 114, 
 116, 135. 
 
 Hadrian of Africa, comes to Eng- 
 land with Theodore, 193, 237. 
 
 "Hadubrand and Hildebrand," Ger- 
 man lay of, 29, 30. 
 
 Haethcyn, son of Hrethel, 19; slays 
 Herebeald, 22; his feud with the 
 Sweons, 23. 
 
 Hagen (Hagena), his story in the 
 romance of Walther of Aquitaine, 
 96-98. 
 
 Hama, 3. 
 
 "Harrowing of Hell," poem on the, 
 329-331. 
 
 Hartlepool, 271. 
 
 Healfdene, father of Hrothgar, 26. 
 
 Heardred, son of Hygelac, 19; trained 
 by Beowulf, 22, 48. 
 
496 
 
 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Heathfield, verse on the battle of, 117. 
 
 Heathobeards, the, 68, 69 n. 
 
 Heatholaf , slain by Ecgtheow, 20. 
 
 Heathoraemas, the, 62. 
 
 Heiu, Abbess of Hartlepool, 200. 
 
 Hel, the goddess, 38. 
 
 " Heliand," Low German poem of the, 
 
 100 ra. ; its connection with Genesis 
 
 B, 301-302. 
 Henderson's FolJc-Lore (quoted) , 160 ?i. 
 Hengest, son of Finn, sung of in 
 
 Heorot, 39 ; his part in the Fight at 
 
 Finnshurg, 63-65. 
 a Jutish chief, lands at Ebbsfleet, 
 
 102. 
 Hengestdun, battle of, 249. 
 Henry of Huntingdon, his Chronicle 
 
 (quoted) ,'103, 117,118. 
 Heodenings, the, 5. 
 Heorot, the hall of Hrothgar, 2, 26, 31, 
 
 32, 34 71., 37, 39. 
 Heorrenda (Horaut?), Deor's rival 
 
 bard, 5. 
 Herebeald, son of Hrethel, 19; slain 
 
 by Haethcyn, 22. 
 Heremod, story of, told in Beowulf, 66. 
 Hexham, 227, 344 n. 
 Hickes, Dr. G., discovers MS. of Fight 
 
 at Finnsburg, 63. 
 Hild, her legend in Lament of Deer, 5 ; 
 
 discussion of the story. Note B, 462. 
 Abbess of Whitby, 200 ; her early 
 
 years, 275, 276 ; present at Synod of 
 
 Whitby, 276; takes the monastic 
 
 life, 277 ; establishes monastery, 275, 
 
 276 ; referred to, 286, 287. 
 Hildeburh, daughter of Hoce the Dane, 
 
 present at the burning of her son, 28 ; 
 
 referred to, 39, 63-65. 
 Hildegund (Hildeguthe), Princess of 
 
 Burgundy, her story in the romance 
 
 of Walther of Aquitaine, 96-98. 
 Hildelida, Abbess of Barking, 241. 
 Hnaef, son of Finn, 2; his burial de- 
 scribed, 28 ; his story, 39, 63-65. 
 Hoce, 63. 
 Hodgkin, T., his Dynasty of Theo- 
 
 dosius (quoted) , 40 ?i. 
 Hondscio, thegn of Beowulf, killed by 
 
 Grendel, 39. 
 Honorius, Archbishop of Canterbury, 
 
 236. 
 Hook, Archbishop, his Lives of the 
 
 Archhishops (referred to), 228 n. 
 Horsa, Jutish chief, lands at Ebbsfleet, 
 
 102. 
 Hreads, the, 3, 4. 
 
 Hrethel, King of the Geats, grand- 
 father of Beowulf, 19; his sons, ib. ; 
 
 adopts Beowulf, 22 ; his grief at death 
 
 of Herebeald, ib. 
 
 Hrothgar, King of the Scylding Danes, 
 2, 19; builder of Heorot, 26; Beo- 
 wulf's quest to him against Grendel, 
 29-33; his feud with the Heatho- 
 beards, 68 n. 
 
 Hrothulf , nephew of Hrothgar, 68 n. 
 
 Hrunting, Hunferth's sword, lent to 
 BeowuU, 20, 46. 
 
 Hunferth (Unferth) mocks Beowulf, 
 
 20, 35, 57; lends him Hrunting, 20; 
 Beowulf's generosity to, 20, 46. 
 
 Huns, their war with Goths, mentioned 
 in Widsith, 3; their defeat by Con- 
 stantine, told in Elene, 131 n. 
 
 "Husband's Message," poem of the, 
 355-359. 
 
 Hygberht, Archbishop of Lichfield, 
 253. 
 
 Hygd, second(?) wife of Hygelac, 19; 
 begs Beowulf to take kingdom, 20, 
 
 21, 49. 
 
 Hygelac, King of Geats, Beowulf's 
 uncle, identified with Chochilaicus, 
 13; his feud with Frisians, 14; be- 
 comes king, 19 ; avenges Haethcyn's 
 death, 23; has become legendary, 
 76 n. 
 
 Ida, King of the Angles, 115. 
 
 Ine, King of Wessex, his laws, 241; 
 
 encourages education, 242. 
 Ing, first King of the East Danes, 75; 
 
 Note E, 476. 
 Ingeld, son of Froda, 2; marries Frea- 
 
 ware, 68 ; his feuti with Danes, 68, 69. 
 lona, 267, 271. 
 Irish, the, their Interchange of learn.. 
 
 ing with England, 5 ; settlement in 
 
 Scotland, 267; their influence on 
 
 literature and religion in Northum- 
 
 bria, 267-273. 
 
 Jabnbebht, Archbishop of Canter- 
 bury, 248. 
 
 James the Deacon, 277. 
 
 Jarrow, 272 n. 
 
 Jewitt's Grave Mounds (quoted) , 126 n. 
 
 John, Abbot of St. Martin's, teaches 
 singing at Wearmouth, 226. 
 
 of Beverley, Bishop of Hexham 
 
 and York, 276 ; his connection with 
 Latin literature in Northumbria, 343. 
 
 John Barleycorn, ballad of (quoted), 
 152 n. 
 
 "Judith," the poem of, its origin and 
 date, 332-334; described and trans- 
 lated, 334-336; quoted also, 128, 
 130. 
 
 "Juliana," Cynewulf's poem of, de- 
 scribed, 387-389; the runic passage 
 in, 208, 377-379. 
 
INDEX 
 
 497 
 
 Junius (Francis Dujon), his edition of 
 the Caedmonian poems, 280, 2S2. 
 
 Jutes, their settlement in Britain, 102, 
 114; they receive Christianity in 
 Kent, 190, 191; in Wight, 193. 
 
 Kbmele, John M., his edition of 
 Beowulf, 12; his Saxons in Eng- 
 land (quoted), 128 ti., etc. 
 
 Kent, conquest of, 103; Christianity 
 received in, 190, 191; rise of litera- 
 ture in, 234-240. 
 
 Kent, Professor, his edition of Judith 
 (referred to) , 405. 
 
 Kyndylan, Welsh prince, mourned in 
 poem on Uriconium, 111. 
 
 " Lament of Deor,'' poem of, its 
 strophic form, 5, 6; the first English 
 lyric, 6 ; translated, 6-8. 
 
 Lastingham, 231, 271. 
 
 Laws, of Kent, 236 n. ; of Ine of Wes- 
 sex, 241 and n. ; of .Alfred preferred 
 to),i6. 
 
 "Leasing of Men " {Bi manna leaie), 
 poem on the, 436 n. 
 
 Leo, H., his theory of authorship of 
 Riddles, 369. 
 
 Libraries, monastic, 224 ; at York, 224 ; 
 at Wearmouth, ib. ; at Jarrow, 225. 
 
 Lichfield, see of, set up hy Offa, 248, 253. 
 
 Lihdisfarne, 55, 191, 222, 231. 
 
 Lindiswara, the, a tribe of Angles, 
 114, 116. 
 
 Llywarch Hen, his poem on Uriconium, 
 111. 
 
 Logeman, Dr., his account of inscrip- 
 tion on the St. Gndule cross, 338. 
 
 London, its rank as Roman city, 107. 
 
 Lullus, Archbishop of Mainz, his inter- 
 course with England, 247. 
 
 Maban, teaches singing at Hexham, 
 
 226. 
 Mailduf, an Irish monk, 223; founds 
 
 Malmesbury, 227, 238. 
 Malmesbury, 239, 240, 242. 
 Maserfeld, battle of, 118. 
 Matthew of Westminster (quoted), 78, 
 
 Melrose (Old), 221, 222, 271. 
 
 Mercia, rise of literature in, 251-253. 
 
 Mercians, the, settle in England, 116. 
 
 Milton, resemblances of his Paradise 
 Lost to the Genesis. 
 
 Mimming, the sword of Weland, 98 n. 
 
 Monasteries, early English, their in- 
 fluence on English literature, 218- 
 233; founded by Irish Church, 271, 
 272 ; founded by Roman Church, 272 
 n. ; attacked by Danes, 455-456. 
 
 Montalembert, Count, his Monks of 
 the West (referred to) , 200 n. 
 
 Mount Badon, battle of, 13, 103, 104. 
 
 MUllenhof , K., his theory of origin of 
 Beowulf, 13. 
 
 Myrgings, the, 2 n. 
 
 Naegling, Beowulf's sword, 54, 57. 
 
 Nechtansmere, battle at, 266 n. 
 
 Nickers, sea-beasts, attendant on Gren- 
 del's dam, 76. 
 
 Nithhad (Nidad) , story of, in Lament 
 of Deor, 6; in the Edda, Note B, 
 461. 
 
 Nial Saga, the burial of Flosi in the, 
 27. 
 
 Northfolk, a band of Angles, settled 
 in Britain, 114. 
 
 Northumbria, kingdom of, founded, 
 115; its supremacy, 116; national 
 literature in, 254r-278; Latin litera- 
 ture in, 242-351; its fall, 452-456. 
 [See also Christianity] 
 
 Nothelm, Archbishop of Canterbury, 
 230, 250. 
 
 Nursling, 242. 
 
 OCKLBT, verse on battle of, 248 n. 
 
 Odinn (Woden), bears away body of 
 Sinfiotli, 26, 27. 
 
 Offa, son of Wermund, King of the 
 Angles, mentioned in Widsith, 2; his 
 sword, Skrep, 54 ; marries Thrytho, 
 67, 67 n. ; confused in legend with 
 Offa of Mercia, 76, 253. 
 
 King of Mercia, restores import- 
 ance of bath, 107; character of his 
 rule, 252, 253. 
 
 Oftf or, Bishop of Worcester, 276. 
 
 Ohthere, son of Ongentheow, 23. 
 
 Old Saxony, Caedmonian poems con- 
 nected with, 232. 
 
 Onela, son of Ongentheow, 23. 
 
 Ongentheow, King of the Sweons, his 
 feud with Haethcyn, 23. 
 
 Ordlaf , 65. 
 
 Orkneyinga Saga, hunting of reindeer 
 told of in the, 142. 
 
 Orosius, his account of the Northmen's 
 coast, 82. 
 
 Osred I., King of Northumbria, 259. 
 
 II., King of Northumbria, 452. 
 
 Osric, King of Northumbria, 259. 
 
 under-king of Hwiccas, 107. 
 
 Oswald, King of Northumbria, defeats 
 Cadwallon at Dennisburn, 118; is 
 slain at Maserfeld, ib, ; Christianity 
 under, 191, 192, 258; Irish influence 
 on, 270. 
 
 Oswin, King of Deira, slain by Oswiu, 
 258. 
 
498 
 
 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Oswiu, King of Northumbria, slays 
 Penda at Winwaed, 118; slays Os- 
 win, 258 ; Irish influence on, 270-271 ; 
 is present at Synod of Whitby, 277. 
 
 " Panther," verses on the, 431, 432. 
 
 " Partridge," verses on the, 431. 
 
 FauUinus, converts Northumbria, 191 ; 
 flees thence, ib, ; Baeda's descrip- 
 tion of, 201, 202; influence of his 
 flight on poetry in England, 260, 261. 
 
 Feada, son of Fenda, embraces Chris- 
 tianity, 192. 
 
 Pen, battle of, 118. 
 
 Penda, King of Mercia, allies with 
 Cadwallon, 112; slays Eadwine at 
 Heathfield, 118; slays Oswald at 
 Maserfeld, 118; is killed by Oswiu 
 at Wiuwaed, ib.; fights against 
 Christianity, 192. 
 
 Pengwern (Shrewsbury), 110. 
 
 "Phoenix," poem of the, 427-430; 
 quoted also, 215, 216. 
 
 Picts, 264, 266. 
 
 Powell, F. York (referred to), 114 n. 
 [See Vigfusson] 
 
 Prehn, A., his RaUel des Exeterbuches 
 (referred to) , 122 n., etc. 
 
 Eaedwald, King of East Anglia, his 
 battle with JSthelfrith, 118; his 
 treatment of Christianity, 192. 
 
 Eeinfrid, restores Whitby, 286, and n, 
 
 Eheda, a nature goddess, mentioned 
 by Baeda, 81. 
 
 Rhyming Poem (Rime song) (referred 
 to), 205, 355. 
 
 Rhys, Prof. J., his Hibbert Lectures 
 (referred to), 84 n. 
 
 Riddles, Early English, their charac- 
 ter, 134-136, 137, 142; on the Wan- 
 dering Singer, 7 ; Dragon, 52, and n. ; 
 Sword, 122; Shield, 123; Vizor of 
 Helmet, 124; Spear, 124; Battering 
 Ram, 125; Bow, 125; Mail-coat, 126; 
 Horn, 127; Reed-flute, 135; Month 
 (?), 136; Ox, 136; Creation, 137, 141 
 (2); Stag-horns, 141; Stag, 142; 
 Badger, 142 ; Plough, 145 ; Rake, 146 ; 
 Young Bull, 146 ; Falcon, 147 ; Swan, 
 148; Starlings (?), 148; Nightingale, 
 149; Loon, 151 ; Mead, 151; Old John 
 Barleycorn ( ?) , 152 ; Sun and Moon, 
 154; Anchor, 178; Barnacle Goose 
 (?), 179; Ice-floe, 181; Storm on 
 land, 182 ; Storm on sea, 182 ; Hurri- 
 cane, 183-186. See also 136, 150, 153, 
 175, 229. 
 
 Latin (.^Enigmata) , 246, 368. [See 
 
 Ealdhelm, Eusebius, Symphosius, 
 Tatwine] 
 
 Ripon, 222, 226, 272 n. 
 
 Roger of Wendover, 5, 117. 
 
 Romanus, 277. 
 
 Rorik, 249. 
 
 "Ruined Burg," poem of the, 107-109. 
 
 "Rune Song," the, Note E; quoted 
 also, 136, 138, 180. 
 
 Runes, on the whale-bone casket, 60 n.; 
 on the Ruthwell Cross, 336, 337 ; on 
 reliquary of Cross at St. Gudule, 
 337, 338 ; in Cynewulf 's poems, 208, 
 380; Note D, 384, 485. 
 
 Ruthwell Cross. [See Runes] 
 
 Rydberg, V., his Teutonic Mythology 
 (quoted), 78, 79; his explanation of 
 the myth of Ing in the Rune Song, 
 Note E, 476. 
 
 Saeberht, King of the East Saxons, 
 receives Christianity, 191. 
 
 Saga, Odin's daughter, 10. 
 
 Saga-cycles of song in Beow^ilf, 74-76. 
 
 Saxo Grammaticus, 301. 
 
 Saxons, the, their migration to Eng- 
 land, 114. [See EasH South-, Wesl^ 
 Saxons] 
 
 Sceaf . [See Soyld] 
 
 Schmeller, Professor, his theory of con- 
 nection of Caedmonic poems with 
 the Heliand, 302 n. 
 
 SclUin^, Widsith's brother bard, 2, 3. 
 
 Scop, life and character of the, 5, 6, 7, 
 9, 10; Cynewulf, a, 8; the wander- 
 ing, not usual, 8 ; singers below the, 
 9. [See also for sketches of the Scop, 
 the poems of Widsith, Dear, Riddle 
 on Wandering Singer] 
 
 Scyld, legend of, 26, 77 ; his burial told 
 in Beowulf, 26, 27; his legend told 
 by English Chroniclers, 78, 80; bear- 
 ing of legend on the origin of the 
 Teutonic Aryans, 79, 80 ; Rydberg's 
 theory concerning him, 79. See 
 also Note D, 486. 
 
 Scyldings, 26. 
 
 Sea, the, in Early English Poetry, terms 
 for, 162-167, 176, 177, 179; its scen- 
 ery, 167, 168, 173, 180; its sailors, 
 169, 171-178; its ships, 168, 173 n., 
 176; its birds, 178, 179; weather on, 
 180-186 ; symbolic use of, in poetry, 
 187, 188. 
 
 " Seafarer," poem of the, date and 
 authorship, 354, 366-358; love of 
 nature in, 361, 362; translated, 362, 
 363; and Note A, 480; quoted also, 
 180, 205. 
 
 Secgas, 65. 
 
 Sherborne, 239 n., 242. 
 
 Sidnacester, 231. 
 
 Siegfried. [See Arminius, Sigemund] 
 
INDEX 
 
 499 
 
 Sievers, Professor, his theory of source 
 
 of Genesis B, 301. 
 Sigeberht, King of East Anglia, 192, 
 
 193 ; sets up schools, 231. 
 King of "Wessex, 243. 
 
 Sigemund, his burial of Slnfiotli, 27; 
 his story told in Beowulf, 39, 62, 63, 
 75, 76. 
 
 Sigfred, friend of Baeda, 230, 345 n. 
 
 Sigurd. [See Sigemund] 
 
 Simeon of Durham, 78. 
 
 Similes, in Anglo-Saxon Poetry, 187 n., 
 399 n. 
 
 Skeat, Professor (quoted), 43 n., etc. 
 
 Skene, his Four Ancient Books of 
 Wales (referred to) , 104 n. 
 
 Southfolk, the, a baud of Angles, set- 
 tle in Britain, 114. 
 
 South Saxons, the, found kingdom of 
 Sussex, 103; converted by WiUrid 
 193. 
 
 " Spirit of Men," poem on the, de- 
 scribed, 436 n. ; (quoted), 153. 
 
 Stephens, Professor, his edition of 
 Waldhere, 95. 
 
 Strathclyde, Welsh kingdom of, 117, 
 264. 
 
 Streoneshalh, 279 n. [See also Whitby] 
 
 Stubbs, Bishop, his account of Baeda's 
 means of education, 345 n. ; quoted 
 also, 350, etc. ' 
 
 Surtees Psalter, 236 n. 
 
 Sweet, Henry (quoted), 60 n., 244. 
 
 Sweons, feud between Geats and, 23, 
 24,56. 
 
 Swithhun, Bishop of Worcester, 333. 
 
 Symphosius, his Riddles, 179 n., 181. 
 
 Tacitus, his account of Teutonic music 
 and verse in the Germania, 10; in 
 the Annals, 10, 11. 
 
 Taine, M., his sketch of the Early Eng- 
 Ush, 70. 
 
 Taliessin, 266 n. 
 
 Tatwine, Archbishop of Canterbury, 
 
 his Riddles, 122 n., 181, 238, 250. 
 • Ten Brink, Professor, his theory con- 
 cerning origin of Genesis B, 302; 
 his Early English Literature (re- 
 ferred to), 302 'n. 
 
 Theodore of Tarsus, Archbishop of 
 Canterbury, 193; encourages learn- 
 ing, 236, 237 ; his Ten Articles, 237 n. 
 
 Theodric, King of the Goths, men- 
 tioned in Lament of JDeor, 5 ; dis- 
 cussion of the passage. Note B, 462. 
 
 Theodorio, King of the Franks, his 
 attack on Chochilaicus, 14. 
 
 Thor, 80. 
 
 Thprkelin, G., first publishes Beowulf 
 entire, 12. 
 
 Thrytho, wife of Offa, son of Wer- 
 mund, 2, 4; contrasted with Hygd, 
 ib. ; two versions of her story, 67 n. 
 
 Tisbury, 242. 
 
 Trumbert, friend of Baeda, 230, 345 n. 
 
 Trumhere, Abbot ofi Gilling, 271. 
 
 Turner, Sharon, his History of the 
 Anglo-Haxons (referred to) , 12. 
 
 Tynemouth, 271. 
 
 Ukiconium (Wroxeter), a British 
 town, 105; its destruction by West 
 Saxons, 106, 107 ; Welsh poem on its 
 fall, 109-111. 
 
 Vbeca, Abbess of Tynemouth, 200. 
 
 " Vercelli Book," 255. 
 
 Vigfusson and Powell, their Corpus 
 Poeticum Boreale (referred to) , 11 
 n., etc. 
 
 Vikings, the, ravage England, 248, 249. 
 
 Vilkina Saga (alluded to), 54 n., 95. 
 
 Village, the Early English, its out- 
 skirts, 143-150; its life and inhabi- 
 tants, 150-161. 
 
 Volsunga Saga, the dragon Fafnir of, 
 compared with the Beowulf dragon, 
 50 ; first sketch of, in Beowulf, 63. 
 
 Waegmundings, the, 19. 
 
 Waldhere (Walther), Ekkehard's ver- 
 sion of the story of, 95, 96-99. 
 
 " Waldhere," the poem of, 95, 99, 100. 
 
 Walrus, the,-Note C, 463. 
 
 Waltham, 242. 
 
 " Wanderer," poem of the, date and 
 authorship, 355-357; descriptions of 
 Nature in, 357-359; translated, 364r- 
 367 ; Note A, 478 ; quoted also, 178,- 
 205, 206. 
 
 Wanley, H., discovers poem of Beo- 
 wulf, 12. 
 
 War, in Early English Poetry, 128-132. 
 
 Wareham, 227. 
 
 Wealhtheow, wife of Hrothgar, asks 
 Beowulf's friendship for her sons, 
 19; greets him at the banquet, 35; 
 gives him gifts, 39 ; her character, 67. 
 
 Wearmouth, 227, 272 n. 
 
 Wederas, the, 15. 
 
 " Weirds of Men," poem on the, 435, 
 436; quoted also, 136, 140, 147, 
 153 re. 
 
 Weissenbrunner Prayer, the. High 
 German Poem, 100 n. 
 
 Wells, 242. 
 
 Weland, story of, in Lament of Deor, 
 6 ; Note B, 461 ; engraved on casket, 
 60 n. ; mentioned in Beowulf, 75 ; in 
 Waldhere, 95, 98, 99. 
 
 Weohstan, 23 n. 
 
500 
 
 EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Werlauff, Professor, his discovery of 
 Waldhere, 95. 
 
 "West Saxons, their conquest of South 
 Britain, 103-106. 
 
 Wessex, Christianity in, 192; rise of 
 literature in, 239-243. 
 
 Whale, poem on the, 431-433; runic 
 verses on the, 60 n. ; (Sperm) , 433 
 n. ; Note C, 463. 
 
 Whalley, battle of, 452. 
 
 Whitby, Synod of, 193, 258; monastery 
 of, 271 ; scenery round, 285-288. 
 
 Widia, 98 »., 99. 
 
 Widsith, discussion of the name, 1; 
 the poem of, 1-5 ; its date. Note A, 459. 
 
 " Wife's Complaint," poem of the, its 
 date and authorship, 355-357 ; trans- 
 lated, 359-361; quoted also, 374. 
 
 Wight, Isle of, 193. 
 
 Wiglaf, last of the Waegmundings, 
 19; helps Beowulf against dragon, 
 21, 53, 54; is present at Beowulf's 
 death, 54, 55; reproaches the recre- 
 ant thegns, 56. 
 
 Wilfrid, converts the Jutes of Wight, 
 193; encourages the arts in Nor- 
 thumbria, 227 ; his ascendancy, 262 ; 
 introduces Benedictine rule at Ripon, 
 272 n. ; is present at Synod of Whitby, 
 277; becomes Archbishop of York, 
 341 ; his friendship with Aoca, 344. 
 
 II., Bishop of York, 277. 
 
 Willehad, his connection with litera^ 
 ture, 247. 
 
 William of Malmesbury (quoted), 78, 
 etc. 
 
 Willibald, his travels in the East, 246. 
 
 Willibrord, his work among the Fri- 
 sians, 245. 
 
 Willigis, father of Willibrord, founds 
 monastery, 244 n. 
 
 Wimborne, 225, 242. - 
 
 Winchester, 192. 
 
 Winfrid. [See Boniface] 
 
 Winwaed, battle at the, 118. 
 
 Woden, Widsith another name for 
 ( ?) , 1 ; called Hnikarr, 76 ; is he our 
 earliest forefather ? 79-81 ; and Note 
 D, 329; probably personifies the 
 heavens, 80, 81 ; his relation to Sceaf , 
 80 n., and Note D, 468; worship of, 
 Note D, ib. [See also Odinn] 
 
 Women, in early England, 67, 68, 198- 
 200. 
 
 Wudga, 3. 
 
 Wulf, 23. 
 
 Wulfgar, 24, 34. 
 
 Wulfhere, son of Penda, 250. 
 
 Wiilker, Professor, his Grundriss (re- 
 ferred to), 16 n., etc. 
 
 Wylfings, 19. 
 
 Wyrd, the Teutonic doctrine of, 24; 
 in Beoiflulf, 24, 31; her place in 
 Early English religion, 81; in war, 
 120; change wrought by Christian- 
 ity in doctrine of, 206, 207. 
 
 Ynglinga Saga, burial of Haki in 
 the, 27 n. 
 
 York, stormed by Saxons, 115; its 
 restoration, 115; a centre of learn- 
 ing, 115 ; School of, 433, 444r457. 
 
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 Poetry after the Restoration. 
 
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 Pope. 
 
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 The Dawn of Naturalism in Poetry. 
 The Novelists. 
 
 Johnson and the Philosophers. 
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