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I

CHAPTER II

THE EPIC

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N the beginnings of our national life, our forefathers called poets smiths of song." These men were entertainers at feasts. As the ale or mead was passed round in a great cup, among the warriors who feasted and rested after the day's work and fighting, these Singers recited stories, or sang to the sound of a harp, songs of great deeds and hairbreadth escapes of their heroes, dead or living. A king would have a minstrel of his own, generally a man of high rank, attached to the Court, who was called a Scóp, which comes from the Old English verb, to shape, or create, because he made his own songs, partly out of old traditions, and partly out of passing events.

As a race, we have one great Epic of our early days, named, after the hero, Beowulf. It falls into four divisions, of which the first two tell of his fight with an appalling being, Grendel, and with Grendel's mother. None of the people mentioned in it lived in England; the poem calls them Geatas (Goths); they lived probably in the southern part of Sweden called Götaland. We have only to look at the map of Northern Europe to see that they could look out on the Baltic Sea on the East, while when they had passed round the North of Denmark they would find themselves in the wild North Sea.

No one doubts that the original story of Beowulf belongs to Scandinavia, but there is nothing really known about the one manuscript we possess (now in the British Museum) except that it belongs to the tenth century. The story is several hundred years older than the manuscript. Scholars, on the whole, think that it was a story known to all the North European tribes, who, with the exception of the Huns, were, however much they fought and squabbled, probably at bottom all of one kin. So far as we can now tell, after so many centuries, the English pirates, who drove the native Britons to the West, and themselves occupied the South, Midlands, and North of this island, brought the Götaland story with them, the story they were accustomed to tell or to sing over their mead-cups. When they and those who came with or followed them had settled down comfortably, they still treasured their old family stories (we have a fragment, about fifty lines, of another called The Fight at Finnesburg), and they were sung and told in the tribal manner at feasts, till at last some Englishman of the tenth century wrote Beowulf down. He, if not a Christian, could easily know about Christianity, which may account for ideas and details scattered about this pagan poem which its original makers would never have put in.

Beowulf is most likely the oldest written story in any North European tongue; it is, or should be, a source of pride to us that it was written in our own. But it is not only old, it is also alive and vivid; its men have the same qualities which we still pride ourselves that we possess; it has our own love of the sea and of wild moor and mountain country; it is full of strength, endurance, manly courage, and, above all, of truth speaking and loyalty.

In the first canto we learn that Hrothgar, Healfdene's second son, succeeded, on his brother's death, to the throne of the Scyldings, and very soon determined to build a great palace:

To him in mind it came to command

Men to build a hall-dwelling, a mighty mead-house,

Of which the children of men should ever know.
And there within it he should share out all things,

As God had given to him, save the public share

Of all the people, and the souls of men.

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He who wielded widely power of his words

Gave to it the name Heorot.

Trouble soon befell, since Hrothgar not only kept to his plan of distributing rewards and gifts, but encouraged the warriors to meet and feast in the great mead-hall. Their joyful noises aroused the wrath of a terrible enemy, Grendel, who, by a curious mixture of Jewish and North European thought, is represented as a descendant of Cain, who, having murdered his brother, thereby became, as it were, the parent of all murderers. Grendel was a night-time fiend:

On each of the days he heard rejoicing

Loud in the hall; there was the harp's sound
And the minstrel's clear song.

Such pleasure, comfort and merriment were intolerable to

The grim guest called Grendel
The mighty march-stepper who held
The moors, fen and fastness.

Hidden by darkness, Grendel entered the RingDanes' Hall, when the warriors, fully satisfied with food and mirth, slept securely:

Grim and greedy, ready was he soon,
Rugged and wrathful; in their rest
He snatched away thirty thanes.

Grendel made these raids nightly, carrying away and devouring Hrothgar's nobles, until those who remained at last went to rest elsewhere:

So Grendel reigned, against right contended,
One alone against all, till empty stood
The most excellent of houses.

After twelve years of this miserable struggle between Hrothgar and his Scyldings on the one side, and Grendel on the other, the King's nephew, Beowulf, who ruled West Gothland, heard of his uncle's plight, and set out to go across the sea to Denmark to his help. After an adventurous voyage, he reached Heorot and was brought to Hrothgar, who, by this time, after so many troubles, had grown, so the poet declares,

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The young Beowulf thus addressed his aged and weary kinsman:

Hail be thou Hrothgar, Hygelac's kinsman I,
Kinsman and comrade: I, in my youth,
Have many great actions undertaken.
To me, on my native turf, the matter
Of Grendel was manifestly made known.
Sea-farers say that this hall stands,
This best of houses, empty and useless,
To every one of the warriors, after evening-light
Is hidden under heaven's night-silence.

Beowulf, having thus recalled his past victories, offered Hrothgar his help. The latter accepted it gladly, and, once more, hoping for a return of their old joys, the warriors sat down to feast in the great mead-hall. But the feast's joy was marred by the jealousy of one of Hrothgar's thanes, Hunferth:

To him the voyage of Beowulf, the bold sea-farer,
Was mighty displeasure, because he would not allow
That any other man under the heavens
Should ever have, on this middle-earth,
More renown than he himself.

However, this poor creature's unworthy sneer that Beowulf had been beaten by Breca, in a swimming match, is responsible for one of the great sea-pictures in the poem, pictures which must ever delight a sea-loving race like ours. Beowulf showed the warriors how, in this friendly bout, he and Breca had found common foes in the deadly

sea-creatures:

When on the narrow sea we rowed,

A naked sword had we hard in hand,
We thought to war against the whale-fishes.

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The welling waves, coldest of storms
Darkening night, and the northern wind
Drove us apart, battle-grim turned against us.
Rough rose the billows, the sea-fishes' rage
Was roused. My body-shirt, hard,
Hand-locked, help afforded me against my foes.

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To the bottom, a foe, a dire fiend, tugged me,
Fast had me, grim in his grasp;

Yet was it granted to me, miserable man,

That with my point, my war-sword, I reached
The mighty mere-beast: with my own hand

A battle-rush destroyed.

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Thus often, my hated foes threatened me heavily:

I, with my dear sword, served them

As was fitting. Joy of that glut-that they

Should eat me those wicked doers had not,
Sitting round their feast, nigh the sea-bottom;
But in the morning, with falchions wounded,
Among the sea-drift, along they lay

In crowds put to sleep,

So that nevermore have they hindered
The sea-farers' way about the foaming ford.

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When his courage holds, Wyrd1 often saves
The undoomed man: so 'twas given to me
With my sword to slay the nickers.2

After the feast, during the course of which Wealtheow, the Queen, had handed round the mead-cup

Suddenly, Healfdene's son his evening rest

Would seek.

Slyly, the poet suggests that Hrothgar was not wholly unmindful of the danger of staying too late in that fiend-ravaged hall, when

Murky night, Creation's shadow-helmet came
Wandering over all things.

1 Wyrd, to our forefathers, was a power who ruled the fortunes of men, who, though not absolutely supreme, was to them terrible in her might.

2 In Northern mythology, nickers were devils who lived in the sea.

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