The Beowulf MS. (Cotton Vitellius A. XV.) was one of those collected by Sir Robert Cotton. It was in Little Deans Yard, Westminster, when the fire which, in 1731, destroyed so many manuscripts took place, and was fortunately among those which were not fatally injured. In 1753, having spent some time in the old dormitory at Westminster, it was transferred to the British Museum. In 1705 Wanley, employed by Hickes, the Anglo-Saxon scholar, to make a catalogue of the old northern books in the kingdom, discovered the poem of Beowulf in the Cottonian library and calls it a tractatus nobilissimus poetice scriptus. It is a parchment codex, and the handwriting of the two copyists is of the beginning of the tenth century. Thorkelin, a Danish scholar, had two copies of it made in 1786, and published the whole of it for the first time in 1815. This edition made the poem known, and it was discussed in English and foreign reviews. Meantime, in 1805, Sharon Turner gave the first account of the poem in his history of the Anglo-Saxons. Turner again, in 1823, and Conybeare, in 1826, filled up that account and translated portions of “Beowulf” into English verse, and in 1833 and 1837 John M. Kemble edited, with historical prefaces, and translated the whole of the poem. This scholarly book increased the interest of foreign scholars in the poem; and, since then, a great number of editions and translations have been published, while the essays, dissertations, articles, and notices on the poem and the subjects contained in it, fill a long list, and are written by English, French, German, Dutch, Danish, and American scholars.
The plan … is sufficiently simple. The characters, as far as they are developed, are well sustained, and their speeches usually natural and well appropriated. The narrative is by no means so encumbered with repetitions as that of the reputed Cædmon; nor is the style so ambitious and inflated. Over the almost unintelligible rhapsodies of the Edda (for these are the fairest points of comparison) it possesses a decided superiority; nor are there many among the metrical romances of the more polished Normans, with which it may not fairly abide a competition.
Is probably a Translation or Rifacciamento of some older Lay originally written in the antient Language of Denmark.
If antiquaries still wander among shadows, the poet cannot err. Beowulf may be a god or a nonentity; but the poem which records his exploits must at least be true,—true in the manners it paints and the emotions which the poet reveals,—the emotions of his contemporaries.
One of the oldest and most important remains of Anglo-Saxon literature is the epic poem of “Beowulf.” Its age is unknown; but it comes from a very distant and hoar antiquity; somewhere between the seventh and tenth centuries. It is like a piece of ancient armor; rusty and battered, and yet strong. From within comes a voice sepulchral, as if the ancient armor spoke, telling a simple, straight-forward narrative; with here and there the boastful speech of a rough old Dane, reminding one of those made by the heroes of Homer. The style, likewise, is simple,—perhaps one should say, austere. The bold metaphors, which characterize nearly all the Anglo-Saxon poems we have read, are for the most part wanting in this. The author seems mainly bent upon telling us, how his Sea-Goth slew the Grendel and the Fire-drake. He is too much in earnest to multiply epithets and gorgeous figures. At times he is tedious; at times obscure; and he who undertakes to read the original will find it no easy task.
The Beowulf’s-Lay, then, appears to me to have as good a Claim to be considered an original Work in its Present State as the Æneid of Virgil or indeed any Epic Poem in Existence. I conceive then that the Author was a Christian of this Country, and from the little Bits of Preaching that one meets with every here and there, and his References to the Sacred Volumes, I think it probable that he may have been an Ecclesiastic…. The Language of the Poem, again, does not appear to me to differ so much from that of King Ælfred, or of Ceadmon, as to warrant our placing a very long Interval between the Productions: but it appears to forbid our considering it as belonging to the later Danish Dynasty of Cnut.
With respect to this the oldest heroic poem in any Germanic tongue, my opinion is, that it is not an original production of the Anglo-Saxon muse, but a metrical paraphrase of an heroic Saga composed in the south-west of Sweden, in the old common language of the North, and probably brought to this country during the sway of the Danish dynasty…. From the allusions to Christianity contained in the poem, I do not hesitate to regard it as a Christian paraphrase of a heathen Saga, and those allusions as interpolations of the paraphrast, whom I conceive to have been a native of England of Scandinavian parentage. As a monument of language the poem of Beowulf is highly valuable, but far more valuable is it as a vivid and faithful picture of old Northern manners and usages, as they existed in the halls of the kingly and the noble at the remote period to which it relates. In this respect, where are we to look for its like?
In the higher excellences of poetry, the celebrated epic, Beowulf, ranks perhaps first among the monuments of Anglo-Saxon literature, but in subject, plan, and treatment, it differs so widely from the general character of the versified compositions in the language, that it cannot be considered as a product of the same genius or the same influences which have given form and spirit to the other literary efforts of that people…. In its machinery, it has many points of resemblance to Scandinavian mythic poetry, and though there exists no Old-Northern poem of very similar character, there are prose sagas—generally indeed of much later date—which in tone and treatment are not unlike the story of Beowulf.
Fiction as yet is not far removed from fact: the man breathes manifest under the hero. Rude as the poetry is, its hero is grand; he is so, simply by his deeds. Faithful, first to his prince, then to his people, he went alone, in a strange land, to venture himself for the delivery of his fellow-men; he forgets himself in death, while thinking only that it profits others. “Each one of us,” he says in one place, “must abide the end of his present life.” Let, therefore, each do justice, if he can, before his death. Compare with him the monsters whom he destroys, the last traditions of the ancient wars against inferior races, and of the primitive religion; think of his life of danger, nights upon the waves, man’s efforts against the brute creation, the indomitable breast crushing the breasts of beasts, powerful muscles which, when exerted tear the flesh of the monsters: you will see through the mist of legends, and under the light of poetry, the valiant men who, amid the furies of war and the raging of their own mood, began to settle a people and to found a state.
If “Beowulf” is no national poem and no epos in the strict sense, taking matter and composition into account, yet as regards style and tone, character and customs, it is both in a high degree; and it is not without significance that a poem stands at the head of English literature whose subject is the struggle with the waves, and which is permeated by a vivid perception of the sea and of sea life. A great wealth of poetic feeling is revealed in this poem. We are charmed by pictures of external things and actions delineated with most realistic freshness, and epic minuteness.
Although much of the poem of Beowulf is at best only legendary, and a great deal of it purely fabulous, there can be no doubt, I think, that we have, imbedded in the marvels and wild fancies of the story, a dim and vague but authentic record of the doings of our ancestors some fourteen centuries ago…. Its real value—considered as an historical authority merely—lies in the vivid picture it gives us of the life, the manners, and the habits of thought and speech of our forefathers in that “dark backward and abysm of time.” We have it here at first hand, “proving,” in Chapman’s words,
| “—how firm truth builds in poet’s feigning;” |
Even if the poem were composed in the first half of the eighth century, the life depicted is that of two centuries earlier, unless the writer transfers to those times the manners and customs of his own day.
The heroic tale of “Beowulf” is worth a thousand Ossians. Not one falsetto note, not one sham-antique sentiment or image, not one grotesque anachronism stains its primitive beauty and simplicity.
There is speech from beginning to end; there is music; the minstrel sitting on the mead bench sings several noble lays. Our ears are deafened with the roar of talk; there are long orations; there is dramatic dialogue canto after canto. The very silence of the poem is a thunder, for through it we hear the tread of the dragon; the very darkness of it is like a vivid flash, for out of it leaps the figure of Grendel. Even the raven tells the eagle “how he joyed him in the feast when with the wolf he plundered the slain” (3027). The “storm of arrows,” the “shower of iron,” the din and friction of clashing weapons, horns and trumpets blowing their blasts, bring sharply before us more than a sound: they evoke a picture. All three fights with the dragons are tempests in words. All the people are loud-voiced; there are joyous welcomes and partings; the “glee-beam,” the “music-wood” soften or stir the hearts of the feasting watchers as they keep the vigil. There is no noiseless wassailing or shadow-drinking in pantomine.
It does not show the imaginative character of the Edda. There was never with the Saxon any such epic cycle as with the Scandinavian. It is a grand torso. But it is the very image of the time and the men.
The general sense of the poem is this. There is work for the age of Blood and Iron, but such an age must yield to a better. Force is not the supreme and final arbiter of human destiny; above and behind Might is enthroned the diviner genius of Right. In this idea we recognize the essential thought of Civilization, the clue to emergence out of barbarism. And even further back, as if in barbarism itself, we see a germ of culture and the gentler forms of life. The honoured position of woman, which here rests upon ancestral custom, is full of promise for the development of the nobler instincts of Society.
If we want to feel whether “Beowulf” is good poetry or not, let us place ourselves in the hall as evening draws on, when the benches are filled with warriors and seamen, and the chief sits in the high seat, and the fires flame in the midst, and the cup goes round—and then hear the Shaper strike the harp. With gesture, with the beat of his voice and of the hand upon his instrument at each alliterative word of the saga, he sings of the great fight with Grendel or the dragon, of Hrothgar’s giving, of the sea-voyage, to men who had themselves fought against desperate odds, to sailors who knew the storms, to the fierce rovers of the deep, to great ealdormen who ruled their freemen, to thegns who followed their kings to battle and would die rather than break the bond of comradeship. Then as we image this, and read the accented verse, sharply falling and rising with the excitement of the thing recorded, we understand how good the work is, how fitted for its time and place, how national, how full of noble pleasure.
Beowulf crushes all he touches; in his fights he upsets monsters, in his talks he tumbles his interlocutors headlong. His retorts have nothing winged about them; he does not use the feathered arrow, but the iron hammer. Hunferth taunts him with not having had the best in a swimming match. Beowulf replies by a strong speech, which can be summed up in few words: liar, drunkard, coward, murderer! It seems an echo from the banqueting hall of the Scandinavian gods; in the same manner Loki and the goddesses played with words. For the assembled warriors of Hrothgar’s court Beowulf goes in nowise beyond bounds; they are not indignant, they would rather laugh. So did the gods.
The poem of “Beowulf” has been sorely tried; critics have long been at work on the body of it, to discover how it is made. It gives many openings for theories of agglutination and adulteration. Many things in it are plainly incongruous…. However the result was obtained, “Beowulf” is, at any rate, the specimen by which the Teutonic epic poetry must be judged. It is the largest monument extant. There is nothing beyond it, in that kind, in respect of size and completeness. If the old Teutonic epic is judged to have failed, it must be because “Beowulf” is a failure.
The manuscript itself, the handwriting of which is probably of the tenth century, affords, apart from that fact, no presumption as to the date of the poem. It is a bad transcript of a work the language of which the scribe seems to have imperfectly understood, and hence to have in many places hopelessly misrepresented; and the interval in time between the transcript and the original composition may have been indefinitely great…. Briefly summarised, the views here suggested as to the authorship of “Beowulf” may be stated thus: Sagas, either in the Danish dialect or in that of the Geatas—more probably the latter—were current in the Scandinavian countries in the seventh century. Among these Sagas, that of Beowulf the Geat must have had a prominent place; others celebrated Hygelac his uncle, Hnæf the Viking, the wars of the Danes and the Heaðobards, of the Danes and the Swedes, etc., etc. About the end of the century missioners from England are known to have been busy in Friesland and Denmark, endeavouring to convert the natives to Christianity. Some one of these, whose mind had a turn for literature, and dwelt with joy among the traditions of the past, collected or learnt by heart a number of these Sagas, and taking that of Beowulf as a basis, and weaving many others into his work, composed an epic poem of upwards of three thousand lines, to which, although it contains the record of two, or rather of three adventures, the heroic scale of the figure who accomplishes them all imparts a real unifying epic interest. The poet who, returning to England, gave this work to his countrymen, cannot at present be identified. It was not Cynewulf: style, tone, and tendency are all so different, that this solution, in my opinion at least, must be decisively rejected. Nor was it, for the reasons that have been given, the author of “Andreas;” nor, most certainly, was it the author of “Guðlac.” A fresh, searching examination of the entire mass of Anglo-Saxon poetry, with a view to the solution of this one question—Who wrote “Beowulf?”—must be made, before the problem can be put aside as insoluble. Such an examination, if not undertaken in England, will doubtless be ultimately carried out by some scholar of a Swedish or German university.
If we take into consideration the fact, which is all but a certain fact, that “Beowulf” is the very oldest poem of any size and scope in any modern language, that it has no known predecessors, and has the whole literature of romance for successors—then without attributing to it merits which it cannot claim, or muddling it up with myths which simply minish its interest, we shall see that it is a very venerable document indeed, well worth the envy of the nations to whom it does not belong. Even if it were no older than its MS., “Beowulf” would be the senior of the “Chanson de Roland” by nearly a century, the senior of the “Poema del Cid” by two, the senior of the “Nibelungen Lied” by two or three. In reality it is possibly the elder of the eldest of these by half a millennium. Some of those who love England least have been fain to admit that we have the best poetry in Europe; it is thanks mainly to “Beowulf” that our poetry can claim the oldest lineage, and poetical coat-armour from the very first.
