Grendel and the Dragon, was sung in the ancient England over the sea. The destruction of Grendel and his dam by Beowulf is said to be the destruction of the winter powers of the sea-coast as they attack one of the Danish settlements which felt alike the charging of the icy sea and the The deadly cold and venom of the fenland. story of Beowulf overcoming in his last fight the Dragon is probably the story Reduced facsimile of a page of the Beowulf MS. written about A.D. 1000, amongst the Cotton MSS. of the British Museum. Transcription and translation are given below.1 1 Geata ær he on bed stige no ic me an secean dear. wig ofer wapen ond siththan witig [Continued at foot of page 7. of the aging Summer contending with the powers of incoming Winter, who attempts to grasp the treasures of the harvest. The Summer God saves the golden hoard, but dies in the struggle. These myths are embodied in the story of Beowulf, and through them his personality is built up by the poet. He becomes the English and North-Germanic ideal of a king, and the ideal is historic. The manners and customs both in war and peace, the picture of the young men sailing on adventure, the town with its hall and meadows and garths, the etiquette and feast of the hall, the daily doings of the settlement from morn to night, the position of women, the homelife, the temper of mind, the thoughts and feelings of our forefathers, are all portrayed in this poem, and there are few historical records so vivid and so interesting. It is the book of our beginnings. It is also a great sea-tale, fit for the origin of the poetry of the mistress of the seas. Beowulf hears that Hrothgar is harried by a monster, Grendel, who haunts Heorot, the hall of the folk, and devours Hrothgar's thanes. The distressful tale thrills the hero with pity, and he sets sail to help the Danish chief. Arriving, he is told of Grendel, the man-beast of some folk-tale, the creature of the mist and the stormy sea, strong as thirty men, lonely and dreadful, greedy of blood, hating all joy, who tears and eats his Then the good (warrior), Beowulf the Geat, deprive him (thus) of life, though I well can do it. Knows he not the good (war-) way-that he may strike me back, hew upon the shield, -though he may be strong in the works of warfare. But we two must at night refrain from the sword, if he dare to seek war without weapons; and then the wise God the holy Lord, afterwards, the glory may award, on what hand soever meet may seem to him.' victims. Beowulf and his men sleep in the hall, and Grendel, stalking over the misty moors, strikes in the doors, and rends one of Beowulf's men, but meets at last the grip of the hero. In the fierce wrestle Grendel's arm is torn away, and the monster flies through the night to die. Next morning all is happiness at Heorot; the feast is held and gifts are given; but at night Grendel's dam comes to avenge her son, and Hrothgar's best battle-man is torn in pieces by the wolfwoman of the sea. This is the re-creation in a later form of the original myth-a separate and later lay. It is now woven into the poem by the single writer of the whole. Grendel's dam is a sea-monster, and lives in a sea-cave; her hands are armed with claws; her blood eats like fire; she is even more savage than her son. The place where she dwells among the cliffs, in a gorge where the black waters welter furiously, is as savage as her nature; and the description of it is the first of those natural descriptions of wild scenery of which our modern English poetry is so full. Beowulf plunges into the sea, rises with the monster who has seized him into her cave, slays her with a magic sword, and returns triumphant with Grendel's head to Hrothgar, who sends him home to Hygelac laden with gifts and honour. This closes the first part of the poem. The second part opens some fifty years after, when Beowulf is an old man. He has been long king of the country, and his people love him. A Dragon, angry that his hoard is robbed, flies forth to burn and ravage; and Beowulf arms to fight his last fight and to win the treasure for his folk. Only one of his thanes comes to help him, and in the battle he is wounded to the death. The Dragon is slain, the treasure is won, and the hero burned on a lofty pyre overlooking the sea. The poem, many full accounts and translations of which have been set forth, runs to 3183 lines, and its manuscript is in the Cottonian Library in the British Museum. It has been said to be an epic, but it is more justly a narrative poem. It has neither the unity, the weight, the continuity, nor the mighty fates of an epic. Nevertheless it reaches a spiritual unity from the consistency of the hero's character developed from daring youth to wise and self-sacrificing age. It reaches even excellence in the clearness with which its portraits are drawn and its natural scenery represented. Our power of natural description in poetry begins with Beowulf. The verse has a fine ring in it; the tale, if we forget the bardic repetitions, is Continued from foot of page 6.] hine tha heatho deor hleor bolster on Beowulf and Breca at Sea. When we swam on the Sound, our sword was laid bare, Bright beacon of God; the billows grew still. Half-Heathen Poetry. Elegies and Riddles. When the lays of Beowulf were made into a poem Christianity had been long established in England. It had come with Augustine in 597. Its last conquest was the Isle of Wight in 686. It took, therefore, ninety years to Christianise England. During that interval, and indeed for a long time afterwards, a semi-heathenism prevailed. Then lay down the war-brave, his cheek pressed the bolster, the face of the earl; and round about him many a sea-hero ready bent to his hall-rest. None of them thought, there, that thence should he after, evermore again, seek his home beloved, (his) folk or (his) free burg, where he had been fostered. But they had been hearing that by far too many erewhile in that wine-hall, slaughter-death had taken from the Danish folk. But to them the Lord gave weaving of war-victory. (Beowulf, II. 676–698.) Even in Cnut's reign we find the laws forbidding the worship of heathen gods by the farmers and labourers; and it is more than probable that the greater number of the warriors, bards, and chiefs of the seventh and eighth centuries were only Christian in name, and followed their heathen ways of thinking, feeling, and fighting. The poetry composed by the bards in a chief's following and by the wandering minstrels, outside of the monastic influence, was not likely to be influenced to any depth by Christianity. There are a few examples of such poetry in the Exeter Book, and five of them are of great interest-the Ruined Burg, the Wanderer, the Seafarer, the Wifes Complaint, and the Husband's Message. Along with these we may place a number of the Riddles, written, it is supposed, by Cynewulf when he was a wild young poet at some noble's court, and which treat of natural phenomena, of war and armour, of the feast and the hall of the folk, of daily life in the settlements, of hunting and cattle, of forest and fish and bird. The first five poems mentioned above may fairly be called elegiac. They are full of regret for the glory of the past and the sadness of the present, and though we have no means of dating them, I should be inclined to place them in the first quarter of the eighth century. They are devoid of Christian sentiment and doctrine. The prologue and epilogue of the Wanderer, and the long tag added to the Seafarer, are Christian, but these are additions quite out of harmony with the body of the poems. Where they were written is also unknown. Some allot them to the south of England and to the ninth century, others to Mercia. I believe them to be Northumbrian, and to belong to the beginning of the eighth century. Their scenery is northern, their temper is northern; and even the Ruined Burg, which mourns in solemn verse the vanished glory of a desolate city, and is probably a description of the ruins of Bath may have been written by a Mercian poet educated in the Northumbrian schools. Their most remarkable quality, independent of their heathen dwelling on Fate rather than on the will of God, is their love of Nature-and this too has a heathen tinge. They scarcely touch those softer aspects of the earth and sea and sky which poetry distinctly Christian loved to describe. They dwell on the tempest and the fury of the waves, on the hail lashing the broken fortress, on the thunder of the ice and the deathfulness of the snow, on the black caves in the forest and the cliffs white with the frost. There are half-a-dozen of the Riddles concerned with the terrible play of Nature in the northern seas, in the storm-wearied sky, and in the wild marsh and forest land. Our Naturepoetry of the nineteenth century is a reversion to this early English temper, and poetry of this kind in the eighth or the ninth century is unique in Teutonic literature of that time. Poetry of natural description is to be found also in Welsh and Irish song, and it is probable that the writing of it in England is to be traced to the influence on Northumbria and Mercia of the Celtic poets. But I also believe-and the fact that the form of the English Nature-poetry of this time is finer than any Celtic work of the kind may be due to this -that these northern poets were well acquainted with Virgil; moreover, neither in Irish nor Welsh poetry of this period are there poems, such as the three Riddles on the storms, which treat of Nature alone, of Nature for her own sake. One of these is placed among the extracts. The finest of them is a long poem upon the Hurricane, impersonated as a giant rising from his prison under the earth to work his terrors on land and sea and in the sky; and in each of these realms it is described with so much force, fire, and imagination that we know the poet had watched from point to point the actual thing. Of the Elegies the Wanderer is the best, but the Seafarer is the most interesting. The Wanderer describes the mournful fates of men, the ruin of great towns and earls, friendships lost, departed glory, the winter night and snow settling on the world and on the heart of man. The Seafarer is perhaps a dramatic dialogue between an old and a young sailor, each telling of their terrible days at sea, yet each confessing the wild fascination of a sailor's life. The Husband's Message, or rather the Lover's Message, calls, in exile, on the sweetheart of the writer to join him in the foreign land where he waits for her: 'Come in the spring, when the cuckoo calls from the cliff.' The Wife's Complaint tells of her banishment by false tongues from her lord, and mourns her fate from the cave in the wood where she dwells, but mourns the most because she knows he loves her still, and suffers from want of her tenderness. These two last poems are the only poems in Old English which touch upon the passion and subtlety of human There may have been many more, but all the poetry of which we have to speak in the next section was written under the shadow of the monasteries, and the subject of love is absent. love. The Last Verses of the 'Wanderer' Whoso then these ruined Walls wisely has thought over, And this darkened life of man deeply has considered, Sage of mood 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 befell the seats of feasting? Whither fled the joys in hall? O, alas, the beaker bright! O, alas, the byrnied warriors! O, alas, the people's pride! Ah, how perished is that Time! Veiled beneath Night's helm it lies, 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, Swords that for the slaughter hungered, and the Wyrd sublime! See, the storms are lashing on the stony ramparts; Heavy drift of hail for the harm of heroes. All is full 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, Nitherward my neb is set, deep inclined I fare; The Iceberg-Riddle xxxiv. Came a wondrous wight o'er the waves a-faring, Grim was then his hate. He was greedy for the slaughter, Bitter in the battle work; 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.' Cædmon and the Christian Poetry. The distinctive Christian poetry begins before the date of the Elegies and the Nature-Riddles—in the seventh century, with Cadmon of Whitby. He is the first English poet whose name we know, and it stands at the head of the long and glorious musterroll of English singers. We have worn Apollo's laurel for 1200 years. Cædmon began to make verse, we may fairly say, between 660 and 670. We know the date of his death-680; and we are told that he was somewhat advanced in years when the gift of song came upon him. We first find him as a secular attendant of the monastery of Hild, an abbess of royal blood, who had set up her house of God on the lofty cliff which rises above the little harbour where the Esk meets the gray waters of the German Ocean. Whitby is its Danish name; in the days of Bæda it was called Streoneshalh. Cadmon was born a heathen if he was English; but if, as some think from his name, he was a Celt, he was born a Christian. The monastery in which he afterwards became a monk was founded on the Celtic pattern-one of the children of Iona-and he was early imbued with the Celtic spirit. Existing Celtic hymns, such as Colman's, may have been placed before him by the Irish monks as models for his poetry. But, for all this, his tongue was English and his poems were made in English. Whatever the Irish spirit did for him, the ground of his work was English. Bæda tells the story of Cadmon's birth as a poet. One night, having the care of the cattle, he fell asleep in the stable, and One came to him and said, 'Cadmon, sing me something.' 'I know not how to sing,' he replied, and for this cause left I the feast.' 'Yet,' said the divine visitant, you must sing to me.' 'What shall I sing?' said Cædmon. 'Sing,' the other replied, 'the beginning of created things.' And immediately Cædmon began a hymn in praise of the World's Upbuilder, and awakening, remembered what he had sung, and told the TownReeve of his gift, who brought him to Hild; and, becoming a monk, he continued in the abbey till he died with joy and in peace, singing, day by day, all the Scripture history, and of the Judgment-day. Others after him,' said Bæda, 'tried to make religious poems, but none could compare with him.' His poetry had then made a school which was doing similar work to his when Bæda, fifty years after Cadmon's death, was finishing his Ecclesiastical History. Of what kind that work was we have no certain knowledge. The poems attributed to Cadmon by Junius in the manuscript called the Junian Cadmon have been assigned by critics to different writers. Only one of them-Genesis A-is thought by a few to be possibly from his hand. If so, he wrote the thing in two distinct manners-partly in a mere paraphrase of the Biblical story, dull, unilluminated by any imagination; and partly in imaginative episodes, in which the Fall of the rebel angels, the Flood, the battles of Abraham, and the story of Hagar and of Isaac are imaginatively treated as heroic tales, in the manner of a heathen saga, and with English feeling. It is to be hoped that some day we shall get evidence to prove that these fine, bold episodes are from Cædmon's hand. The only verses we know to be his are transferred into Latin by Bæda, and we have a Northumbrian version of them in an old MS. of the Historia Ecclesiastica. They are the short hymn which he is said to have sung on awakening from his dream. Their hymnic form Reduced facsimile from the eleventh-century Junian MS. of the Cadmonian poems in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, with a picture designed to represent Noah's ark.1 1 The following is a transcription of the above passage as it stands in the MS., written straight on without regard to the rhythmical measures, which are partly indicated by the dots. The literal translation printed opposite shows the lines into which the poem naturally falls: Noe freme. swa hine nergend heht hyrde tham hal that is syndrig cynn. Symle bith thy heardra. the hit hreoh suggests to critics that Cadmon's work was mainly a series of heroic hymn-like lays on the subjects of the Old and New Testament, tinged with the colours of the Nature and the hero myths. It may be that we have the remains of one of these in the poem, portions of which are carved in runic letters on the Ruthwell Cross in Dumfriesshire. The lines sing of 'Jesus, the young Hero, who was God Almighty, who girded Himself and stepped up, full of courage, on the gallows for the sake of man.' And as He lies there, the Sacred Rood speaks Lifted on high, I bore the Lord of the heavenly realm, and trembled, all besteamed with blood. Pierced with spears and sore pained with sorrows, I beheld it all. They laid Him, limbwearied, in the grave.' If this fragment be really Cadmon's work, it fills us with deep regret that we have lost his other poems-lost a poetry so close to the heroic manner, so filled with the spirit of that heathen vigour and passion which his life had seen and known. At any rate, we owe him a great debt. He bridged the river between the pagan and the Christian poetry. He showed to his folk how the new material of Christianity could be used by the bards of England. He made a great school of poetry. He made Cynewulf possible. He is the first English poet in our England. The royal line of England goes back to Cerdic, the still more royal line of English poets goes back to Cædmon. The poetry of the School of Cadmon belongs to the end of So did Noah as the Lord had bidden him. it is always the harder the more the rough water, (Genesis, ll. 1314-1326.) |