[1] See the curious delineation of the Vikings of the North, in
Turner's "Hist. of the Anglo-Saxons," i. 456, third edition.
[2] Mr. KEMBLE, the translator of BEOWULF, has extricated himself out
of an extraordinary dilemma. The first volume, which exhibits the
Anglo-Saxon text, furnished in the preface, with an elaborate
abundance, all the historical elucidations of his unknown hero.
Subsequently when the second volume appeared, which contains the
translation, it is preceded by "A Postscript to the Preface," far
more important. Here, with the graceful repentance of precipitate
youth, he moans over the past, and warns the reader of "the
postscript to cut away the preface root and branch," for all that he
had published was delusion! particularly "all that part of my preface
which assigns dates to one prince or another, I declare to be null
and void!" The result of all this scholar's painful researches is,
that Mr. Kemble is left in darkness with Beowulf in his hand; an
ambiguous being, whom the legend creates with supernatural energies,
and history labours to reduce to mortal dimensions.
The fault is hardly that of our honest Anglo-Saxon, as trustful of
the Danes as his forefathers were heretofore. It is these, our old
masters, who, with Count Suhm, the voluminous annalist of Denmark, at
their head, have "treated mythic and traditional matters as
ascertained history. It is the old story of Minos, Lycurgus, or Numa,
furbished up for us in the North." What a delightful phantasmagoria
comes out while we remain in darkness! But a Danish Niebuhr may yet
illuminate the whole theatre of this Pantheon.
[3] These Teutonic heroes were frequently denominated by the names of
animals, which they sometimes emulated: thus, the hero exulting in
bone and nerve was known as "the Bear;" the more insatiable, as "the
Wolf;" and "the Wild Deer" is the common appellative of a warrior.
The term "Deer" was the generic name for animal, and not then
restricted to its present particular designation.
"Rats and Mice, and such SMALL DEER,"
baffled our Shakspearean commentators, who rarely looked to the great
source of the English language--the Anglo-Saxon, and, in their
perplexity, proposed to satisfy the modern reader by a botch of their
own--and read _geer_ or _cheer_. Percy discovered in the old metrical
romance of "Sir Bevis of Southampton," the very distich which Edgar
had parodied.--Warton, iii. 83.
[4] Thucydides, Lib. i.
[5] Thucydides.