CHAPTER II

THE TEUTONIC EPIC

I

THE TRAGIC CONCEPTION

Of the heroic poetry in the Teutonic alliterative verse, the history

must be largely conjectural. The early stages of it are known merely

through casual references like those of Tacitus. We know that to the

mind of the Emperor Julian, the songs of the Germans resembled the

croaking of noisy birds; but this criticism is not satisfactory,

though it is interesting. The heroes of the old time before Ermanaric

and Attila were not without their poets, but of what sort the poems

were in which their praises were sung, we can only vaguely guess. Even

of the poems that actually remain it is difficult to ascertain the

history and the conditions of their production. The variety of styles

discoverable in the extant documents is enough to prevent the easy

conclusion that the German poetry of the first century was already a

fixed type, repeated by successive generations of poets down to the

extinction of alliterative verse as a living form.

After the sixth century things become a little clearer, and it is

possible to speak with more certainty. One thing at any rate of the

highest importance may be regarded as beyond a doubt. The passages in

which Jordanes tells of Suanihilda trampled to death by the horses of

Ermanaric, and of the vengeance taken by her brothers Sarus and

Ammius, are enough to prove that the subjects of heroic poetry had

already in the sixth century, if not earlier, formed themselves

compactly in the imagination. If Jordanes knew a Gothic poem on

Ermanaric and the brothers of Suanihilda, that was doubtless very

different from the Northern poem of Sorli and Hamther, which is a

later version of the same story. But even if the existence of a Gothic

ballad of Swanhild were doubted,--and the balance of probabilities is

against the doubter,--it follows indisputably from the evidence that

in the time of Jordanes people were accustomed to select and dwell

upon dramatic incidents in what was accepted as history; the

appreciation of tragedy was there, the talent to understand a tragic

situation, to shape a tragic plot, to bring out the essential matter

in relief and get rid of irrelevant particulars.

In this respect at any rate, and it is one of the most important,

there is continuity in the ancient poetry, onward from this early

date. The stories of Alboin in the Lombard history of Paulus Diaconus,

the meaning of which for the history of poetry is explained so

admirably in the Introduction to _Corpus Poeticum Boreale_, by Dr.

Vigfusson and Mr. York Powell, are further and more vivid

illustrations of the same thing. In the story of the youth of Alboin,

and the story of his death, there is matter of the same amount as

would suffice for one of the short epics of the kind we know,--a poem

of the same length as the Northern lay of the death of Ermanaric, of

the same compass as _Waltharius_,--or, to take another standard of

measurement, matter for a single tragedy with the unities preserved.

Further, there is in both of them exactly that resolute comprehension

and exposition of tragic meaning which is the virtue of the short

epics. The tragic contradiction in them could not be outdone by Victor

Hugo. It is no wonder that the story of Rosamond and Albovine king of

the Lombards became a favourite with dramatists of different schools,

from the first essays of the modern drama in the _Rosmunda_ of

Rucellai, passing by the common way of the novels of Bandello to the

Elizabethan stage. The earlier story of Alboin's youth, if less

valuable for emphatic tragedy, being without the baleful figure of a

Rosamond or a Clytemnestra, is even more perfect as an example of

tragic complication. Here again is the old sorrow of Priam; the slayer

of the son face to face with the slain man's father, and not in

enmity. In beauty of original conception the story is not finer than

that of Priam and Achilles; and it is impossible to compare the

stories in any other respect than that of the abstract plot. But in

one quality of the plot the Lombard drama excels or exceeds the story

of the last book of the _Iliad_. The contradiction is strained with a

greater tension; the point of honour is more nearly absolute. This

does not make it a better story, but it proves that the man who told

the story could understand the requirements of a tragic plot, could

imagine clearly a strong dramatic situation, could refrain from

wasting or obliterating the outline of a great story.

The Lombards and the Gepidae were at war. Alboin, son of the Lombard

king Audoin, and Thurismund, son of the Gepid king Thurisvend, met in

battle, and Alboin killed Thurismund. After the battle, the Lombards

asked King Audoin to knight his son. But Audoin answered that he would

not break the Lombard custom, according to which it was necessary for

the young man to receive arms first from the king of some other

people. Alboin when he heard this set out with forty of the Lombards,

and went to Thurisvend, whose son he had killed, to ask this honour

from him. Thurisvend welcomed him, and set him down at his right hand

in the place where his son used to sit.

Then follows the critical point of the action. The contradiction is

extreme; the reconciliation also, the solution of the case, is

perfect. Things are stretched to the breaking-point before the release

comes; nothing is spared that can possibly aggravate the hatred

between the two sides, which is kept from breaking out purely by the

honour of the king. The man from whom an infinite debt of vengeance is

owing, comes of his own will to throw himself on the generosity of his

adversary. This, to begin with, is hardly fair to simple-minded people

like the Gepid warriors; they may fairly think that their king is

going too far in his reading of the law of honour:

And it came to pass while the servants were serving at the

tables, that Thurisvend, remembering how his son had been

lately slain, and calling to mind his death, and beholding

his slayer there beside him in his very seat, began to draw

deep sighs, for he could not withhold himself any longer,

and at last his grief burst forth in words. "Very pleasant

to me," quoth he, "is the seat, but sad enough it is to see

him that is sitting therein."[16]

[Footnote 16: _C.P.B._, Introduction, p. lii.]

By his confession of his thoughts the king gives an opening to those

who are waiting for it, and it is taken at once. Insult and rejoinder

break out, and it is within a hair's breadth of the irretrievable

plunge that the king speaks his mind. He is lord in that house, and

his voice allays the tumult; he takes the weapons of his son

Thurismund, and gives them to Alboin and sends him back in peace and

safety to his father's kingdom. It is a great story, even in a prose

abstract, and the strength of its tragic problem is invincible. It is

with strength like that, with a knowledge not too elaborate or minute,

but sound and clear, of some of the possibilities of mental conflict

and tragic contradiction, that heroic poetry first reveals itself

among the Germans. It is this that gives strength to the story of the

combat between Hildebrand and his son, of the flight of Walter and

Hildegund, of the death of Brynhild, of Attila and Gudrun. Some of the

heroic poems and plots are more simple than these. The battle of

Maldon is a fair fight without any such distressful circumstances as

in the case of Hildebrand or of Walter of Aquitaine. The adventures of

Beowulf are simple, also; there is suspense when he waits the attack

of the monster, but there is nothing of the deadly crossing of

passions that there is in other stories. Even in _Maldon_, however,

there is the tragic error; the fall and defeat of the English is

brought about by the over-confidence and over-generosity of Byrhtnoth,

in allowing the enemy to come to close quarters. In _Beowulf_, though

the adventures of the hero are simple, other less simple stories are

referred to by the way. One of these is a counterpart to the story of

the youth of Alboin and the magnanimity of Thurisvend. One of the most

famous of all the old subjects of heroic poetry was the vengeance of

Ingeld for the death of his father, King Froda. The form of this story

in _Beowulf_ agrees with that of Saxo Grammaticus in preserving the

same kind of opposition as in the story of Alboin, only in this case

there is a different solution. Here a deadly feud has been put to rest

by a marriage, and the daughter of Froda's slayer is married to

Froda's son. But as in the Lombard history and in so many of the

stories of Iceland, this reconciliation is felt to be intolerable and

spurious; the need of vengeance is real, and it finds a spokesman in

an old warrior, who cannot forget his dead lord, nor endure the sight

of the new bride's kinsmen going free and wearing the spoils of their

victory. So Ingeld has to choose between his wife, wedded to him out

of his enemy's house, and his father, whom that enemy has killed. And

so everywhere in the remains, not too voluminous, of the literature of

the heroic age, one encounters this sort of tragic scheme. One of

those ancient plots, abstracted and written out fair by Saxo, is the

plot of _Hamlet_.

There is not one of the old Northern heroic poems, as distinct from

the didactic and mythological pieces, that is without this tragic

contradiction; sometimes expressed with the extreme of severity, as in

the lay of the death of Ermanaric; sometimes with lyrical

effusiveness, as in the lament of Gudrun; sometimes with a mystery

upon it from the under-world and the kingdom of the dead, as in the

poems of Helgi, and of the daughter of Angantyr.

The poem of the death of Ermanaric is a version of the story told by

Jordanes, which since his time had come to be attached to the cycle of

the Niblungs.

Swanhild, the daughter of Sigurd and Gudrun, was wedded to Ermanaric,

king of the Goths. The king's counsellor wrought on his mind with

calumnies against the queen, and he ordered her to be trampled to

death under horses' feet, and so she died, though the horses were

afraid of the brightness of her eyes and held back until her eyes were

covered. Gudrun stirred up her sons, Sorli and Hamther, to go and

avenge their sister. As they set out, they quarrelled with their

base-born brother Erp, and killed him,--the tragic error in this

history, for it was the want of a third man that ruined them, and Erp

would have helped them if they had let him. In the hall of the Goths

they defy their enemy and hew down his men; no iron will bite in their

armour; they cut off the hands and feet of Ermanaric. Then, as happens

so often in old stories, they go too far, and a last insult alters the

balance against them, as Odysseus alters it at the leave-taking with

Polyphemus. The last gibe at Ermanaric stirs him as he lies, and he

calls on the remnant of the Goths to stone the men that neither sword

nor spear nor arrow will bring down. And that was the end of them.

"We have fought a good fight; we stand on slain Goths that

have had their fill of war. We have gotten a good report,

though we die to-day or to-morrow. No man can live over the

evening, when the word of the Fates has gone forth."

There fell Sorli at the gable of the hall, and Hamther was

brought low at the end of the house.

Among the Norse poems it is this one, the _Hamðismál_, that comes

nearest to the severity of the English _Maldon_ poem. It is wilder and

more cruel, but the end attains to simplicity.

The gap in _Codex Regius_, the "Elder" or "Poetic Edda," has destroyed

the poems midway between the beginning and end of the tragedy of

Sigfred and Brynhild, and among them the poem of their last meeting.

There is nothing but the prose paraphrase to tell what that was, but

the poor substitute brings out all the more clearly the strength of

the original conception, the tragic problem.

After the gap in the manuscript there are various poems of Brynhild

and Gudrun, in which different views of the story are taken, and in

all of them the tragic contradiction is extreme: in Brynhild's

vengeance on Sigurd, in Gudrun's lament for her husband slain by her

brothers, and in the later fortunes of Gudrun. In some of these poems

the tragedy becomes lyrical, and two kinds of imagination, epic and

elegiac, are found in harmony.

The story of Helgi and Sigrun displays this rivalry of moods--a tragic

story, carried beyond the tragic stress into the mournful quiet of the

shadows.

Helgi is called upon by Sigrun to help her against Hodbrodd, and save

her from a hateful marriage. Helgi kills Hodbrodd, and wins Sigrun;

but he has also killed Sigrun's father Hogni and her elder brother.

The younger brother Dag takes an oath to put away enmity, but breaks

his oath and kills Helgi.

It is a story like all the others in which there is a conflict of

duties, between friendship and the duty of vengeance, a plot of the

same kind as that of Froda and Ingeld. Sigrun's brother is tried in

the same way as Ingeld in the story told by Saxo and mentioned in

_Beowulf_. But it does not end with the death of Helgi. Sigrun looks

for Helgi to come back in the hour of the "Assembly of Dreams," and

Helgi comes and calls her, and she follows him:--

"Thy hair is thick with rime, thou art wet with the dew of

death, thy hands are cold and dank."

"It is thine own doing, Sigrun from Sevafell, that Helgi is

drenched with deadly dew; thou weepest cruel tears, thou

gold-dight, sunbright lady of the South, before thou goest

to sleep; every one of them falls with blood, wet and chill,

upon my breast. Yet precious are the draughts that are

poured for us, though we have lost both love and land, and

no man shall sing a song of lamentation though he see the

wounds on my breast, for kings' daughters have come among

the dead."

"I have made thee a bed, Helgi, a painless bed, thou son of

the Wolfings. I shall sleep in thine arms, O king, as I

should if thou wert alive."

This is something different from epic or tragedy, but it does not

interfere with the tragedy of which it is the end.

The poem of the _Waking of Angantyr_ is so filled with mystery and

terror that it is hard to find in it anything else. After the

_Volospá_ it is the most wonderful of all the Northern poems.

Hervor, daughter of Angantyr, is left alone to avenge her father and

her eleven brothers, killed by Arrow Odd before her birth. In her

father's grave is the sword of the Dwarfs that never is drawn in vain,

and she comes to his grave to find it. The island where he lies is

full of death-fires, and the dead are astir, but Hervor goes on. She

calls on her father and her brothers to help her:

"Awake, Angantyr! It is Hervor that bids thee awake. Give me

the sword of the Dwarfs! Hervard! Hiorvard! Rani! Angantyr!

I bid you all awake!"

Her father answers from the grave; he will not give up the sword, for

the forgers of it when it was taken from them put a curse on those who

wear it. But Hervor will not leave him until he has yielded to her

prayers, and at last she receives the sword from her father's

hands.[17]

[Footnote 17: This poem has been followed by M. Leconte de Lisle in

_L'Épée d'Angantyr (Poèmes Barbares)_. It was among the first of the

Northern poems to be translated into English, in Hickes's _Thesaurus_

(1705), i. p. 193. It is also included in Percy's _Five Pieces of

Runic Poetry_ (1763).]

Although the poem of Hervor lies in this way "between the worlds" of

Life and Death,--the phrase is Hervor's own,--although the action is

so strange and so strangely encompassed with unearthly fire and

darkness, its root is not set in the dim borderland where the dialogue

is carried on. The root is tragic, and not fantastic, nor is there any

excess, nor anything strained beyond the limit of tragedy, in the

passion of Hervor.

Definite imagination of a tragic plot, and sure comprehension of the

value of dramatic problems, are not enough in themselves to make a

perfect poem. They may go along with various degrees of imperfection

in particular respects; faults of diction, either tenuity or

extravagance of phrasing may accompany this central imaginative power.

Strength of plot is partly independent of style; it bears translation,

it can be explained, it is something that can be abstracted from the

body of a poem and still make itself impressive. The dramatic value of

the story of the death of Alboin is recognisable even when it is

stated in the most general terms, as a mere formula; the story of

_Waltharius_ retains its life, even in the Latin hexameters; the plot

of _Hamlet_ is interesting, even in Saxo; the story of the Niblungs,

even in the mechanical prose paraphrase. This gift of shaping a plot

and letting it explain itself without encumbrances is not to be

mistaken for the whole secret of the highest kind of poetry. But, if

not the whole, it is the spring of the whole. All the other gifts may

be there, but without this, though all but the highest kind of epic or

tragic art may be attainable, the very highest will not be attained.

Aristotle may be referred to again. As he found it convenient in his

description of epic to insist on its dramatic nature, in his

description of tragedy it pleased him to lay emphasis on that part of

the work which is common to tragedy and epic--the story, the plot. It

may be remarked how well the barbarous poetry conforms to the pattern

laid down in Aristotle's description. The old German epic, in

_Hildebrand_, _Waldere_, _Finnesburh_, _Byrhtnoth_, besides all the

Northern lays of Sigurd, Brynhild, and Gudrun, is dramatic in its

method, letting the persons speak for themselves as much as may be. So

far it complies with Aristotle's delineation of epic. And further, all

this dramatic bent may be seen clearly to have its origin in the mere

story,--in the dramatic situation, in fables that might be acted by

puppets or in a dumb show, and yet be tragical. No analytic or

psychological interest in varieties of character--in [Greek:

êthê]--could have uttered the passion of Brynhild or of Gudrun.

Aristotle knew that psychological analysis and moral rhetoric were not

the authors of Clytemnestra or Oedipus. The barbarian poets are on a

much lower and more archaic level than the poets with whom Aristotle

is concerned, but here, where comparison is not meaningless nor

valueless, their imaginations are seen to work in the same sound and

productive way as the minds of Aeschylus or Sophocles, letting the

seed--the story in its abstract form, the mere plot--develop itself

and spring naturally into the fuller presentation of the characters

that are implied in it. It is another kind of art that studies

character in detail, one by one, and then sets them playing at chance

medley, and trusts to luck that the result will be entertaining.

That Aristotle is confirmed by these barbarian auxiliaries is of no

great importance to Aristotle, but it is worth arguing that the

barbarous German imagination at an earlier stage, relatively, than the

Homeric, is found already possessed of something like the sanity of

judgment, the discrimination of essentials from accidents, which is

commonly indicated by the term classical. Compared with Homer these

German songs are prentice work; but they are begun in the right way,

and therefore to compare them with a masterpiece in which the same way

is carried out to its end is not unjustifiable.

II

SCALE OF THE POEMS

The following are the extant poems on native heroic themes, written in

one or other of the dialects of the Teutonic group, and in unrhymed

alliterative measures.

(1) _Continental._--The _Lay of Hildebrand_ (_c._ A.D. 800), a Low

German poem, copied by High German clerks, is the only remnant of the

heroic poetry of the continental Germans in which, together with the

national metre, there is a national theme.

(2) _English._--The poems of this order in old English are _Beowulf_,

_Finnesburh_, _Waldere_, and _Byrhtnoth_, or the _Lay of Maldon_.

Besides these there are poems on historical themes preserved in the

Chronicle, of which _Brunanburh_ is the most important, and two

dramatic lyrics, _Widsith_ and _Deor_, in which there are many

allusions to the mythical and heroic cycles.

(3) _Scandinavian and Icelandic._--The largest number of heroic poems

in alliterative verse is found in the old Northern language, and in

manuscripts written in Iceland. The poems themselves may have come

from other places in which the old language of Norway was spoken, some

of them perhaps from Norway itself, many of them probably from those

islands round Britain to which a multitude of Norwegian settlers were

attracted,--Shetland, the Orkneys, the Western Islands of

Scotland.[18]

[Footnote 18: Cf. G. Vigfusson, Prolegomena to _Sturlunga_ (Oxford,

1878); (_Corpus Poeticum Boreale_ (_ibid._ 1883); _Grimm Centenary

Papers_ 1886); Sophus Bugge, _Helgedigtene_ (1896; trans. Schofield,

1899).]

The principal collection is that of the manuscript in the King's

Library at Copenhagen (2365, 4'o) generally referred to as _Codex

Regius_ (R); it is this book, discovered in the seventeenth century,

that has received the inaccurate but convenient names of _Elder Edda_,

or _Poetic Edda_, or _Edda of Sæmund the Wise_, by a series of

miscalculations fully described in the preface to the _Corpus Poeticum

Boreale_. Properly, the name _Edda_ belongs only to the prose treatise

by Snorri Sturluson.

The chief contents of _Codex Regius_ are a series of independent poems

on the Volsung story, beginning with the tragedies of _Helgi and

Swava_ and _Helgi and Sigrun_ (originally unconnected with the Volsung

legend), and going on in the order of events.

The series is broken by a gap in which the poems dealing with some of

the most important parts of the story have been lost. The matter of

their contents is known from the prose paraphrase called _Volsunga

Saga_. Before the Volsung series comes a number of poems chiefly

mythological: the _Sibyl's Prophecy_, (Volospá); _the Wooing of Frey_,

or the _Errand of Skirnir_; the _Flyting of Thor and Woden_

(Harbarzlióð); _Thor's Fishing for the Midgarth Serpent_ (Hymiskviða);

the _Railing of Loki_ (Lokasenna); the _Winning of Thor's Hammer_

(Þrymskviða); the _Lay of Weland_. There are also some didactic poems,

chief among them being the gnomic miscellany under the title

_Hávamál_; while besides this there are others, like _Vafþrúðnismál_,

treating of mythical subjects in a more or less didactic and

mechanical way. There are a number of prose passages introducing or

linking the poems. The confusion in some parts of the book is great.

_Codex Regius_ is not the only source; other mythic and heroic poems

are found in other manuscripts. The famous poem of the _Doom of

Balder_ (Gray's "Descent of Odin"); the poem of the _Rescue of

Menglad_, the enchanted princess; the verses preserved in the

_Heiðreks Saga_, belonging to the story of Angantyr; besides the poem

of the _Magic Mill_ (Grottasöngr) and the _Song of the Dart_ (Gray's

"Fatal Sisters"). There are many fragmentary verses, among them some

from the _Biarkamál_, a poem with some curious points of likeness to

the English _Lay of Finnesburh_. A Swedish inscription has preserved

four verses of an old poem on Theodoric.

Thus there is some variety in the original documents now extant out of

the host of poems that have been lost. One conclusion at least is

irresistible--that, in guessing at the amount of epic poetry of this

order which has been lost, one is justified in making a liberal

estimate. Fragments are all that we possess. The extant poems have

escaped the deadliest risks; the fire at Copenhagen in 1728, the

bombardment in 1807, the fire in the Cotton Library in 1731, in which

_Beowulf_ was scorched but not burned. The manuscripts of _Finnesburh_

and _Maldon_ have been mislaid; but for the transcripts taken in time

by Hickes and Hearne they would have been as little known as the songs

that the Sirens sang. The poor remnants of _Waldere_ were found by

Stephens in two scraps of bookbinders' parchment.

When it is seen what hazards have been escaped by those bits of

wreckage, and at the same time how distinct in character the several

poems are, it is plain that one may use some freedom in thinking of

the amount of this old poetry that has perished.

The loss is partly made good in different ways: in the Latin of the

historians, Jordanes, Paulus Diaconus, and most of all in the

paraphrases, prose and verse, by Saxo Grammaticus; in Ekkehard's Latin

poem of _Waltharius_ (_c._ A.D. 930); in the _Volsunga Saga_, which

has kept the matter of the lost poems of _Codex Regius_ and something

of their spirit; in the _Thidreks Saga_, a prose story made up by a

Norwegian in the thirteenth century from current North German ballads

of the Niblungs; in the German poems of the twelfth and thirteenth

centuries, which, in a later form of the language and in rhyming

verse, have preserved at any rate some matters of tradition, some

plots of stories, if little of the peculiar manner and imagination of

the older poetry.

The casual references to Teutonic heroic subjects in a vast number of

authors have been brought together in a monumental work, _die deutsche

Heldensage_, by Wilhelm Grimm (1829).

THE WESTERN GROUP

_Hildebrand_, _Finnesburh_, _Waldere_, _Beowulf_, _Byrhtnoth_

The Western group of poems includes all those that are not

Scandinavian; there is only one among them which is not English, the

poem of _Hildebrand_. They do not afford any very copious material for

inferences as to the whole course and progress of poetry in the

regions to which they belong. A comparison of the fragmentary

_Hildebrand_ with the fragments of _Waldere_ shows a remarkable

difference in compass and fulness; but, at the same time, the

vocabulary and phrases of _Hildebrand_ declare that poem unmistakably

to belong to the same family as the more elaborate _Waldere_.

_Finnesburh_, the fragmentary poem of the lost Lambeth MS., seems

almost as far removed as _Hildebrand_ from the more expansive and

leisurely method of _Waldere_; while _Waldere_, _Beowulf_, and the

poem of _Maldon_ resemble one another in their greater ease and

fluency, as compared with the brevity and abruptness of _Hildebrand_

or _Finnesburh_. The documents, as far as they go, bear out the view

that in the Western German tongues, or at any rate in England, there

was a development of heroic poetry tending to a greater amplitude of

narration. This progress falls a long way short of the fulness of

Homer, not to speak of the extreme diffuseness of some of the French

_Chansons de Geste_. It is such, however, as to distinguish the

English poems, _Waldere_, _Beowulf_, and _Byrhtnoth_, very obviously

from the poem of _Hildebrand_. While, at the same time, the brevity of

_Hildebrand_ is not like the brevity of the Northern poems.

_Hildebrand_ is a poem capable of expansion. It is easy enough to see

in what manner its outlines might be filled up and brought into the

proportions of _Waldere_ or _Beowulf_. In the Northern poems, on the

other hand, there is a lyrical conciseness, and a broken emphatic

manner of exposition, which from first to last prevented any such

increase of volume as seems to have taken place in the old English

poetry; though there are some poems, the _Atlamál_ particularly, which

indicate that some of the Northern poets wished to go to work on a

larger scale than was generally allowed them by their traditions.

In the Northern group there is a great variety in respect of the

amount of incident that goes to a single poem; some poems deal with a

single adventure, while others give an abstract of a whole heroic

history. In the Western poems this variety is not to be found. There

is a difference in this respect between _Hildebrand_ and _Waldere_,

and still more, at least on the surface, between _Hildebrand_ and

_Beowulf_; but nothing like the difference between the _Lay of the

Hammer_ (Þrymskviða), which is an episode of Thor, and the _Lay of

Weland_ or the _Lay of Brynhild_, which give in a summary way a whole

history from beginning to end.

_Hildebrand_ tells of the encounter of father and son, Hildebrand and

Hadubrand, with a few references to the past of Hildebrand and his

relations to Odoacer and Theodoric. It is one adventure, a tragedy in

one scene.

_Finnesburh_, being incomplete at the beginning and end, is not good

evidence. What remains of it presents a single adventure, the fight in

the hall between Danes and Frisians. There is another version of the

story of _Finnesburh_, which, as reported in _Beowulf_ (ll. 1068-1154)

gives a good deal more of the story than is given in the separate

_Finnesburh Lay_. This episode in _Beowulf_, where a poem of

_Finnesburh_ is chanted by the Danish minstrel, is not to be taken as

contributing another independent poem to the scanty stock; the

minstrel's story is reported, not quoted at full length. It has been

reduced by the poet of _Beowulf_, so as not to take up too large a

place of its own in the composition. Such as it is, it may very well

count as direct evidence of the way in which epic poems were produced

and set before an audience; and it may prove that it was possible for

an old English epic to deal with almost the whole of a tragic history

in one sitting. In this case the tragedy is far less complex than the

tale of the Niblungs, whatever interpretation may be given to the

obscure allusions in which it is preserved.

Finn, son of Folcwalda, king of the Frisians, entertained Hnæf the

Dane, along with the Danish warriors, in the castle of Finnesburh.

There, for reasons of his own, he attacked the Danes; who kept the

hall against him, losing their own leader Hnæf, but making a great

slaughter of the Frisians.

The _Beowulf_ episode takes up the story at this point.

Hnæf was slain in the place of blood. His sister Hildeburg, Finn's

wife, had to mourn for brother and son.

Hengest succeeded Hnæf in command of the Danes and still kept the hall

against the Frisians. Finn was compelled to make terms with the Danes.

Hengest and his men were to live among the Frisians with a place of

their own, and share alike with Finn's household in all the gifts of

the king. Finn bound himself by an oath that Hengest and his men

should be free of blame and reproach, and that he would hold any

Frisian guilty who should cast it up against the Danes that they had

followed their lord's slayer.[19] Then, after the oaths, was held the

funeral of the Danish and the Frisian prince, brother and son of

Hildeburg the queen.

[Footnote 19: Compare _Cynewulf and Cyneheard_ in the Chronicle (A.D.

755); also the outbreak of enmity, through recollection of old wrongs,

in the stories of Alboin, and of the vengeance for Froda (_supra_, pp.

68-70).]

Then they went home to Friesland, where Hengest stayed with Finn

through the winter. With the spring he set out, meaning vengeance; but

he dissembled and rendered homage, and accepted the sword the lord

gives his liegeman. Death came upon Finn in his house; for the Danes

came back and slew him, and the hall was made red with the Frisian

blood. The Danes took Hildeburg and the treasure of Finn and carried

the queen and the treasure to Denmark.

The whole story, with the exception of the original grievance or

grudge of the Frisian king, which is not explained, and the first

battle, which is taken as understood, is given in _Beowulf_ as the

contents of one poem, delivered in one evening by a harper. It is more

complicated than the story of _Hildebrand_, more even than _Waldere_;

and more than either of the two chief sections of _Beowulf_ taken

singly--"Beowulf in Denmark" and the "Fight with the Dragon." It is

far less than the plot of the long _Lay of Brynhild_, in which the

whole Niblung history is contained. In its distribution of the action,

it corresponds very closely to the story of the death of the Niblungs

as given by the _Atlakviða_ and the _Atlamál_. The discrepancies

between these latter poems need not be taken into account here. In

each of them and in the _Finnesburh_ story there is a double climax;

first the wrong, then the vengeance. _Finnesburh_ might also be

compared, as far as the arrangement goes, with the _Song of Roland_;

the first part gives the treacherous attack and the death of the hero;

then comes a pause between the two centres of interest, followed in

the second part by expiation of the wrong.

The story of _Finnesburh_ is obscure in many respects; the tradition

of it has failed to preserve the motive for Finn's attack on his

wife's brother, without which the story loses half its value.

Something remains, nevertheless, and it is possible to recognise in

this episode a greater regard for unity and symmetry of narrative than

is to be found in _Beowulf_ taken as a whole.

The Lambeth poem of _Finnesburh_ most probably confined itself to the

battle in the hall. There is no absolute proof of this, apart from the

intensity of its tone, in the extant fragment, which would agree best

with a short story limited, like _Hildebrand_, to one adventure. It

has all the appearance of a short lay, a single episode. Such a poem

might end with the truce of Finn and Hengest, and an anticipation of

the Danes' vengeance:

It is marvel an the red blood run not, as the rain does in

the street.

Yet the stress of this adventure is not greater than that of Roland,

which does not end at Roncesvalles; it may be that the _Finnesburh_

poem went on to some of the later events, as told in the _Finnesburh_

abridgment in _Beowulf_.

The story of Walter of Aquitaine as represented by the two fragments

of old English verse is not greatly inconsistent with the same story

in its Latin form of _Waltharius_. The Latin verses of _Waltharius_

tell the story of the flight of Walter and Hildegund from the house of

Attila, and of the treacherous attack on Walter by Gunther, king of

the Franks, against the advice, but with the unwilling consent, of

Hagen, his liegeman and Walter's friend. Hagen, Hildegund, and Walter

were hostages with Attila from the Franks, Burgundians, and

Aquitanians. They grew up together at the Court of Attila till

Gunther, son of Gibicho, became king of the Franks and refused tribute

to the Huns. Then Hagen escaped and went home. Walter and Hildegund

were lovers, and they, too, thought of flight, and escaped into the

forests, westward, with a great load of treasure, and some fowling and

fishing gear for the journey.

After they had crossed the Rhine, they were discovered by Hagen; and

Gunther, with twelve of the Franks, went after them to take the

Hunnish treasure: Hagen followed reluctantly. The pursuers came up

with Walter as he was asleep in a hold among the hills, a narrow green

place with overhanging cliffs all round, and a narrow path leading up

to it. Hildegund awakened Walter, and he went and looked down at his

adversaries. Walter offered terms, through the mediation of Hagen, but

Gunther would have none of them, and the fight began. The Latin poem

describes with great spirit how one after another the Franks went up

against Walter: Camelo (ll. 664-685), Scaramundus (686-724),

Werinhardus the bowman (725-755), Ekevrid the Saxon (756-780), who

went out jeering at Walter; Hadavartus (781-845), Patavrid (846-913),

Hagen's sister's son, whose story is embellished with a diatribe on

avarice; Gerwicus (914-940), fighting to avenge his companions and

restore their honour--

Is furit ut caesos mundet vindicta sodales;

but he, too, fell--

Exitiumque dolens, pulsabat calcibus arvum.

Then there was a breathing-space, before Randolf, the eighth of them,

made trial of Walter's defence (962-981). After him came Eleuther,

whose other name was Helmnod, with a harpoon and a line, and the line

was held by Trogus, Tanastus, and the king; Hagen still keeping aloof,

though he had seen his nephew killed. The harpoon failed; three

Frankish warriors were added to the slain; the king and Hagen were

left (l. 1060).

Gunther tried to draw Hagen into the fight. Hagen refused at first,

but gave way at last, on account of the slaying of his nephew. He

advised a retreat for the night, and an attack on Walter when he

should have left the fastness. And so the day ended.

Walter and Hildegund took turns to watch, Hildegund singing to awaken

Walter when his turn came. They left their hold in the morning; but

they had not gone a mile when Hildegund, looking behind, saw two men

coming down a hill after them. These were Gunther and Hagen, and they

had come for Walter's life. Walter sent Hildegund with the horse and

its burden into the wood for safety, while he took his stand on rising

ground. Gunther jeered at him as he came up; Walter made no answer to

him, but reproached Hagen, his old friend. Hagen defended himself by

reason of the vengeance due for his nephew; and so they fought, with

more words of scorn. Hagen lost his eye, and Gunther his leg, and

Walter's right hand was cut off by Hagen; and "this was their sharing

of the rings of Attila!"--

Sic, sic, armillas partiti sunt Avarenses (l. 1404).

Walter and Hildegund were king and queen of Aquitaine, but of his

later wars and victories the tale has no more to tell.

Of the two old English fragments of this story the first contains part

of a speech of Hildegund[20] encouraging Walter.

[Footnote 20: Hildegyth, her English name, is unfortunately not

preserved in either of the fragmentary leaves. It is found (Hildigið)

in the _Liber Vitae_ (Sweet, _Oldest English Texts_, p. 155).]

Its place appears to be in the pause of the fight, when the Frankish

champions have been killed, and Gunther and Hagen are alone. The

speech is rhetorical: "Thou hast the sword Mimming, the work of

Weland, that fails not them that wield it. Be of good courage, captain

of Attila; never didst thou draw back to thy hold for all the strokes

of the foeman; nay, my heart was afraid because of thy rashness. Thou

shalt break the boast of Gunther; he came on without a cause, he

refused the offered gifts; he shall return home empty-handed, if he

return at all." That is the purport of it.

The second fragment is a debate between Gunther and Walter. It begins

with the close of a speech of Gunther (Guðhere) in which there are

allusions to other parts of the heroic cycle, such as are common in

_Beowulf_.

The allusion here is to one of the adventures of Widia, Weland's son;

how he delivered Theodoric from captivity, and of Theodoric's

gratitude. The connexion is obscure, but the reference is of great

value as proving the resemblance of narrative method in _Waldere_ and

_Beowulf_, not to speak of the likeness to the Homeric way of quoting

old stories. Waldere answers, and this is the substance of his

argument: "Lo, now, Lord of the Burgundians, it was thy thought that

Hagena's hand should end my fighting. Come then and win my corselet,

my father's heirloom, from the shoulders weary of war."[21]

[Footnote 21: The resemblance to Hildebrand, l. 58, is pointed out by

Sophus Bugge: "Doh maht du nu aodlihho, ibu dir din ellen taoc, In sus

heremo man hrusti giwinnan." (Hildebrand speaks): "Easily now mayest

thou win the spoils of so old a man, if thy strength avail thee." It

is remarkable as evidence of the strong conventional character of the

Teutonic poetry, and of the community of the different nations in the

poetical convention, that two short passages like _Hildebrand_ and

_Waldere_ should present so many points of likeness to other poems, in

details of style. Thus the two lines quoted from _Hildebrand_ as a

parallel to _Waldere_ contain also the equivalent of the Anglo-Saxon

phrase, _Þonne his ellen deah_, a familiar part of the Teutonic

_Gradus_.]

The fragment closes with a pious utterance of submission to heaven, by

which the poem is shown to be of the same order as _Beowulf_ in this

respect also, as well as others, that it is affected by a turn for

edification, and cannot stand as anything like a pure example of the

older kind of heroic poetry. The phrasing here is that of the

Anglo-Saxon secondary poems; the common religious phrasing that came

into vogue and supplemented the old heathen poetical catch-words.

The style of _Waldere_ makes it probable that the action of the story

was not hurried unduly. If the author kept the same proportion

throughout, his poem may have been almost as long as _Waltharius_. It

is probable that the fight among the rocks was described in detail;

the _Maldon_ poem may show how such a subject could be managed in old

English verse, and how the matter of _Waltharius_ may have been

expressed in _Waldere_. Roughly speaking, there is about as much

fighting in the three hundred and twenty-five lines of _Maldon_ as in

double the number of hexameters in _Waltharius_; but the _Maldon_ poem

is more concise than the extant fragments of _Waldere_. _Waldere_ may

easily have taken up more than a thousand lines.

The Latin and the English poems are not in absolute agreement. The

English poet knew that Guðhere, Guntharius, was Burgundian, not Frank;

and an expression in the speech of Hildegyth suggests that the fight

in the narrow pass was not so exact a succession of single combats as

in _Waltharius_.

The poem of _Maldon_ is more nearly related in its style to _Waldere_

and _Beowulf_ than to the _Finnesburh_ fragment. The story of the

battle has considerable likeness to the story of the fight at

Finnesburh. The details, however, are given in a fuller and more

capable way, at greater length.

_Beowulf_ has been commonly regarded as exceptional, on account of its

length and complexity, among the remains of the old Teutonic poetry.

This view is hardly consistent with a right reading of _Waldere_, or

of _Maldon_ either, for that matter. It is not easy to make any great

distinction between _Beowulf_ and _Waldere_ in respect of the

proportions of the story. The main action of _Beowulf_ is comparable

in extent with the action of _Waltharius_. The later adventure of

_Beowulf_ has the character of a sequel, which extends the poem, to

the detriment of its proportions, but without adding any new element

of complexity to the epic form. Almost all the points in which the

manner of _Beowulf_ differs from that of _Finnesburh_ may be found in

_Waldere_ also, and are common to _Waldere_ and _Beowulf_ in

distinction from _Hildebrand_ and _Finnesburh_. The two poems, the

poem of _Beowulf_ and the fragments of _Waldere_, seem to be alike in

the proportion they allow to dramatic argument, and in their manner of

alluding to heroic matters outside of their own proper stories, not to

speak of their affinities of ethical tone and sentiment.

The time of the whole action of _Beowulf_ is long. The poem, however,

falls naturally into two main divisions--_Beowulf in Denmark_, and the

_Death of Beowulf_. If it is permissible to consider these for the

present as two separate stories, then it may be affirmed that in none

of the stories preserved in the old poetic form of England and the

German Continent is there any great length or complexity.

_Hildebrand_, a combat; _Finnesburh_, a defence of a house; _Waldere_,

a champion beset by his enemies; _Beowulf in Denmark_, the hero as a

deliverer from pests; _Beowulf's Death_ in one action; _Maldon_ the

last battle of an English captain; these are the themes, and they are

all simple. There is more complexity in the story of _Finnesburh_, as

reported in _Beowulf_, than in all the rest; but even that story

appears to have observed as much as possible the unity of action. The

epic singer at the court of the Dane appears to have begun, not with

the narrative of the first contest, but immediately after that,

assuming that part of the story as known, in order to concentrate

attention on the vengeance, on the penalty exacted from Finn the

Frisian for his treachery to his guests.

Some of the themes may have less in them than others, but there is no

such variety of scale among them as will be found in the Northern

poems. There seems to be a general agreement of taste among the

Western German poets and audiences, English and Saxon, as to the right

compass of an heroic lay. When the subject was a foreign one, as in

the _Hêliand_, in the poems of _Genesis_ and _Exodus_, in _Andreas_,

or _Elene_, there might be room for the complexity and variety of the

foreign model. The poem of _Judith_ may be considered as a happy

instance in which the foreign document has of itself, by a

pre-established harmony, conformed to an old German fashion. In the

original story of _Judith_ the unities are observed in the very degree

that was suited to the ways of the Anglo-Saxon poetry. It is hazardous

to speak generally of a body of poetry so imperfectly represented in

extant literature, but it is at any rate permissible to say that the

extant heroic poems, saved out of the wreck of the Western Teutonic

poetry, show a strong regard for unity of action, in every case except

that of _Beowulf_; while in that case there are two stories--a story

and a sequel--each observing a unity within its own limit.

Considered apart from the Northern poems, the poems of England and

Germany give indication of a progress in style from a more archaic and

repressed, to a more developed and more prolix kind of narrative. The

difference is considerable between _Hildebrand_ and _Waldere_,

between _Finnesburh_ and _Beowulf_.

It is the change and development in style, rather than any increase in

the complexity of the themes, that accounts for the difference in

scale between the shorter and the longer poems.

For the natural history of poetical forms this point is of the highest

importance. The Teutonic poetry shows that epic may be developed out

of short lays through a gradual increase of ambition and of eloquence

in the poets who deal with common themes. There is no question here of

the process of agglutination and contamination whereby a number of

short lays are supposed to be compounded into an epic poem. Of that

process it may be possible to find traces in _Beowulf_ and elsewhere.

But quite apart from that, there is the process by which an archaic

stiff manner is replaced by greater freedom, without any loss of unity

in the plot. The story of Walter of Aquitaine is as simple as the

story of Hildebrand. The difference between _Hildebrand_ and _Waldere_

is the difference between an archaic and an accomplished mode of

narrative, and this difference is made by a change in spirit and

imagination, not by a process of agglutination. To make the epic of

_Waldere_ it was not necessary to cobble together a number of older

lays on separate episodes. It was possible to keep the original plan

of the old story in its simplest irreducible form, and still give it

the force and magnificence of a lofty and eloquent style. It was for

the attainment of this pitch of style that the heroic poetry laboured

in _Waldere_ and _Beowulf_, with at least enough success to make these

poems distinct from the rest in this group.

With all the differences among them, the continental and English

poems, _Hildebrand_, _Waldere_, and the rest, form a group by

themselves, with certain specific qualities of style distinguishing

them from the Scandinavian heroic poetry. The history of the

Scandinavian poetry is the converse of the English development. Epic

poetry in the North becomes more and more hopeless as time goes on,

and with some exceptions tends further and further away from the

original type which was common to all the Germans, and from which

those common forms and phrases have been derived that are found in the

"Poetic Edda" as well as in _Beowulf_ or the _Hêliand_.

In England before the old poetry died out altogether there was

attained a certain magnitude and fulness of narrative by which the

English poems are distinguished, and in virtue of which they may claim

the title _epic_ in no transferred or distorted sense of the term. In

the North a different course is taken. There seems indeed, in the

_Atlamál_ especially, a poem of exceptional compass and weight among

those of the North, to have been something like the Western desire for

a larger scale of narrative poem. But the rhetorical expansion of the

older forms into an equable and deliberate narrative was counteracted

by the still stronger affection for lyrical modes of speech, for

impassioned, abrupt, and heightened utterance. No epic solidity or

composure could be obtained in the fiery Northern verse; the poets

could not bring themselves into the frame of mind required for long

recitals; they had no patience for the intervals necessary, in epic as

in dramatic poetry, between the critical moments. They would have

everything equally full of energy, everything must be emphatic and

telling. But with all this, the Northern heroic poems are in some of

their elements strongly allied to the more equable and duller poems

of the West; there is a strong element of epic in their lyrical

dialogues and monologues, and in their composition and arrangement of

plots.

THE NORTHERN GROUP

In comparing the English and the Northern poems, it should be borne in

mind that the documents of the Northern poetry are hardly sufficient

evidence of the condition of Northern epic at its best. The English

documents are fragmentary, indeed, but at least they belong to a time

in which the heroic poetry was attractive and well appreciated; as is

proved by the wonderful freshness of the _Maldon_ poem, late though it

is. The Northern poems seem to have lost their vogue and freshness

before they came to be collected and written down. They were

imperfectly remembered and reported; the text of them is broken and

confused, and the gaps are made up with prose explanations. The

fortunate preservation of a second copy of _Volospá_, in Hauk's book,

has further multiplied labours and perplexities by a palpable

demonstration of the vanity of copiers, and of the casual way in which

the strophes of a poem might be shuffled at random in different texts;

while the chief manuscript of the poems itself has in some cases

double and incongruous versions of the same passage.[22]

[Footnote 22: Cf. _C.P.B._, i. p. 375, for double versions of part of

_Hamðismál_, and of the _Lay of Helgi_. On pp. 377-379, parts of the

two texts of _Volospá_--R and H--are printed side by side for

comparison.]

The _Codex Regius_ contains a number of poems that can only be called

_epic_ in the widest and loosest sense of the term, and some that are

not _epic_ in any sense at all. The gnomic verses, the mythological

summaries, may be passed over for the present; whatever illustrations

they afford of early beliefs and ideas, they have no evidence to give

concerning the proportions of stories. Other poems in the collection

come under the denomination of epic only by a rather liberal extension

of the term to include poems which are no more epic than dramatic, and

just as much the one as the other, like the poems of _Frey's Wooing_

and of the earlier exploits of Sigurd, which tell their story

altogether by means of dialogue, without any narrative passages at

all. The links and explanations are supplied, in prose, in the

manuscript. Further, among the poems which come nearer to the English

form of narrative poetry there is the very greatest variety of scale.

The amount of story told in the Northern poems may vary indefinitely

within the widest limits. Some poems contain little more than an idyll

of a single scene; others may give an abstract of a whole history, as

the whole Volsung story is summarised, for instance, in the _Prophecy

of Gripir_.

Some of the poems are found in such a confused and fragmentary form,

with interruptions and interpolations, that, although it is possible

to make out the story, it is hardly possible to give any confident

judgment about the original proportions of the poems. This is

particularly the case with the poems in which the hero bears the name

of Helgi. The difficulties of these were partly appreciated, but not

solved, by the original editor.

The differences of scale may be illustrated by the following summary

description, which aims at little more than a rough measurement of the

stories, for purposes of comparison with _Beowulf_ and _Waldere_.

The _Lay of Weland_ gives a whole mythical history. How Weland and his

brother met with the swan-maidens, how the swan-brides left them in

the ninth year, how Weland Smith was taken prisoner by King Nidad, and

hamstrung, and set to work for the king; and of the vengeance of

Weland. There are one hundred and fifty-nine lines, but in the text

there are many defective places. The _Lay_ is a ballad history,

beginning at the beginning, and ending, not with the end of the life

of Weland, nor with the adventures of his son Widia, but with the

escape of Weland from the king, his enemy, after he had killed the

king's sons and put shame on the king's daughter Bodvild.

In plan, the _Lay of Weland_ is quite different from the lays of the

adventures of Thor, the _Þrymskviða_ and the _Hymiskviða_, the songs

of the Hammer and the Cauldron. These are chapters, episodes, in the

history of Thor, not summaries of the whole matter, such as is the

poem of _Weland_.

The stories of Helgi Hundingsbane, and of his namesakes, as has been

already remarked, are given in a more than usually complicated and

tangled form.

At first everything is simple enough. A poem of the life of Helgi

begins in a way that promises a mode of narrative fuller and less

abrupt than the _Lay of Weland_. It tells of the birth of Helgi, son

of Sigmund; of the coming of the Norns to make fast the threads of his

destiny; of the gladness and the good hopes with which his birth was

welcomed. Then the _Lay of Helgi_ tells, very briefly, how he slew

King Hunding, how the sons of Hunding made claims for recompense. "But

the prince would make no payment of amends; he bade them look for no

payment, but for the strong storm, for the grey spears, and for the

rage of Odin."[23] And the sons of Hunding were slain as their father

had been.

[Footnote 23: Cf. _Maldon_, l. 45 _sq._, "Hearest thou what this

people answer? They will pay you, for tribute, spears, the deadly

point, the old swords, the weapons of war that profit you not," etc.]

Then the main interest begins, the story of Helgi and Sigrun.

"A light shone forth from the Mountains of Flame, and lightnings

followed." There appeared to Helgi, in the air, a company of armed

maidens riding across the field of heaven; "their armour was stained

with blood, and light went forth from their spears." Sigrun from among

the other "ladies of the South" answered Helgi, and called on him for

help; her father Hogni had betrothed her, against her will, to

Hodbrodd, son of Granmar. Helgi summoned his men to save her from this

loathed wedding. The battle in which Helgi slew his enemies and won

the lady of the air is told very shortly, while disproportionate

length is given to an interlude of vituperative dialogue between two

heroes, Sinfiotli, Helgi's brother, and Gudmund, son of Granmar, the

warden of the enemy's coast; this passage of _Vetus Comoedia_ takes up

fifty lines, while only six are given to the battle, and thirteen to

the meeting of Helgi and Sigrun afterwards. Here ends the poem which

is described in _Codex Regius_ as the _Lay of Helgi_ (_Helgakviða_).

The story is continued in the next section in a disorderly way, by

means of ill-connected quotations. The original editor, whether

rightly or wrongly, is quite certain that the _Lay of Helgi_, which

ends with the victory of Helgi over the unamiable bridegroom, is a

different poem from that which he proceeds to quote as the _Old Lay of

the Volsungs_, in which the same story is told. In this second version

there is at least one interpolation from a third; a stanza from a poem

in the "dialogue measure," which is not the measure in which the rest

of the story is told. It is uncertain what application was meant to

be given to the title _Old Lay of the Volsungs_, and whether the

editor included under that title the whole of his second version of

Helgi and Sigrun. For instance, he gives another version of the

railing verses of Sinfiotli, which he may or may not have regarded as

forming an essential part of his _Old Volsung Lay_. He distinguishes

it at any rate from the other "Flyting," which he definitely and by

name ascribes to _Helgakviða_.

It is in this second version of the story of Helgi that the tragedy is

worked out. Helgi slays the father of Sigrun in his battle against the

bridegroom's kindred: Sigrun's brother takes vengeance. The space is

scant enough for all that is told in it; scant, that is to say, in

comparison with the space of the story of Beowulf; though whether the

poem loses, as poetry, by this compression is another matter.

It is here, in connexion with the second version, that the tragedy is

followed by the verses of the grief of Sigrun, and the return of Helgi

from the dead; the passage of mystery, the musical close, in which the

tragic idea is changed into something less distinct than tragedy, yet

without detriment to the main action.

Whatever may be the critical solution of the textual problems of these

_Lays_, it is impossible to get out of the text any form of narrative

that shall resemble the English mode. Even where the story of Helgi is

slowest, it is quicker, more abrupt, and more lyrical even than the

_Lay of Finnesburh_, which is the quickest in movement of the English

poems.

The story of Helgi and Sigrun is intelligible, and though incomplete,

not yet so maimed as to have lost its proportions altogether. Along

with it, however, in the manuscript there are other, even more

difficult fragments of poems about another Helgi, son of Hiorvard,

and his love for another Valkyria, Swava. And yet again there are

traces of a third Helgi, with a history of his own. The editors of

_Corpus Poeticum Boreale_ have accepted the view of the three Helgis

that is indicated by the prose passages of the manuscript here;

namely, that the different stories are really of the same persons born

anew, "to go through the same life-story, though with varying

incidents."[24] "Helgi and Swava, it is said, were born again," is the

note in the manuscript. "There was a king named Hogni, and his

daughter was Sigrun. She was a Valkyria and rode over air and sea;

_she was Swava born again_." And, after the close of the story of

Sigrun, "it was a belief in the old days that men were born again, but

that is now reckoned old wives' fables. Helgi and Sigrun, it is

reported, were born anew, and then he was Helgi Haddingjaskati, and

she Kara, Halfdan's daughter, as is told in the songs of Kara, and she

was a Valkyria."

[Footnote 24: _C.P.B._, i. p. 130.]

It is still possible to regard the "old wives' fable" (which is a

common element in Celtic legend and elsewhere) as something

unessential in the poems of Helgi; as a popular explanation intended

to reconcile different myths attaching to the name. However that may

be, the poems of _Helgi and Swava_ are so fragmentary and confused,

and so much has to be eked out with prose, that it is impossible to

say what the complete form and scale of the poetical story may have

been, and even difficult to be certain that it was ever anything else

than fragments. As they stand, the remains are like those of the story

of Angantyr; prominent passages quoted by a chronicler, who gives the

less important part of the story in prose, either because he has

forgotten the rest of the poem, or because the poem was made in that

way to begin with.

Of the poem of _Kara_, mentioned in the manuscript, there is nothing

left except what can be restored by a conjectural transference of some

verses, given under the name of Helgi and Sigrun, to this third

mysterious plot. The conjectures are supported by the reference to the

third story in the manuscript, and by the fact that certain passages

which do not fit in well to the story of Helgi and Sigrun, where they

are placed by the collector, correspond with prose passages in the

late Icelandic romance of _Hromund Greipsson_,[25] in which Kara is

introduced.

[Footnote 25: _C.P.B._, Introduction, p. lxxviii.]

The story of Helgi and Swava is one that covers a large period of

time, though the actual remnants of the story are small. It is a

tragedy of the early Elizabethan type described by Sir Philip Sidney,

which begins with the wooing of the hero's father and mother. The hero

is dumb and nameless from his birth, until the Valkyria, Swava, meets

him and gives him his name, Helgi; and tells him of a magic sword in

an island, that will bring him victory.

The tragedy is brought about by a witch who drives Hedin, the brother

of Helgi, to make a foolish boast, an oath on the Boar's head (like

the vows of the Heron or the Peacock, and the _gabs_ of the Paladins

of France) that he will wed his brother's bride. Hedin confesses his

vanity to Helgi, and is forgiven, Helgi saying, "Who knows but the

oath may be fulfilled? I am on my way to meet a challenge."

Helgi is wounded mortally, and sends a message to Swava to come to

him, and prays her after his death to take Hedin for her lord. The

poem ends with two short energetic speeches: of Swava refusing to have

any love but Helgi's; and of Hedin bidding farewell to Swava as he

goes to make amends, and avenge his brother.

These fragments, though their evidence tells little regarding epic

scale or proportions, are, at least, illustrations of the nature of

the stories chosen for epic narrative. The character of Hedin, his

folly and magnanimity, is in strong contrast to that of Dag, the

brother of Sigrun, who makes mischief in the other poem. The character

of Swava is a fainter repetition of Sigrun.

Nothing very definite can be made out of any of the Helgi poems with

regard to the conventions of scale in narrative; except that the

collector of the poems was himself in difficulties in this part of his

work, and that he knew he had no complete poem to offer his readers,

except perhaps the _Helgakviða_.

The poem named by the Oxford editors "The Long Lay of Brunhild" (i. p.

293) is headed in the manuscript "Qviða Sigurþar," _Lay of Sigurd_,

and referred to, in the prose gloss of _Codex Regius_, as "The Short

Lay of Sigurd."[26] This is one of the most important of the Northern

heroic lays, in every respect; and, among other reasons, as an example

of definite artistic calculation and study, a finished piece of work.

It shows the difference between the Northern and the Western standards

of epic measurement. The poem is one that gives the whole of the

tragedy in no longer space than is used in the poem of _Maldon_ for

the adventures of a few hours of battle. There are 288 lines, not all

complete.

[Footnote 26: The "Long Lay of Sigurd" has disappeared. Cf. Heusler,

_Die Lieder der Lücke im Codex Regius der Edda_, 1902.]

There are many various modes of representation in the poem. The

beginning tells the earlier story of Sigurd and Brynhild in twenty

lines:--

It was in the days of old that Sigurd, the young Volsung,

the slayer of Fafni, came to the house of Giuki. He took the

troth-plight of two brothers; the doughty heroes gave oaths

one to another. They offered him the maid Gudrun, Giuki's

daughter, and store of treasure; they drank and took counsel

together many a day, Child Sigurd and the sons of Giuki;

until they went to woo Brynhild, and Sigurd the Volsung rode

in their company; he was to win her if he could get her. The

Southern hero laid a naked sword, a falchion graven, between

them twain; nor did the Hunnish king ever kiss her, neither

take her into his arms; he handed the young maiden over to

Giuki's son.

She knew no guilt in her life, nor was any evil found in her

when she died, no blame in deed or thought. The grim Fates

came between.[27]

[Footnote 27: From _C.P.B._, i. pp. 293, 294, with some

modifications.]

"It was the Fates that worked them ill." This sententious close of the

prologue introduces the main story, chiefly dramatic in form, in which

Brynhild persuades Gunnar to plan the death of Sigurd, and Gunnar

persuades Hogni. It is love for Sigurd, and jealousy of Gudrun, that

form the motive of Brynhild. Gunnar's conduct is barely intelligible;

there is no explanation of his compliance with Brynhild, except the

mere strength of her importunity. Hogni is reluctant, and remembers

the oaths sworn to Sigurd. Gothorm, their younger brother, is made

their instrument,--he was "outside the oaths." The slaying of Sigurd

by Gothorm, and Sigurd's dying stroke that cuts his slayer in two, are

told in the brief manner of the prologue to the poem; likewise the

grief of Gudrun. Then comes Sigurd's speech to Gudrun before his

death.

The principal part of the poem, from line 118 to the end, is filled by

the storm in the mind of Brynhild: her laughter at the grief of

Gudrun, her confession of her own sorrows, and her preparation for

death; the expostulations of Gunnar, the bitter speech of

Hogni,--"Let no man stay her from her long journey"; the stroke of the

sword with which Brynhild gives herself the death-wound; her dying

prophecy. In this last speech of Brynhild, with all its vehemence,

there is manifest care on the part of the author to bring out clearly

his knowledge of the later fortunes of Gudrun and Gunnar. The prophecy

includes the birth of Swanhild, the marriage of Attila and Gudrun, the

death of Gunnar at the hands of Attila, by reason of the love between

Gudrun and Oddrun; the vengeance of Gudrun on Attila, the third

marriage of Gudrun, the death of Swanhild among the Goths. With all

this, and carrying all this burden of history, there is the passion of

Brynhild, not wholly obscured or quenched by the rhetorical ingenuity

of the poet. For it is plain that the poet was an artist capable of

more than one thing at a time. He was stirred by the tragic personage

of Brynhild; he was also pleased, intellectually and dispassionately,

with his design of grouping together in one composition all the events

of the tragic history.

The poem is followed by the short separate Lay (forty-four lines) of

the _Hell-ride of Brynhild_, which looks as if it might have been

composed by the same or another poet, to supply some of the history

wanting at the beginning of the _Lay of Brynhild_. Brynhild, riding

Hell-ward with Sigurd, from the funeral pile where she and Sigurd had

been laid by the Giuking lords, is encountered by a giantess who

forbids her to pass through her "rock-built courts," and cries shame

upon her for her guilt. Brynhild answers with the story of her evil

fate, how she was a Valkyria, punished by Odin for disobedience, set

in the ring of flame, to be released by none but the slayer of Fafni;

how she had been beguiled in Gunnar's wooing, and how Gudrun cast it

in her teeth. This supplies the motive for the anger of Brynhild

against Sigurd, not clearly expressed in the _Lay_, and also for

Gunnar's compliance with her jealous appeal, and Hogni's consent to

the death of Sigurd. While, in the same manner as in the _Lay_, the

formalism and pedantry of the historical poet are burnt up in the

passion of the heroine. "Sorrow is the portion of the life of all men

and women born: we two, I and Sigurd, shall be parted no more for

ever." The latter part of the _Lay_, the long monologue of Brynhild,

is in form like the _Lamentation of Oddrun_ and the idyll of Gudrun

and Theodoric; though, unlike those poems, it has a fuller narrative

introduction: the monologue does not begin until the situation has

been explained.

On the same subject, but in strong contrast with the _Lay of

Brynhild_, is the poem that has lost its beginning in the great gap in

_Codex Regius_. It is commonly referred to in the editions as the

_Fragmentary Lay of Sigurd_ ("Brot af Sigurðarkviðu"); in the Oxford

edition it is styled the "Fragment of a short Brunhild Lay." There are

seventy-six lines (incomplete) beginning with the colloquy of Gunnar

and Hogni. Here also the character of Brynhild is the inspiration of

the poet. But there does not seem to have been in his mind anything

like the historical anxiety of the other poet to account for every

incident, or at least to show that, if he wished, he could account for

every incident, in the whole story. It is much stronger in expression,

and the conception of Brynhild is more dramatic and more imaginative,

though less eloquent, than in the longer poem. The phrasing is short

and emphatic:--

Gudrun, Giuki's daughter, stood without, and this was the

first word she spoke: "Where is Sigurd, the king of men,

that my brothers are riding in the van?" Hogni made answer

to her words: "We have hewn Sigurd asunder with the sword;

ever the grey horse droops his head over the dead king."

Then spake Brynhild, Budli's daughter: "Have great joy of

your weapons and hands. Sigurd would have ruled everything

as he chose, if he had kept his life a little longer. It was

not meet that he should so rule over the host of the Goths

and the heritage of Giuki, who begat five sons that

delighted in war and in the havoc of battle."

Brynhild laughed, the whole house rang: "Have long joy of

your hands and weapons, since ye have slain the valiant

king."[28]

[Footnote 28: From _C.P.B._, i. p. 307, with some changes.]

The mood of Brynhild is altered later, and she "weeps at that she had

laughed at." She wakens before the day, chilled by evil dreams. "It

was cold in the hall, and cold in the bed," and she had seen in her

sleep the end of the Niblungs, and woke, and reproached Gunnar with

the treason to his friend.

It is difficult to estimate the original full compass of this

fragmentary poem, but the scale of its narrative and its drama can be

pretty clearly understood from what remains. It is a poem with nothing

superfluous in it. The death of Sigurd does not seem to have been

given in any detail, except for the commentary spoken by the eagle and

the raven, prophetic of the doom of the Niblungs. The mystery of

Brynhild's character is curiously recognised by a sort of informal

chorus. It is said that "they were stricken silent as she spoke, and

none could understand her bearing, that she should weep to speak of

that for which she had besought them laughing." It is one of the

simplest forms in narrative; but in this case the simplicity of the

rhetoric goes along with some variety and subtlety of dramatic

imagination. The character of the heroine is rightly imagined and

strongly rendered, and her change of mind is impressive, as the

author plainly meant it to be.

The _Lay of Attila_ (_Atlakviða_) and the Greenland poem of _Attila_

(_Atlamál_) are two poems which have a common subject and the same

amount of story: how Attila sent for Gunnar and Hogni, the brothers of

Gudrun, and had them put to death, and how Gudrun took vengeance on

Attila.

In the _Atlakviða_ there are 174 lines, and some broken places; in

_Atlamál_ there are 384 lines; its narrative is more copious than in

most of the Norse Lays. There are some curious discrepancies in the

matter of the two poems, but these hardly affect the scale of the

story. The difference between them in this respect is fairly

represented by the difference in the number of their lines. The scenes

of the history are kept in similar proportions in both poems.

The story of Gudrun's vengeance has been seen (p. 83) to correspond,

as far as the amount of action is concerned, pretty closely with the

story of Hengest and Finn. The epic unity is preserved; and, as in the

_Finnesburh_ story, there is a distribution of interest between the

_wrong_ and the _vengeance_,--(1) the death of Hnæf, the death of

Gunnar and Hogni; (2) the vengeance of Hengest, the vengeance of

Gudrun, with an interval of dissimulation in each case.

The plot of the death of Attila, under all its manifold variations, is

never without a certain natural fitness for consistent and

well-proportioned narrative.

None of the Northern poems take any account of the theory that the

murder of Sigfred was avenged by his wife upon her brothers. That

theory belongs to the _Nibelungenlied_; in some form or other it was

known to Saxo; it is found in the Danish ballad of _Grimild's

Revenge_, a translation or adaptation from the German. That other

conception of the story may be more full of tragic meaning; the

Northern versions, which agree in making Attila the slayer of the

Niblung kings, have the advantage of greater concentration. The motive

of Attila, which is different in each of the poems on this subject, is

in no case equal to the tragic motive of Kriemhild in the

_Nibelungen_. On the other hand, the present interest of the story is

not distracted by reference to the long previous history of Sigfred; a

new start is made when the Niblungs are invited to Attila's Court. The

situation is intelligible at once, without any long preliminary

explanation.

In the _Lay of Attila_ the hoard of the Niblungs comes into the story;

its fatal significance is recognised; it is the "metal of discord"

that is left in the Rhine for ever. But the situation can be

understood without any long preliminary history of the Niblung

treasure and its fate. Just as the story of _Waldere_ explains itself

at once,--a man defending his bride and his worldly wealth against a

number of enemies, in a place where he is able to take them one by

one, as they come on,--so the story of _Attila_ can begin without long

preliminaries; though the previous history is to be found, in

tradition, in common stories, if any one cares to ask for it. The plot

is intelligible in a moment: the brothers inveigled away and killed by

their sister's husband (for reasons of his own, as to which the

versions do not agree); their sister's vengeance by the sacrifice of

her own children and the death of her husband.

In the _Atlamál_ there is very much less recognition of the previous

history than in _Atlakviða_. The story begins at once with the

invitation to the Niblung brothers and with their sister's warning.

Attila's motive is not emphasised; he has a grudge against them on

account of the death of Brynhild his sister, but his motive is not

very necessary for the story, as the story is managed here. The

present scene and the present passion are not complicated with too

much reference to the former history of the personages. This mode of

procedure will be found to have given some trouble to the author, but

the result at any rate is a complete and rounded work.

There is great difference of treatment between _Atlakviða_ and the

Greenland poem _Atlamál_, a difference which is worth some further

consideration.[29] There is, however, no very great difference of

scale; at any rate, the difference between them becomes unimportant

when they are compared with _Beowulf_. Even the more prolix of the

two, which in some respects is the fullest and most elaborate of the

Northern heroic poems, yet comes short of the English scale. _Atlamál_

takes up very little more than the space of the English poem of

_Maldon_, which is a simple narrative of a battle, with nothing like

the tragic complexity and variety of the story of the vengeance of

Gudrun.

[Footnote 29: See pp. 150-156 below.]

There is yet another version of the death of Gunnar the Giuking to

compare with the two poems of _Attila_--the _Lament of Oddrun_

(_Oddrúnargrátr_), which precedes the _Atlakviða_ in the manuscript.

The form of this, as well as the plot of it, is wonderfully different

from either of the other two poems. This is one of the epic or tragic

idylls in which a passage of heroic legend is told dramatically by one

who had a share in it. Here the death of Gunnar is told by Oddrun his

mistress, the sister of Attila.

This form of indirect narration, by giving so great a dramatic value

to the person of the narrator, before the beginning of her story, of

course tends to depreciate or to exclude the vivid dramatic scenes

that are common everywhere else in the Northern poems. The character

of the speaker leaves too little independence to the other characters.

But in none of the poems is the tragic plot more strongly drawn out

than in the seventy lines of Oddrun's story to Borgny.

The father of Oddrun, Brynhild, and Attila had destined Oddrun to be

the bride of Gunnar, but it was Brynhild that he married. Then came

the anger of Brynhild against Sigurd, the death of Sigurd, the death

of Brynhild that is renowned over all the world. Gunnar sought the

hand of Oddrun from her brother Attila, but Attila would not accept

the price of the bride from the son of Giuki. The love of Oddrun was

given to Gunnar. "I gave my love to Gunnar as Brynhild should have

loved him. We could not withstand our love: I kept troth with Gunnar."

The lovers were betrayed to Attila, who would not believe the

accusation against his sister; "yet no man should pledge his honour

for the innocence of another, when it is a matter of love." At last he

was persuaded, and laid a plot to take vengeance on the Niblungs;

Gudrun knew nothing of what was intended.

The death of Gunnar and Hogni is told in five-and-twenty lines:--

There was din of the hoofs of gold when the sons of Giuki

rode into the Court. The heart was cut out of the body of

Hogni; his brother they set in the pit of snakes. The wise

king smote on his harp, for he thought that I should come to

his help. Howbeit I was gone to the banquet at the house of

Geirmund. From Hlessey I heard how the strings rang loud. I

called to my handmaidens to rise and go; I sought to save

the life of the prince; we sailed across the sound, till we

saw the halls of Attila. But the accursed serpent crept to

the heart of Gunnar, so that I might not save the life of

the king.

Full oft I wonder how I keep my life after him, for I

thought I loved him like myself.

Thou hast sat and listened while I have told thee many evils

of my lot and theirs. The life of a man is as his thoughts

are.

The Lamentation of Oddrun is finished.

The _Hamðismál_, the poem of the death of Ermanaric, is one that, in

its proportions, is not unlike the _Atlakviða_: the plot has been

already described (pp. 70-71). The poem of 130 lines as it stands has

suffered a good deal. This also is like the story of Hengest and the

story of Gudrun in the way the action is proportioned. It began with

the slaying of Swanhild, the wrong to Gudrun--this part is lost. It

goes on to the speech of Gudrun to her sons, Sorli and Hamther, and

their expedition to the hall of the Goth; it ends with their death. In

this case, also, the action must have begun at once and intelligibly,

as soon as the motive of the Gothic treachery and cruelty was

explained, or even without that explanation, in the more immediate

sense of the treachery and cruelty, in the story of Swanhild trampled

to death, and of the news brought to Gudrun. Here, also, there is much

less expansion of the story than in the English poems; everything is

surcharged with meaning.

The _Old Lay of Gudrun_ (_Guðrúnarkviða in forna_), or the tale of

Gudrun to Theodoric, an idyll like the story of Oddrun, goes quickly

over the event of the killing of Sigurd, and the return of Grani,

masterless. Unlike the _Lament of Oddrun_, this monologue of Gudrun

introduces dramatic passages. The meeting of Gudrun and her brother is

not merely told by Gudrun in indirect narration; the speeches of Hogni

and Gudrun are reported directly, as they might have been in a poem of

the form of _Atlakviða_, or the _Lay of Sigurd_, or any other in

which the poet tells the story himself, without the introduction of an

imaginary narrator. The main part of the poem is an account of the way

in which Gudrun's mother, Grimhild, compelled her, by a potion of

forgetfulness, to lose the thought of Sigurd and of all her woes, and

consent to become the wife of Attila. This part is well prefaced by

the quiet account of the life of Gudrun in her widowhood, before

Grimhild began her schemes; how Gudrun lived in the house of Half,

with Thora, daughter of Hakon, in Denmark, and how the ladies spent

their time at the tapestry frame, working pictures of the heroes, the

ships of Sigmund, the ranks of Hunnish warriors.

In the manuscript there are found at the end of the _Old Lay of

Gudrun_, as if they were part of it, some verses which have been

separated from it by the editors (_C.P.B._, i. 347) as a "Fragment of

an Atli Lay." They came from a poem of which the design, at any rate,

was the same as that of the _Old Lay_, and Gudrun is the speaker. She

tells how, after the death of Gunnar and Hogni, she was wakened by

Atli, to listen to his evil dreams, foreboding his doom, and how she

interpreted them in a way to comfort him and put him off his guard.

In English poetry there are instances of stories introduced

dramatically, long before the pilgrimage to Canterbury. In _Beowulf_

there are various episodes where a story is told by one of the persons

engaged. Besides the poem of Hengest chanted in Heorot, there is

Beowulf's own narrative of his adventures, after his return to his own

people in the kingdom of the Gauts, and passages still nearer in form

to the _Lament of Oddrun_ and the _Confession of Gudrun_ are the last

speech of Beowulf before his death (2426-2537), and the long speech of

Wiglaf (2900-3027) telling of the enmity of the Gauts and the Swedes.

But those are not filled with dramatic pathos to the same degree as

these Northern _Heroides_, the monologues of Oddrun and Gudrun.

The _Lay of Gudrun_ (_Gudrúnarkviða_) which comes in the manuscript

immediately before the _Lay of Sigurd_, is a pure heroic idyll. Unlike

most of its companions, it leaves the details of the Volsung story

very much in neglect, and brings all its force to bear on the

representation of the grief of the queen, contrasted with the stormy

passion of Brynhild. It is rightly honoured for its pathetic

imagination of the dumb grief of Gudrun, broken up and dissolved when

her sister draws away the covering from the face of Sigurd. "But fire

was kindled in the eyes of Brynhild, daughter of Budli, when she

looked upon his wounds."

The refrain of the poem increases its resemblance to the form of a

Greek idyll. The verse is that of narrative poetry; the refrain is not

purely lyrical and does not come in at regular intervals.

The _Tregrof Guðrúnar_, or _Chain of Woe_, restored by the Oxford

editors out of the most confused part of the original text, is pure

lamentation, spoken by Gudrun before her death, recounting all her

sorrows: the bright hair of Swanhild trampled in the mire; Sigurd

slain in his bed, despoiled of victory; Gunnar in the court of the

serpents; the heart of Hogni cut out of his living body--"Saddle thy

white steed and come to me, Sigurd; remember what we promised to one

another, that thou wouldst come from Hell to seek me, and I would come

to thee from the living world."

The short poem entitled _Qviða Guðrúnar_ in the manuscript, the

_Ordeal of Gudrun_ in the English edition, has a simple plot. The

subject is the calumny which was brought against Gudrun by Herkja, the

cast-off mistress of Attila (that "she had seen Gudrun and Theodoric

together") and the ordeal of water by which Gudrun proved her

innocence, while the falsehood was brought home to Herkja, the

bondwoman. The theme is slighter than all the rest, and this poem, at

least, might be reckoned not unfit to be taken up as a single scene in

a long epic.

Some of the Northern poems in the epic measure are almost wholly made

up of dialogue. The story of _Balder's Doom_ is a dialogue between

Odin and the witch whom he raises from the dead. The earlier part of

the story of Sigurd in the "Elder Edda" is almost all dialogue, even

where the narrative measure is employed.

There is hardly any mere narrative in the poems remaining of the cycle

of Angantyr. In several other cases, the writer has only given,

perhaps has only remembered clearly, the dramatic part of the poems in

which he was interested; the intervals of the story he fills up with

prose. It is difficult to tell where this want of narrative connexion

in the poetry is original, and where it is due to forgetfulness or

ignorance; where the prose of the manuscripts is to be taken as

standing in the place of lost narrative verses, and where it fills a

gap that was never intended to be filled with verse, but was always

left to the reciter, to be supplied in his own way by passages of

story-telling, between his chantings of the poetic dialogue of Hervor

and the Shepherd, for instance, or of Hervor and Angantyr.

The poems just mentioned are composed in narrative measure. There are

also other dialogue poems in a measure different from this, and

peculiarly adapted to dialogues, the measure of the gnomic _Hávamál_

and of the didactic mythological poems, _Vafþrúðnismál_, _Alvíssmál_,

_Grímnismál_. These pieces are some distance removed from epic or

ballad poetry. But there are others in this gnomic measure which it

is not easy to keep far apart from such dialogue poems as _Balder's

Doom_, though their verse is different. By their peculiar verse they

are distinguished from the English and Saxon heroic poetry; but they

retain, for all their peculiar metre and their want of direct

narrative, some of the characteristics of Teutonic epic.

The _Lokasenna_ has a plot, and represents dramatically an incident in

the history of the gods. The chief business is Loki's shameless

rehearsal of accusations against the gods, and their helpless

rejoinders. It is a masque of the gods, and not a ballad like the

_Winning of Thor's Hammer_. It is not, however, a mere string of

"flytings" without a plot; there is some plot and action. It is the

absence of Thor that gives Loki courage to browbeat the gods; the

return of Thor at the end of the poem avenges the gods on their

accuser.

In the strange poem of the _Railing of Thor and Harbard_, and in a

very rough and irregular kind of verse, there is a similar kind of

plot.

The _Contention of Atli and Rimgerd the Giantess_ is a short comic

dialogue, interposed among the fragments of the poem of Helgi

Hiorvard's son, and marked off from them by its use of the dialogue

verse, as well as by its episodic plot.

Helgi Hiorvard's son had killed the giant Hati, and the giant's

daughter comes at night where Helgi's ships are moored in the firth,

and stands on a rock over them, challenging Helgi and his men. Atli,

keeping watch on deck, answers the giantess, and there is an exchange

of gibes in the old style between them. Helgi is awakened and joins in

the argument. It is good comedy of its kind, and there is poetry in

the giantess's description of the company of armed maidens of the air

whom she has seen keeping guard over Helgi's ships--"three nines of

maids, but one rode foremost, a white maid, enhelmed. Their rearing

horses shook dew from their manes into the deep dales, and hail upon

the lofty woods; thence come fair seasons among men. But the whole

sight was hateful to me" (_C.P.B._, i. p. 154).

The giantess is kept there by the gibes of Atli till the daybreak.

"Look eastward, now, Rimgerd!" And the giantess is turned into stone,

a great harbour mark, to be laughed at.

In some other poems there is much more action, and much more need for

an interpreter to act as chorus in the intervals between the

dialogues. The story of the wooing of Gerd is in this form: how Frey

sat in the seat of Odin and saw a fair maid in Jotunheim, and got

great sickness of thought, till his swain Skirnir found the cause of

his languishing, and went to woo Gerd for him in Gymi's Garth. Another

love-story, and a story not unlike that of Frey and Gerd, is contained

in two poems _Grógaldr_ and _Fiölsvinnsmál_, that tell of the winning

of Menglad by her destined lover.

These two latter poems are not in _Codex Regius_, and it was only

gradually that their relation to one another was worked out, chiefly

by means of the Danish ballad which contains the story of both

together in the right order.

In the first, Svipdag the hero comes to his mother's grave to call on

her for counsel. He has been laid under a mysterious charge, to go on

a quest which he cannot understand, "to find out Menglad," and Menglad

he has never heard of, and does not know where she is to be found.

The second poem, also in dialogue, and in the dialogue measure, gives

the coming of Svipdag to the mysterious castle, and his debate with

the giant who keeps the gate. For Menglad is the princess whose story

is told everywhere, and under a thousand names,--the lady of a strange

country, kept under a spell in a witch's castle till the deliverer

comes. The wooing of Gerd out of Jotunheim is another version of the

same story, which in different forms is one of the oldest and most

universal everywhere,--the fairy story of the princess beyond the sea.

The second dialogue is very much encumbered by the pedantries of the

giant who keeps the gate; it ends, however, in the recognition of

Svipdag and Menglad. Menglad says: "Long have I sat waiting for thee,

many a day; but now is that befallen that I have sought for, and thou

art come to my bower. Great was the sorrow of my waiting; great was

thine, waiting for the gladness of love. Now it is very truth for us:

the days of our life shall not be sundered."

The same form is used in the older poems of Sigurd, those that come

before the hiatus of the great manuscript, and have been gathered

together in the Oxford edition under the title of the _Old Play of the

Wolsungs_. They touch briefly on all the chief points of the story of

the Niblung hoard, from the capture and ransom of Andvari to the

winning of the warrior maiden Sigrdrifa by Sigurd.

All these last-mentioned dialogue poems, in spite of their lyric or

elegiac measure, are like the narrative poems in their dependence upon

traditional, mythic, or heroic stories, from which they choose their

themes. They are not like the lyrical heroic poems of _Widsith_ and

_Deor_ in Anglo-Saxon literature, which survey a large tract of heroic

legend from a point of vantage. Something of this sort is done by some

of the Norse dialogue poems, _Vafþrúðnismál_, etc., but in the poems

of Frey and Gerd, of Svipdag and Menglad, and of the Niblung

treasure, though this reflective and comparative method occasionally

makes itself evident, the interest is that of the story. They have a

story to represent, just as much as the narrative poems, though they

are debarred from the use of narrative.

* * * * *

It must be confessed that there is an easily detected ambiguity in the

use of the term epic in application to the poems, whether German,

English, or Northern, here reviewed. That they are heroic poems cannot

be questioned, but that they are epic in any save the most general

sense of the term is not quite clear. They may be epic in character,

in a general way, but how many of them have a claim to the title in

its eminent and special sense? Most of them are short poems; most of

them seem to be wanting in the breadth of treatment, in the amplitude

of substance, that are proper to epic poetry.

_Beowulf_, it may be admitted, is epic in the sense that distinguishes

between the longer narrative poem and the shorter ballad. The

fragments of _Waldere_ are the fragments of a poem that is not cramped

for room, and that moves easily and with sufficient eloquence in the

representation of action. The narrative of the _Maldon_ poem is not

pinched nor meagre in its proportions. Hardly any of the other poems,

however, can be compared with these in this respect. These are the

most liberal in scale of all the old Teutonic poems; the largest epic

works of which we know anything directly. These are the fullest in

composition, the least abstract or elliptical; and they still want

something of the scale of the _Iliad_. The poem of _Maldon_, for

instance, corresponds not to the _Iliad_, but to the action of a

single book, such as the twelfth, with which it has been already

compared. If the story of the English _Waldere_, when complete, was

not more elaborate than the extant Latin _Waltharius_, it must have

come far short of the proportions of Homer. It is a story for a single

recitation, like the story of Finnesburh in _Beowulf_. The poem of

_Beowulf_ may have more in it than the story of Walter and Hildegund,

but this advantage would seem to be gained at the expense of the unity

of the poem. It is lengthened out by a sequel, by the addition of a

new adventure which requires the poet to make a new start. In the poem

of _Hildebrand_ there is a single tragedy contained in a single scene.

It is briefly rendered, in a style evidently more primitive, less

expansive and eloquent, than the style of _Beowulf_ or _Waldere_. Even

if it had been given in a fuller form, the story would still have been

essentially a short one; it could not well have been longer than the

poem of _Sohrab and Rustum_, where the theme is almost the same, while

the scale is that of the classical epic.

If the old English epic poetry falls short of the Homeric magnitude,

it almost equally exceeds the scale of the Northern heroic poems. If

_Beowulf_ and _Waldere_ seem inadequate in size, the defect will not

be made good out of the Northern lays of _Helgi_ or _Sigfred_.

The Northern poems are exceedingly varied in their plan and

disposition, but none of them is long, and many of them are in the

form of _dramatic lyric_, with no place for pure narrative at all;

such are the poems of _Frey's Wooing_, of _Svipdag and Menglad_, and

others, in which there is a definite plot worked out by means of lyric

dialogue. None of them is of anything like the same scale as

_Beowulf_, which is a complex epic poem, or _Byrhtnoth_, which is an

episodic poem liberally dealt with and of considerable length.

The Teutonic poetry presents itself, at a first view, as the

complement of Homer. Here are to be found many of the things that are

wanting at the beginning of Greek literary history. Here are single

epic lays, or clusters of them, in every form. Here, in place of the

two great poems, rounded and complete, there is the nebulous expanse

of heroic tradition, the outline of an heroic cycle, together with a

number of episodic poems taking their origin from one point or another

of the cycle, according as the different parts of the story happen to

catch the imagination of a poet. Instead of the Homeric scale of epic

there are a number of brief epic tragedies, the plots of which are

chosen from the multitude of stories current in tradition.

Among these shorter epic poems, if such they may be called, there are

to be distinguished great varieties of procedure in regard to the

amount of action represented in the poem.

There is one class of poem that represents a single action with some

detail; there is another that represents a long and complex story in a

summary and allusive way. The first kind may be called _episodic_ in

the sense that it takes up about the same quantity of story as might

make an act in a play; or perhaps, with a little straining of the

term, as much as might serve for one play in a trilogy.

The second kind is not episodic; it does not seem fitted for a place

in a larger composition. It is a kind of short and summary epic,

taking as large a province of history as the _Iliad_ or the _Odyssey_.

_Hildebrand_, the _Fight at Finnesburh_, _Waldere_, _Byrhtnoth_, the

_Winning of the Hammer_, _Thor's Fishing_, the _Death of the Niblungs_

(in any of the Northern versions), the _Death of Ermanaric_, might all

be fairly regarded as belonging to the first kind of story; while the

_Lay of Weland_ and the _Lay of Brynhild_ cover a much larger extent

of story, though not of actual space, than any of those.