Homeric poems. One can tell perhaps from Mr. Arnold's poem of _Sohrab
and Rustum_ how much is wanting to the _Lay of Hildebrand_, and on
what scale the story of Hildebrand might have been told if it had been
told in the Homeric instead of the archaic German manner. The story of
Walter of Aquitaine in the Latin hexameters of _Waltharius_ takes up
1456 lines. Although the author of this Latin poem is something short
of Homer, "a little overparted" by the comparison, still his work is
designed on the scale of classical epic, and gives approximately the
right extent of the story in classical form. But while those stories
are comparatively short, even in their most expanded forms, the story
of Weland and the story of Helgi each contains as much as would
suffice for the plot of an _Odyssey_, or more. The _Lay of Brynhild_
is not an episodic poem of the vengeance and the passion of Brynhild,
though that is the principal theme. It begins in a summary manner with
Sigurd's coming to the house of the Niblungs, the wedding of Sigurd
and Gudrun, the wooing of Brynhild for Gunnar; all these earlier
matters are taken up and touched on before the story comes to the
searchings of heart when the kings are persuaded to kill Sigurd. Then
the death of Sigurd is told of, and the rest of the poem is filled
with the tragedy of Brynhild and Gudrun; the future history of Gudrun
is spoken of prophetically by Brynhild before she throws herself on
the funeral pile. Plainly this cannot be considered in the same sense
"episodic" as the poem of Thor's fishing for the Midgarth snake. The
poems of Thor's fishing and the recovery of the hammer are distinctly
fragments of a legendary cycle. The _Lay of Brynhild_ makes an
attempt to complete the whole Volsung story from beginning to end,
while giving special importance to one particular incident of it,--the
passion of Brynhild after the death of Sigurd. The poems of _Attila_
and the _Lay of the Death of Ermanaric_ are more restricted.
It remains true that the great story of the Niblung tragedy was never
told at length in the poetical measure used for episodes of it, and
for the summary form of the _Lay of Brynhild_. It should be
remembered, however, that a poem of the scale of the _Nibelungenlied_,
taking up the whole matter, must go as far beyond the Homeric limit as
the _Lay of Brynhild_ falls short of it. From one point of view the
shorter episodic poems are more Homeric in their plots than either the
summary epics which cover the whole ground, as the _Lay of Brynhild_
attempts to cover it, or the longer works in prose that begin at the
beginning and go on to the end, like the _Volsunga Saga_. The _Iliad_
and the _Odyssey_ are themselves episodic poems; neither of them has
the reach of the _Nibelungenlied_. It should not be forgotten, either,
that Aristotle found the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ rather long. The
Teutonic poems are not to be despised because they have a narrower
orbit than the _Iliad_. Those among them that contain matter enough
for a single tragedy, and there are few that have not as much as this
in them, may be considered not to fall far short of the standard fixed
by Aristotle for the right amount of action to be contained in an
heroic poem. They are too hurried, they are wanting in the classical
breadth and ease of narrative; but at any rate they are
comprehensible, they observe an epic unity. They do not, like certain
of the endless French poetical histories, remind one of the picture
of incomprehensible bulk in Aristotle's _Poetics_, the animal 10,000
stadia long.
Thus, though it is natural at first to imagine that in the old
Teutonic poetry one is possessed of such separate lays or ballads as
might be the original materials of a larger epic, an epic of the
Homeric scale, this impression will hardly remain long after a closer
criticism of the workmanship of the poems. Very few of them correspond
in the amount of their story to the episodes of the Homeric poems.
Many of them contain in a short space the matter of stories more
complicated, more tragical, than the story of Achilles. Most of them
by their unity and self-consistency make it difficult to think of them
as absorbed in a longer epic. This is the case not only with those
that take in a whole history, like the _Lay of Brynhild_, but also
with those whose plot is comparatively simple, like _Hildebrand_ or
_Waldere_. It is possible to think of the story of Walter and
Hildegund as forming part of a larger story of the fortunes of the
Huns. It has this subordinate place in the _Thidreks Saga_. But it is
not easy to believe that in such a case it preserves its value.
_Thidreks Saga_ is not an epic, though it is made by an agglutination
of ballads. In like manner the tragedy of _Hildebrand_ gains by its
isolation from the stories of the other chiefs, Theodoric and Odoacer.
The stories of Walter and of Hildebrand, like the story of Hamlet the
Dane, are too strong in themselves to form part of a larger
composition, without detriment to its unity and harmony. They might be
brought in allusively and in a subordinate way, like the story of
Thebes and other stories in the _Iliad_; but that is not the same
thing as making an epic poem out of separate lays. So that on all
grounds the first impression of the Teutonic epic poetry has to be
modified. If ever epic poetry was made by a conglomeration of
ballads, it must have had other kinds of material than this. Some of
the poems are episodic; others are rather to be described as
abridgments of epic than as separate epic scenes. But neither in the
one case nor in the other is there to be found the kind of poetry that
is required by the hypothesis of composite epic. There are short epics
that might conceivably have served as the framework, or the
ground-plan, of a more elaborate work, containing, like the _Lay of
Helgi_ or the _Lay of Brynhild_, incidents enough and hints of
character enough for a history fully worked out, as large as the
Homeric poems. If it should be asked why there is so little evidence
of any Teutonic attempt to weave together separate lays into an epic
work, the answer might be, first, that the separate lays we know are
too much separate and individual, too strong in themselves, to be
satisfactorily cobbled into a more expansive fabric; and, secondly,
that it has not yet been proved that epic poems can be made by process
of cobbling. The need of a comprehensive epic of the Niblungs was not
imperative. Neither was there any demand in Athens, in the time of
Sophocles and Euripides, for a comprehensive work--a _Thebaid_, a
_Roman de Thèbes_--to include the plots of all the tragedies of the
house of Cadmus. It was not a poet, but a prose journeyman, who did
this sort of work in the North, and it was not till the old school of
poetry had passed away that the composite prose history of the
Volsungs and Niblungs, of Sigmund and Sinfiotli, Sigurd, Brynhild,
Gudrun, and Atli, was put together out of the old poems. The old lays,
Northern and Western, whatever their value, have all strong individual
characters of their own, and do not easily submit to be regarded as
merely the unused materials, waiting for an epic composer who never
was born.
III
EPIC AND BALLAD POETRY
The ballads of a later age have many points of likeness to such poems
as _Hildebrand_, _Finnesburh_, _Maldon_, and the poems of the Northern
collection. The two orders of poetry are, however, not to be
confounded. Their affinity indeed is clear. But the older poems in
alliterative verse have a character not possessed by the ballads which
followed them, and which often repeated the same stories in the later
Middle Ages. Even the simplest of the older poems, which is the _Lay
of Hildebrand_, is distinguished by evident signs of dignity from even
the most ambitious of the rhyming ballads in any of the tongues. Its
rhetoric is of a different order.
This is not a question of preferences, but of distinction of kinds.
The claim of an epic or heroic rank for the older poems need not be
forced into a denial of all the other excellences of the rhyming
ballads.
_Ballad_, as the term is commonly used, implies a certain degree of
simplicity, and an absence of high poetical ambition. Ballads are for
the market-place and the "blind crowder," or for the rustic chorus
that sings the ballad burden. The wonderful poetical beauty of some of
the popular ballads of Scotland and Denmark, not to speak of other
lands, is a kind of beauty that is never attained by the great
poetical artists; an unconscious grace. The ballads of the Scottish
Border, from their first invention to the publication of the _Border
Minstrelsy_, lie far away from the great streams of poetical
inspiration. They have little or nothing to do with the triumphs of
the poets; the "progress of poesy" leaves them untouched; they learn
neither from Milton nor from Pope, but keep a life of their own that
has its sources far remote in the past, in quite another tradition of
art than that to which the great authors and their works belong.
The Teutonic epic poems, the Northern poems at any rate, are ballads
in respect of their management of the plots. The scale of them is not
to be distinguished from the scale of a ballad: the ballads have the
same way of indicating and alluding to things and events without
direct narrative, without continuity, going rapidly from critical
point to point, in their survey of the fable.
But there is this great difference, that the style of the earlier
epics is ambitious and self-conscious, an aristocratic and
accomplished style. The ballads of _Clerk Saunders_ or _Sir Patrick
Spens_ tell about things that have been generally forgotten, in the
great houses of the country, by the great people who have other things
to think about, and, if they take to literature, other models of
style. The lay of the fight at Finnesburh, the lays of the death of
Attila, were in their time the poems of the king's or the earl's hall;
they were at the height of literary accomplishment in their
generation, and their style displays the consciousness of rank. The
ballads never had anything like the honour that was given to the older
lays.
The difference between epic and ballad style comes out most obviously
when, as frequently has happened, in Denmark, Iceland, and the
Faroes, the poems of the old school have been translated from their
epic verse into the "eights and sixes" or some other favourite measure
of the common ballads. This has been the case, for instance, with the
poem of Thor's Hammer, and the poem of the journey of Svipdag in
search of Menglad. In other cases, as in that of the return of Helgi
from the dead, it is less certain, though it is probable, that there
is a direct relation between the two kinds of poetry, between the old
Northern poem of Helgi and the Danish ballad of Sir Aage which has the
same story to tell; but a comparison of the two styles, in a case like
this, is none the less possible and justifiable.
The poems in the older form and diction, however remote they may be
from modern fashions, assert themselves unmistakably to be of an
aristocratic and not a popular tradition. The ballads have many things
in common with the other poems, but they have lost the grand style,
and the pride and solemnity of language. One thing they have retained
almost invariably. Ballad poetry may be trusted to preserve the sense
of the tragic situation. If some ballads are less strong than others
in their rendering of a traditional story, their failure is not
peculiar to that kind of composition. Not every ballad-singer, and not
every tragic poet, has the same success in the development of his
fable. As a rule, however, it holds good that the ballads are sound in
their conception of a story; if some are constitutionally weak or
unshapely, and others have suffered from the infirmity of reciters and
transcribers, these accidents are not to be counted against the class
of poetry to which they belong. Yet, however well the ballads may give
the story, they cannot give it with the power of epic; and that this
power belongs to the older kind of verse, the verse of the _Lay of
Brynhild_, may be proved with all the demonstration that this kind of
argument allows. It is open to any one to say that the grand style is
less attractive than the charm of the ballad burdens, that the airy
music of the ballads is more appealing and more mysterious than all
the eloquence of heroic poetry; but that does not touch the question.
The rhetoric of the older poems merely claims to be acknowledged for
what it is worth.
The Danish ballad of _Ungen Sveidal_, "Child Sveidal,"[30] does not
spoil the ancient story which had been given in the older language and
older verse of _Svipdag and Menglad_. But there are different ways of
describing how the adventurer comes to the dark tower to rescue the
unknown maiden. The ballad uses the common ballad forms, the common
easy rhymes and assonances:--
Out they cast their anchor
All on the white sea sand,
And who was that but the Child Sveidal
Was first upon the land?
His heart is sore with deadly pain
For her that he never saw,
His name is the Child Sveidal;
So the story goes.
[Footnote 30: Grundtvig, _Danmarks gamle Folkeviser_, No. 70. See
above, p. 114.]
This sort of story need not be despised, and it is peculiarly valuable
when it appears in the middle of one of the least refreshing seasons
of literature, like this ballad in the age of the Lutheran Reformation
in Denmark. In such an age and among theological tracts and
controversies, the simple ballad measures may bring relief from
oppression and desolation; and call for thanks to the Danish ladies by
whose care this ballad and so many others were written down. But
gratitude need not conceal the truth, that the style of the ballad is
unlike the style of an heroic poem. The older poem from which _Child
Sveidal_ is derived may have left many poetical opportunities
unemployed; it comes short in many things, and makes up for them by
mythological irrelevances. But it is composed in a style of which it
is impossible to mistake the gravity; it has all the advantage of
established forms that have been tested and are able to bear the
weight of the poetical matter. There is a vast difference between the
simplicity of the ballad and the stately measure and rhetorical pomp
of the original:--
Svipdag is my name; Sunbright was my Father's name;
The winds have driven me far, along cold ways;
No one can gainsay the word of Fate,
Though it be spoken to his own destruction.
The difference is as great as the difference between the ballad of the
_Marriage of Gawayne_ and the same story as told in the _Canterbury
Tales_; or the difference between Homer's way of describing the
recovery of lifted cattle and the ballad of _Jamie Telfer of the Fair
Dodheid_.
It happens fortunately that one of the Danish ballads, _Sivard og
Brynild_, which tells of the death of Sigurd (_Danmarks gamle
Folkeviser_, No. 3), is one of the best of the ballads, in all the
virtues of that style, so that a comparison with the _Lay of
Brynhild_, one of the best poems of the old collection, is not unfair
to either of them.
The ballad of _Sivard_, like the _Lay of Brynhild_, includes much more
than an episode; it is a complete tragic poem, indicating all the
chief points of the story. The tragic idea is different from that of
any of the other versions of the Volsung story, but quite as distinct
and strong as any.
SIVARD
(_O the King's Sons of Denmark!_)
Sivard has a horse that is fleet, and he has stolen Brynild
from the Mountain of Glass, all by the light of day. From
the Mountain of Glass he has stolen proud Brynild, and given
her to Hagen, his brother-in-arms. Brynild and Signild went
to the river shore to wash their silken gowns. "Signild, my
sister, where got you the golden rings on your hand?"--"The
gold rings on my hand I got from Sivard, my own true love;
they are his pledge of troth: and you are given to Hagen."
When Brynild heard this she went into the upper room and lay
there sick: there she lay sick and Hagen came to her. "Tell
me, maiden Brynild, my own true love, what is there in the
world to heal you; tell me, and I will bring it, though it
cost all the world's red gold."--"Nothing in the world you
can bring me, unless you bring me, into my hands, the head
of Sivard."--"And how shall I bring to your hands the head
of Sivard? There is not the sword in all the world that will
bite upon him: no sword but his own, and that I cannot
get."--"Go to his room, and bid him lend you his sword, for
his honour, and say, 'I have vowed an adventure for the sake
of my true love.' When first he hands you over his sword, I
pray you remember me, in the Lord God's name." It is Hagen
that has swept his mantle round him, and goes into the upper
room to Sivard. "Here you sit, Sivard, my foster-brother;
will you lend me your good sword for your honour? for I have
vowed a vow for the sake of my love."--"And if I lend you my
good sword Adelbring, you will never come in battle where it
will fail you. My good sword Adelbring you may have, indeed,
but keep you well from the tears of blood that are under the
hilt, keep you from the tears of blood that are so red.[31]
If they run down upon your fingers, it will be your death."
Hagen got the sword, and it was his own sworn brother he
slew there in the room. He took up the bloody head under his
cloak of furs and brought it to proud Brynild. "Here you
have the head for which you sought; for the sake of you I
have slain my brother to my undoing."--"Take away the head
and let me not see it; nor will I pledge you my troth to
make you glad."--"Never will I pledge troth to you, and
nought is the gladness; for the sake of you I have slain my
brother; sorrow is on me, sore and great." It was Hagen drew
his sword and took the proud Brynild and hewed her asunder.
He set the sword against a stone, and the point was deadly
in the King's son's heart. He set the sword in the black
earth, and the point was death in the King's son's heart.
Ill was the day that maiden was born. For her were spilt the
lives of two King's sons. (_O the King's Sons of Denmark!_)
[Footnote 31: Compare the warning of Angantyr to Hervor when he gives
her the sword Tyrfing--"Keep the sword sheathed, the slayer of
Hialmar; touch not the edges, there is venom upon them"--and the magic
sword Skofnung in _Kormaks Saga_.]
This is a consistent tragic story, and it is well told. It has the
peculiar virtue of the ballad, to make things impressive by the sudden
manner in which they are spoken of and passed by; in this abrupt mode
of narrative the ballads, as has been noted already, are not much
different from the earlier poems. The _Lay of Brynhild_ is not much
more diffuse than the ballad of _Sivard_ in what relates to the
slaying of the hero. Both are alike distinct from the method of Homer;
compared with Homer both the lays and the ballads are hurried in their
action, over-emphatic, cramped in a narrow space. But when the style
and temper are considered, apart from the incidents of the story, then
it will appear that the lay belongs to a totally different order of
literature from the ballad. The ballad tells of things dimly
discerned by the poet; king's sons and daughters are no more to him
than they are to the story-tellers of the market-place--forms of a
shadowy grandeur, different from ordinary people, swayed by strange
motives, not irrationally, nor altogether in a way beyond the
calculation of simple audiences, yet in ways for which there is no
adequate mode of explanation known to the reciter. The ballad keeps
instinctively a right outline for its tragic story, but to develop the
characters is beyond its power. In the epic _Lay of Brynhild_, on the
other hand, the poet is concerned with passions which he feels himself
able to comprehend and to set forth dramatically; so that, while the
story of the poem is not very much larger in scale than that of the
ballad, the dramatic speeches are greatly elaborated. Brynhild in the
lay is not a mere tragic symbol, as in the ballad, but a tragic
character. The ballad has the seed of tragedy in it, but in the lay
the seed has sprung up in the dramatic eloquence of Brynhild's
utterances before her death. The ballad is tragical, but in an
abstract manner. The plot of the slighted woman and her vengeance,
with the remorse of Hagen, is all true, and not exaggerated in motive.
But while the motives are appreciated, it is not in the power of the
poet to develop the exposition of them, to make them dramatically
characteristic, as well as right in their general nature. It is just
this dramatic ideal which is the ambition and inspiration of the other
poet; the character of Brynhild has taken possession of his
imagination, and requires to be expressed in characteristic speech. A
whole poetical world is open to the poet of Brynhild, and to the other
poets of the Northern heroic cycle. They have taken the first day's
journey into the empire of Homer and Shakespeare; the forms of poetry
that they employ are varied and developed by them so as to express as
fully as possible the poetical conception of different individual
characters. It is not easy to leave them without the impression that
their poetry was capable of infinitely greater progress in this
direction; that some at least of the poets of the North were "bearers
of the torch" in their generation, not less than the poets of Provence
or France who came after them and led the imagination of Christendom
into another way. That is, it is possible to think of the poets of
Sigurd and Brynhild as holding among the Northern nations of the tenth
or eleventh century the place that is held in every generation by some
set of authors who, for the time, are at the head of intellectual and
literary adventure, who hold authority, from Odin or the Muses, to
teach their contemporaries one particular kind of song, till the time
comes when their vogue is exhausted, and they are succeeded by other
masters and other schools. This commission has been held by various
kinds of author since the beginning of history, and manifold are the
lessons that have been recommended to the world by their authority;
now epic, now courtly and idealist lyric, romantic drama, pedantic
tragedy, funeral orations, analytical novels. They are not all
amusing, and not all their prices are more than the rate of an old
song. But they all have a value as trophies, as monuments of what was
most important in their time, of the things in which the generations,
wise and foolish, have put their trust and their whole soul. The
ballads have not this kind of importance; the ballad poets are remote
from the lists where the great champions overthrow one another, where
poet takes the crown from poet. The ballads, by their very nature, are
secluded and apart from the great literary enterprises; it is the
beauty of them that they are exempt from the proclamations and the
arguments, the shouting and the tumult, the dust and heat, that
accompany the great literary triumphs and make epochs for the
historians, as in the day of _Cléopatre_, or the day of _Hernani_. The
ballad has no weight of responsibility upon it; it does not carry the
intellectual light of its century; its authors are easily satisfied.
In the various examples of the Teutonic alliterative poetry there is
recognisable the effort and anxiety of poets who are not content with
old forms, who have a poetical vocation to go on and find out new
forms, who are on the search for the "one grace above the rest," by
which all the chief poets are led. The remains of this poetry are so
many experiments, which, in whatever respects they may have failed,
yet show the work and energy of authors who are proud of their art, as
well as the dignity of men who are familiar with greatness and great
actions: in both which respects they differ from the ballad poets. The
spell of the popular story, the popular ballad, is not quite the same
as theirs. Theirs is more commanding; they are nearer to the strenuous
life of the world than are the simple people who remember, over their
fires of peat, the ancient stories of the wanderings of kings' sons.
They have outgrown the stage of life for which the fables and old
wives' tales are all-sufficient; they have begun to make a difference
between fable and characters; they have entered on a way by which the
highest poetical victories are attainable. The poetry of the old lays
of the Volsungs, as compared with popular ballads and tales, is
"weighty and philosophical"--full of the results of reflection on
character. Nor have they with all this lost the inexplicable magic of
popular poetry, as the poems of Helgi and Sigrun, and of the daughter
of Angantyr, and others, may easily prove.
IV
THE STYLE OF THE POEMS
The style of the poems, in what concerns their verse and diction, is
not less distinctly noble than their spirit and temper. The
alliterative verse, wherever it is found, declares itself as belonging
to an elaborate poetical tradition. The alliterative line is
rhetorically capable of a great amount of emphasis; it lends itself as
readily as the "drumming decasyllabon" of the Elizabethan style to
pompous declamation. Parallelism of phrases, the favourite rhetorical
device, especially with the old English poets, is incompatible with
tenuity of style; while the weight of the verse, as a rule, prevents
the richness of phrasing from becoming too extravagant and
frivolous.[32]
[Footnote 32: Examples in Appendix, Note A.]
The style of alliterative verse is not monotonous. Without reckoning
the forms that deviate from the common epic measure, such as the
Northern lyrical staves, there may be found in it as many varieties of
style as in English blank verse from the days of _Gorboduc_ onward.
In its oldest common form it may be supposed that the verse was not
distinctly epic or lyric; lyric rather than epic, lyric with such
amount of epic as is proper for psalms of triumph, or for the praise
of a king, the kind of verse that might be used for any sort of
_carmina_, such as for marking authorship and ownership on a sword or
a horn, for epitaphs or spells, or for vituperative epigrams.
In England and the Continent the verse was early adapted for
continuous history. The lyrical and gnomic usages were not abandoned.
The poems of _Widsith_ and _Deor's Lament_ show how the allusive and
lyrical manner of referring to heroic legend was kept up in England.
The general tendency, however, seems to have favoured a different kind
of poetry. The common form of old English verse is fitted for
narrative. The ideal of the poets is one that would have the sense
"variously drawn out from one verse to another." When the verse is
lyrical in tone, as in the _Dream of the Rood_, or the _Wanderer_, the
lyrical passion is commonly that of mourning or regret, and the
expression is elegiac and diffuse, not abrupt or varied. The verse,
whether narrative or elegiac, runs in rhythmical periods; the sense is
not "concluded in the couplet." The lines are mortised into one
another; by preference, the sentences begin in the middle of a line.
The parallelism of the old poetry, and its wealth of paraphrase,
encourage deliberation in the sentences, though they are often
interrupted by a short sentence, generally introduced to point a
moral.
The old Norse poetry, with many likenesses to the old English, had a
different taste in rhetorical syntax. Instead of the long-drawn
phrases of the English poetry, and an arrangement of sentences by
which the metrical limits of the line were generally disguised, the
Norse alliterative poetry adopted a mode of speech that allowed the
line to ring out clearly, and gave full force to the natural emphasis
of the rhythm.
These two opposite rhetorical tendencies are illustrated also by the
several variations upon the common rhythm that found favour in one
region and the other. Where an English or a German alliterative poet
wishes to vary from the common metre, he uses the lengthened line, an
expansion of the simple line, which, from its volume, is less suitable
for pointed expression, and more capable of pathos or solemnity, than
the ordinary form of verse. The long line of the Saxon and English
poets is not used in the Norse poetry; there the favourite verse,
where the ordinary narrative line is discarded, is in the form of
gnomic couplets, in which, as in the classical elegiac measure, a full
line is succeeded by a truncated or broken rhythm, and with the same
effect of clinching the meaning of the first line as is commonly given
by the Greek or Latin pentameter. Of this favourite Northern measure
there are only one or two casual and sporadic instances in English
poetry; in the short dramatic lyric of the _Exeter Book_, interpreted
so ingeniously by Mr. Bradley and Mr. Gollancz, and in the gnomic
verses of the same collection.
This difference of taste goes very far to explain the difference
between English and Norse epic; to appreciate the difference of style
is to understand the history of the early poetry. It was natural that
the more equable form of the English and the Continental German
narrative poetry should prove itself fit for extended and continuous
epic narrative; it was inevitable that the Norse intolerance of tame
expression, and of everything unimpassioned or unemphatic, should
prevent the growth of any of the larger and slower kinds of poetry.
The triumphs of alliterative poetry in the first or English kind are
the long swelling passages of tragic monologue, of which the greatest
is in the Saxon _Genesis_,--the speech of Satan after the fall from
heaven. The best of the Northern poetry is all but lyrical; the poem
of the Sibyl, the poems of Sigrun, Gudrun, Hervor.
The nature of the two forms of poetry is revealed in their respective
manners of going wrong. The decline of the old English poetry is shown
by an increase of diffuseness and insipidity. The old Norse poetry was
attacked by an evil of a different sort, the malady of false wit and
over-decoration. The English poetry, when it loses strength and
self-control, is prone to monotonous lamentation; the Norse poetry is
tempted to overload itself with conceits.
In the one there is excess of sentiment, in the other the contrary
vice of frigidity, and a premeditated and ostentatious use of
figurative expressions.
The poem of _Beowulf_ has known the insidious approach and temptation
of diffuse poetic melancholy. The Northern poems are corrupted by the
vanity of metaphor. To evade the right term for everything has been
the aim of many poetic schools; it has seldom been attained more
effectually than in the poetry of the Norwegian tongue.
Periphrastic epithets are part of the original and common stock of the
Teutonic poetry. They form a large part of the vocabulary of common
phrases which bear witness to the affinity existing among the remains
of this poetry in all the dialects.[33]
[Footnote 33: Compare the index to Sievers's edition of the _Hêliand_
for illustrations of this community of poetical diction in old Saxon,
English, Norse, and High German; and J. Grimm, _Andreas und Elene_
(1840), pp. xxv.-xliv.]
But this common device was differently applied in the end, by the two
literatures, English and Icelandic, in which the old forms of verse
held their ground longest against the rhyming forms. The tendency in
England was to make use of the well-worn epithets, to ply the
_Gradus_: the duller kind of Anglo-Saxon poetry is put together as
Latin verses are made in school,--an old-fashioned metaphor is all the
more esteemed for its age. The poets, and presumably their hearers,
are best content with familiar phrases. In Iceland, on the other hand,
there was an impatience of the old vocabulary, and a curiosity and
search for new figures, that in the complexity and absurdity of its
results is not approached by any school of "false wit" in the whole
range of literature.
Already in the older forms of Northern poetry it is plain that there
is a tendency to lyrical emphasis which is unfavourable to the chances
of long narrative in verse. Very early, also, there are symptoms of
the familiar literary plague, the corruption of metaphor. Both these
tendencies have for their result the new school of poetry peculiar to
the North and the courts of the Northern kings and earls,--the Court
poetry, or poetry of the Scalds, which in its rise and progress
involved the failure of true epic. The German and English epic failed
by exhaustion in the competition with Latin and Romance literature,
though not without something to boast of before it went under. The
Northern epic failed, because of the premature development of lyrical
forms, first of all within itself, and then in the independent and
rival modes of the Scaldic poetry.
The Scaldic poetry, though later in kind than the poems of _Codex
Regius_, is at least as old as the tenth century;[34] the latest of
the epic poems, _Atlamál_ (the Greenland poem of Attila), and others,
show marks of the influence of Court poetry, and are considerably
later in date than the earliest of the Scalds.
[Footnote 34: See _Bidrag til den ældste Skaldedigtnings Historie_, by
Dr. Sophus Bugge (1894).]
The Court poetry is lyric, not epic. The aim of the Court poets was
not the narrative or the dramatic presentation of the greater heroic
legends; it was the elaborate decoration of commonplace themes, such
as the praise of a king, by every possible artifice of rhyme and
alliteration, of hard and exact construction of verse, and, above all,
of far-sought metaphorical allusions. In this kind of work, in the
praise of kings alive or dead, the poet was compelled to betake
himself to mythology and mythical history, like the learned poets of
other nations with their mythology of Olympus. In the mythology of
Asgard were contained the stores of precious names and epithets by
means of which the poems might be made to glitter and blaze.[35] It
was for the sake of poets like these that Snorri wrote his _Edda_, and
explained the mythical references available for the modern poetry of
his time, though fortunately his spirit and talent were not limited to
this didactic end, nor to the pedantries and deadly brilliance of
fashionable verse. By the time of Snorri the older kind of poetry had
become very much what Chaucer was to the Elizabethan sonneteers, or
Spenser to the contemporaries of Pope. It was regarded with some
amount of honour, and some condescension, but it had ceased to be the
right kind of poetry for a "courtly maker."
[Footnote 35: Compare _C.P.B._, ii. 447, Excursus on the Figures and
Metaphors of old Northern Poetry.]
The Northern poetry appears to have run through some of the same
stages as the poetry of Greece, though with insufficient results in
most of them. The epic poetry is incomplete, with all its nobility.
The best things of the old poetry are dramatic--lyrical monologues,
like the song of the Sibyl, and Gudrun's story to Theodoric, or
dialogues like those of Helgi and Sigrun, Hervor and Angantyr. Before
any adequate large rendering had been accorded to those tragic
histories, the Northern poetry, in its impatience of length, had
discovered the idyllic mode of expression and the dramatic monologue,
in which there was no excuse for weakness and tameness, and, on the
contrary, great temptation to excess in emphatic and figurative
language. Instead of taking a larger scene and a more complex and
longer story, the poets seem to have been drawn more and more to cut
short the story and to intensify the lyrical passion of their dialogue
or monologue. Almost as if they had known the horror of infinite
flatness that is all about the literature of the Middle Ages, as if
there had fallen upon them, in that Aleïan plain, the shadow of the
enormous beast out of Aristotle's _Poetics_, they chose to renounce
all superfluity, and throw away the makeshift wedges and supports by
which an epic is held up. In this way they did great things, and
_Volospá_ (the _Sibyl's Prophecy_) is their reward. To write out in
full the story of the Volsungs and Niblungs was left to the prose
compilers of the _Volsunga Saga_, and to the Austrian poet of the
_Nibelungenlied_.
The _Volospá_ is as far removed from the courtly odes and their manner
and ingenuity as the _Marriage Hymn_ of Catullus from the _Coma
Berenices_. The _Volospá_, however, has this in common with the
mechanical odes, that equally with these it stands apart from epic,
that equally with these it fuses epic material into an alien form. The
sublimity of this great poem of the _Doom_ is not like the majesty or
strength of epic. The voice is not the voice of a teller of stories.
And it is here, not in true epic verse, that the Northern poetry
attains its height.
It is no ignoble form of poetry that is represented by the _Sibyl's
Song_ and the _Lament of Gudrun_. But it was not enough for the
ambition of the poets. They preferred the composition of correct and
elaborate poems in honour of great men, with much expenditure of
mythology and without passion;[36] one of the forms of poetry which
may be truly said to leave nothing to be desired, the most artificial
and mechanical poetry in the world, except possibly the
closely-related kinds in the traditional elaborate verse of Ireland or
of Wales.
[Footnote 36: These may be found in the second volume of the _Corpus
Poeticum Boreale_.]
It was still possible to use this modern and difficult rhetoric,
occasionally, for subjects like those of the freer epic; to choose a
subject from heroic tradition and render it in the fashionable style.
The _Death-Song of Ragnar Lodbrok_[37] is the chief of those secondary
dramatic idylls. It is marked off by difference of verse, for one
thing, from the _Hamðismál_ and the _Atlakviða_; and, besides this, it
has the characteristic of imitative and conventional heroic
literature--the unpersuasive and unconvincing force of the heroic
romance, the rhetoric of Almanzor. The end of the poem is fine, but it
does not ring quite true:--
The gods will welcome me; there is nothing to bewail in
death. I am ready to go; they are calling me home, the
maidens whom Odin has sent to call me. With gladness will I
drink the ale, set high among the gods. The hours of life
are gone over; laughing will I die.
[Footnote 37: _C.P.B._, ii. 339.]
It is not like the end of the sons of Gudrun; it is not of the same
kind as the last words of Sorli, which are simpler, and infinitely
more imaginative and true:--
We have fought; if we die to-day, if we die to-morrow, there
is little to choose. No man may speak when once the Fates
have spoken (_Hamðismál_, s.f.).
It is natural that the _Song of Ragnar Lodbrok_ should be appreciated
by modern authors. It is one of the documents responsible for the
conventional Valkyria and Valhalla of the Romantic School, and for
other stage properties, no longer new. The poem itself is in spirit
rather more nearly related to the work of Tegnér or Oehlenschläger
than to the _Volospá_. It is a secondary and literary version, a
"romantic" version of ideas and images belonging to a past time, and
studied by an antiquarian poet with an eye for historical
subjects.[38]
[Footnote 38: Translated in Percy's _Runic Poetry_ (1763), p. 27, and
often since.]
The progress of epic was not at an end in the rise of the new Court
poetry that sounded sweeter in the ears of mortals than the old poems
of _Sigurd_ and _Brynhild_. The conceits and the hard correctness of
the Scalds did not satisfy all the curiosity or the imaginative
appetite of their patrons. There still remained a desire for epic, or
at least for a larger and freer kind of historical discourse. This was
satisfied by the prose histories of the great men of Iceland, of the
kings of Norway and the lords of the Isles; histories the nearest to
true epic of all that have ever been spoken without verse. That the
chief of all the masters of this art should have been Snorri
Sturluson, the exponent and practitioner of the mystery of the Court
poets, is among the pleasantest of historical paradoxes.
The development of the Court poetry to all extremes of "false wit,"
and of glaring pretence and artificiality of style, makes the contrast
all the more vivid between its brocaded stiffness and the ease and
freedom of the Sagas. But even apart from the Court poetry, it is
clear that there was little chance for any development of the Northern
heroic poetry into an Homeric fulness of detail. In the Norse poetry,
as in Greek, the primitive forms of heroic dirges or hymns give place
to narrative poetry; and that again is succeeded by a new kind of
lyric, in which the ancient themes of the _Lament_ and the _Song of
Praise_ are adorned with the new ideas and the new diction of poets
who have come to study novelty, and have entered, though with far
other arms and accoutrements, on the same course as the Greek lyric
authors of dithyrambs and panegyrical odes. In this progress of poetry
from the unknown older songs, like those of which Tacitus speaks, to
the epic form as it is preserved in the "Elder Edda," and from the
epic form to the lyrical form of the Scalds, the second stage is
incomplete; the epic form is uncertain and half-developed. The rise of
the Court poetry is the most obvious explanation of this failure. The
Court poetry, with all its faults, is a completed form which had its
day of glory, and even rather more than its share of good fortune. It
is the characteristic and successful kind of poetry in Iceland and
Norway, just as other kinds of elaborate lyric were cultivated, to the
depreciation of epic, in Provence and in Italy. It was to the Court
poet that the prizes were given; the epic form was put out of favour,
generations before the fragments of it were gathered together and
preserved by the collector from whose books they have descended to the
extant manuscripts and the editions of the "Elder Edda."
But at the same time it may be represented that the Court poetry was
as much effect as cause of the depreciation of epic. The lyrical
strain declared itself in the Northern epic poetry too strongly for
any such epic work as either _Beowulf_ or the _Hêliand_. The bent was
given too early, and there was no recovery possible. The Court poetry,
in its rhetorical brilliance and its allusive phrases, as well as in
the hardness and correctness of its verse, is carrying out to
completion certain tastes and principles whose influence is manifest
throughout the other orders of old Northern poetry; and there is no
need to go to the Court poetry to explain the difference between the
history of Northern and of English alliterative verse, though it is by
means of the Court poetry that this difference may be brought into the
strongest light. The contrast between the English liking for
continuous discourse and the Norse liking for abrupt emphasis is
already to be discerned in the oldest literary documents of the two
nations.
V
THE PROGRESS OF EPIC
VARIOUS RENDERINGS OF THE SAME STORY
Due (1) to accidents of tradition and impersonal causes:
(2) to calculation and selection of motives by the poets,
and intentional modification of traditional matter.
_Beowulf_, as the poem stands, is quite a different sort of thing from
the poems in the Copenhagen manuscript. It is given out by its scribes
in all the glory of a large poem, handsomely furnished with a prelude,
a conclusion, and divisions into several books. It has the look of a
substantial epic poem. It was evidently regarded as something
considerable, as a work of eminent virtue and respectability. The
Northern poems, treasured and highly valued as they evidently were,
belong to a different fashion. In the _Beowulf_ of the existing
manuscript the fluctuation and variation of the older epic tradition
has been controlled by editors who have done their best to establish a
text of the poem. The book has an appearance of authority. There is
little of this in the Icelandic manuscript. The Northern poems have
evidently been taken as they were found. Imperfections of tradition,
which in _Beowulf_ would have been glossed over by an editorial
process, are here left staring at the reader. The English poem
pretends to be a literary work of importance--a book, in short; while
the Icelandic verses are plainly gathered from all quarters, and in
such a condition as to defy the best intentions of the editor, who did
his best to understand what he heard, but had no consistent policy of
improvement or alteration, to correct the accidental errors and
discrepancies of the oral communications.
Further, and apart from the accidents of this particular book, there
is in the poems, even when they are best preserved, a character of
fluctuation and uncertainty, belonging to an older and less literary
fashion of poetry than that of _Beowulf_.
_Beowulf_ has been regarded by some as a composite epic poem made out
of older and shorter poems. _Codex Regius_ shows that this hypothesis
is dealing with an undoubted _vera causa_ when it talks of short lays
on heroic subjects, and of the variations of treatment to be found in
different lays on one and the same theme, and of the possibilities of
contamination.
Thus, in considering the story of Beowulf's descent under water, and
the difficulties and contradictions of that story as it stands, Ten
Brink has been led to suppose that the present text is made up of two
independent versions, run together by an editor in a hazardous way
without regard to the differences in points of detail, which still
remain to the annoyance of the careful reader.
There is no great risk in the assumption that there were different
versions of the fight with Grendel's mother, which may have been
carelessly put together into one version in spite of their
contradictions. In the _Codex Regius_ there are three different
versions of the death of the Niblungs, the _Atlakviða_, _Atlamál_,
and the _Lament of Oddrun_. The _Lament of Oddrun_ is vitally
different from the other two poems, and these differ from one another,
with regard to the motive of Atli's feud with Gunnar. It is possible
for the human mind to imagine an editor, a literary man, capable of
blending the poems in order to make a larger book. This would be
something like the process which Ten Brink has suspected in the
composition of this part of _Beowulf_. It is one thing, however, to
detect the possibility of such misdemeanours; and quite another thing
to suppose that it is by methods such as these that the bulk of the
larger epic is swollen beyond the size of common lays or ballads. It
is impossible, at any rate, by any reduction or analysis of _Beowulf_,
to get rid of its stateliness of narrative; it would be impossible by
any fusion or aggregation of the Eddic lays to get rid of their
essential brevity. No accumulation of lays can alter the style from
its trick of detached and abrupt suggestions to the slower and more
equable mode.
That there was a growth of epic among the Teutonic nations is what is
proved by all the documents. This growth was of the same general kind
as the progress of any of the great forms of literature--the Drama,
the Novel. Successive generations of men, speaking the same or similar
forms of language, made poetical experiments in a common
subject-manner, trying different ways of putting things, and changing
their forms of poetry according to local and personal variations of
taste; so that the same story might be told over and over again, in
different times, with different circumstances.
In one region the taste might be all for compression, for increase of
the tension, for suppression of the tamer intervals in the story. In
another it might run to greater length and ease, and favour a gradual
explication of the plot.
The "Elder Edda" shows that contamination was possible. It shows that
there might be frequent independent variations on the same theme, and
that, apart from any editorial work, these versions might occasionally
be shuffled and jumbled by mere accidents of recollection.
Thus there is nothing contrary to the evidence in the theory that a
redactor of _Beowulf_ may have had before him different versions of
different parts of the poem, corresponding to one another, more or
less, as _Atlamál_ corresponds to the _Atlakviða_. This hypothesis,
however, does not account for the difference in form between the
English and the Northern poems. No handling of the _Atlamál_ or the
_Atlakviða_ could produce anything like the appearance of _Beowulf_.
The contaminating editor may be useful as an hypothesis in certain
particular cases. But the heroic poetry got on very well without him,
generally speaking. It grew by a free and natural growth into a
variety of forms, through the ambitions and experiments of poets.
Variety is evident in the poems that lie outside the Northern group;
_Finnesburh_ is of a different order from _Waldere_. It is in the
Northern collection, however, that the variety is most evident. There
the independent versions of the same story are brought together, side
by side. The experiments of the old school are ranged there; and the
fact that experiments were made, that the old school was not satisfied
with its conventions, is perhaps the most legitimate inference, and
one of the most significant, to be made by a reader of the poems.
Variations on similar themes are found in all popular poetry; here
again the poems of the _Edda_ present themselves as akin to ballads.
Here again they are distinguished from ballads by their greater degree
of ambition and self-consciousness. For it will not do to dismiss the
Northern poems on the Volsung story as a mere set of popular
variations on common themes. The more carefully they are examined, the
less will be the part assigned to chance and imperfect recollection in
producing the variety of the poems. The variation, where there are
different presentations of the same subject, is not produced by
accident or the casual and faulty repetition of a conventional type of
poem, but by a poetical ambition for new forms. _Codex Regius_ is an
imperfect monument of a time of poetical energy in which old forms
were displaced by new, and old subjects refashioned by successive
poets. As in the Athenian or the English drama the story of Oedipus or
of Lear might be taken up by one playwright after another, so in the
North the Northern stories were made to pass through changes in the
minds of different poets.
The analogy to the Greek and the English drama need not be forced.
Without any straining of comparisons, it may be argued that the
relation of the _Atlamál_ and _Atlakviða_ is like the relation of
Euripides to Aeschylus, and not so much like the variations of ballad
tradition, in this respect, that the _Atlamál_ is a careful,
deliberate, and somewhat conceited attempt to do better in a new way
what has been done before by an older poet. The idylls of the
heroines, Brynhild, Gudrun, Oddrun, are not random and unskilled
variations; they are considerate and studied poems, expressing new
conceptions and imaginations.
It is true that this poetry is still, in many respects, in the
condition of popular poetry and popular traditional stories. The
difference of plot in some versions of the same subject appears to be
due to the ordinary causes that produce the variants of popular
tales,--defective memory, accidental loss of one point in the story,
and change of emphasis in another. To causes such as these, to the
common impersonal accidents of tradition, may perhaps be referred one
of the strangest of all the alterations in the bearing of a story--the
variation of plot in the tradition of the Niblungs.
In the "Elder Edda" the death of the Niblungs is laid to the charge of
Attila; their sister Gudrun does her best to save them; when she fails
in this, she takes vengeance for them on her husband.
In the German tradition, as in the version known to Saxo in the
_Nibelungenlied_, in the Danish ballad of _Grimild's Revenge_ (which
is borrowed from the German), the lines are laid quite differently.
There it is their sister who brings about the death of the kings; it
is the wife of Sigfred, of Sigfred whom they have killed, that exacts
vengeance from her brothers Gunther and Hagene. Attila is here put
aside. Gudrun's slaughter of her children is unrecorded; there is no
motive for it when all her anger is turned against her brothers. This
shifting of the centre of a story is not easy to explain. But,
whatever the explanation may be, it seems probable that it lies
somewhere within the range of popular tradition, that the change is
due to some of the common causes of the transformation of stories, and
not to a definite and calculated poetical modification. The tragical
complications are so many in the story of the Niblungs that there
could not fail to be variations in the traditional interpretation of
motives, even without the assistance of the poets and their new
readings of character.
In some of the literary documents there may be found two kinds of
variation from an original form of story,--variation due to those
popular and indefinite causes, the variation of failing memory, on the
one hand; and on the other, variation due to the ambition or conceit
of an author with ideas of his own.
A comparison of the _Atlakviða_, the _Atlamál_, and the _Lamentation
of Oddrun_ may at first suggest that we have here to deal with just
such variants as are common wherever stories are handed on by oral
tradition. Further consideration will more and more reduce the part
allotted to oral maltreatment, and increase the part of intentional
and artistic modification, in the variations of story to be found in
these poems.
All three poems are agreed in their ignorance of the variation which
makes the wife of Sigfred into the avenger of his death. In all three
it is Attila who brings about the death of the brothers of Gudrun.
It seems to have been a constant part of the traditional story, as
known to the authors of these three poems, that Attila, when he had
the brothers of Gudrun in his power, gave order to cut out the heart
of Hogni, and thereafter to throw Gunnar into the serpents' den.
The _Atlakviða_ presents an intelligible explanation of this; the
other two poems leave this part of the action rather vague.
In the _Atlakviða_ the motive of Attila's original hatred is left at
first unexplained, but comes out in the circumstances of the death of
the Niblungs. When the Burgundian kings are seized and bound, they are
called upon to buy themselves off with gold. It is understood in
Gunnar's reply, that the gold of the Niblung treasure is what is
sought for. He asks that the heart of Hogni may be brought to him.
They bring him, instead, the heart of Hialli, which Gunnar detects at
once as the heart of a coward. Then at last the heart of Hogni is cut
out and brought to Gunnar; and then he defies the Huns, and keeps his
secret.
Now is the hoard of the Niblungs all in my keeping alone,
for Hogni is dead: there was doubt while we two lived, but
now there is doubt no more. Rhine shall bear rule over the
gold of jealousy, the eager river over the Niblung's
heritage; the goodly rings shall gleam in the whirling
water, they shall not pass to the children of the Huns.
Gunnar was thrown among the snakes, and there he harped upon his harp
before his death came on him. The end of Gunnar is not told
explicitly; the story goes on to the vengeance of Gudrun.
In the _Oddrúnargrátr_ there is another motive for Attila's enmity to
Gunnar: not the gold of the Niblungs, but the love that was between
Gunnar and Oddrun (Oddrun was the sister of Attila and Brynhild). The
death of Brynhild is alluded to, but that is not the chief motive. The
gold of the Niblungs is not mentioned. Still, however, the death of
Hogni precedes the death of Gunnar,--"They cut out the heart of Hogni,
and his brother they set in the serpents' close." Gunnar played upon
his harp among the serpents, and for a long time escaped them; but the
old serpent came out at last and crawled to his heart. It is implied
that the sound of his music is a charm for the serpents; but another
motive is given by Oddrun, as she tells the story: Gunnar played on
his harp for Oddrun, to be heard by her, so that she could come to
help him. But she came too late.
It might be inferred from this poem that the original story of the
death of Hogni has been imperfectly recollected by the poet who
touches lightly on it and gives no explanation here. It is fairer to
suppose that it was passed over because it was irrelevant. The poet
had chosen for his idyll the love of Gunnar and Oddrun, a part of the
story which is elsewhere referred to among these poems, namely in the
_Long Lay of Brynhild_ (l. 58). By his choice of this, and his
rendering of it in dramatic monologue, he debarred himself from any
emphatic use of the motive for Hogni's death. It cannot be inferred
from his explanation of Gunnar's harp-playing that the common
explanation was unknown to him. On the contrary, it is implied here,
just as much as in _Atlakviða_, that the serpents are kept from him by
the music, until the old sleepless one gives him his death. But the
poet, while he keeps this incident of the traditional version, is not
particularly interested in it, except as it affords him a new occasion
to return to his main theme of the love story. Gunnar's music is a
message to Oddrun. This is an imaginative and dramatic adaptation of
old material, not a mere lapse of memory, not a mere loss of the
traditional bearings of the story.
The third of these poems, the _Atlamál_, is in some respects the most
remarkable of them all. In its plot it has more than the others, at
the first reading, the appearance of a faulty recollection; for, while
it makes a good deal of play with the circumstances of the death of
Hogni, it misses, or appears to miss, the point of the story; the
motive of Gunnar, which is evident and satisfactory in the
_Atlakviða_, is here suppressed or dropped. The gold of the Niblungs
is not in the story at all; the motive of Attila appears to be anger
at the death of his sister Brynhild, Gunnar's wife, but his motive is
not much dwelt on. It is as if the author had forgotten the run of
events, like a blundering minstrel.
On the other hand, the poem in its style is further from all the
manners of popular poetry, more affected and rhetorical, than any of
the other pieces in the book. It is written in the _málaháttr_, a
variety of the common epic measure, with a monotonous cadence; the
sort of measure that commends itself to an ambitious and rhetorical
poet with a fancy for correctness and regularity. The poem has its
origin in an admiration for the character of Gudrun, and a desire to
bring out more fully than in the older poems the tragic thoughts and
passion of the heroine. Gudrun's anxiety for her brothers' safety, and
her warning message to them not to come to the Court of the Huns, had
been part of the old story. In the _Atlakviða_ she sends them a token,
a ring with a wolf's hair twisted round it, which is noticed by Hogni
but not accepted by Gunnar. In the _Atlamál_ something more is made of
this; her message here is written in runes, and these are falsified on
the way by Attila's messenger, so that the warning is at first unread.
But the confusion of the runes is detected by the wife of Hogni, and
so the story opens with suspense and forebodings of the doom. The
death of Hogni and Gunnar is explained in a new way, and always with
the passion of Gudrun as the chief theme. In this story the fight of
the Niblungs and the Huns is begun outside the doors of the hall.
Gudrun hears the alarm and rushes out with a welcome to her
brothers,--"that was their last greeting,"--and a cry of lamentation
over their neglect of her runes. Then she tries to make peace, and
when she fails in that, takes up a sword and fights for her brothers.
It is out of rage and spite against Gudrun, and in order to tame her
spirit, that Attila has the heart of Hogni cut out of him, and sends
Gunnar to the serpents.
All this change in the story is the result of meditation and not of
forgetfulness. Right or wrong, the poet has devised his story in his
own way, and his motives are easily discovered. He felt that the
vengeance of Gudrun required to be more carefully and fully explained.
Her traditional character was not quite consistent with the horrors of
her revenge. In the _Atlamál_ the character of Gudrun is so conceived
as to explain her revenge,--the killing of her children follows close
upon her fury in the battle, and the cruelty of Attila is here a
direct challenge to Gudrun, not, as in the _Atlakviða_, a mere
incident in Attila's search for the Niblung treasure. The cruelty of
the death of Hogni in the _Atlakviða_ is purely a matter of business;
it is not of Attila's choosing, and apparently he favours the attempt
to save Hogni by the sacrifice of Hialli the feeble man. In the
_Atlamál_ it is to save Hogni from Attila that Hialli the cook is
chased into a corner and held under the knife. This comic interlude is
one of the liveliest passages of the poem. It serves to increase the
strength of Hogni. Hogni begs them to let the creature go,--"Why
should we have to put up with his squalling?" It may be observed that
in this way the poet gets out of a difficulty. It is not in his design
to have the coward's heart offered to Gunnar; he has dropped that part
of the story entirely. Gunnar is not asked to give up the treasure,
and has no reason to protect his secret by asking for the death of his
brother; and there would be no point in keeping the incident for the
benefit of Attila. That Gunnar should first detect the imposture, and
should then recognise the heart of his brother, is a fine piece of
heroic imagination of a primitive kind. It would have been wholly
inept and spiritless to transfer this from Gunnar to Attila. The poet
of _Atlamál_ shows that he understands what he is about. The more his
work is scrutinised, the more evident becomes the sobriety of his
judgment. His dexterity in the disposing of his incidents is proved in
every particular. While a first reading of the poem and a first
comparison with the story of _Atlakviða_ may suggest the blundering
and irresponsible ways of popular reciters, a very little attention
will serve to bring out the difference and to justify this poet. He is
not an improviser; his temptations are of another sort. He is the poet
of a second generation, one of those who make up by energy of
intelligence for their want of original and spontaneous imagination.
It is not that he is cold or dull; but there is something wanting in
the translation of his thoughts into speech. His metres are hammered
out; the precision of his verse is out of keeping with the fury of his
tragic purport. The faults are the faults of overstudy, the faults of
correctness and maturity.
The significance of the _Atlamál_ is considerable in the history of
the Northern poetry. It may stand for the furthest mark in one
particular direction; the epic poetry of the North never got further
than this. If _Beowulf_ or _Waldere_ may perhaps represent the highest
accomplishment of epic in old English verse, the _Atlamál_ has, at
least, as good a claim in the other language. The _Atlamál_ is not the
finest of the old poems. That place belongs, without any question, to
the _Volospá_, the Sibyl's Song of the judgment; and among the others
there are many that surpass the _Atlamál_ in beauty. But the _Atlamál_
is complete; it is a work of some compass, diligently planned and
elaborated. Further, although it has many of the marks of the new
rhetoric, these do not change its character as a narrative poem. It
is a narrative poem, not a poem of lyrical allusions, not an heroic
ode. It is at once the largest and the most harmonious in construction
of all the poems. It proves that the change of the Northern poetry,
from narrative to the courtly lyric, was a change not made without
fair opportunity to the older school to show what it was worth. The
variety of the three poems of Attila, ending in the careful rhetoric
of the _Atlamál_, is proof sufficient of the labour bestowed by
different poets in their use of the epic inheritance. Great part of
the history of the North is misread, unless account is taken of the
artistic study, the invention, the ingenuity, that went to the making
of those poems. This variety is not the confusion of barbarous
tradition, or the shifts and experiments of improvisers. The prosody
and the rhetorical furniture of the poems might prevent that
misinterpretation. It might be prevented also by an observation of the
way the matter is dealt with, even apart from the details of the
language and the style. The proof from these two quarters, from the
matter and from the style, is not easily impugned.
So the first impression is discredited, and so it appears that the
"Elder Edda," for all its appearance of disorder, haste, and hazard,
really contains a number of specimens of art, not merely a heap of
casual and rudimentary variants. The poems of the Icelandic manuscript
assert themselves as individual and separate works. They are not the
mere makings of an epic, the mere materials ready to the hand of an
editor. It still remains true that they are defective, but it is true
also that they are the work of artists, and of a number of artists
with different aims and ideals. The earliest of them is long past the
stage of popular improvisation, and the latest has the qualities of a
school that has learned more art than is good for it.
The defect of the Northern epic is that it allowed itself to be too
soon restricted in its scope. It became too minute, too emphatic, too
intolerant of the comfortable dilutions, the level intervals, between
the critical moments.[39] It was too much affected by the vanities of
the rival Scaldic poetry; it was overcome by rhetoric. But it cannot
be said that it went out tamely.
[Footnote 39: There is a natural affinity to Gray's poetry in the
Icelandic poetry that he translated--compressed, emphatic, incapable
of laxity.]
VI
_BEOWULF_
The poem of _Beowulf_ has been sorely tried; critics have long been at
work on the body of it, to discover how it is made. It gives many
openings for theories of agglutination and adulteration. Many things
in it are plainly incongruous. The pedigree of Grendel is not
authentic; the Christian sentiments and morals are not in keeping with
the heroic or the mythical substance of the poem; the conduct of the
narrative is not always clear or easy to follow. These difficulties
and contradictions have to be explained; the composition of the poem
has to be analysed; what is old has to be separated from what is new
and adventitious; and the various senses and degrees of "old" and
"new" have to be determined, in the criticism of the poem. With all
this, however, the poem continues to possess at least an apparent and
external unity. It is an extant book, whatever the history of its
composition may have been; the book of the adventures of Beowulf,
written out fair by two scribes in the tenth century; an epic poem,
with a prologue at the beginning, and a judgment pronounced on the
life of the hero at the end; a single book, considered as such by its
transcribers, and making a claim to be so considered.
Before any process of disintegration is begun, this claim should be
taken into account; the poem deserves to be appreciated as it stands.
Whatever may be the secrets of its authorship, it exists as a single
continuous narrative poem; and whatever its faults may be, it holds a
position by itself, and a place of some honour, as the one extant poem
of considerable length in the group to which it belongs. It has a
meaning and value apart from the questions of its origin and its mode
of production. Its present value as a poem is not affected by proofs
or arguments regarding the way in which it may have been patched or
edited. The patchwork theory has no power to make new faults in the
poem; it can only point out what faults exist, and draw inferences
from them. It does not take away from any dignity the book may possess
in its present form, that it has been subjected to the same kind of
examination as the _Iliad_. The poem may be reviewed as it stands, in
order to find out what sort of thing passed for heroic poetry with the
English at the time the present copy of the poem was written. However
the result was obtained, _Beowulf_ is, at any rate, the specimen by
which the Teutonic epic poetry must be judged. It is the largest
monument extant. There is nothing beyond it, in that kind, in respect
of size and completeness. If the old Teutonic epic is judged to have
failed, it must be because _Beowulf_ is a failure.
Taking the most cursory view of the story of _Beowulf_, it is easy to
recognise that the unity of the plot is not like the unity of the
_Iliad_ or the _Odyssey_. One is inclined at first to reckon _Beowulf_
along with those epics of which Aristotle speaks, the _Heracleids_ and
_Theseids_, the authors of which "imagined that because Heracles was
one person the story of his life could not fail to have unity."[40]
[Footnote 40: _Poet._ 1451 a.]
It is impossible to reduce the poem of _Beowulf_ to the scale of
Aristotle's _Odyssey_ without revealing the faults of structure in the
English poem:--
A man in want of work goes abroad to the house of a certain
king troubled by Harpies, and having accomplished the
purification of the house returns home with honour. Long
afterwards, having become king in his own country, he kills
a dragon, but is at the same time choked by the venom of it.
His people lament for him and build his tomb.
Aristotle made a summary of the Homeric poem, because he wished to
show how simple its construction really was, apart from the episodes.
It is impossible, by any process of reduction and simplification, to
get rid of the duality in _Beowulf_. It has many episodes, quite
consistent with a general unity of action, but there is something more
than episodes, there is a sequel. It is as if to the _Odyssey_ there
had been added some later books telling in full of the old age of
Odysseus, far from the sea, and his death at the hands of his son
Telegonus. The adventure with the dragon is separate from the earlier
adventures. It is only connected with them because the same person is
involved in both.
It is plain from Aristotle's words that the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_
were in this, as in all respects, above and beyond the other Greek
epics known to Aristotle. Homer had not to wait for _Beowulf_ to serve
as a foil to his excellence. That was provided in the other epic poems
of Greece, in the cycle of Troy, in the epic stories of Theseus and
Heracles. It seems probable that the poem of _Beowulf_ may be at least
as well knit as the _Little Iliad_, the Greek cyclic poem of which
Aristotle names the principal incidents, contrasting its variety with
the simplicity of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_.[41]
[Footnote 41: [Greek: toigaroun ek men Iliados kai Odysseias mia
tragôidia poieitai hekateras ê duo monai, ek de Kypriôn pollai kai tês
mikras Iliados pleon oktô, hoion hoplôn krisis, Philoktêtês,
Neoptolemos, Eurypylos, ptôcheia, Lakainai, Iliou persis, kai apoplous
kai Sinôn kai Trôiades] (1459 b).]
Indeed it is clear that the plan of _Beowulf_ might easily have been
much worse, that is, more lax and diffuse, than it is. This meagre
amount of praise will be allowed by the most grudging critics, if they
will only think of the masses of French epic, and imagine the extent
to which a French company of poets might have prolonged the narrative
of the hero's life--the _Enfances_, the _Chevalerie_--before reaching
the _Death of Beowulf_.
At line 2200 in _Beowulf_ comes the long interval of time, the fifty
years between the adventure at Heorot and the fight between Beowulf
and the dragon. Two thousand lines are given to the first story, a
thousand to the _Death of Beowulf_. Two thousand lines are occupied
with the narrative of Beowulf's expedition, his voyage to Denmark, his
fight with Grendel and Grendel's mother, his return to the land of the
Gauts and his report of the whole matter to King Hygelac. In this part
of the poem, taken by itself, there is no defect of unity. The action
is one, with different parts all easily and naturally included between
the first voyage and the return. It is amplified and complicated with
details, but none of these introduce any new main interests. _Beowulf_
is not like the _Heracleids_ and _Theseids_. It transgresses the
limits of the Homeric unity, by adding a sequel; but for all that it
is not a mere string of adventures, like the bad epic in Horace's _Art
of Poetry_, or the innocent plays described by Sir Philip Sidney and
Cervantes. A third of the whole poem is detached, a separate
adventure. The first two-thirds taken by themselves form a complete
poem, with a single action; while, in the orthodox epic manner,
various allusions and explanations are introduced regarding the past
history of the personages involved, and the history of other people
famous in tradition. The adventure at Heorot, taken by itself, would
pass the scrutiny of Aristotle or Horace, as far as concerns the lines
of its composition.
There is variety in it, but the variety is kept in order and not
allowed to interfere or compete with the main story. The past history
is disclosed, and the subordinate novels are interpolated, as in the
_Odyssey_, in the course of an evening's conversation in hall, or in
some other interval in the action. In the introduction of accessory
matter, standing in different degrees of relevance to the main plot,
the practice of _Beowulf_ is not essentially different from that of
classical epic.
In the _Iliad_ we are allowed to catch something of the story of the
old time before Agamemnon,--the war of Thebes, Lycurgus, Jason,
Heracles,--and even of things less widely notable, less of a concern
to the world than the voyage of Argo, such as, for instance, the
business of Nestor in his youth. In _Beowulf_, in a similar way, the
inexhaustible world outside the story is partly represented by means
of allusions and digressions. The tragedy of Finnesburh is sung by the
harper, and his song is reported at some length, not merely referred
to in passing. The stories of Thrytho, of Heremod, of Sigemund the
Wælsing and Fitela his son (Sigmund and Sinfiotli), are introduced
like the stories of Lycurgus or of Jason in Homer. They are
illustrations of the action, taken from other cycles. The fortunes of
the Danish and Gautish kings, the fall of Hygelac, the feuds with
Sweden, these matters come into closer relation with the story. They
are not so much illustrations taken in from without, as points of
attachment between the history of _Beowulf_ and the untold history all
round it, the history of the persons concerned, along with Beowulf
himself, in the vicissitudes of the Danish and Gautish kingdoms.
In the fragments of _Waldere_, also, there are allusions to other
stories. In _Waldere_ there has been lost a poem much longer and
fuller than the _Lay of Hildebrand_, or any of the poems of the "Elder
Edda"--a poem more like _Beowulf_ than any of those now extant. The
references to Weland, to Widia Weland's son, to Hama and Theodoric,
are of the same sort as the references in _Beowulf_ to the story of
Froda and Ingeld, or the references in the _Iliad_ to the adventures
of Tydeus.
In the episodic passages of _Beowulf_ there are, curiously, the same
degrees of relevance as in the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_.
Some of them are necessary to the proper fulness of the story, though
not essential parts of the plot. Such are the references to Beowulf's
swimming-match; and such, in the _Odyssey_, is the tale told to
Alcinous.
The allusions to the wars of Hygelac have the same value as the
references in the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ to such portions of the
tale of Troy, and of the return of the Greek lords, as are not
immediately connected with the anger of Achilles, or the return of
Odysseus. The tale of _Finnesburh_ in _Beowulf_ is purely an
interlude, as much as the ballad of _Ares and Aphrodite_ in the
_Odyssey_.
Many of the references to other legends in the _Iliad_ are
illustrative and comparative, like the passages about Heremod or
Thrytho in _Beowulf_. "Ares suffered when Otus and Ephialtes kept him
in a brazen vat, Hera suffered and Hades suffered, and were shot with
the arrows of the son of Amphitryon" (_Il._ v. 385). The long
parenthetical story of Heracles in a speech of Agamemnon (_Il._ xx.
98) has the same irrelevance of association, and has incurred the same
critical suspicions, as the contrast of Hygd and Thrytho, a fairly
long passage out of a wholly different story, introduced in _Beowulf_
on the very slightest of suggestions.
Thus in _Beowulf_ and in the Homeric poems there are episodes that are
strictly relevant and consistent, filling up the epic plan, opening
out the perspective of the story; also episodes that without being
strictly relevant are rightly proportioned and subordinated, like the
interlude of Finnesburh, decoration added to the structure, but not
overloading it, nor interfering with the design; and, thirdly,
episodes that seem to be irrelevant, and may possibly be
interpolations. All these kinds have the effect of increasing the mass
as well as the variety of the work, and they give to _Beowulf_ the
character of a poem which, in dealing with one action out of an heroic
cycle, is able, by the way, to hint at and partially represent a great
number of other stories.
It is not in the episodes alone that _Beowulf_ has an advantage over
the shorter and more summary poems. The frequent episodes are only
part of the general liberality of the narrative.
The narrative is far more cramped than in _Homer_; but when compared
with the short method of the Northern poems, not to speak of the
ballads, it comes out as itself Homeric by contrast. It succeeds in
representing pretty fully and continuously, not by mere allusions and
implications, certain portions of heroic life and action.
The principal actions in _Beowulf_ are curiously trivial, taken by
themselves. All around them are the rumours of great heroic and tragic
events, and the scene and the personages are heroic and magnificent.
But the plot in itself has no very great poetical value; as compared
with the tragic themes of the Niblung legend, with the tale of
Finnesburh, or even with the historical seriousness of the _Maldon_
poem, it lacks weight. The largest of the extant poems of this school
has the least important subject-matter; while things essentially and
in the abstract more important, like the tragedy of Froda and Ingeld,
are thrust away into the corners of the poem.
In the killing of a monster like Grendel, or in the killing of a
dragon, there is nothing particularly interesting; no complication to
make a fit subject for epic. _Beowulf_ is defective from the first in
respect of plot.
The story of Grendel and his mother is one that has been told in
myriads of ways; there is nothing commoner, except dragons. The
killing of dragons and other monsters is the regular occupation of the
heroes of old wives' tales; and it is difficult to give individuality
or epic dignity to commonplaces of this sort. This, however, is
accomplished in the poem of _Beowulf_. Nothing can make the story of
Grendel dramatic like the story of Waldere or of Finnesburh. But the
poet has, at any rate, in connexion with this simple theme, given a
rendering, consistent, adequate, and well-proportioned, of certain
aspects of life and certain representative characters in an heroic
age.
The characters in _Beowulf_ are not much more than types; not much
more clearly individual than the persons of a comedy of Terence. In
the shorter Northern poems there are the characters of Brynhild and
Gudrun; there is nothing in _Beowulf_ to compare with them, although
in _Beowulf_ the personages are consistent with themselves, and
intelligible.
Hrothgar is the generous king whose qualities were in Northern history
transferred to his nephew Hrothulf (Hrolf Kraki), the type of peaceful
strength, a man of war living quietly in the intervals of war.
Beowulf is like him in magnanimity, but his character is less uniform.
He is not one of the more cruel adventurers, like Starkad in the myth,
or some of the men of the Icelandic Sagas. But he is an adventurer
with something strange and not altogether safe in his disposition. His
youth was like that of the lubberly younger sons in the fairy stories.
"They said that he was slack." Though he does not swagger like a
Berserk, nor "gab" like the Paladins of Charlemagne, he is ready on
provocation to boast of what he has done. The pathetic sentiment of
his farewell to Hrothgar is possibly to be ascribed, in the details of
its rhetoric, to the common affection of Anglo-Saxon poetry for the
elegiac mood; but the softer passages are not out of keeping with the
wilder moments of _Beowulf_, and they add greatly to the interest of
his character. He is more variable, more dramatic, than the king and
queen of the Danes, or any of the secondary personages.
Wealhtheo, the queen, represents the poetical idea of a noble lady.
There is nothing complex or strongly dramatic in her character.
Hunferth, the envious man, brought in as a foil to Beowulf, is not
caricatured or exaggerated. His sourness is that of a critic and a
politician, disinclined to accept newcomers on their own valuation. He
is not a figure of envy in a moral allegory.
In the latter part of the poem it is impossible to find in the
character of Wiglaf more than the general and abstract qualities of
the "loyal servitor."
Yet all those abstract and typical characters are introduced in such a
way as to complete and fill up the picture. The general impression is
one of variety and complexity, though the elements of it are simple
enough.
With a plot like that of _Beowulf_ it might seem that there was danger
of a lapse from the more serious kind of heroic composition into a
more trivial kind. Certainly there is nothing in the plain story to
give much help to the author; nothing in Grendel to fascinate or tempt
a poet with a story made to his hand.
The plot of _Beowulf_ is not more serious than that of a thousand
easy-going romances of chivalry, and of fairy tales beyond all number.
The strength of what may be called an epic tradition is shown in the
superiority of _Beowulf_ to the temptations of cheap romantic
commonplace. Beowulf, the hero, is, after all, something different
from the giant-killer of popular stories, the dragon-slayer of the
romantic schools. It is the virtue and the triumph of the poet of
_Beowulf_ that when all is done the characters of the poem remain
distinct in the memory, that the thoughts and sentiments of the poem
are remembered as significant, in a way that is not the way of the
common romance. Although the incidents that take up the principal part
of the scene of _Beowulf_ are among the commonest in popular stories,
it is impossible to mistake the poem for one of the ordinary tales of
terror and wonder. The essential part of the poem is the drama of
characters; though the plot happens to be such that the characters are
never made to undergo a tragic ordeal like that of so many of the
other Teutonic stories. It is not incorrect to say of the poem of
_Beowulf_ that the main story is really less important to the
imagination than the accessories by which the characters are defined
and distinguished. It is the defect of the poem this should be so.
There is a constitutional weakness in it.
Although the two stories of _Beowulf_ are both commonplace, there is a
difference between the story of Grendel and the story of the dragon.
The story of the dragon is more of a commonplace than the other.
Almost every one of any distinction, and many quite ordinary people in
certain periods of history have killed dragons; from Hercules and
Bellerophon to Gawain, who, on different occasions, narrowly escaped
the fate of Beowulf; from Harald Hardrada (who killed two at least) to
More of More Hall who killed the dragon of Wantley.
The latter part of _Beowulf_ is a tissue of commonplaces of every
kind: the dragon and its treasure; the devastation of the land; the
hero against the dragon; the defection of his companions; the loyalty
of one of them; the fight with the dragon; the dragon killed, and the
hero dying from the flame and the venom of it; these are commonplaces
of the story, and in addition to these there are commonplaces of
sentiment, the old theme of this transitory life that "fareth as a
fantasy," the lament for the glory passed away; and the equally common
theme of loyalty and treason in contrast. Everything is commonplace,
while everything is also magnificent in its way, and set forth in the
right epic style, with elegiac passages here and there. Everything is
commonplace except the allusions to matters of historical tradition,
such as the death of Ongentheow, the death of Hygelac. With these
exceptions, there is nothing in the latter part of _Beowulf_ that
might not have been taken at almost any time from the common stock of
fables and appropriate sentiments, familiar to every maker or hearer
of poetry from the days of the English conquest of Britain, and long
before that. It is not to be denied that the commonplaces here are
handled with some discretion; though commonplace, they are not mean or
dull.[42]
[Footnote 42: It has been shown recently by Dr. Edward Sievers that
Beowulf's dragon corresponds in many points to the dragon killed by
Frotho, father of Haldanus, in Saxo, Book II. The dragon is not wholly
commonplace, but has some particular distinctive traits. See _Berichte
der Königl. Sächs. Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften_, 6 Juli 1895.]
The story of Grendel and his mother is also common, but not as common
as the dragon. The function of this story is considerably different
from the other, and the class to which it belongs is differently
distributed in literature. Both are stories of the killing of
monsters, both belong naturally to legends of heroes like Theseus or
Hercules. But for literature there is this difference between them,
that dragons belong more appropriately to the more fantastic kinds of
narrative, while stories of the deliverance of a house from a
pestilent goblin are much more capable of sober treatment and
verisimilitude. Dragons are more easily distinguished and set aside as
fabulous monsters than is the family of Grendel. Thus the story of
Grendel is much better fitted than the dragon story for a composition
like _Beowulf_, which includes a considerable amount of the detail of
common experience and ordinary life. Dragons are easily scared from
the neighbourhood of sober experience; they have to be looked for in
the mountains and caverns of romance or fable. Whereas Grendel remains
a possibility in the middle of common life, long after the last dragon
has been disposed of.
The people who tell fairy stories like the _Well of the World's End_,
the _Knight of the Red Shield_, the _Castle East o' the Sun and West
o' the Moon_, have no belief, have neither belief nor disbelief, in
the adventures of them. But the same people have other stories of
which they take a different view, stories of wonderful things more
near to their own experience. Many a man to whom the _Well of the
World's End_ is an idea, a fancy, has in his mind a story like that of
Grendel which he believes, which makes him afraid. The bogle that
comes to a house at night and throttles the goodman is a creature more
hardy than the dragon, and more persevering. Stories like that of
Beowulf and Grendel are to be found along with other popular stories
in collections; but they are to be distinguished from them. There are
popular heroes of tradition to this day who are called to do for
lonely houses the service done by Beowulf for the house of Hrothgar.
Peer Gynt (not Ibsen's Peer Gynt, who is sophisticated, but the
original Peter) is a lonely deer-stalker on the fells, who is asked by
his neighbour to come and keep his house for him, which is infested
with trolls. Peer Gynt clears them out,[43] and goes back to his
deer-stalking. The story is plainly one that touches the facts of life
more nearly than stories of _Shortshanks_ or the _Blue Belt_. The
trolls are a possibility.
[Footnote 43: Asbjörnsen, _Norske Huldre-Eventyr og Folkesagn_. _At
renske Huset_ is the phrase--"to cleanse the house." Cf. _Heorot is
gefælsod_, "Heorot is cleansed," in _Beowulf_.]
The story of Uistean Mor mac Ghille Phadrig is another of the same
sort.[44] It is not, like the _Battle of the Birds_ or _Conal Gulban_,
a thing of pure fantasy. It is a story that may pass for true when the
others have lost everything but their pure imaginative value as
stories. Here, again, in the West Highlands, the champion is called
upon like Beowulf and Peer Gynt to save his neighbours from a warlock.
And it is matter of history that Bishop Gudmund Arason of Hólar in
Iceland had to suppress a creature with a seal's head, Selkolla, that
played the game of Grendel.[45]
[Footnote 44: J.F. Campbell, _Tales of the West Highlands_, ii. p. 99.
The reference to this story in _Catriona_ (p. 174) will be
remembered.]
[Footnote 45: _Biskupa Sögur_, i. p. 604.]
There are people, no doubt, for whom Peer Gynt and the trolls, Uistean
Mor and the warlock, even Selkolla that Bishop Gudmund killed, are as
impossible as the dragon in the end of the poem of _Beowulf_. But it
is certain that stories like those of Grendel are commonly believed in
many places where dragons are extinct. The story of Beowulf and
Grendel is not wildly fantastic or improbable; it agrees with the
conditions of real life, as they have been commonly understood at all
times except those of peculiar enlightenment and rationalism. It is
not to be compared with the Phaeacian stories of the adventures of
Odysseus. Those stories in the _Odyssey_ are plainly and intentionally
in a different order of imagination from the story of the killing of
the suitors. They are pure romance, and if any hearer of the _Odyssey_
in ancient times was led to go in search of the island of Calypso, he
might come back with the same confession as the seeker for the wonders
of Broceliande,--_fol i alai_. But there are other wonderful things in
the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ which are equally improbable to the
modern rationalist and sceptic; yet by no means of the same kind of
wonder as Calypso or the Sirens. Probably few of the earliest hearers
of the _Odyssey_ thought of the Sirens or of Calypso as anywhere near
them, while many of them must have had their grandmothers' testimony
for things like the portents before the death of the suitors. Grendel
in the poem of _Beowulf_ is in the same order of existence as these
portents. If they are superstitions, they are among the most
persistent; and they are superstitions, rather than creatures of
romance. The fight with Grendel is not of the same kind of adventure
as Sigurd at the hedge of flame, or Svipdag at the enchanted castle.
And the episode of Grendel's mother is further from matter of fact
than the story of Grendel himself. The description of the desolate
water is justly recognised as one of the masterpieces of the old
English poetry; it deserves all that has been said of it as a passage
of romance in the middle of epic. Beowulf's descent under the water,
his fight with the warlock's mother, the darkness of that "sea
dingle," the light of the mysterious sword, all this, if less
admirably worked out than the first description of the dolorous mere,
is quite as far from Heorot and the report of the table-talk of
Hrothgar, Beowulf, and Hunferth. It is also a different sort of thing
from the fight with Grendel. There is more of supernatural incident,
more romantic ornament, less of that concentration in the struggle
which makes the fight with Grendel almost as good in its way as its
Icelandic counterpart, the wrestling of Grettir and Glam.
The story of _Beowulf_, which in the fight with Grendel has analogies
with the plainer kind of goblin story, rather alters its tone in the
fight with Grendel's mother. There are parallels in _Grettis Saga_,
and elsewhere, to encounters like this, with a hag or ogress under
water; stories of this sort have been found no less credible than
stories of haunting warlocks like Grendel. But this second story is
not told in the same way as the first. It has more of the fashion and
temper of mythical fable or romance, and less of matter of fact. More
particularly, the old sword, the sword of light, in the possession of
Grendel's dam in her house under the water, makes one think of other
legends of mysterious swords, like that of Helgi, and the "glaives of
light" that are in the keeping of divers "gyre carlines" in the _West
Highland Tales_. Further, the whole scheme is a common one in popular
stories, especially in Celtic stories of giants; after the giant is
killed his mother comes to avenge him.
Nevertheless, the controlling power in the story of _Beowulf_ is not
that of any kind of romance or fantastic invention; neither the
original fantasy of popular stories nor the literary embellishments of
romantic schools of poetry. There are things in _Beowulf_ that may be
compared to things in the fairy tales; and, again, there are passages
of high value for their use of the motive of pure awe and mystery. But
the poem is made what it is by the power with which the characters are
kept in right relation to their circumstances. The hero is not lost or
carried away in his adventures. The introduction, the arrival in
Heorot, and the conclusion, the return of Beowulf to his own country,
are quite unlike the manner of pure romance; and these are the parts
of the work by which it is most accurately to be judged.
The adventure of Grendel is put in its right proportion when it is
related by Beowulf to Hygelac. The repetition of the story, in a
shorter form, and in the mouth of the hero himself, gives strength and
body to a theme that was in danger of appearing trivial and fantastic.
The popular story-teller has done his work when he has told the
adventures of the giant-killer; the epic poet has failed, if he has
done no more than this.
The character and personage of Beowulf must be brought out and
impressed on the audience; it is the poet's hero that they are bound
to admire. He appeals to them, not directly, but with unmistakable
force and emphasis, to say that they have beheld ("as may unworthiness
define") the nature of the hero, and to give him their praises.
The beauty and the strength of the poem of _Beowulf_, as of all true
epic, depend mainly upon its comprehensive power, its inclusion of
various aspects, its faculty of changing the mood of the story. The
fight with Grendel is an adventure of one sort, grim, unrelieved,
touching close upon the springs of mortal terror, the recollection or
the apprehension of real adversaries possibly to be met with in the
darkness. The fight with Grendel's mother touches on other motives;
the terror is further away from human habitations, and it is
accompanied with a charm and a beauty, the beauty of the Gorgon, such
as is absent from the first adventure. It would have loosened the
tension and broken the unity of the scene, if any such irrelevances
had been admitted into the story of the fight with Grendel. The fight
with Grendel's mother is fought under other conditions; the stress is
not the same; the hero goes out to conquer, he is beset by no such
apprehension as in the case of the night attack. The poet is at this
point free to make use of a new set of motives, and here it is rather
the scene than the action that is made vivid to the mind. But after
this excursion the story comes back to its heroic beginning; and the
conversation of Beowulf with his hosts in Denmark, and the report that
he gives to his kin in Gautland, are enough to reduce to its right
episodic dimensions the fantasy of the adventure under the sea. In the
latter part of the poem there is still another distribution of
interest. The conversation of the personages is still to be found
occasionally carried on in the steady tones of people who have lives
of their own, and belong to a world where the tunes are not all in one
key. At the same time, it cannot be denied that the story of the
_Death of Beowulf_ is inclined to monotony. The epic variety and
independence are obliterated by the too obviously pathetic intention.
The character of this part of the poem is that of a late school of
heroic poetry attempting, and with some success, to extract the spirit
of an older kind of poetry, and to represent in one scene an heroic
ideal or example, with emphasis and with concentration of all the
available matter. But while the end of the poem may lose in some
things by comparison with the stronger earlier parts, it is not so
wholly lost in the charms of pathetic meditation as to forget the
martial tone and the more resolute air altogether. There was a danger
that Beowulf should be transformed into a sort of Amadis, a mirror of
the earlier chivalry; with a loyal servitor attending upon his death,
and uttering the rhetorical panegyric of an abstract ideal. But this
danger is avoided, at least in part. Beowulf is still, in his death, a
sharer in the fortunes of the Northern houses; he keeps his history.
The fight with the dragon is shot through with reminiscences of the
Gautish wars: Wiglaf speaks his sorrow for the champion of the Gauts;
the virtues of Beowulf are not those of a fictitious paragon king, but
of a man who would be missed in the day when the enemies of the Gauts
should come upon them.
The epic keeps its hold upon what went before, and on what is to come.
Its construction is solid, not flat. It is exposed to the attractions
of all kinds of subordinate and partial literature,--the fairy story,
the conventional romance, the pathetic legend,--and it escapes them
all by taking them all up as moments, as episodes and points of view,
governed by the conception, or the comprehension, of some of the
possibilities of human character in a certain form of society. It does
not impose any one view on the reader; it gives what it is the proper
task of the higher kind of fiction to give--the play of life in
different moods and under different aspects.