n Digitized by tine Internet Arciiive in 2007 witii funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation littp://www.archive.org/details/brookeliteratOObrooricli A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE Crown Svo. 8s. (>d. each volume. ENGLISH LITERATURE FROM THE BEGINNING TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST. By Stopford A. Brooke, M.A. ENGLISH LITERATURE FROM THE NORMAN CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. By William Henry Schofield, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of English in Harvard University. THE AGE OF CHAUCER. By Professor W. H. Schofield. [/« preparation. ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE (1560 -1665). By George Satntsburv. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE (1660- 1780). By Edmund Gosse, C.B., M.A. NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE (1780- 1900). By George Saintsbury. MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd., LONDON. ENGLISH LITERATURE FROM THE BEGINNING TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA • MADRAS MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO DALLAS • SAN FRANCISCO THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO ENGLISH LITERATURE FROM THE BEGINNING TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST BY STOPFORD A. BROOKE MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 192 I 911 <^ 607 COPYRIGHT Firsi Edition 1898 Reprinted xSgg, 1908, 1912, 1919, 1921 PREFACE This book is necessarily, as far as the chapter on King iElfred, a recast of my previous book on Early English Literature up to the Days of Alfred. That book, in two volumes, was too expensive and too long for students in schools. I chose to write it at that length, and I am glad I did so. I was enabled to introduce a great deal of correlative matters which I thought were needed to bring the literature into touch with the history of the country ; and in order to give life, colour, and reality to a time so far away, and in which so little interest is taken by the English public. But having tried to do this, I have now left out these correlative matters ; shortened the whole of the history up to iElfred ; rewritten it, and rearranged it. Of course, some of the older book remains mixed up with the new ; — those parts of it especially which give an account of the poems. The translations, though carefully revised, are the same ; but many of them have been omitted. • I have written about King iElfred at a length somewhat out of proportion with the rest of the book, but the freshly awakened interest of the public in his life and character induced me to give a full account of all that was personal in his literary work. The chapters vi PREFACE from " Alfred " to the end of the book carry the history of Anglo-Saxon or Old English Literature up to the Conquest. A concluding chapter sketches the tale of Old English as far as the beginning of the thirteenth century. The Appendix consists of translations of some remarkable Anglo-Saxon poems ; and I have to thank Miss Kate Warren for her excellent translation in full of the " Battle of Maldon," as well as for the Index and the Bibliography, which, to my pleasure, she undertook. My gratitude is also due to Professor John Rhys and to Professor Ker for their kind answers to a number of questions. STOPFORD A. BROOKE. SCHAFFHAUSEN, lyd Augzisi \[ CONTENTS CHAPTER I PAGE The Relation of Early Britain to English Literature i CHAPTER II Old English Heathen Poetry . . . -36 CHAPTER III Beowulf . . . . . . -58 CHAPTER IV Beowulf — The Poem . . . - .68 CHAPTER V Semi-heathen Poetry . . , . .84 CHAPTER VI The Coming of Christianity . . « .98 vili CONTENTS CHAPTER VII >-AGE Latin Literature — From the Coming of Augustine TO THE Accession of Alfred . . .106 CHAPTER VIII CiEDMON [650-680] . . . . .126 CHAPTER IX Poems of the School of C^.dmon . . r 134 CHAPTER X The Elegies and the Riddles . . .152 CHAPTER XI The Signed Poems of Cynewulf . . .163 CHAPTER XII Poems attributed to Cynewulf or his School . 180 CHAPTER XIII Other Poetry before Alfred .... 203 CHAPTER XIV ^ Alfred . . . . . . .212 CONTENTS IX CHAPTER XV PAGE The Old English Poetry in and after ^:lfred's Time 242 CHAPTER XVI Secular Poetry after Alfred to the Conquest . 253 CHAPTER XVn English Prose from ^Elfred to the Conquest . 269 CHAPTER XVni The Passing of Old English .... 300 APPENDIX . .. . , . .309 BIBLIOGRAPHY . ' , . . . .326 INDEX . . , . . . ' ZZ1 ENGLISH LITERATURE FROM THE BEGINNING TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST CHAPTER I THE RELATION OF EARLY BRITAIN TO ENGLISH LITERATURE The land in which English literature has grown into the mighty tree which now spreads its branches over so many peoples was for many centuries unconscious of any English footfall. Its first indwellers, at a time when it formed part of a continent stretching far into the Northern and Western seas, lived in caves or in trees or in rude huts made of boughs, and saw the great glaciers of the quaternary age push from the mountains into the plains, retreat, advance again, and pass away. Their climate was cold and wet. A short warm summer was succeeded by a long winter. Heavy and constant mist hung over the stagnant fens and woods and the icy gorges of the hills, but the men enjoyed the hunting and fishing by which they lived. They learned at last to smite the flints and chert into axe, spear and arrow-heads ; they invented the bow ; they made their knives of flakes of flint, and as time went on fitted these weapons into rude handles of horn and bone. Skins, roughly sewn together with sinews, clothed them ; they could make the fire by which they cooked the beasts they slew, but they had no domestic animals. Nor were they, after some centuries had ^ B THE RELATION OF EARLY BRITAIN gonef, by; ij^itbpuc pleasure in the work of their hands. They drew, ipcising ,the h^andles of bone and horn, the figures of the beasts '.i;h^y.'hiiiit^4-r-tlAe,^tag, the reindeer, the hairy mammoth, and the bison. These were the PalcEolithic tribes of prehistoric Britain, and they were contemporary at their beginning with the cave lion and hyaena, with a sabre-toothed tiger, with the brown and the grizzly bear, with a woolly rhinoceros and three kinds of elephant, with the great urus, the elk, and the bison, and with other animals existing at the present day. No one can tell how long this people lasted, nor what space of time separates them from the Neolithic tribes whose remains we find in caves, in tombs, and in the lake-dwellings which, as j their civilisation grew, they learnt how to build. It is possible I that the people we call Neolithic were the direct and developed f descendants of the Palaeolithic folk. The glaciers had now gone ; the land had risen and was divided from the continent by the Channel. The more ancient and the more savage animals had disappeared. The urus, the brown bear, the great stags, the reindeer remained among the mountain valleys and the northern moors ; and the wild boar, the wolf, the fox, the wild cat, and a host of the beasts of flood and field haunted in vast numbers the thick, dark, monstrous woods. The climate was warmer and more damp. The lowlands were half water, — out-spreading fens, and swamps, and chains of lakes. The estuaries, like that of the Thames, opened out into leagues of morass and sand The ice- carved mountains were bare and inaccessible, but all along the coast where the fens did not encroach, in the hidden creeks and reedy isles, on the edges of the lakes, on the knolls in the ,fens, by the river-channels, and on the low dry downs and rocky plateaux, lived and hunted a short, black-haired, dark-skinned, dark-eyed race, with an oval face and a long and narrow skull, who had with them domesticated animals. Their weapons were of bone and flint, chert and greenstone, polished and carefully wrought, not rough Uke those of their predecessors. They were hunters, but they mingled the mere hunting life of the savage with pastoral TO ENGLISH LITERATURE employments. Living at first in caves, they finally settled into hamlets or into lake-dwellings built on piles. They kept sheep and cattle, wove a rude cloth for garments, and made pottery and ornaments. Sometimes they buried their dead in caves, but they came to bury them in large-chambered tombs, under long barrows and mounds of earth, lined with stones ; and the greater number of " standing stones," " stone circles," and the rude burial huts built of great blocks of rock,^ which are the denuded remnants of these tombs, attest their reverence for the dead, and their activity. These barrows occur over our land from Dorset to the Yorkshire Wolds, and from the Wolds to Caithness, and they prove that this people occupied the whole country. They also lived over the length and breadth of Ireland. Some think that they came from North Africa across Spain, and the Basque people are certainly their descendants ; others think that some of them came from Spain to Ireland, and thence made their way to Britain, but it is also maintained that they came across the north of Europe. They were not an Aryan race, but they are of a very enduring t^pel^ Eveh^^nowpwe meet their descendants in the west of Ireland, and traces of their nature-myths, their religion, and their customs, enter into the Irish mythology — sombre and grim traditions, as of those who had come out of the " night-country." Their Irish tribal names, so far as we have been able to isolate them, have to do with gloom and mist, as dark as their eyes and hair. In Wales, the main body of the Silures, small men, dark, and of a courageous nature, belonged, as well as other scat- tered folk in North Wales, to this Neolithic people. Men have also traced strange out-crops of this swarthy race in the midland and south-western counties of England, even in the present day. Beyond the English and Scottish border, and on it, they were less got rid of by the Celtic invaders and more mingled with them. A separate body of them, after much admixture, isolated themselves ^ In French archaeology these are called menhirs^ cromlechs^ and dolmens ; but in England we call the pile of three or four upstanding stones with a flat rock resting on them, a cromlech, not a dolmen. 4 THE RELATION OF EARLY BRITAIN chap in Galloway. On the west coast and islands of Scotland, they lasted, and kept up their tribal life alongside of the Scots from Ireland, the Brythons, and afterwards the English. But the larger number of them settled in the Northern Highlands ; and " the description which Scott gives in the Legend of Montrose of the " Children of the Mist " may serve to paint what this fine and steady -hearted race would become when, left to its wild instinct for liberty, it was hunted like a beast of the field. The Celtic races owed much to these predecessors, more perhaps than we imagine, and through the Celt the English may have assimilated some of the elements of the nature of the Neolithic race. \ There are certain weird, primaeval, unaccountable, dark, sometimes monstrous conceptions in our nature-poetry which may have their far-oif roots in the dim world the Neolithic people made for their imagination! The next race which invaded our island, and who, it is sup- posed, established settlements from Sweden to Spain, were tall men, round-faced, with short round skulls, stoutly built, light- haired, with probably gray eyes. It is still debated whether they were or not an Aryan race. / Some scholars call them Celtic — the earliest band of the Celtic migrations.' Others consider them to be of a Finnish or Ugrian type. They were warriors and hunters, and their weapons of battle and chase were at first of stone, shaped with great skill and highly polished. But when they came to our land they had learnt how to make bronze weapons, and are the first men of the bronze_age in this country. But they were much more than warriors and hunters. They established some kind of commerce with the continent, and they kept flocks and herds. Their stone querns prove that they had some knowledge of agriculture. Their persons were decorated with gold and silver ornaments, with amber, jet and glass beads and necklaces. They beat gold wire into their swords, wore a woven cloth, and made good pottery, — vases, cups, food- dishes, and incense-burners. They dwelt in communities and continued, like the Neolithic folk, the building of large, underground, chambered tombs. They set up temples, perhaps like Stone- TO ENGLISH LITERATURE henge, to their gods. But their barrows, which are crowded round Salisbury Plain, are not long but round and shaped like a bowl. Lastly they mixed with, rather than conquered the Neolithic people. This type may also be distinguished, it is said, in various parts of England to the present day.^ History, save in the description by Latin writers of the rude tribes in the interior of Britain, is silent of these two races, the second of which, until more evidence is brought to prove it to be Celtic, we may believe to be as pre-Celtic and non-Aryan as the first. Though history is silent concerning them, they have left traces behind them of their occupation of the country in the myth and legend of the Celtic races which succeeded them, and mingled with them. Old words, not Celtic, in the Celtic tongue, some place-names, some personal names of Celtic heroes, some sculptured stones with unknown designs and unknown alpha- betical signs, some strange customs, chiefly of inheritance, are found among the Celts and derive from their predecessors. How long these races lived undisturbed from without cannot be known, but they were at last broken into by the first great Celtic migration, which, coming along the southern shores of the Baltic between the forest and the sea, passed down the Rhine and the Moselle, and a part of which crossed the narrow seas to our land. This people established itself during some centuries over 1 It has been sought to mark out, with greater definition, these pre-Celtic peoples. M. de Jubainville, speaking of France, arranges them in this manner, (i) The quaternary man. (2) A people who lived in caves, had no knowledge of the metals, and hunted the reindeer. (3) A more civilised folk who knew something of the metals, who could make drawings on horn and bone, who built megalithic monuments, who buried their dead in cabanes funiraires [dolmens =.Qi\xx cromlechs). (4) A still more civilised folk who burned their dead, put the ashes into urns, and hid them under tumuli. (5) The Celts or Gauls, an aristocratic race, who enslaved the conquered ; with long iron swords and war chariots, who buried but did not burn their dead. For a Celt to burn his dead was to do them dishonour. (6) The Roman period. (7) The Frank. Such a division might do for Britain also, if we divide the Celts into two related races, the Goidels and the Brythons (Gauls), and read the Ettdish for the Frank. 3 6 THE RELATION OF EARLY BRITAIN chap the habitable parts of England, Ireland, and Scotland, driving the Neolithic folk before them to the remoter lands, but also absorb- ing them in their progress. It may be that a number of them landed first in Ireland, and afterwards crossed the Irish Channel into Wales. Such Irish immigration has taken place in historic times. It is probable it also took place in prehistoric times. These are the Gaelic or Goidelic tribes.";. Their occupation of the country lasted for some centuries. Meanwhile a new migration of the Celtic hordes had begun. This Second Wandering, as it poured down towards Western Europe, took a more southward direction than the first. When it reached the Alps, some of the folk descended into Italy or went eastward by the Danube; but others, crossing the mountains, made their way into the regions we call Gaul and Spain. Those of them who finally settled on the northern coasts of Gaul, either pushed from behind, or eager for adventure and land, or lured by the shimmer of the white cliffs in the morning sun and by the mysterious legends of a land of the happy dead, which, in the elder days, gathered round our islands, made their way over the straits, perhaps as early as 300 B.C., and fell upon the Goidels of the south-eastern shores. We call this second people of the Celts Brythons. Like the English afterwards, they first settled themselves in Kent and round the mouths of the Thames. Like the English also, their immigration was gradual. They came, one relay after another, and the Goidels were only slowly driven back before them. The last who arrived, about 100 B.C., if not earlier, were the Belgae.] When the Romans came first, 55 B.C., these tribes certainly held all the south-eastern districts, and those along the east coast as far as the Wash ; but they probably held also the land east of the Trent, the Avon, the Parret and the Stour of Dorsetshire — that is, nearly half of our England. During the ninety years between the invasion of Julius Caesar and the fresh conquests under Claudius, 43 a.d., the Brythons pushed steadily on, and the whole country, with a few exceptions, fell under their power. These exceptions were the counties of Devon and Cornwall, all I TO ENGLISH LITERATURE 7 South Wales, west of the Severn and south of the Teme and the Wyre, North Wales and Anglesea from the river Mawddach to the Dee, Cumberland and Westmoreland and part of Lanca- shire. In these lands the Goidels remained, mixed more or less with the Neolithic races which preceded them. But even this rem- nant of the Goidels became, as time went on, Brythonic in language, manners, and customs, so that we may say that at last no tribes existed in England and Wales speaking- the Goidelic tongue. North of the Sol way and the Tweed the country was less exclusively Brythonic. The Goidels in Scotland were even more mixed with the Neolithic tribes than in Wales; and into this admixture the Brythons drove their way, penetrating from the East in wedges into the Goidels northwards and westwards, either sub- duing them or intermingling with them, or living in alliance with them. So it came to pass that the three races — the Neolithic folk (who may be said to represent the Picts of history), the Goidels, and the Brythons — ran in and out of one another over the southern half of Scotland, like the changing patterns in a kaleidoscope made \ by three differently coloured pieces of glass. The Brythons were thickest in the east. The Neolithic people concentrated them- selves in Galloway and the western isles, but the Goidels were so dominant among them that their speech and traditions became in time Goidelic. In the northern isles and Highlands the Neo- lithic people were most numerous, but they also, partly influenced by the invading Scots from Ireland, adopted, as the centuries went on, the customs and speech of the Goidels. At last Scot- land broke into two main divisions. The Highlands became Goidelicised. The Lowlands, with the exception of Galloway, were rapidly becoming Brythonised, when the victory which made Kenneth MacAlpin<(844-86o) King of the Picts introduced again the Goidel elements, and by the time of the Norman Con- quest the Lowlands were probably Goidelicised again. But this was after the time of which we speak. At present, we may sum up the whole by saying that those who spoke Goidel, and be- came at one with the Goidel strain, existed in the north of Scot- ^ THE RELATION OF EARLY BRITAIN land, in Galloway, in the Isle of Man, and in Ireland. The rest of England, Scotland, and Wales spoke the Brythonic tongue, 1 and, though largely mixed with Goidels and Neolithic folk, had all become or were becoming Brythons in name and manners. Into this heterogeneous mass of three or perhaps four races, two pre-Celtic, two Celtic, and the last two infiltrated by the Roman law, language, and custom, the English in the fifth cen- tury began to push their plough. During the first hundred years of their conquest their main policy was destruction,^ and they almost blotted out the Roman and Brythonic civilisation from Kent to Devonshire ; from the eastern counties to an east-curving line drawn from Chester to Bristol ; from the Humber to the Forth, and thence westward over more than half of Northern England and the Lowlands to the borders of the kingdom of Strathclyde. Their policy of destruction was then followed by a policy of amalgamation, whenever they took any new portions of the I Brythonic lands into their power. At last the pure Brythons were (isolated into three places — into Cornwall, into our Wales, and ;into Cumbria — and the name adopted by the Brythons of Wales jand Cumbria was Cymry, that is, "fellow-countrymen." This general sketch of the localisation in Great Britain and Ireland of the various races which occupied the country, and of their intermingling, is of more use to a history of English litera- ture than one would at first imagine. Questions of race are often questions of literature. They ahnot, it is true, provide us with certainties, only with conjec- tures ; but good conjectures, subject to strict experiment, may lead to certainties ; and problems — such as the fuller growth of early English poetry in the North rather than in Wessex or Mercia ; the remarkable development of the ballad poetry of the sixteenth, 6an ^ The Brythons were by no" means all destroyed. From the first years of the Conquest, and for more tlian a century after, a large proportion of them emigrated to Armorica. Moreover, as the Biythonic women were kept for slaves, the English blood was from the beginning mixed with a Celtic >train. The admixture increased to the west and north- TO ENGLISH LITERATURE seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, chiefly in the wild march- land of the Border ; why the English lyric poetry began, with few exceptions, near the Welsh border ; how it happened that the later poetry of natural description had a more original and earlier begin- ning in Scotland than in England, and yet was only brought to its finest form in England ; and many other problems belonging to the introduction of fresh elements into our poetry, are, not completely, but partly solved by the distribution of races in this country, and by our knowledge of the characteristics of these races. / Four other subjects, on each of which a little book might be written, remain to be briefly treated in this introduction, (i) The first of these is the early condition of the country, and how far it bore on literature, j History, before the time of Caesar, is almost silent with regard to Britain./ We know, however, that Timseus, the Sicilian historian, who flourished 350-326 B.C., was aware of the British tin trade; and Pytheas, his contemporary, whose Travels were set forth shortly after 330 B.C., eight years after the death of Aristotle, speaks, in the fragments which alone remain of his book, of the Cornish miners bringing their tin eastward along the coast, storing it in an island,^ and exchanging it for goods with the Gauls of the continent. This intrepid voyager of Mar- seilles, who seems to have sailed as far as the Northern seas until he touched the ice, landed twice on the south-eastern coasts of our island, and found the inhabitants fairly civilised by their trading. Posidonius, who voyaged to Britain about 90 B.C., visited Cornwall; and Diodorus Siculus, probably quoting Posidonius, gives an account of the tin trade between Britain and Gaul, in which the tin brought from Belerion (Cornwall) was carried to an island called Ictis (Vectis?), and from thence to Gaul and the mouth of the Rhone. The inhabitants, he says, are fond of strangers ; and, from their intercourse with foreign merchants, are civilised in their manner of life. The nature of the other trades we learn from Strabo, who wrote about 1-19 a.d. The Britons * Some suppose this island to be Thanet, and others, more probably, that it was the Isle of Wight. I daresay both islands were used. (; iO THE RELATION OF EARLY BRITAIN chap. exported corn, cattle, gold, silver, iron, skins, slaves, and dogs. They imported, among other things, " ivory bracelets and neck- laces, red amber beads, vessels of glass, and such-like trumpery." Caesar mentions the tin of the interior, and speaks of copper as one of the British imports. South-eastern and south-western Britain had thus reached a somewhat civilised manner of life when Caesar came to BritainJ In fact, whatever civilisation the Gauls had gained in contact with the Greek and the Roman they carried with them into Britain, and we hear even of a rude luxury and splendour in the dress and manners of the Brythons. / Inland, however, where the Goidels yet roamed and fought, the men had not passed beyond the pastoral stagej They were as wild as the Highland- men of the seventeenth century, and lived in much the same way. They grew no corn, were clad in skins, and painted themselves for love and war. The farther men were from the coasts the less was civilisation possible, not only from the absence of trade- influences, but also from the condition of the country. ) Before the Romans came, far the greater portion of Britain was uninhabitable, a desolation of vast woods full of sleepy swamps into which the choked-up rivers spread ; huge tracts of bleak moorland covered with low scrub and heather and dry grass ; and in every hollow deep and treacherous bogs, while rugged and pathless labyrinths of rocks led up to the higher mountains. The interior was wholly unexplored. Over it the wolves ranged in packs and ran down the stags ; the wild swine fed in thousands on the acorns and mast of the oak and beech forests ; the white- maned urus ran through the glades among the tangled under- growth of yew and holly and wild briars, and the wild, small black cattle, short-horned and with close-curled manes, herded on the hills. The bear still lingered in the deepest recesses ol the forests, and in the caves of the northern mountains. The reindeer was still to be found in Scotland. The beavers built their dams across the rivers ; hosts of the smaller wild beasts, the fox, the weasel tribe, the badger, the otter, the wild cat. TO ENGLISH LITERATURE devoured one another ; and enormous flocks of land- and water- birds hunted their prey in the woods and over the widespread marshes. The forests in many places approached the coast, and left only a narrow strip of land fit for the dwelling of man. Elsewhere, the tides carried the sea, especially on the eastern shores, far into the land, making waste leagues of reedy fen over which the cold or clammy mists rose and fell in the sunless summers, and where the winters settled down as grim as death. Men lived only on the outskirts of these ragged solitudes of forest and fen, on the fringe of coast, along the rivers, in sparse glades of the woods, on the hills and downs, and on the ridges and moors of chalk, granite, limestone and sandstone that rose above the levels of the steaming forest land. The Romans, under Agricola and after his time, wrought a great change on this condition^ , Where they settled, the rivers were embanked, the morasses bridged, the fens drained; the trees felled along the roads, the woods cleared back from the river- valleys, the valleys made fit for tillage and pasture. Agri- culture increased, great corn-fleets carried the produce of Britain to the provinces on the continent, the deep grass of the river- valleys nourished vast herds of cattle, the hills were covered with thousands of sheep, the export of wool was immense. Gold, silver, and iron were sent out of the country, and the tall- power- ful hunting dogs of Britain were imported by the wealthy Romans. Yet scarcely a sixth of the land was redeemed. When the English came, the forest-land opposed their advance continually. The fen-lands of the east and the wide marshes of Somerset remained desolate. The great woods of Andred, of Arden, of Dean, and of many others, were still huge wastes where only the outlaw lived. Wales was one enormous woodland. Even in Elizabeth's time a third of England was waste land. I The constant presence of this wild country has had a remark- able influence on literature. That influence is strongest where the Celtic element is strongest in our folk, and it appears among such folk as a love of wild nature. The early English poetry of 12 THE RELATION OF EARLY BRITAIN chap. Northumbria is full of the sentiment of the savage weather and storm-lashed cliffs of the sea-coasts, and of the passion of the furious sea. |The poem of Layamon, written on the Welsh border, is alive with the natural description of the wild scenery which the poet loved. The work of the Lancashire poet who wrote Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight is equally full of the love of the rocks and hills and woodland of that Celtic country. When the description of nature in the reigns of Henry VII. and VIII. is conventional in England, it is passionate and done directly from nature in Scottish poetry. Spenser's special pleasure in unin- habited forests and lonely streams, swift rivers and rugged mountains, came partly of his stay in Lancashire and of his life in Ireland. \ Nor is it without significance that the love of nature for its own sake in modern English poetry began in the eighteenth century from Scotland, and that the great nature-poetry of the nineteenth century was born and grew into strength in the heart of a Cumbrian poet. / I The wild country acted differently on the German side of the English race/ /It was felt, not as a thing to be loved, but to be feared. / The solitary moors, the cruel woods, the fens where the wild birds cried like demons, the black morass, are alive in early English literature with the evil-bringing powers o^ nature. Monsters like Grendel haunted the misty moors and the black seapots where the waves boiled ; the dragon lurked in the fen or in the caves of the rocks ; hateful phantoms rode on the storm- clouds or lay in wait for the traveller when he crossed the swollen stream or passed the gray stones on the heath. A whole world of fearful imagination was born which has never left our literature. / Out of both, out of the Celtic love and the German fear of wild nature, has grown at last the modern poetry of nature, a mingled web of love and awe. And between both, and also mfiuencing modern poetry, was all the romance of the wildwood which collected itself in story and ballad round the life of the bold outlaw in the forests, and was mingled with the gaiety of the fairy crew that danced by moonlight in the pleasant glades- . I TO ENGLISH LITERATURE 13 (2) The second subject of which a sketch is here to be given is the Roman occupation, and how far it influenced our Hterature. On such a land as I have described the Romans came for the first time with Juhus Caesar in 55 B.C., and then again the year after; and the noble defence of south-eastern England made against them by Cassivelaunos in his stronghold of Verulam is not unremembered in literature. Nor has Caratacos missed in letters the tribute due to his courage and his patriotism. He, leading the Silures, of a sturdier temper than the Celtic tribes, defended the northern and midland parts of Britain against the legions of the Emperor Claudius, when, ninety years after Caesar's landing, the Romans made the south-east of the island into a province of the empire. In Nero's reign, Suetonius Paulinus took and sacked the island of Mona, slew the Druid bands and cut down their sacred groves. But he had left the east of Britain unprotected, and Boadicea (Boudicca), Queen of the Iceni, raised the country to avenge her bitter wrongs, and destroyed with terrible slaughter London, Verulam, and Camalodunon, but was at last defeated and died of poison. These two events have often been celebrated by English poetry. Cowper sang, with his own melodious grace, the British Queen in her wrath and sorrow. \ One of Tennyson's daring experiments in metre sang of the Druids, the Brythonic gods, the yellow- haired queen, the bloody vengeance which she took, and invented her prophecy of the fall of Rome and the glory of England. / The better government of Agricola, under Vespasian, redeemed the cruelties of Paulinus and drew all the British chieftains below the Forth and the Clyde into the Roman peace. The line of forts he set up between Glasgow and Edinburgh was made into a wall by Antoninus in 140 a.d. ; and Hadrian, twenty years before, had built another wall, whose ruins now stretch between Newcastle and Carlisle. These huge walls with their forts and towers, the fortifications with which the Romans encompassed their towns, their white stone buildings, the temples, theatres, and public baths, the rich country-houses and the magnificent roads with which they 14 THE RELATION OF EARLY BRITAIN chap. quartered the land, were marvels to the Britons. They were still more wonderful to the English, f Early English poetry is full of allusions to these " works of giants " ; and one of its finest Elegies describes the wondrous walls, the gates, the crumbling towers, the heap of shattered houses, the pillars and pinnacles, the market- place and the marble baths of Bath — or perhaps of Caerleon on Usk, built by the second Augusta legion — a noble town which, in literature, is "towered Camelot." In this way the Romans left some trace on the letters of England./ ) It was the Romans, also, who brought Christianity into Britain, and British Christianity has faintly entered into English literature. It seems possible that some of the soldiers of the legion which' had served at Jerusalem, and which was sent to Britain in the first century, may have been Christians, and have spread their faith among the British folk ; and Wiilker conjectures that it is owing to this that the Eastern elements were so strong in the British Church. When Christianity came, it grew steadily. Ter- tuUian speaks of the British Christians at the end of the second century ; and at the end of the third and beginning of the fourth century Britain had three martyrs of the faith — Alban of Verulam, and two citizens of Caerleon, Aaron and Julius. After 386 a.d. the Church of Christ was fully established. / It is in the legends of saints, as, for example, of Alban of Verulam, handed down from the days of the Roman occupation, that we find traces of the influence on English literature of the Christianity Britain owed to Rome/ The chief story is that of Helena and her "Invention of the true Cross." ^onstantine, who was proclaimed emperor at York, was the son of Helena, the daughter of a Dacian innkeeper, whom legend made into a British princess. One of Cynewulf s noblest poems celebrates the dream and victory of Constantine, the voyage of Helena to Jerusalem, and her discovery of the Rood ; nor is the story unrepresented in the later literature of England. ^ /^ But, on the whole, the influence of British Christianity on ( English literature is all but imperceptible. The slaughter the TO ENGLISH LITERATURE English heathen made of the British, and the destruction of their shrines in the first hot years of the Conquest, left only a few traces of the Roman civilisation and Christianity. Canterbury may have retained a remnant of Christian churches and schools. Roman civilisation and Christianity remained alive in Wales, but where the English heathen passed, ruin was on their right hand and their left. When England became Christian, the memory of those cruel days kept the British Church apart in hatred from the English ; and when in the later conquests the Britons were absorbed into the English, they became children of the Latin not of the British Church. There was one place, however, where British Christianity and its traditions were handed on without a break into English Christianity, and whence the Celtic devotion and imagination flowed into English literature. That place was Glastonbury. WTien Cenwealh, in 658, passing over the great marshes, captured Glastonbury Tor, he found there the British Church and monastery, which, since the overthrow of Ambresbury, had been the centre of British Christianity. Unlike Ambresbury, it was not destroyed by the English, for Cenwealh, lately made a Christian and founder of the bishopric of Win- chester, saw brethren, not enemies, in the monks of Glastonbury. ^Vhen Ine, some thirty years after, came to the throne of Wessex, he too honoured the ancient site, added to the ancient Church another of his own, and enriched the monastery. Hence Glaston- bury was the only place in southern England where British Christianity continued into English, where the religion, the tradi- tions, the legends of saints, and a church of the Brythons mingled in a happy marriage with those of the English. The Celtic Christian legends, which carried the story of Glastonbury back to Joseph of Arimathea, to the Apostles, even to the Last Supper and the Cross, though they took their literary form much later, had lived at Glastonbury in embryonic Celtic forms, some of them heathen in origin./ The story of the Holy Grail, springing out of early Irish roots, grew, like a myth, by accretion, in Glastonbury, and taking at last a literary form, not only brought the central I6 THE RELATION OF EARLY BRITAIN chap. doctrine of the Roman Church into those imaginative affections of the common people which story-telling nourishes, but also went from England all over Europe. But its origins were in the Celtic Christianity which passed through Glastonbury into the English Church, j^ It was not only Brythonic Christianity which had a centre of dispersion at Glastonbury. The place had close connections with Goidelic, with Irish Christianity. It is supposed that a second Patrick refuged there. Columb and Bridget are both brought to Avalon. We know that many pilgrims came yearly from Ireland to worship at Glastonbury, and that many Irish scholars studied in the monastery, added to its library, and brought to its folk the legends of their saints, perhaps the stories of their heroes. I Irish influence thus came into England/not only from the nortn through lona, but from the south through Glastonbury. In fact Goidelic, Brythonic, and English Christianity met and mingled their powers in this ancient seat of learning. The spirit of all these powers, though they had grievously dwindled when he was young, concentrated itself in Dunstan, who, brought up as a child in the sight of the monastery and taught by its Irish pilgrims, became its abbot in manhood, and made it the source from which the revival of monastic life and learning spread over England. The literature which blossomed in ^Ethelwold, and bore such copious fruitage in ^Ifric, was sown in the great school of Glastonbury, and by the hand of Dunstan. And Dunstan was perhaps as much the child of Celtic as of EnglishN Christianity. To return from this necessary episode, not much now remains to say of Roman Britain. Severus, in 210, drove back the tribes beyond the walls with great slaughter. Seventy years afterwards two other foes added to the troubles of the provincials. The Scots from the north of Ireland began in 286 their constant raids on the north and west of the island. The Saxons, as the Britons called them, ravaged the eastern and south-eastern coasts for the first time in 290 a.d., and so incessant was their piracy that the whole coast from Southampton to the Wash was called by the I TO ENGLISH LITERATURE 17 Romans the " Saxon shore." By the middle of the fourth century these greedy enemies of Britain leaped from every side upon her flanks. They were beaten back by Theodosius ; and returning, were again routed by Maximus in 384. In 396 and 400 the north and the south were again attacked, and Stilicho rescued the provinces for the last time. " Me perishing by my neighbour's hands," sang Britannia in Claudian's poem, " Stilicho defended, when the Scot excited all lerne to arms, and the ocean was white, beaten by the oars of the invaders." But Rome was now defend- ing her heart against the German sword, and the invasion of the Vandals drew the Romans away from Britain. Constantine, a private soldier, made emperor of the west by the army, sent for the Roman legions from Britain in 407. One of his generals, Gerontius, a Brython, conceiving himself injured by Constantine, invited the Germans to join him in a conquest of Britain. / The " cities of Britain " rallied to their own defence, repulsed the in- vaders, and declared their independence of Rome. j/The Emperor Honorius agreed to that which he was powerless to prevent, and bid the cities take care of themselves. They replied by banishing all the Roman officials, and setting up governments of their own. Britain now, in 410, stood alone, but she was not able to support her freedom. Her various governments had no bond of union ; they fought with one another ; famine and pestilence followed on civil war ; and then her three enemies, Picts, Irish, and Saxons, closed in upon her. She fought with great courage for more than thirty years against desperate odds, but she was at last worn out. In 446 or 447 it is said that a piteous letter of appeal was addressed by the Britons to Aetius. "We are driven by the savages into the sea, and by the sea we are thrown among the savages— -we are either butchered or drowned." It is not likely that this appeal, if it ever was written, was ever presented. At any rate, no help came from Rome ; aijd in an evil hour for the Britons, Gwerthigern (Vortigern), their most powerful king, called on the English marauders for their help ; and Hengist and Horsa, whose names also belong to Saga, landed in Thanet. They c i8 THE RELATION OF EARLY BRITAIN chap. quarrelled with Vortigern ; the land pleased them better than their Jutish flats ; they sent with fraternal pleasure for more of their bands; and in 451 a.d. their conquest of Kent began the con- quest of Britain by the English. It may well be asked how it was that the civilised rule of Rome for so long a period had no influence whatever on English law and literature, and left so few traces on the British. With regard to the British, the hatred between them and the Romans was deep. The relation between them had grown into the relation between cruel oppressors and their victims. The arrival of the tax-gatherers in a British town was like the arrival of a band of plundering and torturing Pindarees in an Indian village. The Britons and their tyrants were two nations in one country. When the Romans left, it was almost as if they had never come. Even the Latin language only existed for a short time. It had been spoken largely in the towns and their suburban country ; thousands of Britons served in the Roman legions, and of course spoke the tongue of Rome, but it did not get far into the interior of Britain. It has been conjectured that a Romance language arose. This is excessively improbable. ) As in Wales and Ireland when conquered by the English, so in Britain conquered by the Romans, two languages were spoken ; and when the Romans left, Latin, as a popular tongue, except among the priests and upper classes, died away. / The tribes also went back at once, each to his own individuality, — to that jealous separate existence which is so dear to all races in the earlier stages of their history, and which Rome strove to destroy. It was suppressed in Britain but not destroyed. The Roman unity had never taught the British tribes to live, govern, or war as one people. Nor did the de- nationalising Roman law and order penetrate into the British nature, any more than English law and order has penetrated into the nature of the Irish people. Britain hated the Romans and their laws because they strove to turn the Britons into Romans, to destroy their nationality. Ireland and Wales have hated the English and their laws whenever they strove to turn them I TO ENGLISH LITERATURE 19 into English ; and it is no wonder. The account which Gildas gives of the condition of the British kingdoms, however exag- gerated by personal feeling, shows how ineffective the Roman order and obedience had been to root out each tribe's desire of self-government. Rome left the land, and the land forgot her with joy. What happened is what would happen now in India if the English Raj were withdrawn. In a few generations an invader would scarcely be aware, save by their public works, that the English people had ever been in the provinces of India. So when the English invaded Britain, they found, save among the remnant who fought at the siege of Mount Badon, little of the Roman government or power, and the little that was left they destroyed. Nothing, save the roads and the ruins, was left of British- Roman civilisation from Canterbury to Bristol and from London to York. This destruction seemed to educated men of the time, like Gildas, to be an irreparable evil. All civilisation, they said, was blotted out ; God Himself has forsaken mankind ; the most cruel heathenism has destroyed Christianity in one of its most sacred homes. But these cultured people are the most often mistaken. It was of first-rate importance for the progress of the world that the steadfast and powerful individuality of the English people should be unhampered by the decayed civilisation of Rome, or by the reckless nature of the Celtic Gauls ; that England, when she came to exist, should develop her Christianity in her own fashion, and weave her literature out of the threads of her own nature. The English tongue, the English spirit, and the English law were secured to mankind by the merciless carnage of the early years of the Conquest. The true influence of Rome came back again with the Roman Christianity, and brought with it Rome's amal- gamating anc^ uniting power, not in the political, but in the spiritual realm; and a mighty influence it had on the develop- ment of a national literature. But by that time the special lan- guage, character, customs, ways of thought and feeling of the English people had so established themselves, that they remained. 20 THE RELATION OF EARLY BRITAIN in spite of the large Celtic admixture, in spite of Rome, in spite of the Danish invasions, in spite of all the French influences which bore upon them, the foundation power, the most enduring note in our literature from the songs of Caedmon to the poems of Tenny- son, from the prose of Alfred to the prose of to-day. And this has been more the case with England than with any other nation which came under the influence of the Roman Church. (3) The third question to ask is — What indirect influence, if any, the Goidels had on the early literature of England. We have seen that the Goidels only existed, as a race apart, in Ireland, in Man, and in the western and northern parts of Scotland, where they were largely mixed with a previous Neolithic people. They seemed from their remoteness to be very unlikely to touch us with their spirit. The Brythons, on the other hand, were not remote from the English. They lay, side by side with them, along the border of Devon and Cornwall, along the March in Mercia, and along the edge of Cumbria, in the land of mountain and moor which extended from the Ribble to the Clyde. Both these Celtic races had each a literature of tales and songs, but owing to strange circumstance it was the Goidels, the more dis- tant of the two, v/hich first influenced England. / Ireland in the / sixth century had a plentiful literature in her own tongue, and a / great school of learning ; find the learning and the literature were brought to the west coast of Scotland by Columba in 563. /There he founded the monastery of_Iona, aQ(i for twenty years evangel- ised the mainland from his lonely island. He died in the very year, 597, in which Augustine landed at Thanet. He was himself an Irish poet, and we still possess some lyrics of his, of warm devotion and of passionate jegret for his exile from Erin. His friend, Dalian Forgaill, who y^rote his Praises^ was chief of the multi- tudinous Irish bards. From his monastery, where Irish poetry was loved and honoured, Northumbria, after PauUinus's flight, was evangelised by Irish-speaking, Irish-hearted monks; and all the elements of religion and devotion which move and pierce the soul TO ENGLISH LITERATURE 21 most deeply, and which through the soul develop the imagination, came to the northern English, and indeed into a great part of Mercia and Anglia, through the Irish spirit. It is scarcely possible to deny that this had some effect, and perhaps not a small one, on the growth in Northumbria, where the Irish in- fluence was greatest, of a larger imagination and of a love of natural description, such as we do not find elsewhere in early English poetry. There is no direct connection between Irish and Northumbrian poetry ; it is always plainly English poetry on which we look, but it is English poetry with a difference, and we may justly claim that difference as due to the Celtic spirit. And this claim is supported by historical facts. There was evidently, even before Aidan crossed the border, an educational relation between lona and the court of Northumbria. j Oswald, with twelve princely companions, six of whom were sorts of ^thelfrith, was trained at lona. He came to that monastic school when he was thirteen years of age, about 616. He lived at lona for seven- teen years. He and the rest of the TEthelings learned Irish and spoke it fluently. He must have known the Irish poetry that Columba knew, and the Irish monks had no religious objections to their own sagas of war and love and sorrow. When he and his princes returned to Northumbria (and he came to the throne in 633) they brought back with them the Irish learning charged wit the Irish spirit. He summoned lona monks to Christianise hi kingdom, and when Aidan brought to Northumbria "the milk' of the Gospel," Oswald travelled with him, interpreting his preach- ing to the nobles and the people, until Aidan had learned English. Oswin in Deira, and Oswiu when he made Northumbria into one kingdom, were both attached to Aidan and carried still further the Irish influence. Oswiu had been baptized and educated at lona; and after the battle of Winwaed, when Northumbria was freed from the terror and paganism of Penda, the country was pervaded by monasteries set up on the Irish model, and directed by monks who had learnt all their religion and the spirit of their devotion from Irish teachers. As Oswald had set up Lindisfarne and its 22 THE RELATION OF EARLY BRITAIN subject monasteries, so Oswiu now set up Whitby on the same Irish pattern. And Whitby became the educational centre of more than half of Northumbria, and sent forth from its loins a number of related monasteries, of bishops and missionaries to the midland and south -of England. The monasteries were founded on the Irish model, the men had received an Irish training, and knew at least some of the Irish literature. Later on^ even after the Synod of Whitby, 664, when the Roman Church estabhshed its ascendancy over the Celtic, the Irish influence, though lessened as an ecclesiastical, remained as an intellectual and literary power. Shoals of Irish scholars came over to Northumbria, and numbers of English went to Ireland to drink the wine of knowledge, to read and love the Irish tales and songs. King Aldfrith also, who died in 705, almost as fond of literature as Alfred, was educated in Ireland and lona, as well as at Canterbury, and was recognised as a scholar by Ealdhelm. It was only when Bseda had raised the school of Jarrow into pre-eminence, and when, after his death, the school of York became the centre of European learning, that the Latin influence entirely prevailed over the Celtic in North- umbria. This was the Goidelic invasion of England. Its first indirect influence — I have said that its direct influence was very small — has been already alluded to. It was the infiltration -into the northern English character of a more emotional atmo- sphere of feeling, of a more imaginative way of looking at man and nature, of a more intense sense of life in all things, than the German tribes possessed^ It was the creation in the English soul of a direct love of nature for her own sake which the German people did not at this time possess at all. j To this we owe Cyne- wulfs passion for the sea, for the changes of the sky, for the storms and the wild scenery of the eastern coast. To this we owe the vivid personification and description of natural objects in the Riddles of Cynewulf, ihe extraordinary fire of his religious hymns, and the singular self- consciousness of his poetry. \ We owe to this the fulness with which he conceives the varied and rejoicing life of heaven, and the mythical elements with which he TO ENGLISH LITERATURE has suffused his picture in the Phcenix of the land of eternal youth. \ I believe that we also owe to it the delightsome elements in the ^ History Baeda wrote, its profound pleasure in mystic and romantic legends, the charm of its story-telling, and the grace of its tender- ness. It is certainly at these points that Bseda differs as a writer from Alfred or ^Ifric. Lastly, it is not improbable that the eagerness of the Irish feeling for sagas had something to do with ) the preservation of Beowulf 'Kn the North, and with the poetising f > of the saga stories of the Old Testament in the early Genesis^ in / Exodus, and in Judith, all of which, as I think, took form in Northumbria. The second influence the Goidelic invasion had on English — literature was also indirect, and the assertion of it is open to dispute. I believe that the steady tendency in Northumbria/ Qowards the making of religious poetry in the vernacular rather I than in Latin, was owing to the Irish influence, Which, carrying I with it the Irish passion for the use of the national tongue, bore \ upon the English poets. The Irish, always using their native \ language for war-tales, used it also for religious tales and songs ; ] and a people Christianised by the Irish would tend to do the j same. It would not even occur to a Northumbrian poet trained ( by Aidan or his followers to write sacred poetry in Latin verse. \ It is the first thing which would occur to a poet trained in the Latin schools of Theodore, of Ealdhelm, of Baeda, of Egcberht of York. Baeda, it is true, loved English verse, and wrote it ; but his chief verse was in Latin, and his practice illustrates what would ' have happened in Northumbria had all the monasteries been,x like Jarrow, linked to Rome. Ealdhelm, also a writer of English \ songs, wrote on all serious subjects in Latin. His English verses were probably popular lays. Some say they were hymns, but the only one which lasted to William of Malmesbury's time was a carmen triviale. put the Northumbrian poets, with the Irish tradition behind them, wrote on the great subjects of the Old Testament, on the mysteries of^demption, on the lives of apostles and martyrs, in their own tongue. / When Caedmon began to sing 24 THE RELATION OF EARLY BRITAIN chap. in English, the heads of the monastery received his English verse with joy, and urged him to go on writing on sacred subjects in English. This would not have been the case at Canterbury under Theodore, or at Malmesbury under Ealdhelm. And that it was the case in the North was largely due to the Irish influence. These were the good things which the Goidelic branch of the Celts did for English literature and learning. Its influence, how- ever, soon lessened, and its direct force perished in the Danish ' invasion. I believe, however, that it continued in Scotland when it had faded in England, and that we owe to it not only the re- markable love of nature for its own sake which we find in Dunbar, Douglas, and even Lyndsay, but also the rough, satirical, rollicking humour of these and other Scottish poets. The " fly tings " of , Dunbar may be said to be the direct descendants of the satirical poems of the Irish bards. And Fergusson and Burns, both in their love of nature and their satire, share in the Irish spirit. But the full Celtic spirit did not reassert itself until the prose poems published under the name of Ossian by Macpherson in the last century drew again the heroic imagination of Europe around the adventures of the Feinne and the gests and sorrows of CucuUainn. Macpherson found the skeletons of his tales in the Highlands, and he filled them up with such literary flesh and blood as it was given him to create. It was a pity he claimed them as true translations. For their value lay in their not being translations, but original transformations of old legends. Their power was derived partly from their origin and partly from Macpherson's own Celtic genius, and they carried with them a great deal of the ancient passion of the legends. They have been unduly depreciated, and we must not forget that they were one of the most stirring and kindling elements in the movement which reawakened romance and the love of nature in the poetry not only of England but of Europe. But having done this, the Gaelic witch fell asleep again. She had been clothed in false garments, and though her beauty shone through them, she put them away and retired to hidden hills and woods. Her influence is felt, but her direct voice is not heard in I TO ENGLJSH LITERATURE 25 the poetry of Wordsworth, Byron, Scott, Shelley, Keats, Browning or Tennyson. But of late she has again awakened, and clothed by scholars in her own garments, has once more unfolded, for the pleasure and pricking of poets, the sagas and the songs of the first / Celtic immigrants into Great Britain and Ireland. (4) The Brythonic Celts whose influence on our literature we have now to indicate began almost immediately after the first English conquests a movement which had in the end a good deal to do with English literature. They also produced about the same time one writer, whose Latin book, De Excidio, and his Epistola^ have come down to us. The movement was the emigration of many of the Britons to Armorica : the writer was Gildas. ,■ Gildas was the first national historian of the Britons, a man whose learning was recognised in Ireland, in Britain, and in Brit- tany ; a saint, of whom two ancient lives exist, one of which is based on the traditions and documents of the Abbaye. de Ruis, an Abbey of which he was the founder. He was born in 493 (the Annales Cambnae make the^date 516), and died in 570 ? He gives "aiTSccount oi the landing of the Jutes in their " three keels." The passage in which he describes the dreadful slaughter and cruel destruction of the British towns is the vivid record of an eye- witness of the ruin, and the language in which he denounces the English " whelps of the barbarian lioness " is worthy of a priest. It is strange to think that two hundred years after he wrote of the hopeless overthrow of all culture and religion by these heathen , butchers they were to become the instructors of all Europe in learning and the most active supporters of Christianity at home and abroad. JJis Epistola addressed to the kings and priests of the Britons, and written within and without with lamentation and mourning and woe, is a bitter denunciation of the iniquities of the kings and a still more bitter attack on the false and immoral priesthood.^ Its denunciations are those natural to a man who lived apart from the stress of life in a cloister, and we gather from their violence \ 26 THE RELATION OF EARLY BRITAIN that the Britons were bad, but not so bad as he represents. He uses, to express his wrath, long strings of texts taken in order from all the prophets and from the New Testament, and this unrelenting accumulation of prophetic angers has a weight and menace in it which at la§t affects the reader like the darkness and flashing of a thunder-storm. But violent words in those days brought no trouble to a priest, and he seems to have Hved an honoured and a safe life. He had many relations with the Irish, especially with S. Brigit and S. Finnian of Clonard. When he was weary of the troubles in Britain he fled to Gaul, built his Abbey, and died in peace. British-Roman culture says its last word in this writer. As to the movement now begun, it was the emigration of the I Britons to a new home in Armorica, and Gildas notices it in a single sentence. It began after the battles of Aylesford and Crayford, 455, 457. The English slew all the Britons they caught, but a good number escaped over the Channel. For we find that the first band of hunted Britons, the source of the Breton people, were numerous enough in 461 to have a church and a bishop of their own. Mansuetus, Bishop of the Bretons, Metropolitan of Armorica, represented them at the Council of Tours in 461. We hear from Sidonius ApoUinaris that in 468 there were Bretons above the Loire {Britannos super Ligeriniim sitos), that is, north of the Loire, in Armorica. This was the beginning of an emi- gration which so steadily continued, as the English pushed their conquests farther to the west, that, in the middle of the sixth century, Armorica is altogether Brittany — name, language, manners entirely changed. Cornwall and Devon sent their emigrants over between 509 and 577, and the emigration did not lessen till the beginning of the seventh century. It was " not an infiltration, but an inundation." Nevertheless, it was slowly done, and with- out violence. The people of Armorica were not slaughtered, they settled down with the emigrants, and the isolated and successive British bands that came over for a century and a half found plenty of land and room for all their wants. Here then, in a much more unmixed way than in England, I TO ENGLISH LITERATURE 27 the old traditions, legends, myths, customs, and the imaginative\ spirit of the Brythonic Celt, both in poetry and in tale -telling, \ were supported and developed : and even Wales was less purely Brythonic than Brittany. Qf course, a certain amount of Goidel blood and tradition went from Devon, Cornwall, and South Wales into Brittany, but it was not a large amount, and the Bry- thonic spirit dominated it. That spirit passed with the wandering ' Breton bards into Normandy, and having mingled with French romance was brought back by the Normans into England, and added its power afterwards to the literature of England. The^ best illustration of this is the Arthur story. As a story it was not I indigenous to Brittany. It had not developed in the seventh I century. But when it came to Brittany from Wales it was rapidly \ assimilated : pure Brythonic-Breton myths were added to it ; it was freshly developed and locally expanded ; and falling then into the hands of the neighbouring Normans, was thrown out of scat- tered legends into clearer form and so brought back to England, where it first received its fuller development as a great tale at the hands of Geoffrey of Monmouth. The emigration of the Briton to Brittany was of high import to English literature. -v n This seems the best place to say a word about the Jlisforia \ Britonum which goes under the name of Nennius, and which is a y phantom-companion of the book of Gildas. Gildas has weight as an historical authority. But we know nothing of Nennius, and the book which goes under his name is a compilation from various sources. Critical investigation has selected two pieces out of the eight which compose this history as the kernel of the book — the Historia Britonum and the Civitates Britanniae. The first of these is judged from internal evidence to have been written about the year 822, and both are the only pieces which occur in all the manuscripts. The compiler, says Guest,^ "used fragments of earlier works which are of great interest and value." But the most interesting part to an historian of literature is that which treats of the struggle of the Britons against the English under the ^ Origines Celiicae, vol. ii. p. 157. 28 THE RELATION OF EARLY BRITAIN chap. i , -* leadership of Arthur. It contains and secures for us the first and most ancient record of those popular legends of Britain which gave birth afterwards to the romances of the Brut, of Merlin, of Arthur, and of the cycle of romance which goes under his name. They are not the inventions of the writer; they are the genuine record of popular stories, stories afterwards used by Geoffrey of Monmouth, and added to by him from Welsh and Breton legends and from his own imagination. ) / After Gildas there is silence, save for the cries of the conquered. The emigration went on, but the Brythons who had remained at home had, in the last quarter of the sixth century, been driven back by the English to Devon and Cornwall and the south of Somerset- shire, and to the lands on the west from the Severn to the Clyde. In 577 Ceawlin, by the battle of Deorham, divided the Brythons of the south-west from those who dwelt in our Wales, and the influence of these south-western tribes on our literature is scarcely appreciable. It is well, however, to reassert in this place three considerations : first, that Glastonbury in the unconquered part of Somerset held till 658 the Brythonic as well as Gpidelic traditions and legends, and handed them on unbroken to the English, so that they stole into English thought ; secondly, that when Devon- shire was conquered, the Brythons were not destroyed, but being amalgamated with the English carried their thought and feeling into the life of their conquerors ; thirdly, that the Brythons who, mixed with the Goidels, had emigrated from West Wales into Brittany, took with them their heroic tales and their imaginative spirit, and in after-times sent both back to England through the additions which the Norman versifiers made to the Breton versions of the Arthurian legends. The influence of the Cymry was much more important. They were the Brythons who dwelt from the Severn to the Dee in Cambria as Wales came to be called, and in Cumbria from the Dee to the Clyde. Cambria and Cumbria are two forms of the same word — the land of the Cymry. At what date these Bry- thonic tribes took the common name of Cymry is not known, but , TO ENGLISH LITERATURE 29 as it means " fellow-countrymen " it points to a time when all the tribes recognised their unity as against a common enemy. Some great misfortune probably drove them into this unity of feeling, and no greater misfortune befell the Cymry than the fatal battle of Chester in 613 when ^thelfrith cut into two parts the Cymric kingdoms, seized on the tract of land between the Dee and the Derwent, and isolated the northern Cymry from the Cymry of Wales. It is possible that at this time the name of Cymry passed into common out of casual use. At any rate, it was now that a desperate struggle began on the part of all the Brythonic tribes to recover the continuity of the country which had been lost; and it seems that they were helped by their Celtic brethren in other lands. The Brythons of Damnonia and Armorica, the Goidels of Dublin and of Scotland, allied themselves with the Cymry against the English, and the struggle carried on by Cadwallon and that of his son Cadwaladr, in alliance with Penda of Mercia, against the Northumbrians, and during the reigns of Eadwine and Oswald, only ended when Oswiu overthrew the Cymry and Penda at the battle of Winwaed in 655. That is the date of the final overthrow of the Cymry State as it was of old, when it stretched unbroken from the Severn to the Solway, and from the Solway to the Clyde. During the whole of this time, from the middle of the sixth to the middle of the seventh century, the Cymry, who were a singing people, sang the fortunes of the strife, its battles and defeats, its sieges and feasts. Four great bards are said to have flourished among them towards the end of the sixth century, and some of their work continued into the seventh. They were Aneurin, Taliessin, Llywarch Hen, and Merddin. We cannot quite tell whether the names represent real men. Merddin, who became the Merlin of the Arthur tales, and Taliessin, seem to grow before our eyes into mythical personages, but at least we have the poems attributed to these names. They exist in manuscripts which date from the twelfth to the fourteenth century. They have been 30 THE RELATION OF EARLY BRITAIN chap. modernised, added to and mishandled, but the ancient body of them is allowed to be historical and contemporary with the events of which they sing. Though the poems have no direct influence on English literature, yet they are the earliest records we possess of English war. Poems attributed to Taliessin and to Llywarch Hen record the wars of Urien, Rhydderch Hen, Gwallawg and Morcant against the Angles of Bernicia under Hussa, King of Bernicia, 567-574. A well known Taliessin poem, the "Battle of Argoed-Llwynfain," sings the struggle, 580-587, of Urien and his son Owain against Deodric the Flamebearer, the son of Ida of Bamborough. It is probable, as Dr. Guest believes, that the old Marwnad or Elegy on the death of Kyndylan, contained in the Red Book of Hergest and said to have been written by Llywarch Hen in his old age, is an account of the sacking of the town of Uriconium, the " White Town in the Valley," by Ceawlin, King of Wessex, in 584, when the English eagles, " eager for the flesh of Kyndylan," came down from Shrewsbury and Eli, burnt the town and slew the chieftain. Y. Gododin^ part of which seems to be by Aneurin, tells of the fight at Cattraeth and Gododin, two districts near one another and the sea, and probably in the north of Lothian. There the Britons and the Scots fought about 596 with the Pagan English and the Pagan Picts. For many years afterwards, until the death 1 of Cadwallon in 659, the poets chanted the great patriotic ' struggle of Cadwallon and Cadwaladr against the Angles in poems, some of which remain in modernised versions to the present day. The poems then, if we follow Mr. Skene, arose among the northern Cymry, and at first drifted loosely from mouth to mouth, but were thrown into some ordered form in the seventh century. After the battle of Winwsed, the northern Cymry remained under English rule, till Ecgfrith fell on the fatal day of Nechtansmere. The Cymry north of the Sol way were then independent till 946, when the Scots' kingdom, established at Alclyde, was subdued by Eadmund, who bestowed all Cumbria from the Derwent to the Clyde on Malcolm the Scottish king I TO ENGLISH LITERATURE 31 Meanwhile a great migration of the northern Cymry took place to Wales, and the heroic history of Cumbria was transferred to Cambria. This is Mr. Skene's explanation, and I give in what follows his theory of what now took place. -^ He holds that the bards of the migration carried with them the north-Cymric poems (the first period poems) to the dwellings which the migratory tribes were given in South Wales, and, as time went on devouring the memories of the past, "the recollection of the kingdom they had left passed away from them," but the poems remained. These "poems, obscurely reflecting the history of the North," were now applied to the present in which they lived. The names, battles, and exploits of old Cumbrian warriors were fitted to the history of North and South Wales, and to the new land the northern Cymry now inhabited. This transference was chiefly made in and about the time of Howel the Good, who reigned over the whole of Wales from 940 to 948, and its poetry makes the second period of old Cymric poetry. About the same time the older Mabinogi took their finished form. Not long afterwards a third " school of Welsh poetry, which speedily assumed large dimensions and exercised a powerful influence, arose in North Wales ; while the literary spirit of South Wales manifested itself more in prose composition," that is, in the creation of new mythical and romantic tales. Still later, and growing gradually, a fourth school of poetry grew up in South Wales. It imitated the old poetry of the North, ^ and wrote in the names of Taliessin, of Llywarch Hen and the rest of the ancients, striving with varying success to reproduce the spirit and the style of the men it imitated. This " spurious poetry " belongs, for the most part, to the time of Rhy5 ap Tewdwr, who was slain in 1090. At his death the Normans occupied Glamorgan- shire, and the kingdom of South Wales came to an end. But the production of this imitative poetry, under forged names, continued through the Norman-Welsh rule, until, in the time of Henry II., 1 See for a full account of this theory, Skene's Four Ancient Books of IVa/es, pp. 244, etc. 32 THE RELATION OF EARLY BRITAIN chap. some of the ancient poems were first transcribed in a manuscript of the twelfth century — the Black Book of Carmarthen. Three other books, containing the old and the spurious -old poetry, appeared in the following centuries — the Book of Aneurin^ the Book of Taliessin^ and the Red Book of Herges t ; the last is a manuscript of the fourteenth century. Of the poems contained in these books I have only alluded to those which bear on English history. The rest of them, and they are many, ranging from the sixth to the twelfth century, are employed only on subjects belonging to the Cymry, on their early traditions, their cities, legendary heroes, sieges, battles, defeats, and on the personal feelings of the bards who sang these fates of men. Along with these war-poems there is a crowd oC miscel- laneous poems on religion, on the lives of the writers, on philo- sophic subjects, on the natural scenery and animal life of the seasons of the year; and some of these last appear to have had an influence on the rise of the lyric poetry of England. Such an influence was certainly exercised by the Welsh poetry of a fifth period, which, growing more copious after the twelfth century, unfolded itself into impassioned lyrics of love and of nature; lovelier but weaker than the older work, and exceedingly per- sonal both in love and in sorrow. As time went on this poetry grew more feeble and, at last, merely sentimental. This further development, however, lies outside of the limits of this book. Looking back, then, over the six centuries on which we write, we find that a great mass of poetry and legendary tales, differing from that of the English, and full of a different spirit, existed among the Cymry, and were sung and told along the marches of the Cymry and the English. These two people came to act fre- quently together in war, and to communicate in peace. In such border relations a bilingual community grows up, and the songs and stories of each people become common property, and mix together their imaginative elements. The le|ends, tales, and poems of the Brythons, and the manner in which they felt about man and nature, could not fail to have I TO ENGLISH LITERATURE 33 some influence on their English conquerors. And for this there was plenty of opportunity. We hear so much of the annihilat- ing slaughter done on the Brythons, that we forget how closely, in after-times, they were bound up with the English. Even in the first fifty years of the Conquest a number of the non-fighting Brythonic population must have been kept by the English as slaves and concubines. The Britons of West Wales, of Devon, Corn- wall, and part of Somerset, and perhaps of certain parts of Wilt- shire, were received into the English peace in the seventh century, and Ealdhelm, to take one example, was in courteous communica- tion with the King of Damnonia. After the Conquest we find, from Domesday Book, that almost all the landed proprietors of Cornwall have English names — farmers who lived, harmoniously enough, among a population which was Brythonic in language and manner. The intercourse which thus prevailed between the dwellers in West Wales and the English existed also on the borders be- tween the English and the Cymry of Cambria and Cumbria ; but after the migration of the Cumbrians to South Wales, it was greatest on the borders of Cambria. In the seventh century, to begin with an early example, Penda was in full alliance with Cadwallon, the King of the Cymry, and helped him for a whole year in his mortal attack upon Northumbria. Mercians and Cymry fought together, camped and sang together. When Offa pushed forwards the border of Mercia, the land he took in had more Brythonic than English indwellers, and the two races inter- mingled all along the new strip from Chester to Bristol. The border inhabitants of north-west Yorkshire, Durham, and North- umberland were in constant touch with the Cymry*of Lancashire, Westmoreland, and Cumberland, with Dumfries, Roxburgh, and Berwick; and, when Westmoreland and Cumberland were con- quered by the Danes and afterwards taken into England, the Cymry infused their spirit into their Danish and English con- querors. In Alfred's time Wessex was in full relation with Wales. The story of Asser and Alfred shows how close and D 34 THE RELATION OF EARLY BRITAIN chap frequent was this inter-communication. Many of the Welsh kings took Alfred for their overlord. Many charters of ^thelstan are signed by chieftains (reguli) of Wales ; and there are traces in the Welsh legends of English names and English stories. The genius of the Celt, and perhaps as much of the Goidel as of the Brython, stole in with more or less influence across the northern and western borders of England, from Berwick to Carlisle, from Carlisle to Chester, from Chester to Bristol, and from Bristol to Glastonbury and Exeter. After the Conquest, this mingling of the English and Cymric spirit along the border went on with greater speed, but a third element, the Norman element, was now added to it. . The French, the English, and the Welsh spirit were woven together in the doings of poetry and of story-telling all over Hereford, Mont- gomery, Radnor, and Monmouth. " In Powys, at the end of the eleventh century, the English element was considerable. Bleddyn, King of Powys, at the battle of Mechain in 1068, had under his orders a large body of English troops. From the end of the eleventh century, when the Normans took possession of a good part of South Wales, the relations between them and the Welsh chieftains are continuous ; and at the end of the twelfth century the two aristocracies are entirely mingled together."^ In like manner the Norman and Welsh mingled and interchanged their literature of tales and poetry. We can trace in the Arthurian stories of Wales elements which have come over from Normandy, and, in the Norman stories, elements from Wales. It remains only to mention the rise of that great Brythonic subject which passed from the Brythons, whether in Wales or Brittany, into England and into Europe. This is the subject of Arthur, who has been so mighty a king in English literature, from the days of Henry II. to the days of Victoria. I might trace in the close of this chapter the upgrowth of the myth of Arthur, from the time when the Brythons were still on the Continent to the time when the Normans crossed the channel, but it will be better * J. Loth, " Les Romans Arthuriens," Revue Celtique, vol. xiii. 1 TO ENGLISH LITERATURE 35 to keep the whole story together, and to tell it in a history of Middle English. It appears first in English in the Brut of Lay- amon. In that poem, English poetry having been, like Arthur, almost wounded to the death by foes ; having, like him, lain hid in Avalon watched by weeping queens; returned again, as was prophesied of Arthur, to life and war, to singing and to love. It returned hand -in -hand with Arthur; and, as the centuries moved on, bound into one fair unity of story-telling the ima- gination of the Celt, the romance of France, and the strength of England CHAPTER II OLD ENGLISH HEATHEN POETRY The Teutonic tribes who came to our island, and from their name of Engle called it England, dwelt in the peninsula of Denmark and around the mouths of the Elbe. The most northern of these tribes lived in South Sweden and the upper part of Den- mark, and the men of it were called the Jutes. Their southern boundary was the river Sley near Schleswig. Below them were the Angles, in a little country "about as large as Middlesex," and its capital town was named, said Ethelweard in his Chronicle^ ** in Saxon Sleswic, but in Danish Haithaby." The same town is mentioned in Ohthere's account to King Alfred of his second voyage down the west of Norway to Sciringesheal, and thence to Haithaby. " Two days before he came to Haithaby," wrote the king, "he had on the right Jutland and Zealand and many islands. In these lands dwelt the English before they came into this land." Below the Angles, on the neck of the peninsula and probably in the existing islands of Harde, Eiderstedt, and Nord- strand were the settlements of the Saxons ; but these islands were at this time not islands, but spaces of higher ground in a tract of marshy land which is now a great lagoon. This was the homeland of the Saxons, but they were continually extending themselves along the coast and inland, and Old Saxony finally stretched westward from the mouth of the Elbe across the Low (Countries and into the lands of the Chauci and the Frisians. CHAP. II OLD ENGLISH HEATHEN POETRY 37 The Angles also were not confined to the small piece of land between the Jutes and the Saxons. Widsith, the Traveller's Song, tells of Offa of Ongle " that he won the greatest of realms with his single sword ; he advanced his boundaries towards the Myrgings by Fifeldor, and the Angles and the Sueves henceforth stayed on in the land as Offa had won it." Fifeldor, or the Monster's Gate, probably means the mouth of the Eyder. The island of Angeln was one of their colonies. We hear from Tacitus and Ptolemy that Angles had settled along the Elbe, " between the river and the forest," somewhere in the north of Hanover ; and Tacitus makes them one of the tribes who had a right to worship "Mother Earth" in the awful forest of the Holy Isle. As their original country, like that of the Saxons, was chiefly marsh, and their life a continual battle with the encroaching sea, we are not sur- prised when we hear from Bseda that the whole population left it for Britain, and that, in his time, it remained a lonely waste. The land of the Jutes as it rose towards the north, and the eastern coasts and islands of the peninsula, seem to have been the most fitted for habitation. Hundreds of small settlements were crowded together on the eastern side, where the sea did not, as on the west, ceaselessly eat away the land. But on the west, where rivers had laid down wide morasses, and the land lay level or even lower than the sea, the dwellers — Jutes, Angles, and Saxons — from the northern point of Jutland to the Rhine, had to fight daily a fierce contest with the waves. ' When a high tide, driven by a storm, ran landwards, it overwhelmed their dwellings, and it is told of them that when this took place, the warriors seized their arms and, as they fled, shook sword and spear in wrath against the gods of the sea who dared to disturb them. Full of bold defiance, they returned and built their houses in the same places when the sea retreated, "fearing," as was said of them, "neither flood nor earthquake." Pytheas describes those who lived about the Elbe in the middle of the third century before Christ. They dwelt in a great fen-land, over which the tide flowed 38 OLD ENGLISH HEATHEN POETRY chap and ebbed twice a day, traversed by a number of channels which the river made for itself through the delta. Some of these, near the lands of the Chauci and Frisians, Pytheas calls the Ostians. Their dwellings were also in the fens. "In their huts on the banks they looked like sailors aboard ship when the tide was in, and like shipwrecked men at the ebb. They hunted the fish round their hovels as they tried to escape with the tide ; they had no cattle, made fishing-nets out of tangle and rushes, and were stiffened with the cold." These, if they were Saxons, were the more miserable folk, and though likely to make bold sailors under bold leaders, would not be the owners of those pirate boats who made life so difficult to the Gauls and the Roman provincials of the " Saxon shore." The pirate bands lived probably higher up the rivers in clusters of villages, or on the northern and eastern coasts of Denmark among the fiords or in its archipelago of islands; building their hall and town, as Heorot is built in Beowulf^ on the fringe of land between the sea and those inland wastes of moor which had no indwellers but the wild beasts and the black elves. It is said that Heligoland was the favourite assembling place of these sea-rovers. Taught to build ships and sail them, perhaps by Carausius about 287, they soon excelled their teachers and became the terror of all the neighbouring coasts, "terrible for courage and activity, vehemence and valour, strength and warlike fortitude," equally famed for merciless cruelty and destruc- tiveness, sudden as lightning in attack and in retreat, of an incredible greed for plunder, laughing and joyous in danger./ They chose the tempest in which to sail, that they might find their enemies unprepared, and wherever the wind and waves drove them, there they ravaged. " Every oarsman among them is a leader ; they all command, all obey, all teach and learn the art of pillage. Fiercer than any other enemy, if you be unguarded they attack ; if ready for them they slip away. Those who resist them they despise ; those who are off their guard they destroy \ when they pursue they overtake ; when they retreat they escape. Shipwrecks do not frighten, but discipline them : they not only 11 OLD ENGLISH HEATHEN POETRY 39 know, but are familiar with the perils of the sea." These were the dwellings, and this the character of the three tribes whom the Britons called Saxons, but who called themselves by the common name of English. They were, like other nations of the time, like even the savage hordes of the Huns, a singing folk. Every chieftain had his bard, his Scop, attached to his hall, who sang in the evening at the feast the war -deeds of the day or the sagas of the past. Often the chieftain, like Hrothgar in Beowulf^ was himself a singer. The store of lays contained, and was, the history and the literature of the tribe. The warrior went into the fight chanting as he smote with the sword ; the pirate captain stood on his vessel's prow in the tempest and sang defiance to the winds and waves ; the dying hero versed his glory in war and his farewells to his people. When the feast was over and the drinking began, the wandering guest told his story to the harp and claimed hospitality. Lays were sung in the chambers of the women. Alfred heard the ballads of his people when he was a boy. At the feasts of the commoner folk it was the same as in the nobles' hall. Freedmen, peasants, even the serfs, sent round the harp to each in turn. A man was ashamed who could not sing his tale, as Caedmon was ashamed at the feast at Whitby. Christians as well as heathen sang. Preachers like Ealdhelm chanted old ballads to lure the people into the church. Dunstan carried his harp with him from house to house and sang the legends of Glastonbury, the stories of the hamlets near his birth- place, or the battles of Alfred. A legend makes -Alfred himself a singer. We know from the Chronicle that great victories were handed down to fame in verse. The very weapons when their lord bore them into battle were thought to break into music. The spear yells, the shield hums, the bow screams, the sword shouts, the chariot wheels roar in the battle, and above the fight the Shield Maidens sang aloud the joys of a warrior's death. The raven, the wolf, the gray- winged eagle, lifted their " dreadful song, hoping for the carrion." 40 OLD ENGLISH HEATHEN POETRY chap. The art itself, thus widely spread, was greatly honoured. It came from the god^. Saga was Odin's daughter among the north- men. There was a god of song, and when men sang well it was by his inspiration. And the Christian singers did not change the thought, though they changed the inspirer. Every one at Whitby said that Caedmon's gift was from God Himself " God unlocked my heart," said Cynewulf, " and gave me the power of song." The gift itself was a "gift of joy." Glee, delight, and rapture are synonymous with music and singing. The lay in Beowulf is the " ravishment of the hall." The harp is the " wood of delight." Playing and singing are the "awaking of glee," and all the listeners " sit by in silence, thinking of the past," stirred to joy or sorrow, as Ulysses was in the hall of Alcinous, when they hear the poet sing. But we must not mix up the Christian poet with the Scop. When Caedmon began to write, he changed the position of the poet. The Scop, that is, the shaper, had a fixed position. He received lands and rights from his lord. He was the equal of the noble, often himself a noble. The Christian singer might be of a lower class, a dependent of a monastery, as Caedmon was, a monk as he chose to be ; a layman under monastic guidance, as Cynewulf in all probability became. But he was no less noble in men's eyes. His Master was Christ, and under that Master all were great who served well. Sometimes the Scop who had sung in youth at the chieftain's board changed into the poet who sang at evening in the refectory, and this double career seems to have been Cynewulf s. But whatever change was wrought in the lives of the poets, whether they were Christian or not, they honoured their own art. The Christian singer praised it no less than the heathen bard, and lived for it with the same eagerness. Nor did he ever forget the poetry out of which his own poetry sprang. He trans- ferred its usages, its phrases, its motives to his own work, especially when he sang of the great subjects of his predecessors, of battle and of ships at ^ea. The Christian poets transfused their own matter with the spirit of the ancient song. n OLD ENGLISH HEATHEN POETRY 41 As far as we can go back with certainty we find the Teutonic tribes harpists and singers. '' A fair-haired folk," says Tacitus, " blue-eyed, strongly built, who celebrate in ancient lays TuiscO; their earth-born god, and Mannus his son ";..." who have songs in honour of Arminius and others which they sing at their feasts and in their bivouacs. " Religion, then, and war, were the fullest sources of their poetry, and both flowed together when they went into the fight, for, of all ceremonies, going into battle was the most religious. At one special point, however, their religion and their war (and this is common to all nations) were combined into song — ' in the mingling of the great myths with the lives of the tribal heroes. The English, like the other Teutonic nations, worshipped originally | the Heaven and the Earth, the Father and Mother of all things, \ and their son, the glorious Summer, who fought with the Winter j and the Frost Giants, with the cloud monsters who made the blight and the fog and drove the destroying hail on the works of the farmer. And the doings of the light and darkness, of the heat and cold, were made into mythical stories which gathered around a few and afterwards round many gods whom the personating passion of mankind fitted to the various doings of Nature. These stories grew into lays and sagas of the gods. They became a part of worship.; But the myths thus existing took a fresh life in the war stories. When a great hero arose, did famous deeds and died, his history also grew into a saga, and in a few generations he became almost divine in the minds of men. Then, because wonder must belong to him, the Nature- myths stole also into his story, and the tales of winter and summer, of the gentle doings of the light and of the battle of light with darkness, were modified and varied into the hero's real adventures, till at last we can scarcely distinguish between the f hero and the divine being, between, for example, Beowulf and | Beowa, in all those matters which from day to day represent the • struggle between winter and summer, light and darkness. The religious myth becomes inextricably mixed up with the heroic j tale of war. Thus both the fruitful sources of poetry, worships ./ 42 OLD ENGLISH HEATHEN POETRY chap. and battle, give passion and dignity to the character and deeds of the hero. I This was the origin of the early unhistoric sagas, Uke that of / Beowulf, and such a saga was the highest form of the oral f literature of the German tribes. It was not, however, thrown f into a complete form, like that which we possess in Beowulf till ^ long after its origin. 'It existed at first in short ballads, each 5 ^ celebrating some separate act of the hero. Such short lays, and other lays celebrating the battles of the day; marriage songs, funeral dirges, and religious hymns, were the daily literature which went unwritten from mouth to mouth. Of all this heathen poetry we have scarcely any remains in England. It was not likely to be written down by the monks, and it perished before the disapproval I of Christianity. There exist, however, the lemnants of the original lays which are embedded in Beowulf ; a fragment of a saga concerning Finn, The Battle of Finnsburg ; another fragment of the story of Walther of Acquitaine, Waldhere ; a poem made in praise of his art by a wandering bard, Widsith ; another by a bard whose lord had abandoned him to poverty. The Complaint of Deor ; and a few scattered verses in the Charms which the peasant sang wheri he ploughed, when he swarmed his bees, when he went on a voyage, or when he suffered from cramp and fever. The Charms, in which we find the oldest heathen remnants, "were kept in the mouths of the people, and their paganism was afterwards overlaid by Christianity. They are like an ill-rubbed palimpsest. The old writing continually appears under the -new ; the new is blurred by the old, the old by the new. The heathen superstitions have Christian clothing, and the Christian heathen. The monks could not destroy them, but they changed the gods. Jesus, the Holy Ward of Heaven, replaces Father Heaven ; and the prayer to Mother Earth is made into a prayer to the Virgin Mary. In one of the Charms, tha.t for bewitched land, we have some lines of poetry which are quite heathen ; and other lines in which heathen and Christian work are intermingled The first is the prayer to the Earth : — II OLD ENGLISH HEATHEN POETRY 43 Erce, Erce, Erce ! O Earth, our Mother ! May the All-Wielder, Ever-Lord, grant thee Acres a-waxing, upwards a-growing, Pregnant with corn and plenteous in strength ; Hosts of grain-shafts and of glittering plants ! Of broad barley the blossoms, And of white wheat ears waxing, Of the whole land the harvest. This is part of an ancient lay sung by the ploughers in the old Germanic lands long before the English tribes came to Britain. The only Christian touch is the "Ever-Lord," for the "All- Wielder " may well stand for the Father of gods and men. The song breathes the pleasure and worship of the tillers of the soil in the pregnancy and labour of Mother Earth and in the plenteous children of her womb. It has grown, it seems, out of the breast of Earth herself into the gratitude of men. A few lines after, in the same Charm, we come upon another fragment, gray with antiquity, and sung when the plougher had cut the first furrow, in which we hear of Father Heaven embracing his spouse the Earth, and filling her with fruitfulness : — Hale be thou Earth, Mother of men ! Fruitful be thou in the arms of the god. Be filled with thy fruit for the fare-need of man ! I daresay these verses were sung by the first dwellers on the ; North Sea when the Teutonic folk were born and cradled. They may be the oldest stave in any modern language. A little farther on, when the farmer had taken each kind of meal and kneaded them into a loaf with milk and laid it under the first furrow, he sang again : — 1, Acre, full-fed, bring forth fodder for men ! --"^vl/ ' (X^ Blossoming brightly, blessed become ! And the god who wrought with Earth ^ grant us gift of growing That each of all the corns may come into our need ! And when the farmer had so sung, the rite was done and he drove the plough straight through his acre. 1 "These grounds" or "fields." \ 44 OLD ENGLISH HEATHEN POETRY chap. In the first verses of the same Charm we have a heathen lay to Heaven and Earth overworked by some Christian monk of the eighth or ninth century very curiously. The farmer, having said nine times " Wax and increase and fill this land " over turfs taken from four parts of the field and hallowed, said as often the Pater Noster, and bowed himself nine times very humbly, and sang : — To the East I stand, and for help I bid me ! To the Mighty One I pray, to the Mickle Lord, To the Holy One I pray, to the Ward of Heaven's realm ; And to Earth I pray, and to Heaven on high. And to Mary, ever holy, and for ever true. To the Might of Heaven and to his high-built hall, That I may this evil spell utterly dissolve away By these words I sing, and by thoughts of power. To waken up the swelling crops for the needs of men. This is half heathen, half Christian, and the ceremony which precedes it is a heathen ceremony with Christian rites and names imposed upon it. The turfs which here are taken to the Church and their green side turned to the altar, the names of the evangelists written on the crosses of bast, and the repeating of the Lord's Prayer, are the old sacrificial rites of the ploughing, when the turfs were taken to the shrine of the god, and their green side turned to his symbol, and divine names were written on strips of bast, and the song of dedication and prayer was sung to Earth and Heaven in times when the cornfield, as Professor Rhys says, was the battlefield where the powers favourable to a man made war on those that wished to blast the fruits of his labour. In two other Char7ns we may meet with the Valkyrie or with the Fate-Maidens. In the first of these, a charm for swarming bees, the spell-master, taking some earth and throwing it with his right hand under his right foot, sings : — Lo, this Earth be strong 'gainst all wights whatever, then, throwing gravel over the bees, cried this verse of the old time : — Sit ye, Victory-women, sink ye to the earth ! Never to the wood fly ye wildly more I 11 OLD ENGLISH HEATHEN POETRY 45 The next brings us closer to the Valkyrie, for the " Victory-women " addressed to the bees is more Hke a term of endearment than an allusion to the wild maidens of Woden. But in this new Charju, ^ they come riding over the hill, whirling their spears, as Wagner has drawn them in music. The charm is against a stitch or cramp made by the spear of a witch-maiden. The charm-doctor stands over the sick man with his shield outstretched against the dart, and anoints him with a salve, and sings this ratthng heathen song : — Loud were they, lo ! loud, as over the land they rode ; Fierce of heart were they, as over the hill they rode ! Shield thee now thyself, from their spite thou may'st escape thee. Out, little spear, if herein thou be I Underneath the linden stand I, underneath the shining shield, For the mighty maidens have mustered up their strength. And have sent their spear, screaming through the air ! Back again to them will I send another, Arrow forth a flying from the front against them ! Out, little spear, if herein thou be ! In the Nine Herbs Charm, a most curious piece, we come on full heathendom in four hnes about Woden : — These nine herbs did work nine poisons against. A snake crept on sneaking and with teeth tore the man ! Then Woden in hand took the nine wonder-twigs, And with these he smote the adder that it flew in pieces nine. But these verses, since the mythical Heaven and Earth, the nature deities, are here succeeded by the far more personal Woden of the third century, are later in time than those which preceded them. For the first worship of the English, as we see by these / fragments, was a nature-worship of Father Heaven and Mother / Earth, and of their benignant children, of whom Thor was one ; 1 and to these we may add some kind of war-god, whose name was \ Tiw. Below these deities there were semi -divine ancestors of the folk, and each family had probably their own household spirits. The rites of these worships were conducted partly in the households and partly in temples belonging to the tribe, 46 r OLD ENGLISH HEATHEN POETRY chaf. or in places like the Holy Isle held in wide and profound veneration. After these great personages, a lower worship, founded on fear, was given to the dark and destroying powers of nature, embodied as giants, elves, and monsters, and also to the elements, places, and things in which the gods, the ancestors, and the meaner beings were supposed to dwell — the icy cliffs and lands, the fire, the ocean caves, the dark hill-lake, the howes and burial barrows, the islands in the river, the open spaces in the woods, the great trees, the wells, the ancient pillars of stone they found on the hill-tops and the plain. But the root-thoughts of their religion, as we see from these songs of the earth, were homely and noble, reverent and simple. There were dark and dreadful elements as well, even in the worship of the high gods ; but these, as in certain mystic rites to the earth, appear but seldom, and did not touch the daily life of men. These fragments in the Charms date back to the old England before the conquest of Britain. Of the other heathen poems there is one — the Widsith lay — the personal part of which belongs also to this early date. When the singer of Widsith^ the far-voyager \ or voyage, describes the Angles as still on the Eyder, the Bards and ' the later Longobards as on the lower Elbe, the East-Goths as on the Vistula and eastward of it, he describes conditions which only existed before the conquest of Britain by the English. More- over he speaks, though this is no proof of his living at this early date, of his being contemporary with the earliest chiefs whose names are well-known in the Teutonic saga-cycle. That cycle -did not begin before the time when the folk-wanderings began — that is, in 375 ; and its main heroes were Theodoric (475-526), the East-Goth, Gunther the Burgundian, and Hagen. The poet of Widsith writes of Gifica (Gibich) the father of Gunther, of IGuthhere (Gunther), and of Hagena (Hagen). He declares that he knew Eormanric (Ermanaric), King of the East-Goths, who died in 375, and was alive in the time of ^^tla (Attila), who was king in 433. We cannot say for certain that he lived between these dates, but it is extremely probable. If so, he lived to listen II OLD ENGLISH HEATHEN POETRY 47 to the first songs of the saga of Ermanaric, and before the great saga of Theodoric had begun to form itself. This is a romantic thought, but it is still more romantic to think that the poet heard, fully formed, the lays of a saga-series earlier even than those of Ermanaric, for he speaks of Finn the Frisian, of Hnaef, of Ongentheow, of Hrothgar, concerning whom lays are sung by the bards in Beowulf. He speaks, as if that chief were near his own time, of the Offa who ruled over the ancient Engleland. These names belong to the earliest part of the Widsith; but its later editors, to display their learning, have introduced into the poet's list of the kings and places he visited, other names which carry us backwards and forwards from the middle of the fifth cen- tury. We hear of Alexander the Great, of Caesar, of Alboin who was king in Italy in 568; and, along with the German folk, of the Syrians and Medes, the Egyptians, the Persians, and the Hebrews. These are plainly later interpolations, perhaps of the eleventh century^ to w;hich .. date ^our. manuscript of the poem belongs. - — As to the poem itself, the personal part is the oldest and the most interesting. It begins with, " Widsith told his tale, unlocked his word-hoard, he who most of men saw many kindreds and nations, and often received for his singing fair gifts m hall. Of the tribe of the Myrgings,^ he went as Scop with Ealdhild, the weaver of peace, to visit Eormanric, King of the Hrethen, who lived east from Ongle. Then ^tla ruled the Huns, Eormanric the Goths, Becca the Banings, and Gifica the Burgundians." This prefaces the long list of kings and places which continues to the 87th line, when the personal matter again begins : — For a longish time lived I with Eormanric ! J jv^ There the King of Gotens with his gifts was good to me ; He, the Prince of burg-indwellers, gave to me an armlet i This I gave to Eadgils, to my lord who guarded me, For my master's meed, Lord of Myrgings he ! And another gift Ealdhild gave to me, 1 They dwelt between the Elbe and the Eyder. 48 . OLD ENGLISH HEATHEN TOETRY chap. Folk-queen of the doughty race, daughter of Eadwine I Over many lands I prolonged her praise ; Scilling oft, and with him I, in a voicing clear, Lifted up the lay to our lord victorious ; Loudly at the harping lilting high our voice, That our hearers many, haughty in their heart, They that couth it well, clearly cried their praise — That a better lay never had they listened. This pleasant picture of his friend Scilling and himself singing in hall to the applause of the warriors, comes to us from the old fatherland beyond the seas, and paints the Scop in his prosperity. Nor was he unworthy to sing of war; for, if we may trust the verses, he had shared in the battles the Gothic chiefs had fought with the Huns in the dark woods of the Vistula. " Fierce often was the fight when the Hreth-Goths warded with swords their fatherland all about the Wistla Wood, when Wudga and Hama sent the spear yelling through the air amid the grim-faced folk." Of these things he sang, and he closes his poem by glorifying his art. " I have fared," he said, " through many strange lands ; ' good and evil have I known ; but the wandering gleemen are always welcomed and have joy in their art." Wherever they go, they Say in song their need, speak aloud their thankword, Always South or North some one they encounter "Who, if he be learned in lays, lavish in his giving, Would, before his men of might, magnify his sway, Be of earlship worthy. For, till all shall flit away — Life and light together — laud who winneth thus. Under Heaven hath high-established power. J In another heathen poem, T/ie Complaint of Deor ; or, The \ Singer's Consolation^ we meet with a Scop who has borne as much I adversity as Widsith had prosperity. Deor is no rover like Wid- f sith ; but, like Widsith, he has had a lavish lord who enriched him with gold and lands. But all has been taken from him by Ihis rival Heorrenda, and he writes this poem to console his heart We see from it that the saga of Weland was known to the earlier II OLD ENGLISH HEATHEN POETRY 49 English, as it was known to Alfred, and to the carver of the ivory casket in the British Museum.^ The poem also alludes to the sagas of Theodoric and of Gudrun, for Heorrenda is the Horant of the Gudrun saga. It is plain that the English kept touch with their brethren abroad, and received from them, as the fragment of Waldhere also proves, the great Germanic stories. And DeoT^s Complaint, though its manu-- script dates from the eleventh centuryj3jx4„ though. jt. contains a Christian interpolation, is plainly of the old heathen time. None "of its' lexam pies are Christian ; all are from the heroic sagas. Its form also is remarkable. It has a " refrain," elsewhere unknown-* in Anglo-Saxon verse. And it is a true lyric, with one constant, dominant motive, varied from verse to verse unto the close. I give the first two verses which have to do with the Weland story, and the last. Weland, for a woman, knew too well exile ; Strong of soul that Earl, sorrow sharp he bore ; To companionship he had weary care and longing, Winter-frozen wretchedness ! His was Woe again, again, After that Nithad in a Need had tied him, Severing his sinews ! Sorrow-smitten man ! That he over-went, this also may I. Not to Beadohild was her brother's death On her soul so sore, as was her self-sorrow, When that she was sure, with a surety far too great, That with child she was ! Never could she think. With a clear remembrance how that came to be. That she over-went, this also may L Of the Heodenings, I was hight of old the Sc6p ; Dear unto my Lord, Deor was my name. Well my service was to me, many winters through ; Loving was my Lord, till at last Heorrenda — (Skilled in song the man) — seized upon my land-right, Which the Guard of earls granted erst to me. That he over-went ; this also may L ^ There is a full account of this casket in my book on Early English Literature, vol. i. p. 60. E so OLD ENGLISH HEATHEN POETRY chap Another fragment of an Old English poem, written on two .vellum pages which had been used for the binding of a book, was found by Professor Werlauff in the National Library at Copen- hagen. The two sheets were not continuous, but different portions of the same poem — a poem belonging to the saga of Walther of Acquitaine. This saga, then, which was one of the Theodoric cycle, was domesticated in England ; and if one story out of the cycle, and that one of the least important, is found in a southern English dialect, it is of the highest probability that the Old English possessed the rest of the Theodoric stories. The manuscript, Stephens thought, was of the ninth century, but the Old English poem may be much older, as old perhaps as the seventh century. There are three forms, independent of our fragments, in which the story has come down to us — in a German form only known to us by a translation into Latin hexameters written by Ekkehard of St. Gall in the tenth century ; in a Frankish form, and in a Polish form. Our English poem is derived from the original German form, not from its Latin translation. It has characteristics not found in the later forms. The Anglo-Saxon Hildeguthe (Hilde- gund), with whom Waldhere has fled from the Huns, does not cry out when Guthere and Hagena come riding in pursuit — " Slay me, lest I belong to the Huns, and not to thee ; flee, flee ! " — as she cries in the Latin version of the poem, but kindles Waldhere to the fight like an ancient Teuton maid, though he is one against twelve pursuers. " Honour me in honouring thyself. Be, as always, ^tla's foremost fighter." "This points," says Wiilker, " to a high antiquity," and indeed the lines I quote have all the ring of the earliest warrior times. Not a Christian thought in- trudes. We are with Weland and his sword Mimming (Mimungr), the most famous sword of the northern world ; with Widia, his son, the kinsman of Nithad who delivered Theodoric from grievous straits ; that is, we are placed among the earliest lays of the Theodoric saga. Here is Hildeguthe's cry to Waldhere, couraging him greatly : — OLD ENGLISH HEATHEN TOETRY Truly of Weland the work ne'er deceiveth Any of men who Mimming can wield. Hoary of edges 1 Oft fail in the war Man after man, blood -marbled, sword-wounded, But thou, who art iEtla's forefighter, O, let not thy force Fail downward to-day, O droop not thy lordship I Now is the hour, That thou shall have one thing, or else another, ' Or lose thy life, or long-lived dominion, " Make thine among men — ^Ifhere's Son ! At no time, my Chief, do I chide thee with words ; For never I saw thee, at the sword-playing — Through wretched fear of whatever warrior — Flee out of the fight, or in flight at the slaughter j Or care for thy corse, though a crowd of the foe On thy breast-byrny with bills were a-hewing ; But fighting forward was for ever thy seeking. Now honour thyself By thy great doings, while good is thy fortune. And this good fortune is to stand in the battle, one against twelve. - It is not the thought of the woman of the ninth, but of a much earlier century, of that seventh century when a multitude of lays were produced among the Lombards. There are, for example, in the record of Paul the Deacon, two close paraphrases of ^Ifwine lays, and ^Ifwine is Alboin, King of the Lombards, who died in 572. The original German Waldhere belonged to this seven century, and our English fragments seem to be of the same date, To an older realm of saga than that of Theodoric belongs the fragment we possess of the saga of Finn, in the Battle of Finns- burg ; and its story is either preceded or continued by another portion of the same saga in the poem of Beowulf and which is sung by the Scop at the feast in Heorot. The arrangement of these two fragments of the same tale is differently made by different critics. Which is true, does not so much matter. What I give here is Grein's, but that of Wiilker ^ seems equally probable. * Grein makes the fragment in Beowulf /^//-^w the fragment of Finns- burg; Wiilker makes the Beowz/// fragment precede the fragment of Ftnnsburg, so that this latter comes in between the lines 1145 and 1146 in Beowulf. H 52 OLD ENGLISH HEATHEN POETRY chap. What is important to us is the poetry. Finn, King of the North \ Frisians, was married, to heal a feud, to Hildeburh, daughter of Hoc the Dane and sister of Hnaef. Finn invited Hnaef, much as ^tla invites the Niblungs, to stay with him, desiring to slay him. Hnaef, with his comrade Hengest and sixty men, are lodged , in a great hall, and at night Finn and his men encompass them | with fire and sword. At this point our fragment (which was/ discovered by Dr. Hickes on the cover of a manuscript of homilies | in Lambeth Palace) begins with the alarm of Hnsef,^ who hasi leaped to his feet, young and war-like, and shouts to his men : — ^ This no eastward dawning is, nor is here a dragon flying, Nor of this high hall are the horns a-burning ; But the foe is rushing here ! Now the ravens sing ; Growling is the gray wolf; grim the war-wood rattles ; Shield to shaft is answering ! Shining is the moon. Full below the welkin. Now awaken, rouse ye, men of war of mine, Ready have your hands, think on hero-deeds. In the front be fighting, be of fiery mood. Then did many a thegn Spring to feet, begemmed with gold, girt him with his sword ; And two lordly warriors went to guard the doors, Sigeferth and Eaha, and their swords they drew. At the other doors up-stood Ordlaf and Guthlaf ; And Hengest himself — he strode upon their track ! Then a fierce hero cried from without — Who holds the gate ? and Sigeferth answered — Sigeferth's my name, quoth he. I'm the Secgas' lord Widely known a wanderer I Many woes I've borne, Battles hard to bear. And now there rose the wail of deadly battle, and the shields and helms were shattered, and the house-floor rang, till Garulf fell, and many with him. The raven, swart and sallow-brown, flew round and round, and the sword flashed so that all Finn's 1 According to WUlker, Hnaef has already fallen, and it is his war comrade Hengest who cries out that the redness is not the dawn. II OLD ENGLISH HEATHEN POETRY 53 Burg seemed aflame. Never did sixty swains of war better pay their due to Hnsef for gifts and mead than these his fighting men. Five days they fought and held the doors. Then Hnaef was slain — and here the fragment ends, and that in B eo2vu If hegms. There we hear that Hengest fought on until nearly all Finn's men were slain, and among them Finn's sons by Hildeburh. So, Hildeburh had lost her brother Hnaef by her husband's hands, and she has lost her sons by her brother's hands. Peace is made, but the things done hold so much of brooding in them, that the peace cannot last. All the passion of the situation is in Hildeburh's burial of her sons, which is sung in Beowulf. Beside the pyre of Hnsef Hildeburh bade — Lay her well-beloved son, all along the low of flame ; So to burn his bonechest, on the bale to set him I Wretched was the woman, wept upon his shoulder, Sang her sorrow-dirges ! Now the war-death -smoke arose ; Curling to the clouds, flamed the greatest of corpse-fires. O'er the howe it hissed, till the heads were molten, And the gates of wounds were gaping, and outgushed the blood, From the foes' bite on the body. Then the blaze devoured all. Of all ghosts the greediest. But Hengest, staying with Finn and Hildeburh in Friesland, kept wrath in his heart, and when the waves were unlocked from ice, thought still more of vengeance; and as he brooded, Finn knew of his thought and had him slain. Then Guthlaf and Oslaf took up the feud, attacked Finn in his hall and brought sword- bale to him, and bore back Hildeburh to her own people. So they avenged the death of Hnaef and Hengest. The events are passion- ate, and it is to our sorrow that we have not the whole of this saga which, arising on the North Sea, spread itself among the Franks and Frisians. Beowulf contains in its episodes fragments of, or allusions to sagas older or later than the time of the historic Beowulf, and these are heathen sagas. The myth of Scyld begins the poem, a thing hoary with antiquity. The rivalry of Breca and Beowulf in 54 OLD ENGLISH HEATHEN POETRY chap. swimming through the sea lashed by the northern wind may be a part of the ancient myth of the summer and the winter, but it also contains the common story of the young men of the North fighting I in youthful rivalry with the great water-beasts of the sea. The I story of Heremod was in vogue when Beowulf grew into a poem — [ the story of the bad chieftain who was false to the heathen standard of generosity, of honour, and of gentleness to his comrades. The story of Thrytho, the wicked woman, is part of the ancient saga of Offa of Engle, son of Wermund, a saga sung long before the English came to Britain. The story of Hrothgar's daughter Freaware, and of Ingeld the son of Froda, tells us of another saga, a portion of which has slipped into Beowulf. In a battle between Hrothgar and Froda, Froda is slain, and Hrothgar, to heal the feud, gives Freaware his daughter to be wife to Ingeld, Froda's son. When Freaware comes into Ingeld's hall, one of her seven brothers (of whom seven sagas were written) carries the sword of Froda by his side, and a gray-haired warrior knows the jewelled hilt and turns to Ingeld : " Know'st thou not the sword ? Dear was that blade when the Danes murdered Froda ; thyself of right should'st have it," and Ingeld, stirred to revenge, had his wife's brother slain, and the feud burst forth again. We know the conclusion of the matter, not from the poem of Beo7vulf but from that of Widsith. There we hear that Ingeld led a fleet into the fiord, stormed over the hills and attacked Hrothgar in Heorot; but " Hrothwulf and Hrothgar hewed down at Heorot the host of the Heatho-beardnas. There they bowed the point of the sword of Ingeld." In Beowulf also we touch for a moment on a yet older saga than the saga of Finn or Offa or Ingeld — on the oldest perhaps of j^all the pure sagas, certainly on the most famous. The singer at '■ Hrothgar's court, thinking as he walked the meadows in the dawn : of what he will sing at night, recalls the story of Sigmund the j Waslsing, which afterwards grew into the Volsunga-Saga and into j the Nibelungen Lied. It is interesting that we have here in -^ English the very oldest form of this great Teutonic story. The II OLD ENGLISH HEATHEN POETRY 55 slayer of the dragon here is not Sigfrid, the son of Sigmund, but Sigmund himself. Sigfrid does not yet exist. Nor is the dragon called Fafnir, nor is the story at all connected either with Woden or the Dwarfs, or with the Burgundian story of Gunther and Hagen, or with any women. The singer sings only "of Sigmund's noble deed, of his battles, of the feuds and the crime, of his far journeys of which men knew nothing certainly, save Fitela (Sinfiotli) who was with him, for ever they were true comrades in fighting and many of the race of the Eotens they had slain with swords. But fulness of fame came to Sigmund after his death, for he had slain the Worm, the Watcher of the hoard He alone, the ^theling-born, dared the dreadful deed, going into the cave under the gray rocks, and Fitela was not with him. Yet his sword drave through the wondrous worm, till the good steel clashed against the rock-wall, and there the Drake lay dead. So had he, painfully fighting, wrought with his strength till he could have the hoard of rings at his own will. And he called his sea- boat ; and the offspring of Wsels bore the gleaming gems and gold into the womb of the ship. But the worm melted away. Of all rovers he was the most famous for strong deeds, a shelter of warriors, and for that in old time he had great honour.** This is all Beowulf \inovi^ of the famous story, and its interest lies in its simplicity. We catch the first sketch of that tale which was developed into a national epic in Iceland and in Germany, which has in so many centuries engaged the arts, and at last, in the hands of Wagner, the art of music. One other piece may be, I think, isolated from the poem of ' Beowulf not as a fragment of a saga, but as a separate lay of the heathen time. Like the Sigmund story, it is an example of the short ballads in which sagas began. Introduced into Beowulf to usher in the story of the dragon's hoard and concerning things j which happened three hundred years before the historic Beowulf, it is of great age and singular charm. A prince, three hundred years ago, dwelt in the land of Hygelac, where Beowulf now is king. A deadly life-bane swept away his folk and he alone was 56 OLD ENGLISH HEATHEN POETRY ' chap. left. And he wandered to and fro mourning, yet wishing delay of death that he might still look on the leavings of a high-born race — the heaped-up rings and gold cups, jewels, helms, swords and byrnies, a golden banner, great dishes of gold, and old work of the Eotens. At last, as death drew near, he hid them in a high mound, in the dip of a headland, in sound of the moving waves, and sang over them this lament, which has some likeness to the poem of the Ruined Burg: — " Hold thou here, O Earth, since the heroes could not, Hold the wealth of Earls ! On thee long ago Warriors good had gotten it. Ghastly was the life-bane, And the battle-death that bore every bairn of man away, All my men, mine own, who made yielding of this life ! They have had their joy in hall ... None is left the sword to bear, Or the cup to carry, chased with flakes of gold ; Costly was that cup for drinking, but the Chiefs have gone elsewhere I Now the hard-forged helm, high-adorned with gold, Of its platings shall be plundered ; sleeping are its polishers, Those once bound to brighten battle-masks for war ! So alike the battle-sark that abode on stricken field O'er the brattling of the boards biting of the swords, Crumbles, now the chiefs are dead ! . . . Silent is the joy of harp, Gone the glee-wood's mirth ; nevermore the goodly hawk Hovers through the hall ; the swift horse no more Beats with hoof the Burg-stead. Bale of battle ruinous Many souls of men sent away afar. " So in spirit sad, in his sorrow he lamented, All alone when all were gone — Thus unhappy did he weep. In the day and in the night, till the surge of Death On his heart laid hold. Moreover, in the midst of an account given in Beowulf oi the Tales of the Sons of Hrethel, which might be called the Saga of Hrethel the Geat, and of Ongentheow the Sweon, there is a lay which voices the grief of Hrethel for his eldest son. It has the quality of a lyric ; and it seems to me as if the poet knew of this II OLD ENGLISH HEATHEN POETRY 57 mournful song and used it for this place. Picturesqueness, sim- plicity, passion, and a sweet movement characterise it Sorrow-laden does he look, on the Bower of his son, On the wasted wine-hall, on the wind-swept resting places, Now bereft of happy noise. . . . For the Riders sleep ; In their howe the heroes lie. Clang of harp is there no more, In the dwellings no delight, as in days of old. There are other lays in Beowulf^ but they belong to the very body of the poem — the last and the longest of those Old English songs which arose on the continent, which have come down to us from heathen time, but which were afterwards overlaid by Christian editing. CHAPTER III BEOWULF / ^The poem of Beowulf^ consisting of 3183 lines, records in two parts two great deeds of the hero Beowulf — his fight with the beast- man Grendel, and with his dam, and his fight with the dragon. . The first has two divisions — the death of Grendel and a later ad- J dition, the death of Grendel's mother. More than fifty years elapse' between the overthrow of the monsters and the last fight of Beowulf with the dragon. Several episodes are introduced, one of which gives the history of these fifty years, and others are taken from sagas of an earlier origin than the story of Beowulf. The poem is an example of that mingling of myth and he roic/ _stor^_of which we have spoken, of the clothing of an historical I pers onage w ith mythical, gannents,^ There was an historical i/Beowulf, a Geat who was a nephew of Hygelac. Hygelac is the Chochilaicus whom Gregory of Tours in his history of the Franks (Bk. iii. ch. iii.) tells us made a raid on the Attuarii of the Frisian shore — the Hetware of the poem — sometime between 510 and 520. He swept away many slaves and spoil, but Theodoric, then King of the Franks, sent his son with an army of Franks and Frisians to the rescue. The ships were already laden when Hygelac was overtaken. He fell in battle and all the booty was recovered. Beowulf was with Hygelac, and avenged his lord's death on his slayer, and he tells the story before he goes to fight the dragon. This puts the historical part of the poem into the BEOWULF 59 \ sixth century. Hygelac died in 520; Beowulf reigned for fifty ^ years after the death of Hygelac's son. The lays, then, about the historic Beowulf were fully sung in the beginning of the seventh century, about the time of ^thelfrith in England, before North- umbria had become Christian. But these historic lays are of scarcely any consequence in the poem. They only exist as episodes, and they are chiefly found in the account Beowulf gives in his death-song of his early years, and in Wiglaf 's tale of the feud between the Geats and the Sweons. The main story of the poem lies in the transference to the historical Beowulf of the mythical deeds of Beowa, who is here the god of the sun and of the summer. The lays which told this story were sung in South Sweden and Denmark, in the Isles, and about the Elbe, long before the historic Hygelac and Beowulf were born. I They probably came to England with the Angles, who possessed them before they left their country. These lays told how Beowa,^ bringing with him summer, attacked and slew the winter-powers on ; the sea-coast ; not only the demoniac welter and destroying strength of the icy and stormy sea, but also the deadly fogs, hail and rain of the winter-moorland which brought disease to men and agri- culture. These winter-powers are represented by the monsters, Grendel and his mother. Ettmiiller's derivation of Grendel, if Grendel be German, — from grindan^ "to grind to pieces, to utterly destroy," — agrees with the myth. Grendel is the tearer, the devourer of men ; the crushing ice-laden sea that grinds the rocks, breaks the ships and rends the seamen. This Beowa myth is transferred to Beowulf and becomes his adventure ^th the dreadful creatures which harry Heorot, the hall of Hrothgar ; and the fight with Grendel's mother is a later and an additional form of the fight with Grendel and of the same myth. The second part of the poem is the fight between Beowa and^! the dragon ; the representatives of the ancient myth of the light and the darkness, of the sun overcoming the night and dying in the contest in order to live again. This, the oldest myth in the ) world, was extended, and especially in the North, to the battle ' 6o BEOWULF CHAP between the winter and summer, between the frost-giants and the beneficent beings who brought life to men and fruitfulness to their ) labour. Then it was further specialised to represent different phases of the contest, and its scenery was modified by the peculiar features of the climate and aspects of the place in which these special developments arose. The scenery in which' the contests with Grendel and the dragon are placed is characteristic of the coasts about Denmark and Sweden and of their climate, but the special features of the fight of Beowulf and the dragon represent (it is thought by the mythologists) that phase of the winter and summer myth in which the sun, here Beowa, fighting his last fight with the winter-dragon, rescues from him in late autumn the trea- sures of the earth, the golden corn and ruddy fruits, but, having given them back to men, dies himself of the winter's breath, to rise again, in the next summer, and renew the ever-recurring battle. Whether we can specialise as closely as this the myth into the poem is a niatter open to much dispute. Those who are devoted to the ^ature^myths specialise even further the poem of Beowulf There is an episode in it of Beowulf and a rival of his, Breca, who have a swimming adventure together on the stormy sea and slay a number of nickers. The mythologists declare that Breca is either the stormy wind of spring — the Breaker — who rivals Beowa, the sun, in breaking up the ice ; or that Beowa is a wind-hero — the cloud-sweeper — and that Breca who rules over the Brondings, that is, the sons of the flaming brand, is the child of Beanstan, the sun, and then this episode means that the wind and the sun with .rival powers fight the winter. But this is one of the instances, it seems, where the nature-myth is driven too hard. All we have -nere to say is that lays which told of Beowa, conceived of as the summer god contending with the winter-monsters in early summer and then contending with the winter-dragon in late autumn, were transferred to the historic Beowulf, and made, with local colouring, into adventures of his own. How, where and when this trans- ference was made, after the year 600, we cannot tell, but it was probably made in the lands where the story of Beowulf took place BEOWULF 6i — in South Sweden and Jutland; and the tale, thus developed, was brought to Northumbria by belated Angles, who, as they came from the peninsula where a great part of its scene was laid, had a special national interest in it. It would be gladly received by the dwellers in Bernicia, Deira, and Mercia, and probably - reached its half-epic proportions before 650 in England. Poets who lived in different parts of England would add to it lays and episodes of their own ; and in this way perhaps, to take two instances, the story of Scyld was placed at its beginning, and the fight with Grendel's dam added to the original Grendel story. Then in the eighth century a poet — who I think was a Northum- - brian, but others a Mercian — drew the main story and its additions together, gave it unity, and filled it with his own personality. He is thought to have added to it the Christian elements we find therein, but if so, he did this with so sparing a hand that we owe him gratitude. It may even be the case that these Christian ele- ments were added, not in the eighth century, but by the translator who much later put the whole poem into the West-Saxon dialect^ and from whom we have the existing manuscript in the Cottonian Library. The story of Beowulf, before the business of the poem, that is, before his mythical adventure begins, is to be gathered from various parts of the poem; but his character, which is the English and North Germanic ideal of a hero, is to be inferred from the whole of the poem, and is the creation of the single poet who took the old lays and wrought them into a united poem. The character is historical even in the mythical portions, that is, it is built up out of the ideals of the time in which the poem was written. So also the manners and customs are historical. They are those of our forefathers in the continental lands of the English, and there is no other record of them, save a few hints derived from the ancient Teutonic laws. We see the works of war and peace, the chiefs hall, the settled town with its houses and gardens and the moorland beyond the cliffs and stormy sea, the harbour and the coast-guard, the ships sailing b2 tJlLUVVUl^f and at anchor, the, hunt, the feast, the warriors gathered to hear the bard declaim his sagas, the chief and his friends, and his way of governing. We understand the ideal of a king, his relations to his war-comrades and people, the etiquette of the court, the character and position of women, the sort of life the young men lived who went a-sea-roving, the conduct of ceremonial receptions, the burial of great personages. We have the doings of one whole day from morning to night related in detail. Behind the wars and contentions of the great we watch in this poem the continuous home-life, the passions and thoughts of our fathers who lived for one another, fought and loved, from the sixth to Hhe eighth century. This is the historical value of Beowulf^ and ^ the record is one of surpassing interest. ^ It collects around the character of the hero, and this lives for us apart from the mythical framework. He was the son of Ecgtheow, of the family of the Wsegmundings, a wise warrior who served Hrethel King of the Geats, and to whom Hrethel gave his daughter to wife. Of these two came Beowulf, and to him Hrethel left a 'coat of mail which Weland himself had smithied. Hrethel had three sons, of whom only one, Hygelac, is alive when the action of the poem opens, and he is uncle of Beowulf and his lord. At the end of the poem, Hygelac and all his kindred are dead. Thus on his mother's side all Beowulf s relations are gone. On his father's side also, no one is left alive but Wiglaf, his supporter against the dragon, and Beowulf himself is childless. J. Thi s, lonelines s is one of the pathetic points of the hero's char- acter. "He speaks of it again and again. It is_ his last thought when dying. This, as well as his immense strength, isolates him, and the inward pathos of it gave him, it may be, the gentleness for which among a violent race he is renowned i n the Then, Ecgtheow is known for his wisdom — " All the wise men far and wide remembered him." This wisdom descends to his son. We hear of JBeowulf s good counsel as much as -of^ his - strength. Wealtheow, the queen ot hlrothgar, begs him to be of Ill BEOWULF 63 good advice to her sons. Hrothgar says that he holds his fame with patience, and his might with prudence ; that he is a comfort to his people and a help to heroes. When Beowulf is dying, he thinks mgre.of his wlsdam as a ruler than of his great deeds in waf.- Even in his youth he speaks to Hrothgar, who might be his father, with the steady gravity of an experienced man. " Sorrow not over-much for your friend ; rather avenge him ! Wait the close of Hfe ; win honour ; that is everything ; and be patient of your woes." Along with this went an iroji rps nlntfta^&s. He had " the gentleness of Nelson, and his firmness in battle. "Firm- minded Prince " is one of his names. Fear , as also in Nelson, is \diQlljLJinkn own to him, and he has inspired his comrades with his own 'COTfageT They all lie down and go to sleep in the hall which Grendel haunts. It is a trait worthy of the captains at Trafalgar. But his gentleness does not destroy the North Sea elements in him. His defence against those who attack him is fierce, full of scorn, of savage retort. But when Unferth, who mocks him, repents, he forgets the wrong with a swift__ge This also is in Nelson's character. Bui_Jthe boastl'ulness of. Beowulf did not belong to Nelson. He is as boastful^ of his deeds as all the Northern heroes are. It is their fashion; part almost of their duty. Nor is he less prompt in the blood-feud than in speech, but his vengeance was not hasty or private. He " shared in no blood-brawls," it is said of him, " he did not kill his drunken companions, nor was his mind cruel." So also his sense of honour^of which he was so jealous, was not in a nice readiness to tak e pers onal offence, but in faithfulness to his word, to his duty, to his war-comrades. " I swore no false oaths," he said when dying. " On foot, alone, in front, I was ever my lord's defence." AVhen the kingdom was offered him, he refused, for Heardred, .'Hygelac's son, was alive. It is true he was but a boy, but Beo\vulf was faithful to the family of his lord. He trained the child to war and learning, "guarded him kindly with honour," served him and avenged his death. His ^ejo^xemty and^ouxtasy were part of his honour. He gave away the gifts he received ; 64 BEOWULF women loved his gent]enes5-as much as his audacity. But, above all, he had theTTonour of undaunted courage. The two -great duties of an English chieftain's life were to govern men in peace so as to make them wise and happy ; and to win fame in war out of the jaws of death. Beowulf never fails in battle, and he dies, at the end, for the love and welfare of his people. " Let us have fame or death," he cries; "gain praise that shall never end, and care nothing for life." " Beloved Beowulf," said Wiglaf to him, when the dragon's breath poured flame around him — " bear thyself well. Thou wert wont in youth to say that thou would'st never let Honour go." Before he went to Hrothgar he had borne himself bravely in wars and troubles. In the long life that followed he was set to do many heroic things and to bear the weight of government. So, even when he was young, life seemed to him grim, needing fortitude more than joy. And when he was old, and though he thought his work well done, it had been done with bitter care. Neverthe- -rless his soul had conquered fate. This double aspect of life was deepened in colour by his belief in ^yrd, the Fate Goddess of the North. She was the mistress of man, and none could avoid her doom. But on a strong and noble character, like that of Beowulf, the weight of unavoidable fate acts with distinction, and so it is represented in the poem. " Wyrd will do as she choose," he says, as he goes forth to fight Grendel and to slay the dragon, but the goddess "may save a man if his courage keep his fighting power at full stretch." Yet, the doom is settled, and the mingling of unbreakable courage and of grave sadness which arose from Beowulfs conception of the Wyrd gives him that noble aspect which made Wulfgar say of him, when first he saw him, " Never saw I a greater Earl, nor one of a more matchless air." This is the hero's character ; the English ideal of a prince and warrior of the seventh century. It is well hewn out in the poem, the best piece of art m it. And it is the type of all the great sea-captains of our race ; and more, of the just governors III BEOWULF 65 who are called by the peoples they have ruled, as Beowulf was called, " the good king, the folk-king, the beloved king, the war- guard of the land, mildest and kindest to his comrades, gentlest to his people, keenest of all for fame " ; who having won treasure in death for his folk, thinks of those also who sail the sea ; and making his barrow a beacon for seamen, is burned amid the tears and praise of all. Many tragedies and wars took place when he was young, and in all these he bore his part. At last, times of peace came on, and Hygelac is established on the throne. Then Beowulf looks for adventure, as was the manner of young men. He hears of how Grendel torments Hrothgar, King of the Danes; and he resolves to go and slay the monster. And so the poem begins. Beowulf becomes Beowa. The Summer goes to slay the Winter. I have adopted in this chapter the explanation given by myth- ologists of the legends in Beowulf— oi the Grendel story and of the fight with the dragon. It is the common explanation, and is doubtless part of the truth. The stories came to mean the battle of the summer god with the winter giants, and the variations of that combat. But in a large and general way, not in detail. The detail for the most part was the creation of the poet's imagination, and was modified by the climate and natural scenery of the place where he lived, and by the character, manners, and customs of its indwellers. Matters which the mythologists have explained as nature myths — such as the story of the swimming- match between Beowulf and Breca, which seems to be nothing more than a great feat of rivalry between young men on a seal-hunt — are common events made heroic by the poet for the sake of exalting the hero. Moreover, a good many things in the story of Grendel go back to a time when the nature -myth business — that is, the poetic personification of the forces of nature — had not- come at all into the minds of men, when their minds were not far enough advanced for §ucb conceptions, and when actual savage F 66 BEOWULF men and women existed in the dark woods and moors, among the cliffs and caves, beyond the strip of cultivated land along the sea shore. The original germ of Grendel, and of a host of other cog- ^nate stories among many peoples, was sown at a time when the primeval indwellers of the sea-coast were driven back by the first invaders into the wild moors and rocks of the inland, where the miserable remnant of them took refuge. There, deprived of the fruit of the sea, they were starved, and some became cannibals, if they were not so before. There they gradually died down into a very few who made raids at night on their conquerors. The mystery which surrounded them made them a terror ; their hideous violence, hunger-born, their tiger-desire for revenge, made them seem more than human, and mingled them with the brute. The darkness of the night and the pale mists of the moors magnified their size into monstrous proportions, and their life and its madness gave them the strength of a wild beast. This is at the root of the Grendel story and of stories of the ^same kind, of ogres, trolls, and of their kindred forms, which we find all over the world. It is a piece of common history, enshrin- ing the last struggle between the earliest savages and their first half-civilised conquerors, perhaps between Palaeolithic and Neolithic man. Having this basis in actual experience, it became a folk-tale ; incessantly, in every settlement, changing its form, and modified by the individual fancy of every teller of the tale. Later on, when men did begin to personify the forces of nature, the folk-tale was taken up into the myth and woven into it ; and when a poet took up the story and wound it round a hero, he used both the folk- tale and the myth unconsciously, and gave them his own meaning ; moralising them into a character, such a character as the poet drew in Beowulf Naturally, then, many odd, old, savage things derived from the folk-tale of the eldest times remained ; curious reversions to the original type — the claws on Grendel's hands, the pouch, the baleful eyes flaming in the night, the mist that follows him, the terrific strength, the beast -delight in blood. Ill BEOWULF 67 the rending of the bodies of his victims, the cannibalism, the poison in the pool on the moor, the corrupted blood in the welter of the sea-pot, none of which seem justly or naturally to belong to a nature-myth. The , story of Grendel and Beowulf- is thus a mixture of the folk -tale, the nature-myth, the heroic legend, and the poet's imagination of a noble character. CHAPTER IV BEOWULF — THE POEM The poem opens with an account of the forefathers of Hrothgar, the King of the Danes, and this opening may have been a preface added after the body of the poem was composed. It is probably a fragment out of a mythical saga concerning Scef (who is here -^ called Scyld), the first Culture-hero of the North, and it is only in our England that the myth has been preserved. Four Eng- lish chroniclers, ^thelweard, William of Malmesbury, Simeon of Durham, and Matthew of Westminster, as well as Beowulf record it. Their stories, which differ somewhat, as if from different sources, have their common origin in one heathen myth. They describe a boat drawing out of the deep to the Scanian land, and a boy asleep in it, his head resting on a sheaf of corn. Around him are treasures and tools, swords and coats of mail. The boat, richly adorned, moves without sail and oar. The people draw it to land, take up the child with joy, make him their king, and call him Scef or Sceaf, because he came to them with a sheaf of grain. f This is the same story as that in the beginning oi Beowulf , but I it is told in the poem of Scyld the son of Scef. Though the myth \ is only found as a whole in England, yet the names of Scyld and « Scef are scattered under various forms in the sagas which belong to the tribes round the mouth of the Elbe, to Denmark and South Sweden, that is, to the countries of the English. It is the legend- CHAP. IV BEOWULF— THE POEM 69 mj^th of the man who first taught them agriculture — the father of the sheaf. The lines in Beoivulf continue the sketch of him as the Culture-hero, who, having taught agriculture, teaches law and government when he grows to man's estate. " Then he subdued the scattered tribes around him, and wrought them into one nation. All the folk around him gave him service." This is the history, under the myth, of the first civilisation in Scania. Of him was born Beowa, " the son of Scyld in Scede- land," the personage whose myth is transferred to the Beowulf of the poem. Then Scyld died and was buried, and the ancient lay of his burial ends the preface of the poem. When the day came his comrades bore him down to the flowing of the sea to bury him, as Haki is buried in the Ynglinga saga ; as Sigmund buries Sinfiotli, as the gods themselves bury Balder. Haki, sore wounded, has his ship laden with dead men and weapons, and a pyre made in the midst of it. He is laid on the pyre, the sail is hoisted, the wind blows from shore, the pyre is kindled. Sigmund bears Sinfiotli to the beach, and Odin, mantled in gray, receives the young warrior in his boat and sails away. Balder, lying on a great pyre in the womb of the ship, is pushed from the land into the deep. The pyre is lit, the flame soars high, the wind arises, and the ship rushes out to sea, blazing till all the headlands shine. But Scyld is not set on fire ; he sails away as he came, and none ever knew who received him. There at haven stood, hung with rings the ship ; Ice-bright, for the out-path eager ; craft of iEthelings it was ! Then their lord, the loved one, all at length they laid In the bosom of the bark ; him the bracelet-giver ; By the mast the mighty King. Many gifts were there, Fretted things of fairness brought from far-off ways ! Never heard I of a keel hung more comelily about With the weeds of war, with the weapons of the battle, With the bills and byrnies. On his breast there lay Jewels great and heaped, that should go with him Far to fare away in the Flood's possession. 70 BEOWULF— THE POEM chap. Then they set a standard, all of shining gold, High above his head. And they let the heaving ocean Bear him ; to the sea they gave him. Sad their soul was then, Mourning M^as their mood. None of men can say, None of heroes under heaven, nor in hall the rulers, For a truthful truth, who took up that lading. It is a fair and noble tale. As the hero came from the sea alone, so at death he passes alone into the silence of the deep, with the wind in his golden banner. It is also the burial of a great sea-king, and the earliest of all such records. ♦fc-Moreover it strikes the sea-note of the whole poem. We are L.never in Beowulf vi'iihowt. the presence of the ocean. Beowulf is j in his youth a sea-rover, a fighter with sea-monsters, a mighty / swimmer of the sea. All the action is laid on the sea-coast Grendel and his dam are as much sea-demons as demons of the moor. The king and the dragon fight in hearing of the waves. Beowulf s barrow, heaped high on the edge of Hronesnses, the cliff whence men watched the tumbling of the whales, is a beacon for those who sail through the mists of sea. The back- ground of this story of the fates of men is that ocean life and ocean mystery which here begins the English poetry, and whose foam and roar and salt winds have in this century, after long and curious neglect, entered again with an equal fulness into its singing. The first thing told of Beowulf sounds again that note of the sea which is struck in the preface. He hears at Hygelac's court of the monster Grendel who haunts Heorot, the great hall that Hrothgar the Dane has built; and who has slain and devoured all who ventured into the hall at night. Adventure stirred in his heart to set Hrothgar free from this curse, and his war-comrades whetted him to the deed. So helped by a sea-crafty man who knew the ocean-paths, he sought his ship drawn up on the beach under the high cliff. There the well -geared heroes Stepped upon the stem, while the stream of ocean Whirled the sea against the sand. To the deep ship-bosom IV BEOWULF— THE POEM 71 Bright and carvM things of cost carried forth the heroes, And their armour well-arrayed. Then outpushed the men On desired adventure their tight ocean-wood ! Likest to a fowl, the Floater, foam around its neck, Swiftly went the waves along, with a wind well-fitted, • •••••• Till at last the seamen saw the land ahead Shining sea-cliffs, soaring headlands, Broad Sea-Nesses — So the Sailer of the sea Reached^ the sea-way's end. /''iJ •■; ■ , And the Weder-folk, at the end of the low bay between the cliffs, beached the ship, slipped down the plank ashore, and their battle -sarks rang on them as they moved. They tied up their bark, thanked the- gods the wave paths had been easy to them, and saw on the ridge of the hill above the landing-place the ward of the Scyldings sitting on his horse, and his heavy spear in his hand. He shook it, and cried : — " Who are ye of men, having arms in hand. Covered with your coats of mail, who, your keel a-foaming, O'er the ocean-street, thus have urged along, ' Hither on the high-raised sea ? Never saw I greater 1 Earl upon this earth than is one of you. I 'Less his looks belie him, he is no home-stayer. ' Glorious is his gear of war, setheling his air." Beowulf explains his coming, and is bid to go on to Heorot. As he tops the hill, he finds the well-paved road leading to the town, and sees the hall below among its homes on a strip of cultivated land, reclaimed from the moor ; and on the sea-side of it the ground sloped upwards to the cliffs. The hall is a long, rectangular building; its gables are sharp, with stags' horns on their points, and the ridge of its roof glitters in the sun. Outside of the hall the houses clustered, each with its garden ; and in the midst of the town was a wide meadow, where in the morning the Queen walks with her maidens, and the poet muses apart, and the young men breathe their horses. This is an island of tilled and house-built land between the edge of the sea and a wild 72 BEOWULF— THE POEM chap. waste of moorland which stretches away towards the horizon. Over this the dark mists rose and fell, and in them at night, Grendel, the monstrous growth with eyes of fire, stalked, and thought to devour men. It is the image of a hundred settle- ments such as the Angles built along the margins of the sea; and the monster, originating in a tale of elder days, is now clothed by the poet with their thoughts about the terror-haunted wastes beyond their dwellings. And now Beowulf and his men have reached Heorot, in their grisly war-gear, their swords ringing as they walked. Sea-wearied, they set down their shields ; their spears of gray ash stood like a grove where they struck them on the ground, and Hrothgar asked their names and their wishes. His Queen Wealtheow and his daughter Freaware sat with him, and at his feet Unferth lay, the boon companion ; all of them on the dais, where the table ran from east to west. The other tables stretched for nearly the length of the hall, laden with boars' flesh and venison and cups of ale and mead. In the midst on the paved floor, and between the tables, were the long hearths for fire, and in the roof above, openings for the smoke. The walls and supporting shafts, adorned with gilding and walrus-bone, were hung with shields and spears and tapestries. When Beowulf tells of his wish to fight with Grendel there is a great welcoming, and then the feast begins. Unferth, jealous of Beowulf, tells of Beowulf's rival Breca, and that he beat Beowulf in swimming ; but Beowulf, wrathful, defends himself When his mocking is over, the Queen greets the guests, brings the cup first to her lord, and last of all bears the cup to Beowulf, who swears that he will slay Grendel. And his boast pleased the Queen, who sat down again beside her lord. Then the Scop chants clear in Heorot the ancient sagas, and the feast is over. Night has come, the feasters depart ; only Beowulf and his men are left in the hall, and Beowulf, knowing that the monster is charmed against all weapons, lies down with naked hands. Now Grendel enters on the tale — the ancient man-beast of the IV BEOWULF— THE POEM 73 folk-tale, the death-bringing winter of the myth to wrestle with the life-bringing summer of the early year. The colours are grim in which he is painted. So strong is he that the strength of thirty men can scarcely overcome him ; four men must carry his huge head when he is slain ; he smites in the great doors of the hall with a single blow of his hand ; his nails are monstrous claws. He is the fiend of the morass and the moor, " lonely and terrible, a mighty mark-stepper who holds the fastnesses of the fells." Night is his native air. " In ever-night Grendel kept the misty moors," and the pools where the marsh-fire burns are his refuge. He is also the fiend of the weltering and furious sea. His companions are sea-monsters, and he lives with his fearful mother in a deep sea-cave, in a ghastly hollow of the rocks, where the billows tumble together and roar to heaven. Like his shape, like his dwelling, is his character ; greedy of blood, ravenous, furious, joyless, hating men and their festive music, pleased with evil, always restless, roaming for prey — the creature of the winter and its fury, of the sunless gloom and its despair. If he find sleeping or drunken men in Heorot, he rends them to pieces, breaking the bones and drinking the blood, or bears them away to consume alone in the caverns of the moor or the sea. And he came this night. " In the wan darkness, while the warriors slept, the shadow-stalker drew near from the moorland ; over the misty fells Grendel came ganging on ; under the clouds he strode." He smote the door in, and when he saw the heroes sleeping his heart laughed and loath- some light flared from his eyes. He tore a warrior into shreds, and then he met the grip of Beowulf. Fear fell on him ; the hall cracked and cried with the wrestling and the whoop of the beast ; but Beowulf held on, and at last rent Grendel's arm from its! socket ; " the bone burst, the blood streamed," and the fiend fled? to the sea-cave to die. So in the morning there was wondrous joy in Heorot, games, horse-racing, poets making songs. The king and queen come to see Grendel's arm hung over the dais ; fine gifts are given to the rescuers; the feast is set, the hall is cleansed; the bards, even 74 BEOWULF— THE POEM chap. the king, sing old sagas ; night comes again and all once more sleep in the hall; each under his shield and spear and coat of woven rings. Then begins the vengeance of Grendel's dam. This was - originally a separate and later lay, and is now woven into the poem by the poet of the whole. The monster is described over again ; new qualities are added to him, but Grendel's mother is a fresh creation. The details of the scenery are so particular that it is probable this second lay actually described the cliff scenery of the place where the maker of the lay lived. But the tale is another version of the original folk-tale and myth. Grendel's dam ^is like her son, only she belongs especially to the furious sea.t She is greedy, restless, a death-spirit, a scather of men, a creature also of the mirk and mist. She swims the sea; clutches to Beo- wulf like a sea-monster ; she is a " sea-wolf, a sea-woman, a wolf of the sea-bottom." Her hands are armed with claws ; her blood is so venomous that even the magic-tempered blade which alone can slay her melts in her blood like ice in the sun. Wrath for her son drives her to Heorot, and she bursts into the hall, where Beowulf is not that night, and rends ^schere, Hrothgar's dearest friend, limb from limb, and bears him away to her cave. " Hast thou had a still night," asks Beowulf of Hrothgar in the morning. " Ask after no happiness," answered the king, " ^schere is dead, Yrmenlaf's elder brother, my rede-giver, my shoulder-to-shoulder- man in war. All is ill." He tells the tale of the night and of the place where Grendel's mother lives. "Seek it, if thou dare it; I will pay thee with old treasures." " Life is nothing," answers Beowulf. " Better vengeance for a friend than too much of sorrow for him. Who can win honour, let him do it before he die, for that is best for him when he is dead. Have patience of thy woes to-day ; I look for that from thee. Neither in earth's breast, nor deep in the sea, shall Grendel's kin escape from me." So they rode to the cliffs, and found themselves above a deep sea-gorge with a narrow entrance from the sea, where many " nickers " or sea-monsters were stretched upon the rocks, and in rv BEOWULF— THE POEM 75 which the waves, beaten from side to side, made a mad whirlpool which flung its welter, black and ulcerous, into the sky. Landward the moor sloped downwards, and a stream fell over an arm of gray rock, under ice-nipt trees, into the pool below. The description,' often quoted, is the first of those natural descriptions for which English poetry is famous, and which, frequent in Old EngHsh poetry, are so remarkable at this early time. It seems to have impressed the English writers, for there is a passage in the Blickling Homilies of the tenth century which reads almost like a quotation of this description.^ Secret in gloom is the land Where they ward ; wolf-haunted slopes ; swept with wind its nesses ; Fearful is its marish-path, where the mountain stream, Underneath the nesses' mist, nither makes its way. Under earth its flood is flowing, nor afar from here it is, But the measure of a mile where its mere is set. Over it, outreaching, hang the ice-nipt trees ; Held by roots the holt is fast, and o'er-helms the water. There an evil wonder every night a man may see — In the flood a fire. None alive is wise enough that abyss to know. If the heather-stepper, harried by the hounds, If the strong-horned stag seek unto this holt-wood, Put to flight from far, sooner will he flee his soul, Yield his life-breath on the bank — ere he will therein Try to hide his head. Not unhaunted is the place ! For the welter of the waves thence is whirled on high. Wan towards the clouds when the wind is stirring Wicked weather up, and the lift is waxing dark And the welkin weeping. 1 It occurs in the sermon on the Archangel Michael : *' As Paul looked towards the North from which all the floods came down, he saw a gray rock over the water and north of it were woods hung with icy rime. And darkj mists were there, and under the cliff the dwellings of nickers and other^ monsters. And he saw how on the ice -clad trees many black souls wer^ hanging with bound hands and the devils in shape of wolves seized on theri like Jliungry wolves, and the flood under the cliff was black. And twelve mil^ beneath the cliffs was this water, and when the branches on which the souls hung, broke off, the souls fell into the water, and the water-monsters gripped them." 76 BEOWULF— THE POEM chap. They ride down to the shelving rocks, and find ^Eschere's bloody head, and the water is red and troubled. One of the strange sea-dragons, imaged by the poet from the walrus and the tusked seal, is slain with arrows and spears, and the men gaze on the grisly guest; but Beowulf, arming himself, and taking Un- ferth's sword, Hrunting, one of the old treasures of the world, plunged into the ocean surge. But the sea-wolf saw him, and bore him upwards into her dwelling, a cave where water was not. A weird light was there, and the hero struck at the mere-woman. But the war-beam would not bite, and Grendel's dam seized Beowulf and flung him down as he stumbled, and drew her seax, brown- edged, and drove at his heart. His war-sark withstood the blow, and Beowulf leaped to his feet. And he saw, hanging on the wall, an old sword of the Eotens, hallowed by victory, doughty of edges, a pride of warriors, and, seizing the gold-charmed hilt, he smote at the sea- wolfs neck. The brand gripped on her throat, broke through the bone into the body, and she fell dead on the sand. Again he looked round, rejoicing in his work, and there by the wall lay Grendel, lifeless and weary of war; and his body sprang far away as the hero smote off his head. The blood streamed into the water and Hrothgar's thegns saw it and crying, "We shall see him no more," went their way to Heorot. But Beowulf's thegns sat on, and at last the hero rose through the bloody sea, bearing the golden hilt and Grendel's head. Proudly they marched back to Heorot, and the four men who bore on spears the head of Grendel flung it at the feet of Hrothgar. Beowulf told his tale of victory ; feasting brought on the night, and night the morning, "over shadows sliding." Great gifts were given and alliance sworn ; and Beowulf went home, over the meads and over the sea, to Hygelac, and gave his gifts — horses and gray war-shirts, and a collar like the Brising collar — to Hygelac and Hygd his queen. And Hygelac gave Beowulf a gold -inlaid sword, and seven thousand in money, and a country seat and the dignity of a prince — and so the first part of the poem is at an end. The second part opens some sixty years afterwards, when Bea IV BEOWULF — THE POEM 77 vvulf has succeeded Heardred, Hygelac's son, and has reigned for fifty years. He has outlived all enmity, and dwells in peace, worshipped by his people, till he is past eighty years of age. The summer of his life has died, late autumn has come, and the sun- king now goes forth to his last fight with the dragon of the winter, and to secure for his people the golden fruits hidden in the earth. He wins the treasure, but in the battle dies. The myth twists itself, through a folk-tale, into the following story. One of Beowulf's thegns found a high barrow on the cliffs, where a dragon watched a treasure laid by three hundred years ago, and stole a cup therefrom. At which the drake, furious, flew forth at night to avenge his wrong, vomiting flashes of fire. The palace-hall, the homes, the country, were all aflame, and Beowulf, hot as of old, let an iron shield be made, under which to slay the ravager. The cave where the dragon lurks is in a valley-dip be- tween two headlands whose cliffs plunge into the sea. These have their names, Hronesnaes and Earnanses, the Ness of the Whale, the Ness of the Earns. The dell between them has low cliffs on either side, and on the ridge of the right-hand cliff is a wood, where Beowulf sits and sings his death song before he goes down into the meadow below, and where his frightened thegns take refuge. It is on this side that Beowulf, with his back to the rocks, is brought to bay by the dragon. On the other side, but higher up the dell, the great barrow stands, and near it the cave, entered by a rocky arch ; and here is the lair of the worm. A stream breaks from the mouth of the cave, and runs down the dell to lose itself in the gray heath which from the inland rises to the cliffs. This is the place where Beowulf finds his last foe and his death. And he sat down, and sang the deeds of his life. " I remember all, since I was seven years old." He bade his men farewell, and armed himself, for he has to fight with fire. " Not a foot will I fly the ward of the hill ; but at the rock wall it shall be as Wyrd wills, Wyrd, the measurer of the lives of men. Wait ye on the hill, clad in your byrnies. Then the fierce champion, brave under helm, bore his mail sark down to the rocks." And 78 BJiOWUJ.F — THE POEM CHAP. he shouted, seeing the cave and the stream smoking with the dragon's breath, and his shout was like a storm. Now the ward of the hoard knew the voice of a man, and rolling in curves, and his fiery breath burning before him while the earth roared, he struck at Beowulf with his head. And the king smote hard, but Naegling, his sword, slid off the bone, and in a moment Beowulf was wrapt in flame. Then all his thegns fled, save one, Wiglaf, his kinsman, who, wading through the deadly reek, stood beside his lord. "Ward thy life, loved Beowulf, think on fame, I will stand by thee." And the hero smote again, but Naegling broke, and the drake clasped his paws round the king's throat till the life-blood bubbled forth in waves. But Wiglaf struck lower into the belly of the beast, and the fire abated ; whereat Beowulf drew his deadly seax, bitter and battle-sharp, and clove the worm in two. So the battle ended. But the king had got his death. The venom boiled in his breast, and he sat down to think, and to look at the arch of the cave, while Wiglaf unloosed his helm. And he spoke his death- words : " Would I could give to a son this war-weed of mine, but I have none sprung from my loins. Fifty winters I held my sway over my folk ; nor durst any king greet me with his war-friends or press on me the terror of war. I tarried at home on the hour of my weird ; I held mine own fitly ; I sought no feuds ; I swore no oaths which I did not keep, and I swore few ; so I may, for all this, have comfort, since the Master of men may not charge me with murder-bale of kinsmen, when life flies from my body. Now hasten, dear Wiglaf, and bring the hoard out of the hollow rock, that I may see the ancient wealth, so that, after sight of it, I may the easier give up my life, and the peopleship I have held so long." And Wiglaf, hastening, saw in the worm's den the glittering gold, and many treasures ; and, greatest of wonders, an all-golden banner, curious in handiwork, woven with magic songs, and shed- ding a wizard light over all things in the cave. And he brought forth the treasure. " I thank the glorious king," cried Beowulf, IV BEOWULF— THE TOEM 79 " that, ere I die, I have won these things for my people ; have paid my old Hfe for them. But do thou supply the need of my folk, I may no longer be here." , Bid the battle-famed build a barrow high, Clear to see when bale is burnt, on the bluffs above the surge. Thus it may for folk of mine, for remembering of me. Lift on high its head, on the height of Hronesnaes ; So that soon sea-sailing men, in succeeding days. Call it Beowulf s Barrow ; when, their barks a-foam, From afar they make their way through the mists of Ocean. And he did off from his neck the golden collar, and gave his helm and ring and mail-coat to Wiglaf. " Use them well," he said. "Thou art the last of the Waegmundings. Wyrd swept them all away ; strong earls they were ; each at the weirded hour. I must go after them. This was the last of the thoughts of his heart." So Wiglaf sat alone, with his dead lord in the green dell between the two cliffs; and on the meadow lay the fire-drake, fifty feet of him, and the broken sword, and the gold cups and dishes, rings, and jewels : swords rusted with three hundred winters ; and above them, as was Scyld's honour when he died, the golden banner glistened. And all the host, and the twelve thegns who had fled, came down to see the sight and their dead king. And Wiglaf reproached the faithless who had deserted their lord; and the passage marks one of the main Teutonic conceptions : — Now shall getting gems, and the giving too of swords, And the pleasure of a home, and possession of the land, Be no more to kin of yours ! Every man of kin to you Shall bereft of land-right roam, when the lords shall hear Of your deep damnation. Death is better far. For whatever warrior, than a woeful life of shame. And the messenger who tells of the king's death to the host pro- phesies that because of it the old feud with the Sweons will break out again. "The leader of our battle has ceased from laughter, from sport and the joy of song. The treasures will be 8o BEOWULF— THE POEM chap. borne away, the maidens shall walk in alien fields, the hands (of ghosts?) shall lift the spear, morning cold, and the harp shall never more With its ringing rouse the warriors, but the Raven wan, Eager, fiercely, o'er the fated, shall be full of talking, M Croaking to the sallow Earn how it sped him at the gorging, When he, with the wolf, on the war-stead tore the slain. So the three beasts, like the Valkyrie, shall speak of their bloody work. Then Wiglaf told of the battle, and of the burial the king wished for ; and they laded a wain with the treasures, and heaved the drake over the cliff, and carried Beowulf to the further edge of Whale's Ness ; and Wiglaf sang, while he laid with care the gray-headed warrior on the bier : — Now the deed shall fret, And the wannish flame wax high, on this War-strength of his warriorsH^ Him who oft awaited iron showers in the battle, When the storm of arrows, sent a- flying from the strings, Shot above the shield-wall ; and the shaft its service, Fledged with feathers, did, following on the barb. So they made a great barrow, labouring for ten days, timbered-up on high, to be seen far and wide by those who fared the main ; and did into it armlets and bright gems and the ashes of theii lord, and hung it with shields and helms and shining shirts oi war. Then about the barrow rode the beasts of battle, Twelve in all they were, bairns of ^thelings, Who would speak their sadness, sing their sorrow for their king. So, with groaning, grieved, all the Geat folk, All his hearth-companions for their House-lord's overthrow 1 Quoth they, that he was, of the world-kings all, Of all men the mildest, and to men the kindest. To his people gentlest, and of praise the keenest. With these words of farewell Beoivulf closes ; and this care- fully-wrought conclusion and the summing up of the hero's character go far to prove that, however many ancient lays were rv BEOWULF— THE POEM 8i used by the writer, the poem was composed as a whole by one ; _ poet who had the keenest sympathy with the heathen traditions of his people, and who may himself have been, like many folk in the eighth century, half heathen at heart. The Christian inter- polations, I have already said, may have been made, not by him, but by the Wessex editor of the saga in the tenth century. At any rate, they are few, and of slight importance. Some, who have not, it seems, read the poem, make a great deal of them, and say they spoil the poem. They are, it is true, quite out of place and jarring when they occur. But they are curiously.-^ brief, with the exception of the sermon of Hrothgar about pride ; and they are easily set aside. The poet was remarkably merciful, and thought too well of his original material to do much of this Christianising work. I have, however, sometimes thought that the second part of the poem, the fight with the dragon, may have been frankly heathen, and that the later editor made / omissions in consequence, for this part is much broken up ( and confused. Whatever may be said of this conjecture, it I remains true that the form of the first part is good and clear; \ that of the second not. Loose lays are introduced into it without any just arrangement ; and the story of the theft from the dragon is told twice over. But when that is said, criticism has but little left to say but praise, especially when we think ot the early date at which the poem was made. Its lays go back to the seventh, perhaps to the sixth century ; its composition as a whole to the eighth. No other extant modern poem — the Welsh poems of the - sixth century and some Irish verse being excepted — can approach its age, save, perhaps, that fragment of Hadubrandand Hildebra?td found at Fulda, said to date from the eighth century, and to have been sung as a lay in the seventh. But this is a mere fragment ; Beowulf is a complete poem. Its age dignifies it, excuses its want of form, and demands our reverence. What poetic standard it reaches is another question. It has been called an epic, but it is narrative rather than epic poetry. — The subject has not the weight pr dignity of an epic poem, G 82 BEOWULF— THE POEM chap. nor the mighty fates round which an epic should revolve. Its ^story is rather personal than national. The one epic quality it has, the purification of the hero, the evolution of his character - through trial into perfection — and Beowulf passes from the isolated hero into the image of an heroic king who dies for his people — may belong to a narrative poem. Moreover the poem is made -up of two narratives with an interval of some sixty years, an - interval which alone removes it from the epic method, which is bound to perfect the subject in an ordered, allotted, and con- tinuous space of time. But as a narrative, even broken as it is, It attains unity from the unity of the myth it represents under ^two forms, and from the unity of the hero's character. He is the same in soul, after fifty years, that he was when young. - There is also a force, vitality, clearness and distinctiveness of portraiture, not only in Beowulf's personality, but in that of all the other personages, which raise the poem into a high place, and —predict that special excellence of personal portraiture which has made the English drama so famous in the world. Great imagina- (tion is not one of the excellences of Beowulf^ but it has pictorial ipower of a fine kind, and the myth of summer and winter on which it rests is out of the imagination of the natural and early world. It has a clear vision of places and things and persons; it has preserved for us two monstrous types out of the very early world. When we leave out the repetitions which oral poetry —created and excuses, it is rapid and direct ; and the dialogue is brief, simple and human. Finally, we must not judge it in the study. If we wish to feel whether Beoivulf is good poetry, we should place ourselves, as evening draws on, in the hall of the folk, when the benches are filled with warriors, merchants and seamen, and the Chief sits in the high seat, and the fires flame down the midst, and the cup goes round — and hear the Shaper strike the harp to sing this heroic lay. Then, as he sings of the great fight with Grendel or the dragon, of the treasure- giving of the king, and of the well-known swords, of the sea- rovings and the sea-hunts and the brave death of men, to sailors IV BEOWULF— THE POEM 83 who knew the storms, to the fierce rovers who fought and died with glee, to great chiefs who led their warriors, and to warriors who never left a shield, we feel how heroic the verse is, how passionate with national feeling, how full of noble pleasure. The poem is great in its own way, and the way is an English way. The men, the women, at home and in war, are one in character with us. It is our Genesis, the book of our origins. CHAPTER V SEMI-HEATHEN POETRY We are still in heathen times when we accompany the Jutes across the sea to the conquest of Kent. Other Jutes, a good time afterwards, took and colonised the Isle of Wight and a small piece of the adjacent mainland. News of the conquest of Kent reached the Saxons, and the first band of them, landing near Chichester, completed the conquest of Sussex in 491. Wessex began to be made by a second band of Saxons under Cerdic, but it was not till 577, after the battle of Deorham, that the West Saxons, having previously conquered Dorset and Wilts, secured the north of Somerset, reached the Bristol Channel, and seizing the valley of the Severn, occupied our Herefordshire and Worcestershire. The third tribe, the Angles, left Denmark about 547. They settled in the district they named Norfolk and Suffolk ; they seized the coasts of Yorkshire and subdivided it westward to the Pennine chain. They subdued the northern coast as far as the Firth of Forth and the land westward to the valley of the"^ Clyde and Cumberland. The Yorkshire part they called Deira, "the southland," and the northern Bernicia, "the land of the Braes," and these two, when they were afterwards united, made Northumbria. Then all the rest of the Angles poured across the sea, leaving their old lands so totally uninhabited that the Angles are never mentioned again among the German tribes ; and these belated invaders, passing through the East Anglian lands, turned ll CHAP. V SEMI-HEATHEN POETRY 85 south and west and won the middle of England as far as the Vale of the Severn. As these English called the borderland between them and the Welsh the March, they called themselves the Mercians. Meanwhile, other Saxon bands conquered Middlesex where London was, and Essex where was Colchester. So all England, save the three Welsh kingdoms — the Kingdom of Devon and Cornwall, that is. West Wales ; the Kingdom of our North and South Wales ; and the Kingdom of Cumberland with the Clyde valley — belonged to the English. This conquest — for the - Brythons fought with desperate and steady courage, unlike the English against the Normans after Senlac — took about 150 years. During this period the poetry of England was altogether heathen unbroken by a single Christian voice. But there is no doubt that every famous fight and the deeds of kings and warriors were sung by the English bards in ballad form, and grew into sagas of the Conquest of England. The only English poem which has any relation to the Con-' quest is the fragment called the Ruined Burg. It is now generally allowed to be a description of Bath (Bathanceaster), which was sacked and burnt by Ceawlin after the battle of Deorham in 577.^ The Saxons left it, for they scorned to dwell in towns, and the wild forest grew in the colonnades and porches of the hot springs, over the Forum and the public buildings of the Romans. It was not till a century after, in 676, that Osric, an under-king of V the Hwiccas, founded a monastery among its ruins ; and more than a century later, in 781, that Ofifa, seeing the importance of the place, encouraged the new town into a vigorous life. Some poet, coming in a chieftain's train to visit the place — we may^' say in the eighth century — and wandering on a frosty morning among'~the' fallen buildings, was smitten to the heart by the sorrow of so much ruin, and made this poem, which has no Christian elements in it, but much humanity. Its motive — imagin- 1 It is possible that the Roman buildings may have fallen into ruin before Ceawlin attacked the town. It is also possible that the poem may describe not Bath, but Camelot. 86 SEMI-HEATHEN POETRY chap % /\ ative sadness for the departure of splendour and life — became ^ common in early English poetry. Wondrous is this wall of stone ; Weirds have shattered it ! Broken are the burg-steads, crumbled down the giants' work ! Fallen are the roof-beams, ruined are the towers : All undone the door-pierced turrets ; frozen dew is on their plaster. Shorn away and sunken down, are the sheltering battlements. Under-eaten of Old Age ! Earth is holding in her clutch These, the power- wielding workers ; all forworn and all forlorn in death are they. Hard the grip is of the ground, while a hundred generations Move away. . . . Long its wall abode Through the rule that followed rule, ruddy-stained, and grey as goat, Under storm-skies steady. Steep the Court that fell ; Brilliant were the burg-steads ; burn -fed houses many ; High the heap of hornM gables ; of the host a mickle sound. Many were the mead-halls, full of mirth of men, Till the strong-willed Wyrd whirled that all to change. In a slaughter wide they fell, woeful days of bale came on j Famine-death fortook fortitude from men ! All their battle -bulwarks bared to their foundations are ; Crumbled is the castle keep ! . . . . . . Many a brave man there Glad of yore,a-gleam with gold, gloriously adorned, Hot with wine, and haughty, in war-harness shone ; Saw upon his silver, on set gems and treasure, On his welfare and his wealth, on his well-wrought jewels, On this brightsome burg of a broad dominion ! Then the baths are described — the steam surging hotly through the courts of stone and whirling round and round, the waves filling the great circle of the bath, "a kingly thing, ** or a place where a " Thing " might assemble. There is no trace of Christian sentiment in the poem, and this * want seems remarkable. But we must remember that Christianity, after its introduction in 597, took nearly a century to conquer the whole of England, and left, even after the last heathen district was christianised in 686, a great part of the wild country and its V SEMI-HEATHEN TOETRY 87 farmers all but heathen. It is not strange then that a good deal / of poetry among the people was scarcely touched by Christianity. \ It is probable that many laymen, who, like Cynewulf in his youth, \ lived as poets in the train of chieftains, had, though nominally 1 Christians, little or no Christian feeling. Even when they were j '* converted " they easily recurred, at least whenever they sang of ^ war, or of the sea, or of personal sorrow other than that for sin, to the old heathen lays for inspiration. The Riddles of Cynewulf, the Elegies^ the passages concerning war in the Caedmonic poems and TiTtHe "Christian poems of Cynewulf are all heathen in tone and manrier. Tlfe" same may be said of even so late a poem as the Song of Brunanburh. It is not till we come to the Battle of' Maiden^ 991, that we meet wnth a poem of war which mingles Christian prayer and inspiration with the noise of arms and the passion of fame. Therefore, before we discuss the poetry which is distinctively Christian, it will be well to consider that poetry of war, of nature, and of daily Hfe which has no Christian elements in it, even when it occurs in Christian poems. War was the chief business and the chief glory of the Germanic tribes. And being waged for the sake of home and fame, ad- venture and revenge, it became, through the ideality of these things, the chief subject of song. Everything that belonged to it was clothed in imaginative dress. All weapons, and chiefly the sword, were glorified ; and the great smiths, like Weland, were the themes of legend. Battle was attended by spiritual beings, by Wyrd, by the Shield-Maidens, by Woden in his coat of gray, by the spirits who became at one with the famous swords and spears of heroes. Even the creatures of the wood and the air who devoured the dead, the gray-eagle, the raven, the kite, the hawk from the cliff, the wolf and the hill-fox, were impersonated. They screamed, croaked, howled their battle-song, they talked with one another as they rent the dead, and the note of their cries foretold the issue of the battle. They are rarely absent from the poetry of war. Cynewulf conceives the sword in one of his Riddles^ and with JL SEMI-HEATHEN POETRY A\ all his impersonating power, as a warrior wrapped in his scabbard k \ as in a coat of mail, going like a hero into battle, hewing his path into the ranks of the foe, praised in the hall by kings, and even mourning, when it is laid by, for its childlessness and for the anger with which women treat it as the slaughterer of men. Im- personation can scarcely go further, yet it is not too far among men who conceived of a living being in the sword. In another Riddle Cynewulf impersonates the shield, and in others the helmet, the spear, and the bow. The shield is sick of battles, no physician can heal its wounds, it is weary of the sword-edges, notched day and night with the mighty strokes of the sword, that " heritage of hammers." The helmet mourns the bitter weather it has to bear, and as the lines sketch a northern storm I quote them : — On me, still upstanding, smite the showers of rain ; Hail, the hard grain, beats on me, and the hoar-frost covers me ; And the flying snow (in flakes) thickly falls on me. The spear wails that as a sapling it was taken from the green fields and forced to bow to a slaughterer's will ; but as it comes to know its master better, it learns to love his fame as its own, and to be happy. Then it is proud of its small neck and fallow sides : rejoicing when the sun glitters on its point and a hand of strength is on its shaft, when it knows its way in battle. The bow exults, singing with savage joy when out of its bosom fares forth an adder, hot to sting, venomous against the foe. Then a drink of death he buys, Brimming sure the beaker that he buys with life. The coat of mail cries that he was brought out of the bosom of the dewy meadowland, and woven into rings, not with the shuttle, not through the crafts of the Fate goddesses, but to be the honoured web of fighters, famous far along the earth. The horn boasts that he is kissed of warriors, that he summons comrades to battle, that the horse on land and the ocean-horse on sea bear SEMI-HEATHEN POETRY 89 him on adventure, that he calls the haughty heroes to the wine- feast and makes the plundering pirates fly to their ships with his shouting. These are all sketches from Cynewulf's hand, and were written while he was a wild boon-companion of his lord. No touch of Christian thinking intrudes on their heathen hardihood. They tell us how the ancient English thought of their war- weapons, and they have abundant literary power. Then, many of the finest passages in Old English poetry ire descriptions of battles. They occur in Christian poems, but they recollect in every line the spirit of the heathen poetry. When the Jews in Judith pressed towards the Assyrian host, making a shield-burg as they went, they sent spear and arrow over their yellow shields. Letten forth be flying shower-flights of darts, Adders of the battle, arrows hard of temper, From the horn-curved bows ! Loud and high they shouted, Warriors fierce in fighting. Then rejoiced the gaunt Wolf, Rushing from the wood ; and the Raven wan, Slaughter-greedy fowl ! Surely well they knew That the war-thegns of the folk thought to win for them Fill of feasting on the fated. On their track flew fast the Earn, Hungry for his fodder, all his feathers dropping dew : Sallow was his garment, and he sang a battle lay ; Horny -nebbed he was. WTien in the Exodus Pharaoh's host draws nigh, the poet sees Forth and forward-faring Pharaoh's war-array. Gliding on, a grove of spears ! Glittering the hosts ! Fluttered there the flags of war, there the folk the march trod. Onwards surged the war, strode the spears along, Blickered the broad shields, loudly blew the trumpets. Wheeling round in gyres, yelled the fowls of war, Of the battle greedy ! Hoarsely barked the Raven, Dew upon his feathers, o'er the fallen corpses ; Swart was that slain-chooser ! Loudly sang the wolves At the eve their awful song, eager for the carrion ! 90 SEMI-HEATHEN POETRY chap. When in the Elene Constantine joins battle with the Huns Cynewulf 's description is pagan : — ■„ Forth then fares the Fyrd of folk, and a fighting lay Sang the wolf in woodland, wailed his slaughter-rune. Dewy-feathered, on the foes' track, Raised the Earn his song. ... ► ... Loud upsang the Raven, Swart and slaughter-fell. Strode along the war-host, Blew on high the horn-bearers, heralds of the battle shouted ; Stamped the earth the stallion, and the host assembled Quickly to the quarrel ! There the trumpets sang Loud before the war-host, and the raven loved the work. Dewy-plumed, the earn looked upon the march j . . . Song the wolf uplifted Ranger of the holt ! Rose the Terror of the battle ! There was rush of shields together, and the crush of men together ; Hard was the hand-swinging there, and the dinging down of hosts, After they had first encountered flying of the arrows. Full of hate, the hosters grim, on the fated folk Sent the spears above the shields, and the shower of arrows. Strode the stark of spirit, stroke on stroke they pressed along. Broke into the board-wall, plunged their bills therein. Where the bold in battle thronged, there the banner was uplifted ; Victory's song was sung round the ensign of the host ; And the javelins glistened, and the golden helm O'er the field of fight ; till there fell the heathen, Dead in ruthless slaughter. These are but a few examples of the pagan keenness in the wai song lasting on into the Christian poetry, and they probabh belong to the eighth century when Christianity had been full; established in England. When we turn from war to that natural description which is S( remarkable in Old English p'oetry, we are neither in a specially heathen nor in a specially Christian world of thought. When the descriptions are connected with the nature-myths, the heather elements of course exist, but the natural description in early Eng Ush poetry goes far beyond the phrases derived from the myths V SEMI-HEATHEN POETRY 91 Where the descriptions occur in poems on Christian subjects, they are as it were apart from the theme ; the poet steps aside, as if led by a personal fondness, to describe the things he sees in sea or sky. The only set description of nature which is intimately inwoven with Christian thought is that of the sinless and lovely land in the Phoenix^ and it is not done from nature, but from imagination. Moreover, its origin is in the poem of Lactantius which the poet was adapting, and which itself had a far-off origin in the Celtic myth of the Land of Eternal Youth. Independent, 1 however, of these descriptions, the Riddles of Cynewulf insert/ deliberate and careful descriptions of natural scenery, not as a( background for human interest, but for the sake of nature alone, I and this is quite singular in early modern poetry. \ The chief natural things of which the English poets wrote were the forest-land, the sky, and the sea. The forest-land was all the wild uncultivated country, on the outskirts of which, and continually scooping their way back from the river valleys into it, the English lived and set up their hamlets. Scattered records of this forest- land occur in the poems. The moor, roamed over by the wolves, the grizzly heath -tramplers ; in the pools and caves of which dwelt the water elves and the dragon of the English imagination ; does not fill so large a place as the fens, where the anchorites built their hermitages, and the fisher watched the " brown-backed billow " come in with the tide, and the wild birds came to St. Guthlac's hand. But the woods were nearest to the English life. The various trees are described in verse — the yew, the oak, the holly, and the birch. " Laden with leaves is the birch, high is its helm, decked out with beauty its branches, in touch with the air." A wild refuge in a forest hollow for the outlaw or the exile is closely described : — Men have garred me dwell in a grove of woodland, Under an oak-tree, hidden in an earthen cave. Old is this earth-hall ; I am all outwearied ; Dark are these deep dells, high the downs above ; Bitter my burg hedges, with wild briars overwaxen. 92 SEMI-HEATHEN POETRY chap. When in early dawn all alone I go Underneath the oak, round about my lair, There I sit and weep through the summer-lengthened day. Wife's Complaint. The animals which haunt the wood are described — the wolves, the swine, the wild cattle, the stag tossing his head •' while the gray frost fled from his hair," the badger on the slopes of the forest hills, the beaver in the river, and the salmon darting in the pools ; the eagle, the raven, and the hawk from their homes in the recesses of the woods; the falcon on the noble's fist, brought from the wild sea cliff; the cuckoo shouting in the glen and announcing the spring, the starlings rising and falling in flocks among the village roofs [Riddle Iviii.] : — Here the air beareth wights that are little, O'er the hill-summits, and deep black are they, Swart, sallow-coated ! sweet is their song, Flocking they fly on, shrilly they sing, Roam the wood-cliffs, and at whiles the town-dwellings Of the children of men. So also Cynewulf sings the nightingale, and paints the hamlet as the bird pours its song on the air, and the men sitting at theii , doors listening in silence [Riddle ix.] : — Many varied voices voice I through my bill ; Holding to my tones, hiding not their sweetness — I, the ancient evening-singer, bring unto the Earls Bliss within the burgs, when I break along With a cadenced song. Silent in their dwelling They are sitting, leaning forwards. But the most charming of these descriptions is that of the wild swan, whose feathers, like those of the swan-maidens, sound in flight [Riddle viii.] :— ^^ Voiceless is my robe when in villages I dwell. When I fare the fields, when I drive the flood along. But at times my glorious garment and the lofty air Heave me high above all the houses of the heroes. V SEMI-HEATPIEN POETRY 93 Wheresoe'er the craft ^ of clouds carries me away, Far the folk above — then my fretted feathers Loudly rustling hum, lulling, sound along, Sing a sunbright song — then, restrained to earth no more, Over flood and field I'm a spirit faring far ! This is of a quality almost unimaginable in poetry of the eighth century. It is like poetry of our own time. The "power of clouds " is a phrase Wordsworth might have used The poetry of the sky, of sun and moon, and of the sea is equally remarkable. The northern English were close observers of these great Creatures, and one proof of this lies in the number of words they invented to express their different aspects. The changes of the dawn from the first gray tinge of the east to the upward leap of the sun, the noonday light, the changes of the evening from the light left by immediate sunset to the last glimmer of it before dead night, have each their own special words. The fiercer phases of the weather are drawn with a rough observant pencil. Cynewulf describes three different kinds of storms. But no natural object engaged them so much as the sea, and they have at least fifteen different names for it, to express their conceptions of its aspect and its temper. Then they have coined a multitude of phrases to represent the appearance of its waves, and its movements in calm, but chiefly in storm, most of which I have given an account of elsewhere. There can be no doubt from his poetry that Cynewulf lived constantly near the sea and a rocky coast, and that he watched it with all the care of Tennyson. But the temper of mind in which he and his school, after the settlement, considered the sea was very different from the temper of the sailors of the heathen time. Beowulf and his comrades have the spirit of the sea-dogs of Drake and Nelson. They rejoice in the storms, the ocean is their playmate ; they are its masters, or they fight with it as with a monster for their lives. Five nights in all (and if the story be a myth yet the spirit of the swimmers is not), Breca and Beowulf swam in rivalry through the 1 Power, 94 SEMI-HEATHEN POETRY chap. ocean in the bitterest of weathers and fought with the tusked nickers of the deep \_Beowulf, 11. 546-548]. Swoln were the surges, of storms 'twas the coldest ; Dark neared the night, and northern the wind, Rattling and roaring, rough were the billows ! till in the morning the heaving of ocean bore them up on the land of the Heathoraemes. This fearlessness ceased when they settled down and passed from pirates into agriculturists. There is not a trace in the poetry after Caedmon of their old audacious lordship over the sea The Seafarer tells of his voyages, and how he outlived hours 01 pain and dread, sailing his ship through frosty seas : " No mar on land can tell all he suffers who fares on the wanderings of the deep." The crew in the Riddle on the Hurricane are aghast witt fear. The companions of Andreas on his voyage are terrified when the storm begins. It is always^ the merchant sailor anc not the Viking who speaksTn the later poems. But the imagin ative representation of the sea, and especially in storm, is al the greater perhaps for this temper of dread. Here are a fev lines out of the Andreas [11. 369 ; 441] : — Then was sorely troubled, Sorely wrought the Whale-mere. Wallowed there the Horn-fish, Glided through the great deep ; and the gray-backed gull Wheeled in air, of slaughter greedy ! Dark the storm -sun grew : Waxed the wind in gusts, grinded there the waves together. Stirred the surges high ; and the sail-ropes groaned, Wet with washing waves. Water-Horror rose With the might of troops. Ocean-streamings then Beat upon the bulwarks ! Billow answered billow, Wave replied to wave. And at whiles uprose From the bosom of the foam to the bosom of the boat Terror o'er the wave-ship. Along with this vivid description of a storm at sea we may place V SEMI-HEATHEN POETRY 95 and also from the And?'eas^ this description of the coming of winter on the land [11. 1257-1264] : — Snow enchained the earth With the whirling winter-flakes, and the weather grew Cold with savage scours of hail ; while the sleet and frost, Gangers gray of war were they — ! locked the granges up Of the heroes, and folk-hamlets 1 Frozen hard was all the land With the chill of icicles ; shrunk the courage of the water ; O'er the running rivers ice upraised a bridge, And the sea-road shone. Cynewulf's imagination of nature is perhaps highest when, in the thirty-fourth Riddle^ he paints the iceberg plunging and roar- ing through the foaming sea, and shouting out, like a Viking, his coming to the land, singing and laughing terribly. Sharp are the swords he uses in the battle, grim is his hate ; he is greedy to break into the shield -walls of the ships. Nor is he less vigorous when he describes the storm on land, in the second Riddle^ and the storm at sea in the third, and the whole pro- gress of a hurricane in the fourth, from its letting loose, like a delivered giant, from the caverns under the earth, to its driving of the flood of sea, gray as flint, upon the cliffs; from the thunder of the mountainous advance of ocean under its impulse, to the shipwreck it makes and the terror of the seamen. Then he brings the tempest from the sea into the air, and then on the works of men, and finally lulls it to sleep again in its cave. There is no finer description of a great northern gale than this in the whole of our literature. I have translated it fully in an appendix, but it ought to be read in its own language. I may give one more example of this nature-poetry, of a fine poetical quality. It uses one of the old nature-myths with remarkable skill, and fills it with vivid natural description. The first two lines describe the old moon with the young moon in her arms long before Sir Patrick Spence saw it. The rising of the sun over the roof of the world, his setting, the dust and dew and the advent of night are done with the conciseness and force of Tennyson. 96 SEMI-HEATHEN POETRY chap. Cynewulf saw the crescent moon like a boat of air and lighl sailing up the heaven, and the old myths came into his mind. So he likened the moon to a young warrior returning with his spoil, and building a fortress in the height of heaven. But another and a greater warrior, even the Sun, was in hot pursuit, who, coming over the horizon wall, took the moon's booty anc drove him away with great wrath. Then the Sun, full of his vengeance, hastened to the West, and then Night arose and overwhelmed the Sun. It is a true piece of nature-poetry, built on an ancient nature-myth [Riddle xxx.] : — Of a wight I've been aware, wonderfully shapen, Bearing up a booty in between his horns ! 'Twas a Lift-ship, flashing light, and with loveliness bedecked. Bearing home his booty brought from his war-roving ; All to build a bower for it, in the burg on high, And to shape it skilfully if it so might be ! Then, all wondrous, came a wight, o'er the world-wall's roof; Known to all he is of the earth's indweilers ; Snatched away his war-spoil, and his will against. Homeward drove the wandering wretch ! Thence he westward went, With a vengeance faring ; then he hastened further on ! I Dust arose to Heaven, dew fell on the earth, Onward came the Night ! And not one of men Of the wandering of that wight ever wotted more. That there should be so much deliberate nature -poetry written for the sake of nature alone, and with an evident anc observing love, is most remarkable in vernacular poetry of th( eighth century, and very difficult to account for. There is nothing that resembles it, even in the later Icelandic sagas It is only partly derived from nature-myths. We may say ir explanation that the Celtic influence was very strong in North umbria where these poems were written, and the Celtic feeling for natural scenery is always strong. But the feeling here ii different from the Celtic; and it is rather in the imaginative quality of the verse and in certain charmed expressions that we detect the Celtic spirit. It has been said, again, that these Riddki V SEMI-HEATHEN POETRY 97 were nothing more than imitations of the Latin ^nigmata on the / same subjects. This is no explanation. Cynewulf took the subjects, but he transformed the treatment; whatever he takes he makes original. Ealdhelm's Latin Riddles have not a trace of imagination, Cynewulf is impassioned with it. Eald- helm writes like an imitator of the late Latin poets, Cynewulf writes out of his own delight and from the sight of his own eyes. We cannot mistake his personal love of nature. Where, at this time, did he gain it ? How does he happen to have it in a way which scarcely appears again until the nineteenth century ? »^ Perhaps the best answer is that he was a man of genius, but then genius moves in the groove of its own time, and this is not \ a groove which belongs to the time. The one thing I can think of in the way of explanation is that he was a reader of Vergil, and . there are passages in his poems and in the Andreas which seem / directly suggested by Vergil. We know that Vergil was commonly f read by literary men in Northumbria, and no one, with a natural/ tendency to the observation of nature, could long read Vergil* without being put into the temper of love of nature, and of a \ close observation of her ways. Once the temper was gained, the original genius of Cynewulf would use it on the natural scenery which surrounded him. But then, other men read Vergil and did not write like Cynewulf. There must have been something singular in the man. At any rate, it is interesting, considering the magnificent work which the English poets have done on nature, to find at the very beginning of our poetry one who was so filled with pleasure by her doings, and who had the power to put his pleasure into noble expression. These poems then, poems of war and poems of pure nature, may be called half- heathen, though written in Christian times. What changes Christianity wrought in poetry is now our subject. CHAPTER VI THE COMING OF CHRISTIANITY The English literature written of in the previous chapters has been heathen or secular. The passages about war and those dealing with the natural world, taken from poems written when England had become Christian, show clearly how long the temper of heathendom clung to the English, even to those who had warmly accepted the new religion. I^ong after the last conquest of Christianity, heathenism retained its power over the super- stitious ' farmers and folk of the remoter hamlets. Even in the days of Cnut, the laws forbid the worship of heathen gods, of sun and moon, of rivers and wells, of fire, stones, and trees. For a long time, then, Christianity and heathendom mingled their influ- ences together, and they did so in comparative peace. The growth of Christianity was left to the will of the people. It was not forced upon them by the sword. There was so much wisdom and tolerance on the part of the kings and nobles that the two faiths scarcely ever persecuted one another during the many years they existed side by side. Even Penda, that sturdy Mercian pagan, did not prevent the preaching of the faith in his kingdom, and allowed his son to become a Christian. The result of this long intermingling was that heathen ideas were not so much rooted out in literature as changed. There was a continual interpenetration of Christian and heathen ele- ments, of Christian and heathen legend, which had no small CHAP. VI THE COMING OF CHRISTIANITY 99 influence upon the early Christian poetry of England. The mythical representations of Nature — the Sun hasting up the sky like an eager youth, the march of my lord Darkness over the earth, the Moon building his burg in the topmost vault of heaven against the onset of the Sun, the vast " Chasm of chasms " out of which the worlds were made, the all-covering, swart ocean — are mythical conceptions which endure. We find them in the poems of Genesis and Exodus^ and in the poems of Cynewulf. The great nature- festivals of Yule- and Eostra-tide were taken into Christian service, and bound up with the story of the birth and resurrection of Jesus. The festival of Midsummer lives in many Christian observances. New Christian feasts were made to fall on heathen holidays. The Church took the place of the heathen temple, the Holy Rood of the sacred tree ; the groves of the Nature God became the groves of the convent. The hills, the wells, the river islands, once de- dicated to deities of flood and fell, were called after the saints and martyrs. The minor gods and heroes which the various wants of men created to satisfy these wants were replaced by saints who did precisely the same work. The gracious and beneficent work done by the gods kind to man was now done by Jesus and the Virgin ; while the cruel and dreadful monsters of frost and gloom were embodied in Satan and his harmful host. In this way the emotions of the past and their pleasant poetic joy, the primitive imaginations and their popular influence, were re- tained unimpaired, though all the names were changed. The ancient heathen stuff endured, but it was Christianised. The same things happened, under the wisdom of the Roman Church, over ail freshly converted lands, but they happened with persecution. In England they happened without it. The Charms to which I have drawn attention are an example of tTTty 4ntermingling. Other things also passed over fronTlreathenism, with a change, into Christian poetry. The belief in the Wyrd — the goddess who presided over the fates of men or who overcame them in the end — became belief in the will of God. Even the name was at times transferred. " The Wyrd is stronger, the Lord mightier than any lOO THE COMING OF CHRISTIANITY chap. man's thought," is a phrase in the Seafarer^ and it may be matched (in many Anglo-Saxon poems. But though the sadness of destiny remains, it is no longer grim. The Wyrd is now the will of a just God who keeps eternal joy and peace for the Christian warrior. / Another heathen motive was the regret for the passing away of Ithe splendour and mirth and fame of men. It is the note of the jPrince's lay in Beowulf and of the Ruin; it continues after /Christianity in the JVanderer and the Seafarer and in all the poems / of Cynewulf. Mingled with this is the regret for the loss of youth, I of dear companions, and of personal happiness, such regret as we find in Dear's Complaint. This too continues, but it was changed and modified by the Christian hope. "One thing is sure," cries ) the Epilogue to the Wanderer^ "the Fortress in Heaven"; and Cynewulf in many a poem, when he has mourned for earth and loss, and the storms in which all he loved has perished, thinks of the " Haven which the Ruler of the Ether has established," where all "his friends are dwelling now in peace and joy." These are new feelings for the English, and they are the foundations of all our religious poetry. The note of Cynewulf, of Vaughan, of Keble is much the same. The added gentleness and grace of these thoughts and of many others concerning life which Christianity instilled into the English character, but the germs of which we see in the heathen character of Beowulf, brought many new ^elements of poetry and of poetic feeling into English literature. The Ecclesiastical History of Baeda y is full of lovely and tender stories. But with all this new mildness, the war-spirit of our ancestors lived on in literature with as keen a life as it had in heathen times. The battle in the Genesis with the kings of the East might serve to describe the pursuit of some Pictish plunderers by a Northumbrian host. The advance of Pharaoh's army in the Exodus is the exact image of the going forth to war of the Fyrd of ^^thelfrith or Penda. The overthrow of the Huns in the Elene might serve for the war-song sung by Oswiu's bard after the destruction of the Mercians at the fight of Winwaed VI THE COMING OF CHRISTIANITY loi The battle in Judith is sung with the sanie' cieligbt 'v>ith wHIcb Hengest would have sung his first victory. There is no change in the fury of war-poetry. But there is even more to say. The distinctively Christian poetry, the poetry about the fall and the redemption of man, the last judgment, the Nativity, Death, Resurrection and Ascension, of Christ, and the spread of the Gospel, is all sung in termsj of war. The heathen rapture in battle is transferred to the! Christian warfare. The contest between Light and Darkness,! between Summer and Winter, becomes the contest between Christ I and Satan, between the Christian and his spiritual foes. The original spirit of the myth is preserved. It was made not less but more imaginative in Christianity. The Christian war began before the creation of man ; it would only end at the last judgment. It took in all the history of the world. Satan was the great foe who was! gripped by God as Grendel was by Beowulf, and hurled into the\ dark and fiery burg of hell. When man was made, a new phase 1 of the war began, of which Jesus is the divine king. It is by V his being the great warrior that he becomes the great Saviour; | and round his victory the force of the Christian poetry was con- / centrated. In the Vision of the Rood^ the young Hero girded him- / self for the battle. He was almighty God, strong and high-hearted, I and he stepped up on the lofty gallows, brave of soul in the sight / of many, for he would save mankind. All creation wept, mourned j the fall of its king, as all created things wept for Balder. Sore \ weary he was when the mickle strife was done, and the men laid \ him low, him the Lord of victory, in his grave, and folk sang a \ lay of sorrow over him — as his comrades did for Beowulf. It is \ the death and burial of an English hero. j Then in this vast epic comes the Harrowing of hell ; and it is always told in the spirit of the war-song. The hero, Christ, came " like a storm, loud thunder roaring, at the break of day. The war-feud was open that morning, the Lord had overcome his foes ; terrible, he shattered the gates of hell, and all the fiends wailed far and wide through the windy hall." The women who go to the ic2 / X'' ^THE COMING OF CHRISTIANITY chap. "tpiTib'iri t'b'e^poieai'o.ii'the Descent into Hell ^x^ -^theling women. Christ's tomb and death are those of an ^theling. He is "the joy of ^thelings, the victory-son of God." John the Baptist, the great thegn whom Jesus has armed with sword and mail, welcomes his Lord to the gates of hell. " Then high-rejoiced the burghers of Hades," — that is, the Old Testament saints — " for the Hero had risen full of courage from the clay. Conquest-sure was he, and hastened on his war-path. For the Helm of Heaven willed to break and bow to ruin the walls of hell, he alone ; none of byrnie bearing warriors would he lead with him to the gates of hell." Down before him fell the bars ; Down the doors were dashed, inward drove the King his waj. In triumph the hero returns to the burg of heaven. The feast of the Lamb is laid in the long hall, amid the singing of the angels who are the bards of the battle ; and the king makes his speech of welcome and victory to his assembled warriors. But he has left an army on earth to carry on the war, and he gives them, like an English leader, weapons and courage for the fight. The apostles are -^thelings known all over the world. Great proof of valour they gave ; far spread was the glory of the King's thegns. "What!" cries the poet in ^^ Andreas, "we have heard from ancient times of twelve heroes famous under the stars, thegns of the Lord. Never did the glory of their warfare fail when the helms crashed in fight. Far-famed folk-leaders were they, bold on the war-path when shield and hand guarded the helm upon the battle- field." "Bold in war was Andreas; not tardy was James, nor laggard on his way. Daring was the venture of Thomas in India ; he endured the rush of swords. Simon and Thaddeus, warriors brave, sought the Persian land ; not slow were they in the shield- play." Andrew is "the hero hard in war, the beast of battle, the steadfast champion." Round about these heroes stand their thegns, sworn by baptism, as the English warrior was by his oath, to keep unfailing truth to their Lord. All the devotion which tied the thegn to his chief, all the disgrace which befell him if he broke his VI THE COMING OF CHRISTIANITY 103 bond by cpwardice or by betrayal was transferred to the relation of the apostles and saints to Christ. And the fame given to the heathen fighter who was true in war was now given to the warrior of Jesus who fought faithfully to the death. Then, at the end, was the consummate triumph. The Christian poetry of early England exhausts itself in the joy of the great day, when, after the judg- ment of evil, the King returns with his warlike hosts to the city of heaven. Little then of the imaginative poetry, little of the spirit of war was lost. Saga changed its name, but not its nature. These, then, are the ideas which, altered, pasfeed on into Chris-/| tian out of heathen poetry. But there were also other ideas, newll to the English, which are rooted now in poetry. The first of these was the sorrow for sin, the personal cry for release from it, and the rapture which followed the conviction of forgiveness. This, of course, belongs in its depths to personal poetry, and poetry in Old England did not become personal till it came into the hands of Cynewulf. In his verse it reaches a profundity of pain and of joy, of prayer and of exulting praise, the fulness of which is scarcely equalled in the whole range of sacred song in England. And this is true of the praise especially. The very first hymn of English poetry, which Caedmon sang, was an outburst of praise. The rushing praise of Cynewulf in the Crist has the loud uplifted trumpet note of Milton; and the later poems, entitled Christ and Satan, break their divisions with impassioned hymns of joy. English sacred poetry has never lost the music and the manner of its first raptures. One other element was quite new — the love of fair and gentle scenery in contrast with the fierce weather, the bitter climate and the stormy seas which heathen poetry described so well. The Christian poets also painted in words the tempest and the frost, but they had the vision of sweeter scenery, of a more tender air, and a grave delight therein. The gentleness of Christ disposed their minds to this love of happy nature. Here are a few lines — the first from the Genesis : the second from the Azarias — 1 I04 THE COMING OF CHRISTIANITY chap. Winsomely the running water, all well-springs that be, Washed the happy lands, nor as yet the welkin Rose above the roomful land, nor dispersed the rains that are Wan-gloomed with the gale ; yet with growing blooms Was the earth made fair. Lord Eternal, all the river springs ^Laud thee, high exalted ! Often lettest thou Fall the pleasant waters, for rejoicing of the world, Clear from the clean cliffs. The " bubbling streams that run through the woods, the foun- tains that well through the soft sward"; the "spreading plain, fresh with green grass that God loved " ; the " blossoming earth, the flowers, honey -flowing and rejoicing, the fragrant woods"; " the sweet song of birds ; the cuckoo announcing the year " ; " the dew dropping at the dawn and winnowed by the wind ; the cool winds in the summer-tide when the sun is shining"; "the calm and shining sea when the winds are stfll " ; are described with distinction, and the phrases bear with them the proof of a con- templative pleasure in lovely and gracious scenery which was not known or felt by the heathen English. It is in the description of the happy land where the Phoenix lives that this new delight is best expressed. The writer took a great part of it from the poem of Lactantius which he adapts. But he added largely to 'that~ poein, and I think that into tEe" Northumbrian mind had grown, from its long connection with Celtic feeling, the elements at least of the Irish myth of the land of eternal youth and beauty set far among the western seas — the myth which we find in varying forms among nearly all peoples, but nowhere more vividly wrought than among the .Celtic tribes Far away the island lies ; Winsome is the wold there, there the wealds are green ; Spacious-spread the skies below ; there nor snow nor rain, Nor the furious air of frost, nor the flare"of 1ire7 Nor the headlong squaTl of hail, nor the hoar-frost's fall, Nor the burning oriB'e'sifn;" nor the bitter cold, Do their wrong to any wight ; '. . - ~" VI THE COMING OF CHRISTIANITY 105 Calm and fair the glorious field, flashes there the sunny grove : Happy is the holt of trees ; never witliers fruitage there I In the winter, in the sumnieFpte" the wood for ever Hung with blossomed boughs ; nor can ever break away Leaf below the lift ! . . . . . . but the liquid streamlets, Wonderful and winsome, from their wells upspringing. Softly lap the land with the lulling of their floods ! Welling from the woodland's midst are the waters fair. Which, at every moon, through the mossy turTof earth. Surge up as the sea-foam cold, That the mirth of rivers, eveiy month that goes, All about the fame-fast land, should o'erflow in play. This was the new element which, in pleasant contrast with the bitter weather and frost-bound land, the Christian poet introduced into natural description, and it completed the range of that sub- ject of poetry. The Welsh poetry of soft nature was much later. It was, as I have said, remarkable that wild nature should be made in England a separate subject for song; it is still more remarkable to find — however much influence we allot to the study of Vergil — the gentleness of nature treated distinctively. And this is all the more interesting when we think that the poetry of natural description has been in England continuously mingled up with the poetry of the love of God, of Christ, of the Virgin Mary ; with the devotion of the human spirit in worship, repentance, and joy. Such a mingled harmony is indeed to be found in Italian, German, French, and Spanish poetry, but it is found most closely knit together in English poetry, most happily expressed, and most fondly realised. CHAPTER VII LATIN LITERATURE From the Coming of Augustine to the Accession of Alfred The history of literature written in Latin prose in early England might, if we were rigid, be justly excluded from our history, but it is scarcely possible to shut out from our view the School ol Canterbury and the School of York, or men like Ealdhelm, Baeda, Ecgberht, and Alcuin, who, if they did not write English, at least spread knowledge; who stimulated the production of English: and who sent, when • it was most needed, English education and learning into the Continent. The whole of our earliest prose is contained in their Latin work. There were no books of any importance in English prose till Alfred sent forth his translation of Gregory's Pastoral Care. Rome was the origin of this Latin prose, and it was written by monks, in monasteries established by the Latin Church. The his- tory of it lasts from 597, when Augustine landed in England, to the destruction of the monasteries by the Danes in the ninth century ; or, if we wish to be more accurate, from the founding of the Canterbury School by Theodore in 671 to the battle of Ashdown in 871. By 871 almost every^centre of learning in Wessex, Mercia, and Northumbria had been destroyed. The story, then, is the story of 200 years, and it may best be told by dividing it into three parts — Latin literature in Wessex, in Mercia, and in Northumbria. CHAP VII LATIN LITERATURE 107 I. The story begins in Wessex, or rather in Kent, which was then a separate kingdom. Gregory the Great, before he was Pope, saw, according to a well-known story, some blue-eyed and fair-haired children standing to be sold for slaves in the forum of Rome, and was told that they were Angles. " Not Angles," he said, " but Angels " ; and he was moved to bring the people from whom these lovely ones came to the faith of Christ. So, when he was Pope, he sent Augustine to England, who, though delayed on his way, landed in Thanet in 597, and sent messengers to King ^thelberht of Kent ^thelberht, partly influenced by his Christian wife Bertha, daughter of Chariberht of Paris, graciously gave him leave to preach the Gospel. Bertha had already set up a Christian service at St. Martin's Church, and, when the King and his people were baptized, St. Martin's, freshly restored, became the first Christian Church in England, as Canterbury was the first Christian town. In 601 Augustine was made archbishop, and the bishopric of Rochester was founded. Not long after Augustine's coming the Witan was held which enacted the first code of laws that we possess in our mother tongue, and this is the title of the code : " This be the dooms that ^thelbriht. King, ordained in Augustine's days." They were written in Roman letters ; but we do not possess them in the Kentish dialect, but in a West Saxon translation, and in a register of the twelfth century. In 673 the Wes^ Kentish Code appeared, and in 696 King Wihtrsed " set forth more dooms." The Kentish dialect is, then, the first vehicle of English prose, and the schools of Kent the rude cradle of English learning. The first bishops of Canterbury had, however, no sympathy with the English tongue. They were all Italian up to the death | of Honorius in 653. Frithona (Deus-dedii) succeeded him, and / then Theodore of Tarsus was enthroned in 669. He hadi brought with him from Rome an Englishman, Benedict Biscop, \ who soon, leaving Canterbury, led the choir of Latin learning in the North. Hadrian, Theodore's deacon, and an excellent scholar, joined him in 671, and with his help Theodore resolved to make io8 LATIN LITERATURE chap. the English clergy into a body of scholars. A school was estab- lished, and from month to month disciples from Ireland as well as England gathered into Canterbury. " Streams of knowledge," said Baeda, *' daily flowed from Theodore and Hadrian to water the hearts of their hearers." This was the true beginning of literature in the south of England. The teaching of the school included theology, arith- metic, medicine, astronomy, rhetoric; Greek and Hebrew com- position and Latin verse were not neglected; the Latin poets, grammarians, and orators were read, and careful instruction was given in caligraphy, illuminating, and ecclesiastical music. Theodore's fame for learning in the canon law soon spread over Europe. Some record of this learning appeared in the Penitential of Theodore^ drawn up from Theodore's oral answers to questions about discipline. Canterbury had thus begun to produce books of her own; learned foreigners soon ceased to be needed in England ; she had her own bishops and scholars, and before long taught her foreign teachers. Brihtwald, the next archbishop, " was a man," Baeda declared, " whose knowledge of the Greek, Latin, and Saxon tongues and learning was manifold and thorough." Tatwine, who followed him, was " splendidly versed in holy writ," and his ^nigmata were studied by Cynewulf. By this time, that is, by 731, many bishoprics had been set up in Wessex. They were served by men of learning, of whom Daniel, Bishop of Winchester, 705-744, was the most famous. He helped Baeda in his Ecclesiastical History ; foreign missions grew under his fostering care, and the whole West Saxon Church was deeply indebted to his work. But the scholar of Theodore who gathered into himself all the learning and ability of the time was Ealdhelm. \ Xj He was born about the middle of the seventh century, and was a kinsman of Ine, King of Wessex. Eager for the new learning, he joined himself to Mailduf, an Irishman, who set up a hut and hermitage, a school and a small basilica at a place which after- wards took his name, Malmesbury, Mailduf's burg. Ealdhelm thus joined the Irish to the Latin learning, for he was also a scholar of VII LATIN LITERATURE 109 Canterbury. He loved Hadrian with the deep affection which belonged to his character. " My father," he writes, " beloved teacher of my rude infancy, I embrace you with a rush of pure tenderness : I long to see you again." He took up the school at j Malpigsbury after Maildufs death ; it rose into a monastery of f which he became abbot; he was made Bishop of Sherborne, I and travelled continuously through his diocese, preaching, founding monastic schools, building churches (for he was a good architect), and playing on all kinds of instruments, as eager a musician as Dunstan. He founded two monasteries, one at • Bradford-on-Avon, another at Frome, and he assisted Ine in his plans for the restoration of Glastonbury. It is not impossible that he had something to do with the compilation of the Laws of ine ^ the oldest West Saxon laws. They date from about 690, and we possess them in an appendix to the Laws of yEfred in a I noble parchment of the Chronicle now at Cambridge. They are in English, and have this much literary interest that "as the foundation," Earle says, " of the Laws of Wessex, they are also at . the foundation of the laws of all England." Ealdhelm is the \ first Englishman whose Latin writings are those of a scholar. His classical knowledge was famous. He wrote Latin verse with ease ; he composed a long treatise on Latin prosody, and he showed what he could do in this way by his transference into hexameters of the stories told in his treatise, De laudibus Virgini- ^ tatis. He knew Horace, Lucan, Juvenal, Persius, Terence, and / Vergil ; he read the Old Testament in Hebrew ; he spoke Greek, and it is supposed he wrote on Roman Law. He concocted Latin Riddles^ which went to the North with his Prosody to Acircius (Aldfrith), King of Northumbria, and these kindled the genius of Cynewulf in after-days. His Latin is fantastic, allitera- tive, swelling, and pedantic, but the spirit in which he writes is tender, keen, and gay. He corresponded with Gaul, with Ireland, with Rome, with English and Welsh kings ; but his most charming letters are to the abbesses and nuns who knew a little \j3i\\Vi—flores eccksice, he calls them, Christi margaritce^ paradisi no LATIN LITERATURE chap. gemmce. Nor did he wholly neglect the literature of his own tongue. He made songs in EngHsh, some of which Alfred had, and one of which was still commonly sung in the twelfth century. And as he travelled on his preaching tours from town to town, it was his habit to stand, like a gleeman, on the bridge or in the public way, and sing to the people flocking to the fairs in the Enghsh tongue, that by this sweetness of song he might lure them to come with him and hear the word of God. He died on one of his journeys in 709, but he had lived long enough to fill Wessex with the desire of learning, to build up its Church into strength, and to link into spiritual harmony the North and the South. Even the Welsh owned his charm. His letters to Gerontius, King of the Damnonian Britons, converted both king and people to the observance of the Roman Easter. Ealdhelm was the last man in the south of England before Alfred to whose work we may give the name of literature. The learning and energy of Wessex were more displayed in build- ing up the church, in teaching, in policy, and in missionary work than in literature. Winfrid (Boniface), WilHbald, and LuUus were Wessex men. Boniface was, from 719 to 755, the chief apostle to the heathen of Central Europe. Willibald, famous in the history of travel, journeyed through Sicily, Ephesus, Tortosa, and Emessa to Damascus. Thence he visited the whole of Palestine, and reached Constantinople in 725. His voyage was written by a nun, it is supposed from his own dic- tation. Lullus, who left England about 732, and succeeded Boniface as Archbishop of Mainz, never forgot his country. His correspondence, as well as that of his predecessor, was constant with England. There is no better example, not even that of Boniface, of the continual intercourse between the English- kings and bishops and the Continent than the letters of Lullus. But after the middle of the eighth century, the literary life of Wessex passes away. The ceaseless wars troubled even the monasteries ; ignorance succeeded to knowledge, and the schools decayed. The ecclesiastical struggle of Canterbury with the new VII LATIN LITERATURE III metropolitan See set up at Lichfield by Offa left no leisure for ' the work of its school. Archbishop ^thelhard won back the supremacy of Canterbury in 803, but he did not win back any of the learning which Theodore had originated. Alcuin begs him *'to restore at least the reading of the Scriptures." Ecgberht, 1 great king as he was, who came to the throne in 802, was too ' much employed in establishing his overlordship in Mercia and Northumbria to do anything for learning; and, worst of all, he had to fight the Vikings, who had begun their raids by a descent on Dorsetshire in 787. In 833 they endangered the very life of his kingdom. They fell on London in 839 and plundered Rochester. They had the year before descended on East Anglia. In 845 they were defeated in Somersetshire. These [ were desultory raids. But in 851 Rorik sacked Canterbury with | furious slaughter, and penetrated into Essex. Then the Vikings ; regularly camped for the winter at Sheppey in 855. In 860 they f plundered Winchester, and in 865 devastated Kent. In 866 -^ *' the army," as the Danish host was called, came no longer to raid \ but to settle. They conquered Northumbria, they marched into Mercia, and in 871 crossed the Thames into Wessex. There " the army " was met at Ashdowiibj;_yEthelred and ^Ifredj and ,' defeated with great carnage. But in the course^ofthis raiding | and invasion the centres of literature in Wessex were destroyed, L and there is no more to say of learning and literature in the 1 south of England till they rose again to life at the call of -Alfred. ' 2. There is but little to tell of Latin learning in Mercia. Mercia had been heathen during the reign of Penda, who had slain Oswald of Northumbria in 642. But Penda met his death at Winwasd's stream of which it was sung : — At the Winwede was venged the war-death of Anna, The slaughter of Kings — of Sigbert, of Ecgiice, The death of King Oswald, the death of King Edwin. In 655, then, the date of this battle, Mercia became Christian. Penda's son, Wulfhere, 657-675, established some monasteries, 112 LATIN LITERATURE chap. and fable has made him the builder of many more. Under ^thelred, who followed him, the Mercian Church was organised ; and under ^thelbald, his successor, Mercia seems to have established a reputation for literature and learning. When Canterbury wanted archbishops, it drew them from the Mercian priests. Ecgwin, Bishop of Worcester, who founded Evesham, was one of ^thelbald's bishops, and is said, in the questionable report of two later biographers, to have written his own life and to be our first autobiographer. The king himself patronised learning, and his name is mixed up with that of St. Guthlac. In his days, Felix of Crowland wrote in a swollen Latin prose the Life of St. Guthlac for an East Anglian king. The book formed the foundation of the second part of the English poem of St. Guthlac^ and was translated into Anglo-Saxon prose in the tenth or eleventh century. Crowland, where Guthlac had his hermitage, became the site of a great abbey which owed its splendour to the munificence of ^thelbald. Offa, the next Mercian ruler, 757-796, was so great a king that we should expect literature to flourish in his reign. Many have conjectured that it did flourish then; Beowulf has even been allotted to his court; but we have no evidence of any Mercian literature in his time. The king, however, became himself a subject of litera- ture. The legendary tales told of Offa the son of Wermund who ruled the Engle on the Continent, were imputed to our Offa, and obscure all his early history. But after his death the supremacy of Mercia perished. Ecgberht annexed it to Wessex in 828, and shortly after Ecgberht died the great abbeys of East Anglia and Mercia were swept away by the Danes. In Middle England, then, as well as in Wessex no Latin literature was left. 3. Northumbria was the chief English home of Latin litera- ture, and its beginnings were contemporary with the coming of Theodore. The history of it is fuller and longer than that of Mercia or of Wessex, for it contains the tale of a great scholar whom at one point we may call a man of genius, and of a great VII LATIN LITERATURE 113 school — the tale of Baeda, and the tale of the University of York. [ It begins indeed at York, and in that city it also ends. | Christianity reached York, the capital of Deira, in the year 627, when Eadwine and his people were baptized by Paullinus. But when the king died in 633, the kingdom relapse^3into heathenism, and Paullinus, fleeing away, left the conversion of the country to the Celtic missionaries whom Oswald summoned from lona to his help in 634. Aidan, the gentle Irish monk whom Oswald loved, set up his bishop's seat on the wild rock of Lindis- jarne, and in many missionary voyages Christianised both Bernicia and Deira — provinces which Oswiu, a few years after, made into the one kingdom of Northumbria. Twenty-six years after Aidan ; took, root at Lindisfarne, Wilfrid, who followed the Latin rule, led its cause against that ofm^Deltic Church. He introduced the Benedictine rule at Ripon, under the patronage of Alchfrith, son of Oswiu, 661. Some years later he built with great splendour the Priory of Hexham, and made it, as well as Ripon, a centre of Latin learning. In 664, at the Synod of Whitby, he succeeded in establishing the Roman instead of the Celtic Church as the mistress of Northumbria, though the Celtic influence lasted for 1 many years. But Benedict Biscop, who had been in Rome with Theodore and afterwards with him at Canterbury, was, rather than ; Wilfrid, the real founder of Latin learning. He came north, j bringing with him the methodical teaching of Canterbury, and set / up in 674 the monastery of St. Peter's at Wearmouth, and in 682 \ the sister monastery of Jarrow. In the course of five journeys to » Rome, this indefatigable collector brought back to his two monasteries enough books, images, relics, and pictures, to furnish both of them with large and decorated libraries. To these libraries we owe Baeda and the school of York and Alcuin, and all the continental learning that flowed from Alcuin. A famous school grew up around them, and Baeda led it to a greater fame. Benedict was as active in the cause of art as of learning. Archi- tecture, painting, mosaic, music, glass -making, embroidery, belonged to his religion. But his chief love was his books. I 114 LATIN LITERATURE chap. " Keep them together," he cried, as paralysis brought on death, — "keep them with loving care. Never injure them, never disperse them." He died in 690. Aldfrith was Kin^ o f Nort h- umbria at the time, and Aldfrith, educafe^ in Ireland and at "Canterbury, and the friend of Ealdhelm and Wilfrid, may be called a scholar. He too was a collector of bqokSj and^gaye to Abbot Ceolfrid, Benedict's successor at Wearmouth and Jarrow, support and affection.