The Anglo-Saxon poetical narrative of “The Exploits of Beowulf” forms a striking contrast with the chronological paraphrase of Cædmon. Its genuine antiquity unquestionably renders it a singular curiosity; but it derives an additional interest from its representation of the primitive simplicity of a Homeric period—the infancy of customs and manners and emotions of that Hero-life, which the Homeric poems first painted for mankind:—that Hero-life of which Macpherson in his Ossian caught but imperfect conceptions from the fragments he may have collected, while he metamorphosed his ideal Celtic heroes into those of the sentimental romance of another age and another race.
The northern hordes under their petty chieftains, cast into a parallel position with those princes of Greece whose realms were provinces, and whose people were tribes, often resembled them in the like circumstances, the like characters, and the like manners. Such were those kinglings who could possess themselves of a territory in a single incursion, and whose younger brothers, stealing out of their lone bays, extended their dominion as “Sea-Kings” on the illimitable ocean.[1] The war-ship and the mead-hall bring us back to that early era of society, when great men knew only to be heroes, flattered by their bards, whose songs are ever the echoes of their age and their patrons.
We discover these heroes, Danes or Angles, as we find them in the Homeric period, audacious with the self-confidence of their bodily prowess; vaunting, and talkative of their sires and of themselves; the son ever known by denoting the father, and the father by his marriage alliance—that primitive mode of recognition, at a period when, amid the perpetual conflicts of rival chieftains, scarcely any but relations could be friends; the family bond was a sure claim to protection. Like the Homeric heroes, they were as unrelenting in their hatreds as indissoluble in their partisanship; suspicious of the stranger, but welcoming the guest; we find them rapacious, for plunder was their treasure, and prodigal in their distributions of their golden armlets and weighed silver, for their egotism was as boundless as their violence. Yet pride and glory fermented the coarse leaven of these mighty marauders, who were even chivalric ere chivalry rose into an order. The religion of these ages was wild as their morality; few heroes but bore some relationship to Woden; and even in their rude paganised Christianity, some mythological name cast its lustre in their genealogies. In the uncritical chronicles of the middle ages it is not always evident whether the mortal was not a divinity. Their mythic legends have thrown confusion into their national annals, often accepted by historians as authentic records.[2] But if antiquaries still wander among shadows, the poet cannot err. Beowulf may be a god or a nonentity, but the poem which records his exploits must at least be true, true in the manners it paints and the emotions which the poet reveals—the emotions of his contemporaries.
Beowulf,[3] a chieftain of the Western Danes, was the Achilles of the North. We first view him with his followers landing on the shores of a Danish kingling. A single ship with an armed company, in those predatory days, could alarm a whole realm. The petty independent provinces of Greece afford a parallel; for Thucydides has marked this period in society, when plunder well fought for was honoured as an heroic enterprise. When a vessel touched on a strange shore, the adventurers were questioned “whether they were thieves?” a designation which the inquirers did not intend as a term of reproach, nor was it scorned by the valiant;[4] for the spoliation of foreigners, at a time when the law of nations had no existence, seemed no disgrace, while it carried with it something of glory, when the chieftain’s sword maintained the swarm of his followers, or acquired for himself an extended dominion.
Beowulf was a mailed knight, and his gilded ensign hung like a meteor in the air, and none knew the fate it portended. The warder of the coast, for in those days many a warder kept “ocean-watch” on the sea-cliffs, takes horse, and hastens to the invader; fearlessly he asks, “Whence, and what are ye? Soonest were best to give me answer.”
The hero had come not to seek feud, nor to provoke insult, but with the free offering of his own life to relieve the sovereign of the Eastern Danes, whose thanes, for twelve years, had vainly perished, struggling with a mysterious being—one of the accursed progeny of Cain—a foul and solitary creature of the morass and the marsh. In the dead of the night this enemy of man, envious of glory and abhorrent of pleasure, glided into the great hall of state and revelry, raging athirst for the blood of the brave there reposing in slumber. The tale had spread in songs through all Gothland. This life-devourer, who comes veiled in a mist from the marshes, may be some mythic being; but though monstrous, it does little more than play the part of the Polyphemus of antiquity and the Ogre of modern fairyism.
In the timber-palace chambers were but small and few, and the guests of the petty sovereign slept in the one great hall, under whose echoing roof the Witenagemot assembled, and the royal banquet was held; there each man had his “bed and bolster” laid out, with his shield at his head, and his helmet, breastplate, and spear placed on a rack beside him—“at all times ready for combat both in house and field.”
This scene is truly Homeric; and thus we find in the early state of Greece, for the historian records this continual wearing of armour, like the barbarians, because “their houses were unfenced, and travelling was unsafe.”[5]
The watchman of the seas leaves not the coast, duteous in his lonely cares; while Beowulf, with his companions, marches onwards. They came to where the streets were paved; an indication in that age of a regal residence. The iron rings in their mailed coats rang as they trod in their “terrible armour.” They reach the king’s house; they hang up their shields against the lofty wall. They seat themselves on a bench, placing in a circle their mailed coats, their bucklers, and their javelins. This warlike array called forth an Ulysses, “famed for war and wisdom;” they parley; the thane hastens to announce the warlike but the friendly visitor; and the hero, so famed for valour, yet would not obtrude his person, standing behind the thane, “for he knew the rule of ceremony.” The prince of the East Danes joyfully exclaims, that “he had known Beowulf when a child; he remembered the name of his father, who married the only daughter of Hrethel the Goth. It is said that he has the strength of thirty men in the grip of his hand. God only could have sent him.”