Miller was a scholar whose memory should be reverenced, but the letter to the Academy was evidently written in haste. The only evidence which Miller produced for grendel standing alone as a common noun in Old English was a charter of 963 (Birch, 1103: vol. III, p. 336): þanon forð eft on grendel: þanon on clyst: grendel here, he asserted, meant "drain": and consequently gryndeles sylle and grendles mere in the other charters must mean "cesspool." But the locality of this charter of 963 is known (Clyst St Mary, a few miles east of Exeter), and the two words exist there as names of streams to this day—"thence again along the Greendale brook, thence along the river Clyst." The Grindle or Greendale brook is no sewer, but a stream some half dozen miles in length which "winds tranquilly through a rich tract of alluvial soil" (Journal of the Archaeol. Assoc. XXXIX, 273), past three villages which bear the same name, Greendale, Greendale Barton and Higher Greendale, under Greendale Bridge and over the ford by Greendale Lane, to its junction with the Clyst. Why the existence of this charming stream should be held to justify the interpretation of Grendel or Gryndel as "drain" and grendles mere as "cesspool" has always puzzled me. Were a new Drayton to arise he might, in a new Polyolbion, introduce the nymph complaining of her hard lot at the hands of scholars in the Hesperides. I hope, when he next visits England, to conduct Dr Lawrence to make his apologies to the lady. Meantime a glance at the "six inch" ordnance map of Devon suffices to refute Miller's curious hypothesis.
[87] It is often asserted that the same Beowa appears as a witness to a charter (Müllenhoff, Beovulf, p. 8: Haak, Zeugnisse zur altenglischen Heldensage, 53). But this rests upon a misprint of Kemble (C.D.S. V, 44). The name is really Beoba (Birch, Cart. Sax. I, 212).
[88] Beaf er ver kollum Biar, in the descent of Harold Fairhair from Adam, in Flateyarbók, ed. Vigfússon and Unger, Christiania, 1859, I, 27. [The genealogy contains many names obviously taken from a MS of the O.E. royal pedigrees, not from oral tradition, as is shown by the miswritings, e.g., Beaf for Beaw, owing to mistaking the O.E. w for f.] "This is no proof," Dr Lawrence urges, "of popular acquaintance with Bjár as a Scandinavian figure." (Pub. Mod. Lang. Assoc. Amer. XXIV, 246.) But how are we to account for the presence of his name among a mnemonic list of some of the most famous warriors and their horses—mention along with heroes like Sigurd, Gunnar, Atli, Athils and Ali, unless Bjar was a well-known figure?
[89] en Bjárr [reið] Kerti. Kortr, "short" (Germ. Kurz), if indeed we are so to interpret it, is hardly an Icelandic word, and seems strange as the name of a horse. Egilsson (Lex. Poet. 1860) suggests kertr, "erect," "with head high" (cf. Kahle in I.F. XIV, 164).
[90] See [Appendix (A)] below.
[91] Müllenhoff derived Beaw from the root bhū, "to be, dwell, grow": Beaw therefore represented settled dwelling and culture. Müllenhoff's mythological explanation (Z.f.d.A. VII, 419, etc., Beovulf, 1, etc.) has been largely followed by subsequent scholars, e.g., ten Brink (Pauls Grdr. II, 533: Beowulf, 184), Symons (Pauls Grdr. (2), III, 645-6) and, in general outline, E. H. Meyer (Mythol. der Germanen, 1903, 242).
[92] Uhland in Germania, II, 349.
[93] Laistner (Nebelsagen, 88, etc., 264, etc.), Kögel (Z.f.d.A. XXXVII, 274: Geschichte d. deut. Litt. I, 1, 109), and Golther (Handbuch der germ. Mythologie, 1895, 173) see in Grendel the demon of combined storm and pestilence.
[94] E. H. Meyer (Germ. Mythol. 1891, 299).
[95] Mogk (Pauls Grdr. (2), III, 302) regards Grendel as a "water-spirit."