Again, it has been claimed by Sarrazin that the language of Beowulf shows traces of the Scandinavian origin of the poem. Sarrazin's arguments on this head have been contested energetically by Sievers[[229]]. After some heated controversy Sarrazin made a final and (presumably) carefully-weighed statement of his case. In this he gave a list of twenty-nine words upon which he based his belief[[230]]. Yet of these twenty-nine, twenty-one occur in other O.E. writings, where there can be no possible question of translation from the Scandinavian: some of these words, in fact, are amongst the commonest of O.E. poetical expressions. There remain eight which do not happen to be found elsewhere in the extant remains of O.E. poetry. But these are mostly compounds like heaðo-lāc, feorh-sēoc: and though the actual compound is not elsewhere extant in English, the component elements are thoroughly English. There is no reason whatever to think that these eight rare words are taken from Old Norse. Indeed, three of them do not occur in Old Norse at all.
Evidence to prove Beowulf a translation from a Scandinavian original is, then, wanting. On the other hand, over and above the difficulty that the Beowulf belongs just to the period when intimate communication between the Angles and Scandinavians was suspended, there is much evidence against the translation theory. The earliest Scandinavian poetry we possess, or of which we can get information, differs absolutely from Beowulf in style, metre and sentiment: the manners of Beowulf are incompatible with all we know of the wild heathendom of Scandinavia in the seventh or eighth century[[231]]. Beowulf, as we now have it, with its Christian references and its Latin loan-words, could not be a translation from the Scandinavian. And the proper names in Beowulf which Sarrazin claimed were Old Norse, not Old English, and had been taken
over from the Old Norse original, are in all cases so correctly transliterated as to necessitate the assumption that they were brought across early, at the time of the settlement of Britain or very shortly after, and underwent phonetic development side by side with the other words in the English language. Had they been brought across from Scandinavia at a later date, much confusion must have ensued in the forms.
Somewhat less improbable is the suggestion "that the poet had travelled on the continent and become familiar with the legends of the Danes and Geats, or else had heard them from a Scandinavian resident in England[[232]]." But it is clear from the allusive manner in which the Scandinavian tales are told, that they must have been familiar to the poet's audience. If, then, the English audience knew them, why must the poet himself have travelled on the continent in order to know them? There is, therefore, no need for this theory, and it is open to many of the objections of the translation theory: for example it fails, equally with that theory, to account for the uniformly correct development of the proper names.
The obvious conclusion is that these Scandinavian traditions were brought over by the English settlers in the sixth century. Against this only one cavil can be raised, and that will not bear examination. It has been objected that, since Hygelac's raid took place about 516, since Beowulf's accession was some years subsequent, and since he then reigned fifty years, his death cannot be put much earlier than 575, and that this brings us to a date when the migration of the Angles and Saxons had been completed[[233]]. But it is forgotten that all the historical events mentioned in the poem, which we can date, occur before, or not very long after, the raid of Hygelac, c. 516. The poem asserts that fifty years after these events Beowulf slew a dragon and was slain by it. But this does not make the dragon historic, nor does it make the year 575 the historic date of the death of Beowulf. We cannot be sure that there was any actual king of the Geatas named Beowulf; and if there was, the last known historic act with which that king is associated is the raising of Eadgils to the Swedish throne,
c. 525: the rest of Beowulf's long reign, since it contains no event save the slaying of a dragon, has no historic validity.
It is noteworthy that, whereas there is full knowledge shown in our poem of those events which took place in Scandinavian lands during the whole period from about 450 to 530—the period during which hordes of Angles, Saxons and Jutes were landing in Britain—there is no reference, not even by way of casual allusion, to any continental events which we can date with certainty as subsequent to the arrival of the latest settlers from the continent. Surely this is strong evidence that these tales were brought over by some of the last of the invaders, not carried to England by some casual traveller a century or two later.
Section II. The dialect, syntax, and metre of "Beowulf" as evidence of its literary history.