Generally speaking, however, the theories of the "dissecting school" are not in themselves faulty, if we admit the assumptions on which they rest. They fail however in two ways. An examination of the short lay and the long epic, so far as these are represented in extant documents, does not bear out
well the assumptions of the theorizers. Secondly, the minute scrutiny to which the poem has been subjected in matters of syntax, metre, dialect and tradition has failed to show any difference between the parts attributed to the different authors, such as we must certainly have expected to find, had the theories of the "dissecting school" been correct.
That behind our extant Beowulf, and connecting it with the events of the sixth century, there must have been a number of older lays, may indeed well be admitted: also that to these lays our poem owes its plot, its traditions of metre and its phraseology, and perhaps (but this is a perilous assumption) continuous passages of its text. But what Müllenhoff and ten Brink go on to assume is that these original oral lays were simple in outline and treated a single well-defined episode in a straightforward manner; that later redactors and scribes corrupted this primitive simplicity; but that the modern critic, by demanding it, and using its presence or absence as a criterion, can still disentangle from the complex composite poem the simpler elements out of which it was built up.
Here are rather large assumptions. What right have we to postulate that this primitive "literature without letters[[259]]," these short oral ballads and lays, dealt with a single episode without digression or confusion: whilst the later age,—the civilized, Christianized age of written literature during which Beowulf in the form in which we now have it was produced,—is assumed to have been tolerant of both?
No doubt, here and there, in different literatures, groups of short lays can be found which one can imagine might be combined into an orderly narrative poem, without much hacking about. But on the other hand a short lay will often tell, in less than a hundred lines, a story more complex than that of the Iliad or the Odyssey. Its shortness may be due, not to any limitation in the scope of the plot, but rather to the passionate haste with which it rushes through a long story. It is one thing to admit that there must have been short lays on the story of Beowulf: it is another to assume that these lays were of such a character that nothing was needed but compilers
with a taste for arrangement and interpolation in order to turn them into the extant epic of Beowulf.
When we find nearly five hundred lines spent in describing the reception of the hero in Hrothgar's land, we may well doubt whether this passage can have found its way into our poem through any such process of fitting together as Müllenhoff postulated. It would be out of scale in any narrative shorter than the Beowulf as we have it. It suggests to us that the epic is developed out of the lay, not by a process of fitting together, but rather by a retelling of the story in a more leisurely way.
A comparison of extant short lays or ballads with extant epics has shown that, if these epics were made by stringing lays together, such lays must have been different from the great majority of the short lays now known. "The lays into which this theory dissects the epics, or which it assumes as the sources of the epics, differ in two ways from extant lays: they deal with short, incomplete subjects and they have an epic breadth of style[[260]]."
It has been shown by W. P. Ker[[261]] that a comparison of such fragments as have survived of the Germanic short lay (Finnsburg, Hildebrand) does not bear out the theory that the epic is a conglomeration of such lays. "It is the change and development in style rather than any increase in the complexity of the themes that accounts for the difference in scale between the shorter and the longer poems."
A similar conclusion is reached by Professor Hart: "It might be illuminating to base a Liedertheorie in part, at least, upon a study of existing Lieder, rather than wholly upon an attempt to dismember the epic in question. Such study reveals indeed a certain similarity in kind of Ballad and Epic, but it reveals at the same time an enormous difference in degree, in stage of development. If the Beowulf, then, was made up of a series of heroic songs, strung together with little or no modification, these songs must have been something very different from the popular ballad[[262]]."