Section IV. Are the Christian elements incompatible with the rest of the poem?
Later students (like the man in Dante, placed between two equally enticing dishes) have been unable to decide in favour of either of the rival theories of Müllenhoff and ten Brink, and consequently the unity of the poem, which always had its champions, has of late years come to be maintained with increasing conviction and certainty.
Yet many recent critics have followed Müllenhoff so far at least as to believe that the Christian passages are inconsistent with what they regard as the "essentially heathen" tone of the rest of the poem, and are therefore the work of an interpolator[[279]].
Certainly no one can escape a feeling of incongruity, as he passes from ideas of which the home lies in the forests of ancient Germany, to others which come from the Holy Land. But that both sets of ideas could not have been cherished, in England, about the year 700, by one and the same poet, is an assumption which calls for examination.
As Christianity swept northward, situations were created which to the modern student are incongruous. But the Teutonic chief often had a larger mind than the modern student: he needed to have, if he was to get the best at the same time both from his wild fighting men and from his Latin clerks. It is this which gives so remarkable a character to the great men of the early centuries of converted Teutonism: men, like Theodoric the Great or Charles the Great, who could perform simultaneously the duties of a Germanic king and of a Roman Emperor: kings like Alfred the Great or St Olaf, who combined the character of the tough fighting chieftain with that of the saintly churchman. I love to think of these incongruities: to remember that the warrior Alfred, surrounded by thegn and gesith, listening to the "Saxon songs" which he loved, was yet the same Alfred who painfully translated Gregory's Pastoral
Care under the direction of foreign clerics. It is well to remember that Charles the Great, the catholic and the orthodox, collected ancient lays which his successors thought too heathen to be tolerated; or that St Olaf (who was so holy that, having absent mindedly chipped shavings off a stick on Sunday, he burnt them, as penance, on his open hand) nevertheless allowed to be sung before him, on the morning of his last fight, one of the most wild and utterly heathen of all the old songs—the Bjarkamál.
It has been claimed that the account of the funeral rites of Beowulf is such as "no Christian poet could or would have composed[[280]]." Lately this argument has been stated more at length:
"In the long account of Beowulf's obsequies—beginning with the dying king's injunction to construct for him a lofty barrow on the edge of the cliff, and ending with the scene of the twelve princes riding round the barrow, proclaiming the dead man's exploits—we have the most detailed description of an early Teutonic funeral which has come down to us, and one of which the accuracy is confirmed in every point by archaeological or contemporary literary evidence[[281]]. Such an account must have been composed within living memory of a time when ceremonies of this kind were still actually in use[[282]]."
Owing to the standing of the scholar who urges it, this argument is coming to rank as a dogma[[283]], and needs therefore rather close examination.