Professor Chadwick may be right in urging that the custom of burning the dead had gone out of use in England even before Christianity was introduced[[284]]: anyhow it is certain that, wherever it survived, the practice was disapproved by ecclesiastics, and was, indeed, formally censured and suppressed by the church abroad.
The church equally censured and endeavoured to suppress the ancient "heathen lays"; but without equal success. Now, in many of these lays the heathen rites of cremation must certainly have been depicted, and, in this way, the memory of the old funeral customs must have been kept fresh, long
after the last funeral pyre had died out in England. Of course there were then, as there have been ever since, puritanical people who objected that heathen lays and heathen ways were no fit concern for a Christian man. But the protests of such purists are just the strongest evidence that the average Christian did continue to take an interest in these things. We have seen that the very monks of Lindisfarne had to be warned by Alcuin. I cannot see that there is any such a priori impossibility that a poet, though a sincere Christian enough, would have described a funeral in the old style, modelling his account upon older lays, or upon tradition derived from those lays.
The church might disapprove of the practice of cremation, but we have no reason to suppose that mention of it was tabooed. And many of the old burial customs seem to have kept their hold, even upon the converted. Indeed, when the funeral of Attila is instanced as a type of the old heathen ceremony, it seems to be forgotten that those Gothic chieftains who rode their horses round the body of Attila were themselves probably Arian Christians, and that the historian who has preserved the account was an orthodox cleric.
Saxo Grammaticus, ecclesiastic as he was, has left us several accounts[[285]] of cremations. He mentions the "pyre built of ships" and differs from the poet of Beowulf chiefly because he allows those frankly heathen references to gods and offerings which the poet of Beowulf excludes. Of course, Saxo was merely translating. One can quite believe that a Christian poet composing an account of a funeral in the old days, would have omitted the more frankly heathen features, as indeed the Beowulf poet does. But Saxo shows us how far into Christian times the ancient funeral, in all its heathendom, was remembered; and how little compunction an ecclesiastic had in recording it. The assumption that no Christian poet would have composed the account of Beowulf's funeral or of Scyld's funeral ship, seems then to be quite unjustified.
The further question remains: Granting that he would, could he? Is the account of Beowulf's funeral so true to old custom that it must have been composed by an eye-witness of
the rite of cremation? Is its "accuracy confirmed in every point by archaeological or contemporary literary evidence"?
As to the archaeological evidence, the fact seems to be that the account is archaeologically so inexact that it has given great trouble to one eminent antiquary, Knut Stjerna. That the pyre should be hung with arms, which are burnt with the hero (ll. 3139-40), and that then a second supply of unburnt treasures should be buried with the cremated bones (ll. 3163-8), is regarded by Stjerna as extraordinary[[286]].
Surely, any such inexactitude is what we should expect in a late poet, drawing upon tradition. He would know that in heathen times bodies were burnt, and that weapons were buried; and he might well combine both. It is not necessary to suppose, as Stjerna does, that the poet has combined two separate accounts of Beowulf's funeral, given in older lays, in one of which the hero was burnt, and in the other buried. But the fact that an archaeological specialist finds the account of Beowulf's funeral so inexact that he has to assume a confused and composite source, surely disposes of the argument that it is so exact that it must date back to heathen times.
As to confirmation from literary documents, the only one instanced by Chadwick is the account of the funeral of Attila. The parallel here is by no means so close as has been asserted. The features of Attila's funeral are: the lying in state, during which the chosen horsemen of the nation rode round the body singing the dead king's praises; the funeral feast; and the burial (not burning) of the body. Now the only feature which recurs in Beowulf is the praise of the dead man by the mounted thanes. Even here there is an essential difference. Attila's men rode round the dead body of their lord before his funeral. Beowulf's retainers ride and utter their lament around (not the body but) the grave mound of their lord, ten days after the cremation.