And this is perhaps no accidental discrepancy: it may well correspond to a real difference in practice between the Gothic custom of the time of the migrations and the Anglo-Saxon
practice as it prevailed in Christian times[[287]]. For many documents, including the Dream of the Rood, tend to show that the sorhlēoð, the lament of the retainers for their dead lord, survived into Christian times, but as a ceremony which was subsequent not merely to the funeral, but even to the building of the tomb.
So that, here again, so far from the archaeological accuracy of the account of Beowulf's funeral being confirmed by the account of that of Attila, we find a discrepancy such as we might expect if a Christian poet, in later times, had tried to describe a funeral of the old heathen type.
Of course, the evidence is far too scanty to allow of much positive argument. Still, so far as it goes, and that is not far, it rather tends to show that the account of the funeral customs is not quite accurate, representing what later Christian times knew by tradition of the rite of cremation, rather than showing the observation of that rite by an eye-witness.
We must turn, then, to some other argument, if we wish to prove that the Christian element is inconsistent with other parts of the poem.
A second argument that Beowulf must belong either to heathen times, or to the very earliest Christian period in England, has been found in the character of the Christian allusions: they contain no "reference to Christ, to the Cross, to the Virgin or the Saints, to any doctrine of the church in regard to the Trinity, the Atonement, etc.[[288]]" "A pious Jew would have no difficulty in assenting to them all[[289]]." Hence it has been argued[[290]] that they are the work of an interpolator who, working upon a poem "essentially heathen," was not able to impose upon it more than this "vague and colourless Christianity." I cannot see this. If passages had to be rewritten at all, it was just as easy to rewrite them in a tone emphatically Christian as in a tone mildly so. The difficulties which the interpolator would meet in removing a heathen phrase, and composing a Christian half-line in substitution, would be metrical, rather than theological. For example, in a second
half-line the interpolator could have written ond hālig Crist or ylda nergend just as easily as ond hālig god, or ylda waldend: he could have put in an allusion to the Trinity or to the Cross as easily as to the Lord of Hosts or the King of Glory. It would depend upon the alliteration which was the more convenient. And surely, if he was a monk deliberately sitting down to turn a heathen into a Christian poem, he would, of two alternatives, have favoured the more dogmatically Christian.
The vagueness which is so characteristic of the Christian references in Beowulf can then hardly be due to the poem having originally been a heathen one, worked over by a Christian.
Others have seen in this vagueness a proof "that the minstrels who introduced the Christian element had but a vague knowledge of the new faith[[291]]": or that the poem was the work of "a man who, without having, or wanting to have, much definite instruction, had become Christian because the Court had newly become Christian[[292]]." But, vague as it is, does the Christianity of Beowulf justify such a judgment as this? Do not the characters of Hrothgar or of Beowulf, of Hygd or of Wealhtheow, show a Christian influence which, however little dogmatic, is anything but superficial? This is a matter where individual feeling rather than argument must weigh: but the Beowulf does not seem to me the work of a man whose adherence to Christianity is merely nominal[[293]].
And, so far as the absence of dogma goes, it seems to have been overlooked that the Christian references in the Battle of Maldon, written when England had been Christian for over three centuries, are precisely of the same vague character as those in Beowulf.