Cosette Faust.
Stith Thompson.
March, 1918.
[1]The Oldest English Epic, New York, 1909.
I. PAGAN POETRY
1. EPIC OR HEROIC GROUP
WIDSITH
[Critical edition: R. W. Chambers, Widsith: a Study in Old English Heroic Legend. Cambridge, 1912.
Date: Probably late sixth or early seventh century.
Alliterative translation: Gummere, Oldest English Epic (1910), p. 191.
“Widsith—‘Farway’—the ideal wandering minstrel, tells of all the tribes among whom he has sojourned, of all the chieftains he has known. The first English students of the poem regarded it as autobiographical, as the actual record of his wanderings written by a scop; and were inclined to dismiss as interpolations passages mentioning princes whom it was chronologically impossible for a man who had met Ermanric to have known. This view was reduced to an absurdity by Haigh.