I. HISTORY.

I. HISTORY.

(a) #Old English Poetry as a Whole.#

Northumbria was the home of Old English poetry. Beginning with Cædmon and his school A. D. 670, Northumbria maintained her poetical supremacy till A. D. 800, seven years before which date the ravages of the Danes had begun. When Alfred ascended the throne of Wessex (871), the Danes had destroyed the seats of learning throughout the whole of Northumbria. As Whitby had been "the cradle of English poetry," Winchester (Alfred's capital) became now the cradle of English prose; and the older poems that had survived the fire and sword of the Vikings were translated from the original Northumbrian dialect into the West Saxon dialect. It is, therefore, in the West Saxon dialect that these poems[1] have come down to us.

Old English poetry contains in all only about thirty thousand lines; but it includes epic, lyric, didactic, elegiac, and allegorical poems, together with war-ballads, paraphrases, riddles, and charms. Of the five elegiac poems (_Wanderer_, _Seafarer_, _Ruin_, _Wife's Complaint_, and _Husband's Message_), the _Wanderer_ is the most artistic, and best portrays the gloomy contrast between past happiness and present grief so characteristic of the Old English lyric.

Old English literature has no love poems. The central themes of its poets are battle and bereavement, with a certain grim resignation on the part of the hero to the issues of either. The movement of the thought is usually abrupt, there being a noticeable poverty of transitional particles, or connectives, "which," says Ten Brink, "are the cement of sentence-structure."

(b) #Beowulf.#

The greatest of all Old English poems is the epic, _Beowulf_.[2] It consists of more than three thousand lines, and probably assumed approximately its present form in Northumbria about A. D. 700. It is a crystallization of continental myths; and, though nothing is said of England, the story is an invaluable index to the social, political, and ethical ideals of our Germanic ancestors before and after they settled along the English coast. It is most poetical, and its testimony is historically most valuable, in the character-portraits that it contains. The fatalism that runs through it, instead of making the characters weak and less human, serves at times rather to dignify and elevate them. "Fate," says Beowulf (l. 572), recounting his battle with the sea-monsters, "often saves an undoomed man _if his courage hold out_."

"The ethical essence of this poetry," says Ten Brink, "lies principally in the conception of manly virtue, undismayed courage, the stoical encounter with death, silent submission to fate, in the readiness to help others, in the clemency and liberality of the prince toward his thanes, and the self-sacrificing loyalty with which they reward him."

NOTE 1.--Many different interpretations have been put upon the story of _Beowulf_ (for argument of story, see texts). Thus Müllenhoff sees in Grendel the giant-god of the storm-tossed equinoctial sea, while Beowulf is the Scandinavian god Freyr, who in the spring drives back the sea and restores the land. Laistner finds the prototype of Grendel in the noxious exhalations that rise from the Frisian coast-marshes during the summer months; Beowulf is the wind-hero, the autumnal storm-god, who dissipates the effluvia.

[Footnote 1: This does not, of course, include the few short poems in the _Chronicle_, or that portion of _Genesis_ (_Genesis B_) supposed to have been put directly into West Saxon from an Old Saxon original. There still remain in Northumbrian the version of _Cædmon's Hymn_, fragments of the _Ruthwell Cross_, _Bede's Death-Song_, and the _Leiden Riddle_.]

[Footnote 2: The word _bêowulf_, says Grimm, meant originally _bee-wolf_, or _bee-enemy_, one of the names of the woodpecker. Sweet thinks the bear was meant. But the word is almost certainly a compound of _Bêow_ (cf. O. E. #bêow# = grain), a Danish demigod, and _wulf_ used as a mere suffix.]