The West Saxons and the Mercians are then separately praised. The fate of their enemies follows. The deaths of the five kings and seven earls are commemorated. Anlaf's flight and escape are sung, and Constantine's, whose son fell in the conflict. The poet then exults in the superior prowess of his countrymen. He conducts the remains of the defeated army to Dublin, and the victorious princes into West Saxony. He closes his song with two poetical commonplaces; one on the birds of prey, who crowd the field of battle, and the other on the superiority of this victory to all former ones. The song on Edgar's death is much shorter: Then was much groaning of their Creator in their mind. The Governor of victory; Oslac, from the earth, over the rolling of the waves, over the bath of the sea-fowl, the long-haired hero, wise, and in words discreet, over the roaring of the waters, over the country of the whales; And then was shown up in the sky a star in the firmament. a comet by name, men skilled in art, wise truth-tellers. There was over the nation hunger over the mountains. Ruler removed; the Lord of angels! He again gave bliss to every inhabitant by the earth's fertility. These historical songs have none of the story, nor the striking traits of description which interest us in the ballads of a subsequent age. In the Saxon songs we see poetry in its rudest form, before the art of narration was understood. The simplicity of the ballad deceives us into a belief that it is the easy and natural performance of the less cultivated ages of society. But the truth seems to be, that the excellence of the ballad is as difficult of attainment as any other species of approved poetry, and is the result not merely of genius, but also of great cultivation. In the ruder ages of nations, the ballad is the sort of poetry the most frequently composed and the most generally recited. The incessant cultivation of this particular species creates at least an excellence in it which subsequent ages do not attain, because other departments of the Parnassian art are then attended to, and the ballad becomes less used. The song of Canute on Ely was the composition of the eleventh century; and being much later written than that on Athelstan, and therefore of a more cultivated kind, seems to have approached nearer that lively and dramatic form which interests us so much in the ballads of the following ages. This little fragment is, indeed, the oldest specimen of the dramatic or genuine ballad which we have in the Anglo-Saxon language. The genuine ballad seems to have originated when the old Saxon poetry began to decline. The laboured metaphor, the endless periphrasis, the violent inversion, and the abrupt transition, being the great features of the Saxon poetry; these constituted that pompousness which William of Malmsbury truly states to have been its great characteristic. But it was impossible that while these continued prevalent and popular, the genuine ballad could have appeared. The ballad, therefore, probably arose from more vulgar and homely poets-from men who could not bend language into that difficult and artificial strain which the genius of the Anglo-Saxon bard was educated to use. The ambulatory glee-men, who strove to please the public by their merry-andrew antics, were most probably the first inventors of the genuine ballad. While at one time they tumbled and danced, showed their bears, and frolicked before the people in the dresses of various animals, at others they may have told little tales to interest the mob, from whose liberality they drew their mainte nance. Incidents narrated in verse were more intelligible than the pompous songs of the regular poets, and far more interesting to the people. In time they gained admission to the hall and the palace; and, by the style of Canute's ballad, this revolution must have been achieved by the beginning of the eleventh century. Then the harsh and obscure style of the old Saxon poetry began to be unpopular; and being still more discredited after the Norman conquest, it was at length completely superseded by the ballad and the metrical romance. CHAPTER II. Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poems, or Romances.-The Poem on Beowulf. THE origin of the metrical romance has been lately an interesting subject of literary research; and as it has not been yet completely elucidated, it seems proper to inquire whether any light can be thrown upon it from the ancient Saxon poetry. It was asserted by Mr. Ritson, in conformity with the prevailing opinion of antiquaries, that the Anglo-Saxons had no poetical romance in their native tongue. But he grounds this opinion on the fact, that no romance had been at that time discovered in Saxon but a prose translation from the Latin of the legend of Apollonius of Tyre. The Anglo-Saxon poem on Beowulf, which was particularly recommended to the notice of the public in the first edition of this history in the year 1805, proves that this opinion was erroneous. This work is a poem on the actions of its hero Beowulf. If it describes those deeds only which he actually performed, it would claim the title of a historical poem; but if, as few can doubt, the Anglo-Saxon poet has amused himself with portraying the warrior, and incidents of his fancy, then it is a specimen of an Anglo-Saxon poetical romance, true in costume and manners, but with an invented story. It is the most interesting relic of the Anglo-Saxon poetry which time has spared to us; and, as a picture of the manners, and as an exhibition of the feelings and notions of those days, it is as valuable as it is ancient. There is only one MS. of it now existing, which is in the Cotton Library, Vitellius, A. 15; and our antiquarian patriotism may be blamed that, when so much labour and money have been applied to print, at the public expense, so many ancient remains, and some of such little utility, we should have left this curious relic of our ancestors to have been first printed by a foreigner, and in a foreign country. Under the commission for printing the public records of the kingdom much has been printed which deserves the thanks of the community; but I should have rejoiced to have seen the Anglo-Saxon remains substituted for some of the volumes which have perhaps never been twice opened since their publication, and will never be molested even by antiquaries again. Would not a more enlarged principle of selection have been more advantageous to our most valuable MSS.? b Ten years after the first edition of this part of the Anglo-Saxon history, Dr. G. J. Thorkelin, in the year 1815, printed this work at Copenhagen, which he addressed to the Lord John de Bulow, as his Mæcenas optime! by whose private munificence, he says, he had been enabled to bring into his country a monument of literature The MS. of this poem was injured by the fire in the British Museum in 1731. It seems to have been written in the tenth century. Its author, in several places, speaks as if he had been a contemporary of the events he describes; but this may be considered as a poetical license, especially if it be historically true that Beowulf fell in Jutland in the year 340. The following analysis of the poem will give the reader of this history a general notion of its contents, and the extracts will be selected with a view to show the manners it describes. It opens with an exclamatory introduction of his hero, but without immediately naming him: which was above a thousand years old. But he is not entitled to claim it as a Danish poem; it is pure Anglo-Saxon; and though I grant that the Anglo-Saxon language is very like that of the old Icelandic poetry which has survived, yet it is a similarity with great idiomatical and verbal differences. It is by no means identity. So the late Mr. Astle thought, and the writing has all the appearance of being of that age. d Dr. Thorkelin mentions this on the authority of Suhn, in his Geschichte der Danen. I can neither deny nor confirm the chronology. • Thorkelin calls these the Northern Danes, inhabiting Zealand and the other isles, p. 261. His derivation of Gar from Aur, a peninsula in Iceland, is unsatisfactory. I would rather deduce it from the Saxon, as implying the ancient Danes; as eald Saxons, the old Saxons, f Of these see vol. i. of this history, p. 286. Thorkelin's first translation of this poem was burnt in our bombardment of Copenhagen. At the request of his patron, Bulow, he made another translation in Latin, which he has published. As I very often differ with him in the construction of the original, I have attempted to convey the ideas of the poet in a version of my own, in the passages inserted in this work. Yet as a first translation of a very difficult composition, I ascribe great merit to Dr. Thorkelin for that which he has published; and cordially thank him for the courage and ingenuity of his undertaking. h Thorkelin's Beowulf, p. 4. He proceeds to name his hero, and to represent him as announcing and preparing for a warlike or predatory adventure: Beowulf was illustrious. Wide sprang the rumour that the offspring of the scyld would rush upon some lands. So would he be able good vessels to obtain, with abundant money-gifts, in seasonable time. The description of their With them the scyld departed to the ship, while many were eager when with words he governed There at the port he stood: The poet then indulges himself in describing the war-ship and its contents: I have never heard that a more king-like ship has been prepared. With the weapons of Hilda, that with them should far depart on the territory of the flood. Nor did they place in it few presents from the people's wealth; this they did who at its first formation sent it forth, alone over the waves, a spacious vessel. Then they fixed in it the flowing banner high over their heads. They let the waters bear it, the tide, into the ocean. To him would be a soul of sorrow; a mourning mind: men would not be able to say, in truth, that any warrior under heaven would have a happy state who from them would take its lading.* The poet then introduces to us a character who makes also a principal figure in his work: this is Hrothgar, one of the sons of Halfden, a Danish king, to whose dignity Hrothgar had succeeded: i Ibid. p. 4, 5. On collating the Doctor's printed text with the MS. I have com. monly found an inaccuracy of copying in every page; but for a first publisher he has been, on the whole, unusually correct. j Beowulf, p. 5. * Ibid. p. 6. |