the wisdom of antiquity, before essaying, under less favourable conditions, to make conquests in the realm of original thought. 3a. Alcuin, born at York in 732, three years before the death of Beda, was solidly educated in the great monastic school of that city. In time he became its 'scholasticus or head-master, and the fame of his learning spread far and wide. Being in Lombardy in 781, he came under the notice of Charlemagne, at whose invitation he took charge of the palace school at Aix-la-Chapelle. Thence he removed to Tours some years later, and having established a school of great efficiency, died there in 802. His works were ably edited in the last century by Froben, abbot of St. Emmeran at Ratisbon. His letters, nearly three hundred in number, are interesting and historically important; among his correspondents were two popes, Adrian I. and Leo III., Charlemagne and his son, many English kings, many bishops both of English and foreign sees, and several women; to these may be added Rabanus Maurus, his pupil, Colcu the lector, a celebrated Irish scholar, and St. Benedict of Aniane. His Biblical commentaries, educational works, and dogmatic treatises can hardly be said to live; the last-named, however, are of some importance as throwing a clear light on the controversy about Adoptionism. He also wrote Lives of St. Willibrord (infra, § 10) and two French saints, Vedast and Riquier. Among his numerous poems, the most interesting is one in 1650 hexameter lines, 'On the Bishops and Saints of the Church of York.' John Scotus Erigena, whose name sufficiently proves his Irish birth, but on the details of whose life scarcely anything is known, was one of the ornaments of the court of Charles the Bald, in the second half of the ninth century. Of the subtlety and strength of his intellect we can judge from two of his extant works, De Divisione Naturæ and De Predestinatione. At his patron's request, he translated from Greek into Latin the mystical work of the pseudo-Dionysius on the Celestial Hierarchies. He is believed to have died about 885. 4. I. Poetry.-Of Anglo-Saxon poetry there remains to us on the whole a considerable mass. By far the larger portion of it dates, both in original conception and in extant form, from a period subsequent to the introduction of Christianity. One poem, of 143 lines, The Gleeman's Song, bears on the face of it that the writer lived in the time of Attila, in the early part of the fifth century; nor does there seem any sufficient reason to doubt that such was the fact. Another, Beowulf, the longest and most important of all, though in its present form manifestly the composition of a Christian writer, points to, and proves the existence of, earlier Sagas and songs, containing the substance of the narrative, which must have been produced in pre-Christian times. In others, again, as Andreas, Elene, and Judith, although the narrative itself deals with a Christian subject-matter, the zeal of Grimm in the investigation of the old Teutonic world has elicited numerous traces of heathen customs and modes of thought, which to us, and to all Teutonic races, possess the deepest historical interest. The last and least interesting class consists of metrical translations from the Psalms, and other parts of the Bible, the chief value of which lies in any additional illustration which they may bring to the study of the language. 5. The earliest in date of all the Anglo-Saxon poems appears to be The Gleeman's Song. It forms a part of the well-known Exeter MS., given to the cathedral of that city by Bishop Leofric in the time of Edward the Confessor.1 In this poem (printed by Mr. Kemble, together with Beowulf, in 1833, by Dr. Guest in his History of English Rhythms, and by Mr. Thorpe, along with Beowulf, in 1855), we undoubtedly possess, to pass over the mere mention of the name of the Angli by Tacitus,2 the earliest existing notices of the country, government, and political relations of our Angle progenitors. When the Gleeman has to speak of 'Ongle,' the land of the 'Engle,' he tells us that it was ruled over by a king named Offa; that this king, with the help of the Myrgings (apparently a tribe bearing kindred to the Angles,-the poet himself was a Myrging, see 1. 87), enlarged his borders after the battle of Fifel-dór (a name for the Eider-literally 'gate of terror'); and that the Engle and Swæfe (Suevi) held their respective lands thenceforward, as Offa appointed to them. The Angles, at the date of the poem, still lived in Germany; the abode of the great Eormanric or Hermanric, King of the East Goths, was to be sought for eastan of Ongle;' it lay in and around Wistlawudu,' the forest of the Vistula, where the Gothic warriors, with their hard swords, turned to bay in defence of their ancient seats against the hordes of Attila: 3 heardum sweordum Ymb Wistla-wudu wergan sceoldon Again, the nations under the sway of the empire are designated by the singular name of Rum-walas-strangers of Rome,-and part of the dominions of the 'Caser,' or emperor, is called Walarice. Evidently we have here the Wälsch, Wälschland, 1 The Codex Exoniensis was printed for the Society of Antiquaries in 1842, under the editorship of Mr. Thorpe. 2 Germania, xl. 3 It seems a difficulty at first sight to understand how Hermanric (see Gibbon, Decline and Fall, chs. xxv. and xxvi.) and Attila could be brought in conjunction as contemporaries of the same poet. But this was perfectly possible; Hermanric was assassinated in the year 375, and Attila, though not known in the Roman world till many years later, succeeded his uncle as ruler, jointly with his brother Blæda, of the Hunnish tribes, in 403. Now the whole tenor of the poem points to a long course of wanderings continued through many years, so that the Gleeman, at different parts of his career, may easily have known both Hermanric and Attila. Walloon, Welsh, of the Teutonic tribes; names by which they described the races, strange to themselves in blood and language, by which they were surrounded, and especially the inhabitants of Italy. But the Anglo-Saxon, after his conversion at the end of the seventh century, never again applied this name to the subjects of the Roman empire; Rome was then too near and dear a name to him to allow of his using any term importing estrangement with reference to her people. Here again, then, we have an evidence of the early date of the present poem. But it may be objected that the author speaks of 'heathens' (1. 73), and therefore may be presumed to have been a Christian; and if there were Angle Christians early in the fifth century, how came it that at the time of their transmigration to Britain, and for more than a century after, they are represented to us as purely Pagan? Many lines of thought and inquiry suggest themselves in reply, which cannot here be followed up. But it may be observed that Christianity admits of many degrees; that of the Peruvians, after the Spanish conquest, bore but a faint resemblance to that of the Jesuit converts in Paraguay; and the thin varnish of Arian Christianity thrown over the barbarism of Alaric and his Visigoths, shares the name, but not the influence or the durability, of the religious system which softened the manners and the hearts of Ethelbert and Edwin. Besides the East and West Goths, the Burgundians, and many other Teutonic races, professed Christianity in the fifth century; and there is nothing improbable in the conjecture that the Angles may have derived from their neighbourhood to the Goths of East Prussia the same kind of nominal Christianity which the latter possessed. This loose profession they may easily have lost, after their colonizing enterprise had established them firmly in Britain; nor would the circumstance that the Britons were Christians have tended at all to attach them to Christianity, but rather the contrary. For, besides the proverbial 'odisse quem læseris,' no fact is more certain than that the Angles thoroughly despised the Celts whom they dislodged; and as the latter carefully refrained from imparting to their conquerors that faith, without which they believed them to be under the sentence of eternal perdition, so the former must have been disposed to involve the religion of the Britons in the same sweeping contempt which they entertained for themselves. 6. The essential charm of the Anglo-Saxon, as of the Icelandic poetry-though it appertains to the former in a lower degree is in the glimpses which it gives us into the old Teutonic world, when Odin was still worshipped in the sacred wood, when the wolf, the eagle, and the raven were held in reverence as noble and fearless creatures, bringers of good luck, and specially dear to the gods; and when the battle and the banquet were the only forms of life in which the hero could or cared to shine. In this Gleeman's Song, though in the main a mere catalogue of the nations and persons visited by the writer, traces of this primitive state of things may be gathered. From the following lines it would seem that the Goths knew not as yet how to coin money : And ic was mid Eormanrice: ealle prage; 1 Pone ic Eadgilse: on æht sealde, Minum hleo-drihtne: pa ic to ham bicwom, And I was with Eormanric a whole season; There the King of the Goths endowed me with good things: Of beaten gold, reckoning by shillings. That ring I delivered into the possession of Eadgils 7. But the features of the antique world are more distinctly and variously exhibited to us in the poem of Beowulf. Unfortunately the single manuscript on which we are dependent for the text was injured in the fire at the Cotton Library in 1731, and a not inconsiderable number of lines remain from this cause more or less unintelligible. The MS. was first edited, in 1815, by Thorkelin, keeper of the Royal Archives at Copenhagen. In 1833 the text with annotations, and in 1837 a translation with a learned introduction, were produced by J. M. Kemble, under the auspices of the English Historical Society. The poem has been studied most attentively by German scholars, as Grimm, Ettmüller, Leo, and others, for the sake of the light which it throws upon the origins of theTeutonic race. Many different theories have been advanced 1 On the metre see Appendix, § 5. 2 The ring of metal, large or small, was a customary form of present among the Germans. Tacitus (Germ. xv.) mentions 'torques' among the gifts which they delighted to receive from neighbouring nations. 3 The sceat' (a word that still survives in the phrase 'scot and lot') seems to have been equivalent to the smaller penny, twelve of which went to the 'scilling.' 600 sceatta then were equal to 50 scillingas. respecting its age and import of which I have elsewhere given an account. After explaining what the poem is about, I shall briefly state my own view of its origin. 2 8. The main actions of the poem are three: first, the fight of the hero, Beowulf, with the fiendish monster, Grendel, who had long infested the approaches to Heorot, the palace of Hrothgar, king of Denmark, and killed many noble Danes; secondly, the fight of the same hero with Grendel's mother, whom he kills; thirdly, the deadly conflict between Beowulf, now an old man, and king both of Denmark and Gautland, and a huge dragon, keeper of a large treasure-hoard by the sea-shore. Beowulf, who was a prince of the Geatas (the people of Gautland or Gotland in the south of Sweden), came by sea to the aid of Hrothgar, attacked Grendel, and after a tremendous struggle, compelled him to flee, leaving one of his arms torn off in Beowulf's hands, to his home at the bottom of a pool, where he soon afterwards died. His mother, to revenge his defeat, visited Heorot by night, and carried off Eschere, Hrothgar's favourite thane. Beowulf goes in pursuit, traces the creature to her watery abode, goes down into the pool, and after a hard fight despatches her. Returning to his own land, he succeeds after a while to the kingdom, and reigns for many years in all prosperity. In his old age, hearing of the ravages of a fiery dragon on the sea-board of his kingdom, he undertakes the perilous adventure, shunned by all but himself, of attacking and destroying him. He succeeds, but receives in the struggle a mortal wound. The plundering of the dragon-hoard, the burning of Beowulf's body on a funeral pile by the sea-shore, and the raising of a large beacon-mound over his ashes, 'easy to behold by the sailors over the waves,' are the concluding events of the story. 9. The following view of the origin and relations of the poem is briefly summarized from the Introduction to the edition above cited. The date of composition was the early part of the eighth century. This conclusion arises from a number of converging considerations,—such as (1) the language, which in its general cast, and also in certain peculiar terms and expressions, closely resembles that of Guðlac, Andreas, and Elene, poems which must be unquestionably referred to that century; (2) certain historical allusions contained in the work. The most important of these refers to the expedition, mentioned several 1 See the Introduction to the author's Beowulf, a Heroic Poem of the Eighth Century; Longmans, 1876. The name of Heorot is thought to be preserved in Hjortholm, a village of Zealand, not far from Copenhagen. |