learning. For the first time a classical and hieratic language was brought to their knowledge, a tongue no longer the living speech of any people, but acquaintance with which, and in some measure with its literary monuments, was henceforth to distinguish the man of culture from the mere warrior and the boor. For the first time an erudite caste was established among them, men of the book, deeply demarcated from the rest of the community by costume and rule of life. The monastery was to bring the school in its train, and, ere long, prose literature was to arise among a people who had hitherto known no literature but the poetical. King Ethelbert's instinct had not wholly misled him when he shunned to meet the first missionaries from dread of their incantations, though the spirits they were actually to raise came in another shape than any he could have foreseen. At the time of Augustine's mission the Saxons appear to have had no other written character than runes, understood by so few that they were regarded as magical, and proscribed as such by the missionaries. Pre-Christian Before considering the influence of the new creed upon the Angloemains of Saxon mind as manifested in its literature, it will be expedient to dispose Anglo-Saxon of the few literary relics of the pre-Christian age. The position of by far the most important of these is anomalous. The epic of Beowulf, one of the few commanding peaks of Anglo-Saxon literature, is and is not preChristian. Modern criticism, at least, seems almost to have established that it was composed more than a century after the mission of Augustine, and traces of Christianity-perhaps interpolated-are not absent from it. On the other hand, its spirit is that of the old heroic age, it bodies forth unchristened chivalry in its intensest form, it is a near neighbour of the Eddas, and consequently very remote from Bede, Caedmon, and other lights of Christianised Anglo-Saxondom. If the poet really wrote so late as now generally believed, he dwelt spiritually in a romantic past, and cherished ideals extinct among the Saxons, though still flourishing in Scandinavia. His poem, therefore, should be treated rather with reference to its spirit than to the actual date of its composition, even were this absolutely certain. Before examining it, it will be convenient to deal with the inconsiderable fragments of early Anglo-Saxon literature which are probably pre-Christian in every point of view.

Remains of Pre-Christian literature

As in Latin, the earliest written remains of Anglo-Saxon are not literary. They consist mainly of charms, resembling, but surpassing in dignity, the ancient Roman incantations preserved in Cato the Censor's work on agriculture. Being earlier than the knowledge of writing, and transmitted orally from generation to generation, they have come down to us in a mutilated and adulterated form, having been largely interpolated by monastic transcribers in order to eradicate the traces of their original heathenism, which are nevertheless obvious. The earliest, as it would seem to be, is probably the oldest specimen of English extant :

PRE-CHRISTIAN LITERATURE

Hal wes thu, folde, fira modor;
Beo thu growende on Godes faethma;
Fodre gefylled firum to mytte.

Hail to thee, Earth, mother of men ;

Be thou fruitful in God's embrace;
Filled with fruit for the good of men.

7

This and similar invocations must date from a very early period, and were doubtless chanted in Angleland before the emigration to Britain. Poetry unquestionably existed among the Saxons and Angles and kindred German tribes before they came into contact with the Romans, and was an entirely indigenous product, owing nothing to Latin or Celtic influence. It usually took the form of the praise of heroes. Tacitus tells us how in his time the German bards sang the exploits achieved by Arminius a century earlier. It would be most interesting to know whether these songs were contemporary with Arminius, and orally transmitted to a later generation, or whether successions of bards took the subject up anew from age to age. Julian, in the fourth century, found the Alemanni singing heroic lays, which it is to be wished that he had transmitted to us. Priscus, the Byzantine ambassador to the court of Attila, tells us that Attila's deeds were chanted in his presence by his minstrels, whose strains must of course have been contemporary with the events celebrated. But these Ugrian or Mongolian warblings must have been as unintelligible to the Germans as to the Romans, and the insignificant place of the mighty Attila (Etzel) in the Nibelungen Lied affords a striking illustration of Horace's Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona. Attila is nevertheless mentioned in what is most probably the earliest English poem we possess.

The history of this poem is, notwithstanding, involved in many Widsith difficulties. It claims to be the composition of Widsith, an assumed name denoting "the far-traveller," and to commemorate the various courts visited by him as an itinerant minstrel. Chief among these is that of Hermanric, King of the Ostrogoths about 375. If Widsith is a real person, and the poem a genuine record of his bygone days, it must have been composed early in the fifth century. He speaks, however, distinctly of his comradeship with the Goths when they were contending "against the bands of Aetla" (Attila). Attila did not become king until 433, so, even allowing that he may have battled against the Goths before coming to the throne, if the passage is really from the pen of a poet who had known Hermanric in 375, Widsith must have attained a great age. It is, perhaps, in favour of the genuineness of the poem that palpable interpolations should occur in several places. If, for example, Widsith had really mentioned Alboin, King of the Lombards, he could not have written until after 568 A.D. So late a date, however, seems irreconcilable with the mention of the Ostrogoths as still settled upon the Vistula, and other geographical details. It is manifest that, while seeming indications of a late date may easily find

Lament of
Deor

their way into an old poem, tokens of antiquity are not likely to be. interpolated into a recent one unless with the deliberate purpose of deceit, which seems unlikely here. It is difficult not to be impressed by the apparent sincerity of Widsith's praise of his patrons, and still more difficult to conjecture why a literary imposture should be perpetrated in honour of the deceased sovereigns of an extinct nation two centuries after their death. Widsith, as rendered by Mr. Stopford Brooke, says :

For a longish time lived I with Eormanric;

There the King of Gotens with his gifts was good to me;
He, the Prince of burg-indwellers, gave to me an armlet

On the which six hundred scats of beaten gold

Scorèd were, in scillings reckoned.

And another gift Ealdhild gave to me,

Folk queen of the doughty men, daughter of Eadwine,

Over many lands I prolonged her praise :

Whensoe'er in singing I must say to men

Where beneath the sky I had known the best

Of all gold-embroidered queens, giving lavishly her gifts.

It therefore seems not unlikely that Widsith's lays on the conflicts between the Goths and the Huns really related to those which took place under Hermanric's immediate successors, but that the passage has been altered by a later poet, for whom Attila was the representative of the obliterated Hunnish nation, now passing into the domain of legend. An additional argument for the authenticity of Widsith's poem is the occurrence in it of Slavonic names accepted as real by modern Slavonic scholars.

Apart from the veneration due to so ancient a monument of our tongue, the literary claims of Widsith's poem are but slight. It is chiefly interesting for the picture of the minstrel-sole representative of letters and articulate voice of public opinion-faring from court to court and meeting with honour everywhere for all have an appetite for praise, and all would fain live in song:

Always, South or Northward, some one they encounter,
Who, for he is learned in lays, lavish in his giving,
Would before his men of might magnify his sway.
Manifest his earlship. Till all flits away,

Life and light together, land who getteth so

Hath beneath the heaven high established power.

Another very interesting poem probably belongs to the pre-Christian era, even though it may have undergone modification in form. This is the Lament of Deor, an ancient Teutonic bard, perhaps mythical, who bewails his eclipse in popular favour by another bard, Heorrenda, the Horant of the German epic of Gudrun, precisely as, in after ages, Addison and Scott were, as poets, dethroned by Pope and Byron. Deor's behaviour recalls Scott's rather than Addison's; he indulges in no railing against his successful rival, but, unable to rehabilitate himself

by writing Waverley nove's, seeks consolation in true Horatian fashion by summoning up the memories of famous men and women of old who have endured adversity without being overcome by it. The case of each is described in a distinct strophe, with the burden :-"That was withstood; so may this be!" This strophical arrangement and refrain are unique in Anglo-Saxon poetry, and on that account highly interesting: they seem the deceptive foreshadowing of an arrested lyrical development. The piece also possesses charm as a sincere utterance of deep feeling. The half-mythical bard may well impersonate some really wronged or slighted minstrel at an Anglo-Saxon court. The absence of every Scriptural or ecclesiastical personage from his types of misfortune seems almost a proof that, even if the poem did not cross the sea along with the invaders of Britain, it was composed in pre-Christian times.

We have now to treat of the most remarkable of all Anglo-Saxon poems, Beowul and the only one which, though, strictly speaking, but a narrative of adventures, can be considered to approximate to the character of a national epic. A national epic in any strict sense Beowulf is not, for neither the scene nor the personages are English. The leading characters are either Danes or Geats (Goths), whose habitation appears to be in the south of Sweden. Yet the poem is justly regarded as Anglo Saxon and national, for the language is English and the manners depicted are those of the Anglo-Saxons in their ancient seats before their arrival in Britain. Whensoever the poem may have been written, it is, in all respects but one, faithful to the feelings and ideas which obtained at the date of the action, nearly half a century before the conversion of England. The exception is that the poet, though singing heathen times and heathen men in an essentially heathen spirit, is, notwithstanding, himself a Christian, or in any case a heathen whose original work has been manipulated and interpolated by a Christian successor. This tampering is nevertheless so insignificant as scarcely to interfere with the general character of the poem as a noble exhibition of the heroic character as conceived by the northern nations in the fifth century. This prevailing tone of feeling, as well as the probability of its being founded upon heroic lays considerably more ancient than itself, justifies our according Beowulf precedence over Caedmon, although, as we shall see, in its present shape it is probably later.

The attempts to make Beowulf into a nature-myth appear to us exceed- Authorship ingly fanciful. The questions connected with its authorship are almost of Beowulf as intricate as the similar controversies raised with reference to the Homeric poems. Homer and the Homerida were at all events Greeks, and celebrated the exploits of their countrymen. It would be naturally expected that when an epic poet arose in Anglo-Saxon England he would find inspiration in the conquests of Hengist and Horsa. On the contrary, he sings entirely of the Goths, and there is no allusion to anything Anglo-Saxon, unless a mention of the mythical King Offa is designed as a compliment to Offa King of Mercia. It was, therefore,