Halleck's New English Literature. Reuben Post Halleck
all night. Grendel heard them and came.
" … he quickly laid hold of
A soldier asleep, suddenly tore him,
Bit his bone-prison, the blood drank in currents,
Swallowed in mouthfuls."[11]
Bare-handed, Beowulf grappled with the monster, and they wrestled up and down the hall, which was shaken to its foundations. This terrible contest ended when Beowulf tore away the arm and shoulder of Grendel, who escaped to the marshes to die.
In honor of the victory, Hrothgar gave to Beowulf many presents and a banquet in Heorot. After the feast, the warriors slept in the hall, but Beowulf went to the palace. He had been gone but a short time, when in rushed Grendel's mother, to avenge the death of her son. She seized a warrior, the king's dearest friend, and carried him away. In the morning, the king said to Beowulf:—
"My trusty friend AEschere is dead … The cruel hag has wreaked on him her vengeance. The country folk said there were two of them, one the semblance of a woman; the other the specter of a man. Their haunt is in the remote land, in the crags of the wolf, the wind-beaten cliffs, and untrodden bogs, where the dismal stream plunges into the drear abyss of an awful lake, overhung with a dark and grizzly wood rooted down to the water's edge, where a lurid flame plays nightly on the surface of the flood—and there lives not the man who knows its depth! So dreadful is the place that the hunted stag, hard driven by the hounds, will rather die on the bank than find a shelter there. A place of terror! When the wind rises, the waves mingle hurly-burly with the clouds, the air is stifling and rumbles with thunder. To thee alone we look for relief."[12]
Beowulf knew that a second and harder contest was at hand, but without hesitation he followed the bloody trail of Grendel's mother, until it disappeared at the edge of a terrible flood. Undaunted by the dragons and serpents that made their home within the depths, he grasped a sword and plunged beneath the waves. After sinking what seemed to him a day's space, he saw Grendel's mother, who came forward to meet him. She dragged him into her dwelling, where there was no water, and the fight began. The issue was for a time doubtful; but at last Beowulf ran her through with a gigantic sword, and she fell dead upon the floor of her dwelling. A little distance away, he saw the dead body of Grendel. The hero cut off the head of the monster and hastened away to Hrothgar's court. After receiving much praise and many presents, Beowulf and his warriors sailed to their own land, where he ruled as king for fifty years.
He engaged in his third and hardest conflict when he was old. A firedrake, angered at the loss of a part of a treasure, which he had for three hundred years been guarding in a cavern, laid waste the land in the hero's kingdom. Although Beowulf knew that this dragon breathed flames of fire and that mortal man could not long withstand such weapons, he sought the cavern which sheltered the destroyer and fought the most terrible battle of his life. He killed the dragon, but received mortal hurt from the enveloping flames. The old hero had finally fallen; but he had through life fought a good fight, and he could say as the twilight passed into the dark:—
"I have ruled the people fifty years; no folk-king was there of them that dwelt about me durst touch me with his sword or cow me through terror. I bided at home the hours of destiny, guarded well mine own, sought not feuds with guile, swore not many an oath unjustly."[13]
The poem closes with this fitting epitaph for the hero:—
"Quoth they that he was a world-king forsooth,
The mildest of all men, unto men kindest,
To his folk the most gentlest, most yearning of fame."[14]
Wherein Beowulf is Typical of the Anglo-Saxon Race.—Beowulf is by far the most important Anglo-Saxon poem, because it presents in the rough the persistent characteristics of the race. This epic shows the ideals of our ancestors, what they held most dear, the way they lived and died.
I. We note the love of liberty and law, the readiness to fight any dragon that threatened these. The English Magna Charta and Petition of Right and the American Declaration of Independence are an extension of the application of the same principles embodied in Beowulf. The old-time spirit of war still prevails in all branches of the race; but the contest is to-day directed against dragons of a different type from Grendel—against myriad forms of industrial and social injustice and against those forces which have been securing special privileges for some and denying equal opportunity for all.
II. Beowulf is a recognition in general of the great moral forces of the universe. The poem upholds the ideals of personal manliness, bravery, loyalty, devotion to duty. The hero has the ever-present consciousness that death is preferable to dishonor. He taught his thane to sing:—
"Far better stainless death
Than life's dishonored breath."
III. In this poem, the action outweighs the words. The keynote to Beowulf is deeds. In New England, more than a thousand years later, Thoreau wrote, "Be not simply good; be good for something." In reading other literatures, for instance the Celtic, we often find that the words overbalance the action. The Celt tells us that when two bulls fought, the "sky was darkened by the turf thrown up by their feet and by the foam from their mouths. The province rang with their roar and the inhabitants hid in caves or climbed the hills."
Again, more attention is paid to the worth of the subject matter and to sincerity of utterance than to mere form or polish. The literature of this race has usually been more distinguished for the value of the thought than for artistic presentation. Prejudice is felt to-day against matter that relies mainly on art to secure effects.
IV. Repression of sentiment is a marked characteristic of Beowulf and it still remains a peculiarity of the Anglo-Saxon race. Some people say vastly more than they feel. This race has been inclined to feel more than it expresses. When it was transplanted to New England, the same characteristic was prominent, the same apparent contradiction between sentiment and stern, unrelenting devotion to duty. In Snow Bound, the New England poet, Whittier, paints this portrait of a New England maiden, still Anglo-Saxon to the core:—
"A full, rich nature, free to trust,
Truthful and almost sternly just,
Impulsive, earnest, prompt to act,
And make her generous thought a fact,
Keeping with many a light disguise
The secret of self-sacrifice."
No matter what stars now shine over them, the descendants of the English are still truthful and sternly just; they still dislike to give full expression to their feelings; they still endeavor to translate thoughts into deeds, and in this world where all need so much help, they take self-sacrifice as a matter of course. The spirit of Beowulf, softened and consecrated by religion, still persists in Anglo-Saxon thought and action.
THE CAEDMONIAN CYCLE
Caedmon.—In 597 St. Augustine began to teach the Christian religion to the Anglo-Saxons. The results of this teaching were shown in the subsequent literature. In what is known as Caedmon's Paraphrase, the next great Anglo-Saxon epic, there is no decrease in the warlike spirit. Instead of Grendel, we have Satan as the arch-enemy against whom the battle rages.
Caedmon, who died in 680, was until middle life a layman attached to the monastery at Whitby, on the northeast coast of Yorkshire. Since the Paraphrase has been attributed to Caedmon on the authority of the Saxon historian Bede, born in 673, we shall quote Bede himself on the subject, from his famous Ecclesiastical History:—
"Caedmon, having lived in a secular habit until he was well advanced in years, had never learned anything of versifying; for which reason, being sometimes at entertainments, where it was agreed for the sake of mirth that all present should sing in their turns, when he saw the instrument come toward him, he rose from table and returned home.
"Having done so at a certain time, and gone out of the house where the entertainment was, to the stable, where he had to take care of the horses that night, he there composed himself