ABSTRACT

The material is mythical and heathen; but it is clarified by natural filtration through the Christian mind of the poet. Not only are the heathen myths inoffensive, but they are positively favourable to a train of Christian thought. Beowulf’s descent into the abyss to extirpate the scourge is suggestive of that Article in the Apostles’ Creed which had a peculiar fascination for the mind of the Dark and Middle Ages; the fight with the dragon; the victory that cost the victor his life; the one faithful friend while the rest are fearful-these incidents seem almost like reflections of evangelical history. Without seeing in the poem an allegorical design, we may imagine that, with the progress of Christianity, those parts of the old mythology which were most in harmony with Christian doctrines had the best chance at survival; and that, as a poet puts a new physiognomy on an old story without distorting the tradition, as we have seen in our own day the story of Arthur told again, not with the elaborate allegory of Spenser, but with a spiritual transfiguration which makes the Idylls of the King truly an epic of the nineteenth century, so I conceive that Beowulf was a genuine growth of that junction in time (define it where we may)

its production. It has been said to be older than the Saxon Conquest, and some of the materials are doubtless of this antiquity. But for the poem, as we have it, Kemble assigned it to the seventh century; then Ettmüller thought it belonged to the ninth; then Grein went back halfway to the eighth, and this has been adopted by Mr Arnold, and most generally followed. I think Ettmüller is the nearest to the mark; and I would rather go forward to the tenth than back to the eighth. A pardonable fancy might see the date conveyed in the poem itself. The dragon watches over an old hoard of gold, and it is distinctly a heathen hoard (hæðnum horde, 2,217) of heathen gold (hæðen gold, 2,277). In the same context we find that the monster had watched over this earth-hidden treasure for 300 years; and if this may be something more than a poetical number, it may possibly indicate the time elapsed since the heathen age. Three hundred years would bring us to the close of the ninth or the beginning of the tenth century, a date which, on every consideration, I incline to think the most probable. [A further long note dismisses the Chochilaicus reference in Gregory as ‘a doubtful basis for argument about the date of our poem’.]

All the traces of affinity with, or consciousness of, the ‘Beowulf’ that we can discover-and they are very few-are such as to favour this date. [Paraphrases Grettis saga at some length.]

The identity is so manifest that we have only to ask which people (if either) was the borrower, the English or the Danes. And here comes in the consideration that the geography of the ‘Beowulf’ is Scandinavian. There is no consciousness of Britain or England throughout the poem. If this raises a presumption that the Saxon poet got his story from a Dane, we naturally ask, When is this likely to have happened? and the answer must be that the earliest probable time begins after the Peace of Wedmore in 878.