ABSTRACT

In a purely pagan form nowhere; or it would be in the song of Finn: however-neither here nor in the Finnsburg Fragment did the poet find an opportunity to give an indication about himself: the pagan cremation of Finn’s corpse was, just like Beowulf’s funeral, simply taken over from his source. England was converted to Christianity at an early age. [Cosijn cites the story from Bede II, 1 of Gregory and the English slaves, and describes the conversion of England as ‘a real miracle’, for its speed and lack of opposition.]

One would expect therefore to find a surprising contingent of purely spiritual poems among the oldest literary products. But what we find, or rather have left, is of a completely different nature. It was as if the English Muse wanted to rejoice once more in those old, alas!, strange stories before she would devote herself to the service of the church. Nevertheless, in those secular poems the Christian influence is undeniable. The Beowulf, it is said, is on the borderline between paganism and Christianity. Not true! The pagan matter is cast in a Christian mould and the poet puts his own faith in the mouth of his pagan heroes. To be rid of Grendel’s persecutions, the Danes sacrifice to idols. They did not know any better, the poet remarks excusingly, and did not know God as yet. The king’s gratitude for the liberation from the predicament is purely Christian. He beholds the monster’s ripped-off hand and says: ‘For this sight the Allruler be thanked! God can always perform miracle upon miracle, the Lord of Heavens! Now a young man has performed a deed through the power of the Lord, which all of us were unable to do. May the Allruler repay him with good, as He has already done now.’ Yet, I do not believe that those secular poems could find grace with the clergy; in any case, Bede still scorns the ‘lying poets’ [IV, 24], just as our Maerlant [the greatest of Middle Dutch poets] does the French romancers. And when in the list of Durham monks there occurs a series of names derived from the Beowulf, which gives us the impression of a theatre poster for a dramatised performance of that epic, then this shows only the epic’s popularity amongst those who named their children thus, not amongst the spiritual gentlemen themselves. Those passages, then, in which the poet’s Christian persuasion emerges and which in no way could have been unpleasant to the then clergy, are thorns in the eye of Higher Criticism, which takes them for the work of an interpolator, and rejects them. How many of those corruptors of the text have been interpolating?—on this point there is no unanimity. They steadily grow in number and burden with each further textual analysis: one interpolator was even interpolating another one. The investigations that lead to such results are often so subtle that one marvels at the brilliant acumen of the scholars who occupied themselves with this. Speaking for myself, I nevertheless reject the Liedertheorie with its entire shop of athetesen [Müllenhoff’s term for ‘rejections’]. Speaking frankly, the higher Beowulf criticism rests on imitation: it is the adaptation of Lachmann’s Nibelungen criticism, which in its turn was inspired by Wolf’s treatment of Homer.