ABSTRACT

The English scholar W.P.Ker has set out with great emphasis in his idea-packed book Epic and Romance [1897, see item 112 above] the difference between the compressed style of the Eddic poems, the Hildebrandslied, and the Finnsburg Fragment, and the more sweeping mode of presentation of Beowulf, the Waldere-fragments, and the Battle of Maldon. In the alliterative era the heroic poetry of the English carried through the development to a more placid, richer, and more sophisticated narrative mode. The longer epics arose though this change of style far more than through the expansion of the heroic story. Agglutination and contamination were not the decisive forces. The old basis of a short lay could be retained, and the extent of a comprehensive epic was reached through more eloquent recital, and by ornamentation of single features. Most of the alliterating ‘short lays’ do not correspond to single episodes of the Homeric poems in their legendary, epic-dramatic content: handled in Homeric style, they would suffice for entire epics. ‘It is still not proved, that epics could arise by means of linking together’ [Ker 1897:142], but if they ever did arise in this way, then their linked components, the lays, must have been constituted differently from the short alliterating poems of the Germans. See especially Ker pp. 92 ff., 105 f., 140 f.