ABSTRACT

Enough about this for the present; that the Aeneid is in every way a false and mendacious epic hardly needs any proof, and after adding that it is based on the contemplation of the rapine, violation and slavery of beauty (the history of Rome) as the great world-event, I shall now turn to the island of the Angles. Here we come across three great attempts at creating epic poems, two of them relating to the Bible, the third, which we have before us here, to the history of the North. Let us have a glance at the others first, the only one that is well-known being of course Milton’s Paradise Lost. Admittedly, the Fall of Man is in itself the most unfortunate event a poet could choose as the central point of an epic, but that it should be so used in Milton’s poem again connects merely with his lack of taste. For he saw that

central, he made rebellion and fall into a battle where falsehood was really victorious, mocking the victory of truth which in the poem is nothing but an empty threat. Instead of contemplating the spiritual confrontation in history, he reversed the relationship so as to view the latter in the former, thus giving us airy shadows for clear pictures. We perceive well enough, however, that the real content of the epic of history was floating dimly before him in a vast, inconceivable shape, and had the shadows been able to talk, we would be able to show what they said. Of the second attempt we possess only fragments in the so-called Cædmonian paraphrase, planned, it seems, to present the entire Biblical history, through to the resurrection of Christ, as a complete epic with episodes, which is in fact what it is; for the fragments give us the description of the rebellion of the angels, the Fall, the Flood, Abraham’s battle of kings, the triumph of the three men in the red-hot furnace and the resurrection of Christ, to which we may add the song about the defeat of Holofernes which surely belongs here. There is no denying that it was a colossal epic vision that inspired the ancient poet to conceive of such a work, but we know in advance that it would never become an entirety to be grasped by the beholder, and it is striking that like Milton he should dwell with peculiar absorption upon the self-made incident in Hell.