ABSTRACT

Another reviewer has already reported on the first edition of the original text [see item 15 above]. Thorkelin has earned himself lasting profit by his zeal finally to bring out the genuinely valuable monument of Anglo-Saxon antiquity which lay unprinted and unused in England. He delivered the text completely, exactly or little deformed; one has to forgive the boldness of the Latin translation he added (strictly speaking hardly a line has been hit on, and the sense is violently conjectured), to put the best construction on an overrating of their nationality not uncommon among Danish authors. The title De Danorum Rebus Gestis was obviously inappropriate, the poem glorifies a Gotic hero (the reviewer deliberately does not write ‘Gothic’), the Danes appear only in a part of the poem, certainly as a famous, noble race, which however here plays the second part, since Beowulf (i.e. bee-wolf) lands from foreign parts precisely in order to kill monsters at the Danish court against whom the strength of native heroes has availed nothing. In addition the assertion (Thorkelin’s Preface p. x [see item 6]) that ‘this epic evidently shows the AngloSaxon language to be really Danish’ is flatly wrong, if it is not to be taken completely vaguely in the sense according to which the German and Danish dialect appear to a Frenchman to be more or less one and the same language, because in his eyes they have an anyway surprising number of words in common with each other. To the thorough investigation of language this work composed in purest Anglo-Saxon will prove how little it has to do with the dialect called by Hickes Dano-Saxon; however, the study of the Old High German, Old Saxon and Old Norse languages, certainly all related, contributes more to the interpretation of Beowulf than any consideration of present-day Danish or German, or even the

is not living in the customs and deeds of his people. If the author of the Old Saxon gospel harmony [i.e. the Heliand], if our Otfried [author of the OHG Evangelienbuch] had applied his energies to a Germanic hero-story, he would have carried out a far greater service to posterity; if anyone doubts that, compare Rudolf’s ‘William of Orleans’ [i.e. Rudolf von Ems, Middle High German poet, d. c . 1252] with his rewording of the Bible story. Everyone who has made himself competent in his language will wonder at the linguistic skill, the elegance and-it must explicitly be added-the richness of ideas of the excellent Anglo-Saxon poet, whose name we do not even know. He is a Christian, but his poem takes place in heathen times, its composition must be placed at least in the eighth century, and may easily be moved back to the seventh. The events portrayed contain much that is to modern opinion barbaric; there is fighting, drinking, the bringing home of the head of the slain enemy as a sign of victory, the committing of the corpse to the flames: but all relationships and sentiments breathe decency, nobility, justice, gentleness: the gaze is often directed to higher things, to fate and the future. If anyone wanted to brand the Germans as half wild, let him read this work and come to other conclusions. And which of today’s peoples has records of their poetry to show, that are a thousand years old?