ABSTRACT

The Angles and Saxons must-otherwise its entire contents would have had no comprehensible meaning-have brought the legend of Beowulf with them from the old homeland into the new one, and it is in the nature of such traditions, that they were contained for a long time in songs. These epics grow and shrink without cease: it is equally inadmissable to recognise the form of the fifth or sixth century in the reworking of the eighth, and to fail to recognise many unobliterated traces of higher antiquity in the later configuration. Neither the weaving-together of the poems’ contents nor the form of the poetry intimately bound up with them can have arisen at the time when they were written down for the last time, but yet that earlier form of expression had then always remained so comprehensible and agreeable that it could be united with the progress of the language and the art of poetry, and could up to a certain point prevail. Just at this stage everything seems proper: the poetry does not wish to renounce its past, but at the same time does wish to pay homage to the present. One realises, that from the seventh century to the tenth a fairly stable poetic style shaped and preserved itself, which-without resisting the notion of Christianity-still carried within itself many customs of heathendom. As we possess the poem of Beowulf, it seems to me to have come from the hand of its last reviser soon after the beginning of the eighth century, and I do not hesitate to put forward a claim for anyway approximately the same time for the composition of Andreas and Elene. I do not credit the Cædmonian Genesis with any greater age: if it sprang from Caedmon himself (died round 680), this material must still have tempted alterations from the beginning. In form and language, as the preceding explanations will already have made evident, these four poems proclaim a definite relationship, and it is not difficult to contrast their style with that of the tenth century, from the metrical reworking of the psalms or even the Boethius poems.