ABSTRACT

Just as one gets to know from these the nature of the law and with it a hundred other things which characterise the state of the people, especially agriculture, cattle-breeding, the rural way of life, etc., so a practical investigator can infer a large part of life among the old Germanic peoples in yet higher power from the poems and especially from the Beowulf. Thus one learns from this poem of war, of weapons and of ships. Many parts of these ships still bear the same name, a sure proof that they were already efficiently constructed, which could not take place without important advances in the technical arts, nor without efficient manufacture of iron. From that alone, as from so many things, one sees that the Anglo-Saxons were not raw savages: sea-traffic, if indeed carried out in the form of piracy, had woken their spirit: the North Sea was their Mediterranean-though indeed a northern one with flat coastlines! But family life, feasting, household gear, luxury, funeral customs, are all made known to us by this oldest of German poems, which received its present shape at latest in the time of Charlemagne, but whose origin is far older, and whose content touches upon heathendom, indeed upon the folk-migrations, and still lets its ancient and natural popular foundation be seen unmistakably through the imposed fine plaster-work of dogma and Christian-dogmatic sentimentality. [Recommends Ettmüller and Leo as bringing back the dead ‘out of their mounds from Tacitus’s time to Witukind’.]

However, the Anglo-Saxon language is not only interesting and instructive because of the manifold etymological information it affords about German and many other languages; its literature is not only valuable because of the manifold historical insight that it offers with regard to the condition of our people in an age of great obscurity. It is also valuable in its own right for the poetic beauty with which it is

emitting a refreshing breath of life. Fresh from the fountain one draws the word and discerns in the clearness of its depth the spiritual nature of the whole people, perceives at its source the direction and power of the whole wide stream emerging from it; sees the Hercules in his cot, how he stirs, stretches his limbs and his bed becomes too narrow! [Comments on the wealth of synonyms in Anglo-Saxon.]

Along with its copiousness the Anglo-Saxon language has its great inner beauties, indeed it is one of the most poetic languages in existence. In it everything is transformed into image. Everything depends on natural visualisation and natural sound. And these images are not created by the poet as flights of rhetoric but are part of the language of the people, which responded poetically to all the things of everyday life and referred to them through images. This peculiarity of language points to very fortunate spiritual powers in the people, richness of wit, profundity of mind, and an imagination that was just as warm and vital as it was sound. An entire poetical sequence of ideas is often embedded in one word. In this respect also Anglo-Saxon strongly resembles Ancient Greek; just as the elaborate images and comparisons of Beowulf along with single expressions often in a surprising way remind us of Homer, and the naivety, the natural depiction and the natural wit, if one may so call it, of Hesiod, with his anosteos [‘boneless one’] (Polyp?), phereiokos [‘house-carrier’] (snail), indeed it is in this respect even greater, more graphic and picturesque. In another respect, it is true, this oldest of Germanic poetry falls short of the Greek: in the art of coherent, consequential epic and lyric presentation, which is evidently the result of the more refined life of the Greek people and a higher degree of social harmony, factors unfavoured by the Northern skies. That this is the reason, we can see from the Nibelung lays, in which epic portrayal has made much greater progress, because they came from a region in which there was an active traffic and a great if unruly popular life, and because at least in their last perfection they fell into a more advanced period in which, it seems to me, an awareness of the classical works of the Romans, perhaps just through contact with Roman culture, had come to the ears of the singers. In Beowulf, on the other hand, we confront the old Germanic national character in its colossal northern heathen stature, raw, but pure, and only superficially and in part coloured by dogmatic Christian ideas; basically the ancient, virile heathendom, healthy to the core. Because of this also, and corresponding to the ancient Germanic family life, thoughts and images are not always exactly connected and explained, but exist only in broad strokes and great masses, as if they were painted with the stump of a brush. The poetic fire of these sons of nature, their imagination given over entirely to objects, does not trouble itself over words, thinks of no rules of speech, no rhetorical bridle-and so it comes about that these poems, which we see more through language than through ideas, and would wish to have so entirely clear and broad and shining, are hard for us to understand-and they are that indeed! But can

Anglo-Saxon into the grammar-school curriculum.]