ABSTRACT
The close of the Episode from 1140 on has been made incomprehensible by artistic interpretations. Hengest lived among the Frisians through the winter. But early in the year longing awoke in him for his home. But stronger still was the longing for revenge [cites ll. 1140-1141 (reading inn at 1141b]. Instead of tornmot the editors read torngemot, angry meeting; tornmod is closer. When Grein [1862] sees Frisians in the Eotena bearn, he must be reading the passage wrongly; and Rieger, proceeding from Grein’s false interpretation, alters gemunde to gemynte. The sense is quite simple: Hengest wanted to take revenge, if he could carry out his angry mood [Zornmuth=tornmod], so that he thought of the children of the Jutes. He thought of the fallen Jutes, especially of Hnæf; and therefore he wanted to vent his angry mood, or take revenge. But he could not carry out his plan, or the attempt failed, and he could not scape his fate when Hunlafing stabbed him. The passage about Hunlafing and especially the expression on bearm dyde has already been misunderstood, partly by Thorpe, but completely and artificially by Rieger, as if it were speaking of Finn, who is supposed not to have been able to avert his downfall by making a gift of the famous sword Hunlafing to Hengest; Grein, who in his dictionary [1861-4] under don had followed Thorpe’s wrong interpretation [1855] of the words on bearm dide, has returned to the natural explanation in 1862:271.
