ABSTRACT

It is beyond all doubt that the Anglo-Saxon national epic, in the form in which we now possess it, has been constructed by a single gifted poet. It is further as far beyond doubt that this poet was of the clerical order: a mere glance at the circumstances and relationships under which Anglo-Saxon poetry reached its flowering makes this assumption probable, and it becomes a certainty if one notes the subjective and reflective tone which extends throughout the whole poem. [A note extends this remark to the Heliand.] Not only are there single Christianising passages, more or less clumsily inserted, which allow us to recognise unmistakably the clerical reworker, but a Christian colouring has been given to the entire poem, out of which the old heathen background often appears, so that here and there totally different outlooks come into close proximity. Just because of this thoroughgoing and carefully carried-out Christianisation of material which belongs to old native legend, it is not possible to content oneself with cutting out single lines and some of the larger passages in order to gain the poem’s old text. If one leaves out all the lines and passages indicated by Ettmüller [1840] as later Christian additions, there still remains enough that is Christian to recognise clearly the Christian reworker, even after one has also cut out all that most conspicuously stands in the sharpest contradiction to the heathen material. [A note refers to Köhler 1868: 129 ff.] On the other hand so much that is heathen also shows itself, sometimes in entire sentences, sometimes in single words and expressions, that it is obvious: the cleric who created the poem in its present form, had heathen tradition in front of

unified whole. This whole important question about the position of the Beowulf-poem within Liedertheorie, for which the Anglo-Saxon national epic, older than any other heroic poem in any sense German, is of quite special significance, cannot adequately be dealt with in a few pages, and a mere glance at the space allotted to me (quite apart from the wide-ranging quality of the whole undertaking) makes it necessary for us here to orientate ourselves with a few glances and limit more serious investigation to a single point. [Köhler briefly dismisses Ettmüller 1840 and Simrock 1859.]

The poem’s content is formed by legends which are not the property of a single Germanic race, but are the common property of the great Ingvæonic branch of the Germanic family of languages: Geats, Danes, Jutes, Swedes, Angles, Frisians, Hetware, Franks, Hugi, Heathobards, these are the peoples whose legendary treasure has provided the material, or rather the materials for the Beowulf-poem. A significant point lies in this very plurality of materials: the poem does not treat a single heroic legend but a complex of legends, which stand in no organic context and which did not allow themselves to be glued together as need dictated into a tolerable unity through the fatuous pragmatism of a half-educated art-poet; rather, the single motive which made their combination possible is the circumstance that they belonged to closely related peoples and were therefore common property of all the races out of which this group is composed. The insertion of those legends which did not belong to the actual Beowulf-legend, as well as of a part of the Beowulf-legend itself which lies chronologically long before the hero’s major fights, into the presentation of the events which lie in the foreground and compose the epic’s main content, this has been carried out in a highly skilful way, in that they are partly put into the mouth of the scop in the form of songs, or are told of a hero who plays a part in the poem, or else are joined on as instructive examples to one aphorism or another. If this procedure however proves quite sufficiently that we do not have in front of us a rough conglomerate of inconsistent fragments, but a well-composed mosaic, intelligibly arranged by an artist’s hand, it is on the other hand still not proved that the parts of the whole epic did not have an earlier life as separate poems in the mouth of the people. The episode of the fight of Hnæf with Finn the king of the Frisians, l. 1068-1159, appears almost undoubtedly to be an old poem taken into Beowulf more or less in its entirety. Beowulf’s fight with Grendel, with Grendel’s mother, with the dragon, Beowulf’s cremation etc. can well be seen as poems which were available to the organiser; but he has not just ‘put them together’ [zusammengestellt], as Ettmüller puts it, not quite hitting the mark, but has worked them together [zusammengearbeitet], and incorporated them into the whole with skill and taste.