ABSTRACT

Saxons, among the Frisians and Germans, and even to a certain extent among the Danes, at this very time. The leading names are those of St. Wilfrid, St. Willibrord, and St. Boniface or Winfrid. The first, about the year 680, being exiled from Northumbria, passed over to Friesland, was hospitably received by the king Algisus or Aldgisus, and converted great numbers of the natives. St. Boniface, leaving England in 716, laboured at first in Friesland, but with little success; afterwards he preached in Thuringia, Bavaria, and Nassau with extraordinary results. He suffered martyrdom at the hands of heathen Fries-landers in 751. His letters show that the stream of intellectual life ran full and strong among the West Saxons, all through the first half of the eighth century. Never was there a change for the worse until the thick-skulled and savage Northmen came and rooted up the fair plants of culture and humanity, only to succumb themselves to the refining influences of the South after incredible efforts and sacrifices, prolonged through many centuries. [Mentions several Anglo-Saxon saints and scholars of the seventh to eighth centuries.] But the story of Willibrord is more to our immediate purpose. He landed in Friesland in 690, fixed his abode at Utrecht, and after some years spent in labouring to convert the Frisians, visited Denmark in 695 [a footnote refers to Alcuin’s ‘Life of Willibrord’, for which see Talbot 1981]. The king of the Danes at that time was Ongend, a fierce and tyrannical ruler; he, however, received Willibrord kindly enough, and though no impression was made at the time on the nation ‘idolatriæ dedita,’ Ongend allowed Willibrord to take thirty young Danes back with him into Friesland that he might bring them up as Christians, with a view to future operations among their countrymen. Many other such incidents doubtless occurred during the missionary labours of our countrymen in North Germany, of which no record has been preserved. Now what difficulty is there in supposing that these young Danes, or some of them, were steeped in the mythology and hero worship which at that time reigned in the North? Must they not have been nurtured upon sagas about Sigemund and Gudrun, and Guðhere (Gunther, Gunnar),—about the ‘Worm’ killed by Sigefrid, and the necklace of Freya, and the other grand or wild phantoms which the elder Edda and the Völsunga-Saga still exhibit to us? What difficulty in supposing, that the half-mythical, half historical traditions of their own and the neighbouring countries were known to them? That the story of Hygelac’s fall nearly two centuries before had been often told in their hearing? That tales and songs about their earlier kings, Healfdene and Hroðgar, (Roe in Saxo), Ingeld and Hroðulf, (the Rolf Kraka of Snorro), and also about a famous hero and prince in Got-land, Beowulf, were impressed on their youthful memories and hearts? The materials out of which the poem of Beowulf is composed (a portion of them being probably the old Folks-lieder and Sagas themselves retained in memory) might in this way have all been naturally conveyed to some Anglo-Saxon priest, a companion or friend of Willibrord, who loved the poetry and language of his own race, and saw how, by selection among

Anglo-Saxon’s dim recollections of the period before the migration to Britain was always extremely welcome. In some such way as this I account for the origin of Beowulf. [Finds confirmation for this in the use of phrases such as mine gefræge or we gefrunon, ‘as I was informed’, ‘we have learned by inquiry’.]

As has been said before, it is more probable that the author was a churchman than a layman; but if so, he was a churchman in a lay mood. He delights in the concrete; loves persons, places, things, passions, adventures. and since the materials which the Danish neophytes would supply, from the wealth of their heathen folk-lore and tradition, were just calculated to meet and gratify this taste, it is intelligible enough that, in a time of great intellectual activity, (for this was true of Wessex at the time, and is, I am convinced, a point most germane to the matter) a mind of the same order as those which worked up the prose acts of St. Andrew and the Empress Helena into lively and stirring poems, should have performed a similar office by the yet more fascinating stories which reached it from the mysterious North.