ABSTRACT

In this work, The Making of England, London 1882, 158-74, Green repeats verbatim much of what he had written in item 81 above, but with some additions. He praises for instance the ‘simplicity and dignity’ of ‘the fine scene in Beowulf, vv. 1226 to 1254, where Hrothgar’s queen bears the mead-cup about his hall to the warriors and the hero’ (p. 160, n. 2). On the same page he states that ‘the runic letters which these men shared with the other German races sufficed to record on tablets of oak or beech an epic such as that of Beowulf’, but qualifies this in the note to p. 162 by quoting Sweet 1871 on the poem’s ‘palpable interpolations’, see item 76. Much is made, following Kemble 1839-48 and 1849, of the survival of heathen place-names. Finally Beowulf is cited to show the organisation of folk-moot and war-band from which democracy arose. Pp. 173-4.