Beowulf

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 1 Leire, where the grave mounds rise out of the waving corn- fields1. J . Section V. The Heathobeardan. ' Now, as Beoumlf is the one long Old English poem which happens to have been preserved, we, drawing our ideas of Old English story almost exclusively from it, naturally think of Heorot as the scene of...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 1 Leire, where the grave mounds rise out of the waving corn- fields1. J . Section V. The Heathobeardan. ' Now, as Beoumlf is the one long Old English poem which happens to have been preserved, we, drawing our ideas of Old English story almost exclusively from it, naturally think of Heorot as the scene of the fight with Grendel. But in the short poem of Widsith, almost certainly older than Beowulf, we have a catalogue of the characters of the Old English heroic poetry. This catalogue is dry in itself, but is of the greatest interest for the light it throws upon Old Germanic heroic legends and the history behind them. And from Widsith it is clear that the rule of Hrothgar and Hrothulf at Heorot and the attack of the Heathobeardan upon them, rather than any story of monster-quelling, was what the old / poets more particularly associated with the name of Heorot. The passage in Widsith runs: For a very long time did Hrothgar and Hrothwulf, uncle and nephew, hold the peace together, after they had driven away the race of the Vikings and humbled the array of Ingeld, had hewed down at Heorot the host of the Heathobeardan. The details of this war can be reconstructed, partly from the allusions in Beowulf, partly from the Scandinavian accounts. The Scandinavian versions are less primitive and historic. They have forgotten all about the Heathobeardan as an independent tribe, and, whilst remembering the names of the leading chieftains on both sides, they see in them members of two rival branches of the Danish royal house. We gather from Beowulf that for generations a blood feud has raged between the Danes and the Heathobeardan. Nothing is told us in Beowulf about the king Healfdene, except that hewas fierce in war and that he lived to be old. From the Scandinavian s...