about Grimwald, ‘For the lad was fairly shapen, his eyes glittered, and he had long milk-white hair,’ which answers to the description of the Earl in the Lay of Righ: the colouring of the whole charming story of the brothers’ flight from the Avars, where the elder brother, rather than leave his young brother in the enemy’s hands, wants to kill him; and the boy cries out, ‘Do not kill me! I can ride,’ and when he is caught manages to slay his captor with his little sword and rejoin his brethren to their great joy: the curious and humourous story of the Maidens who saved their honour even in captivity: the tale of the quarrel of the Two Warriors before the battle, and several more stories which he merely gives the gist of, are, to our mind, derived from lost Lays, etc.
There is only one German heroic song left, that of Hildebrand and Hadubrand, which is in a sad fragmentary state, and apparently weaker in style than the Lombard Lays. The Song of Walthere in the Chronicon Novaliciense is a later poem, but it has suffered from the hands of the paraphrast, who has turned it into bad Latin hexameters.
Muspilli is, save in metre and a few phrases and expressions, too fundamentally Christian and bookish in character to give one much help towards the reconstruction of the old German Epic, while the other old fragments in German are non-epic in character.
In England an innovation appears, the harper who sits at the king’s feet (as we are shown in Beowolf), like Demodocos, and sings:—
fore Healfdenes hilde-wisan
gomen-wudu gréted gid oft wrecan,
bonne heal-gamen Hroðgares scóp
æfter medo-bence mænan scolde
Finnes eaferom ðá hie se fær begeat:—
. . . . . Leoð was asungen
gleo-mannes gyd.—Beowolf, 1064 and 1160.
In the Exeter MS. the following classic passages occur:—
fótum sittan, feoh þicgan,
ond á snellice snére wræstan.—Wyrde, 80–82.
And― Sum mid hondum mæg hearpan grétan;
áh he gleobeámes gearobrygda list:
sum bid rýnig, sum ryht scytte,
sum leoda gleaw. . . .—Craftas, 49. See also Widsith, 105.
There are unluckily only a few really pure typical Old English poems, such as the Bryhtnoth Lay, made after the fight at Maldon, about 995, and the fine bit of Finn's Lay (which answers to our Biarcamal). The Waldhere fragment is apparently of an archaic cast and should be classed with these. Its action is brisk and its placing matterful. The Brunanburh Lay[1] is book-poetry of the same type as the later bits in the English Chronicle. In the Beowolf we have an epic completely metamorphosed in form, blown out with long-winded, empty repetitions and comments by a book-poet, so that one must be careful not
- ↑ It has several lines almost identical with lines in Judith.
