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Updated: May 15, 2025
And at last one fetched a great book, as I thought in some secrecy, and made thereout nothing more nor less than parts of the song of Beowulf itself, and all about Grendel, which pleased us all well, and so we were quiet enough, listening. First of all he looked pleased to find his people so employed.
There is a flash of illumination, like that which comes to a dying man, in which his mind runs back over his long life and sees something of profound meaning in the elemental sorrow moving side by side with magnificent courage. Then follows the fight with the firedrake, in which Beowulf, wrapped in fire and smoke, is helped by the heroism of Wiglaf, one of his companions.
She seized a warrior, the king's dearest friend, and carried him away. In the morning, the king said to Beowulf: "My trusty friend AEschere is dead... The cruel hag has wreaked on him her vengeance. The country folk said there were two of them, one the semblance of a woman; the other the specter of a man.
High o'er his head waved a bright golden standard Now let the waves bear their wealth to the holm. Sad-souled they gave back its gift to the ocean, Mournful their mood as he sailed out to sea. "And no man," says the poet, "neither counselor nor hero, can tell who received that lading." One of Scyld's descendants was Hrothgar, king of the Danes; and with him the story of our Beowulf begins.
In the next decade, simply from the development of the average eye, cities akin to the beginnings of Florence will be born among us as surely as Chaucer came, upon the first ripening of the English tongue, after Cædmon and Beowulf. Sculptors, painters, architects, and park gardeners who now have their followers by the hundreds will have admirers by the hundred thousand.
At last all the company arose to go to rest; and Hrothgar entrusted the guardianship of Heorot to Beowulf with cheering words, and so bade him good night. Then all left the hall, save only a watch appointed by Hrothgar, and Beowulf himself with his followers, who laid themselves down to rest. No long time passed before Grendel came prowling from his home on the moors under the misty slopes.
ALTHOUGH there are lines of Beowulf which seem to show that the writer of the poem was a Christian, they must have been added by some one who copied or retold the story long after the Saxons had come to Britain, for the poet who first told the tale must have been a heathen, as all the Saxons were. The Britons were Christian, for they had learned the story of Christ from the Romans.
The story may be superb, and its management may be superb; but the words in which the story lives do not come near the grandeur of Milton, or the exquisiteness of Virgil, or the deliciousness of Tasso. Indeed, if we are to say what is the real difference between Beowulf and Paradise Lost, we must simply say that Beowulf is not such good poetry.
He loved fighting and adventure, he loved books too, and soon we find him back in London meeting Ben Jonson and Shakespeare, and all the great writers of the age at the Mermaid Club. For Raleigh knew all the great men of his day, among them Sir Robert Bruce Cotton of whom you heard in connection with the adventures of the Beowulf Manuscript.
At first he denied all knowledge of carnal warfare, but I reminded him of his reading of Beowulf, saying that, if he knew naught of fighting, the verses would have had none of that fire in them. So, in the end, they went to it, and I saw that Guthlac was well used to sword play, and was satisfied also with his pupil.
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