Page:Gummere (1909) The Oldest English Epic.djvu/175



N contrast to the remoteness, the detached and moralizing method, of the poet of the Beowulf, the singer of Finnsburg comes to close quarters with his theme, and treats it in nervous, direct, dramatic fashion. Fragment as this is, it serves to stamp its maker as no bookman, but a minstrel, who knew how to rouse his hearers in the hall with living words. In directness of treatment, in delight of battle, it sounds the same note that one hears in the historical poems of Maldon and Brunnanburh. But it is not an historical poem like those. It is a piece of the old traditional and mainly oral epic, closely related to the legendary cycle from which the Beowulf derived, and resembling that poem in all essentials of style and metre. Those qualities which difference it from the Beowulf are mainly negative; it lacks sentiment, moralizing, the leisure of the writer; it did not attempt, probably, to cover more than a single event; and one will not err in finding it a fair type of the epic songs which roving singers were wont to chant before lord and liegemen in hall and which were used with more or less fidelity by makers of complete epic poems.

The manuscript which contained the Finnsburg fragment once belonged to the library at Lambeth Palace, but was lost some time ago. Hickes made a copy of it for his Thesaurus, at the beginning of the eighteenth century; and all editions are based on the copy. Hickes may have Rh