Page:Gummere (1909) The Oldest English Epic.djvu/18

2 Libraries were then forming in England, and so edifying a poem as this could well find its place in them. Of course, the number of persons who heard the manuscript read aloud would be in vast excess of those who learned its contents through the eye. The poet may or may not have been a minstrel in early life; in any case he had turned bookman. He was familiar to some extent with the monastic learning of his day, but was at no great distance from old heathen points of view; and while his Christianity is undoubted, he probably lived under the influence of that “confessional neutrality,” which ten Brink assumed for the special instance, and which historians record for sundry places and times. Above all, the poet knew ancient epic lays, dealing with Beowulf’s adventures, which were sung in the old home of the Angles, and in Frisia, and were carried over to England; out of these he took his material, retaining their form, style, and rhythmic structure, many of their phrases, their conventional descriptions, and perhaps for some passages their actual language. Finnsburg and Hildebrand give one an approximate idea of these older lays, which were property of the professional minstrel, the gleeman or scop. This scop, or “maker,” is always mentioned by the epic poet with respect. His business was to recite or chant to the music of a harp the lays of bygone generations before king or chieftain in court or hall, precisely as our epic describes the scene. He must also on occasion compose, “put together” in the literal sense, a lay about recent happenings, often carrying it abroad from court to court as the news of the day. Out of such old lays of Beowulf’s