Page:Gummere (1909) The Oldest English Epic.djvu/19

Rh adventures, our poet selected, combined, and retold a complete story from his own point of view. Comment, reflection, and a certain heightening of effect, are his peculiar work, along with a dash of sentiment and an elegiac tone such as one feels one should not meet in a Finnsburg, even if the whole of that lay were preserved. Attempts to prove that the poem was translated or paraphrased from a Scandinavian original have been utterly unsuccessful. Quite obsolete, too, as in the case of Homer, is the idea that Beowulf is primitive and “popular” poetry. Its art is highly developed; its material has been sifted through many versions and forms.

The characters of this epic of Beowulf are all continental Germanic. The scene of action for the first adventure is in Denmark; and Hrothgar’s hall was probably at a place now called Leire, not far from the fiordfjord [sic] of Roeskilde. Where the fight with the dragon took place and Beowulf came to his death, depends on the opinion which one holds in regard to the home of the hero. There are two theo- ries; certainty, despite the recent proclamation of it, is out of the question. Beowulf is said to belong to the “Geatas”; and the majority of scholars hold that these Geatas were a tribe living in the southern part of Sweden. But some powerful voices have been raised for the Geatas as Jutes, who lived in what is now Jutland. In either case. Angles and Frisians, and whatever peoples were grouped about the Elbe, the Weser, and the Ems, would note with great interest, and hold long in memory, an expedition of Geatas which should proceed to the lower Rhine and there find defeat at the hands of a Frankish