Page:Gummere (1909) The Oldest English Epic.djvu/206

190 out into vivid and moving verse. His account of his visit to Eormanric is in parts admirably done. At last he is silent; the word-hoard is locked again; and in a little epilogue the pen of some sympathetic scribe epitomizes a minstrel’s life, and chants that most English of all English, refrains, the memento mori.

So much for Widsith as this oldest of the rescued early poems in English sets him forth. His supposed words are obviously put together in different places and times. Very likely the tale of his actual wanderings, continuous and dealing with definite occasions, may be the original part of the poem, as Dr. Lawrence suggests; but even this modest statement cannot be positively affirmed. No one singer ever saw or did what Widsith professes to have seen and done; and some of the statements can have no basis of fact in the experience of anybody. Widsith’s story is fiction, so one must fairly admit; but Widsith himself is true. He is rescued from the past, with a queer patchwork story which purports to be of his making, and which deals exclusively—as his brother Deor’s tale also dealt—with continental places, persons, and times. Like another singer of far later date, the German Traugemund, he comes with a “true tale” of many strange things which he has seen in his wanderings. The man who copied him into the Exeter Book must have been a lover of the past; the rescue of this old singer with his queer itinerary, his scraps of epic and wastes of history and biography outworn, might well have been precious in the eyes of an antiquarian. One suspects, moreover, that this convenient traveller had fathered many a group of verses, more or less connected in general subject, which imparted “things