Page:Gummere (1909) The Oldest English Epic.djvu/21

Rh and he gives a summary of the lay about one of these feuds which a gleeman sang to Hrothgar’s court. But these, too, were outside of his main interest.

His interest in Beowulf seems to have centred in the hero’s struggles with those uncanny and demonic, but not highly supernatural powers, who either dwell by moorlands and under dismal waters, or else, in the well-known form of a dragon, haunt old barrows of the dead and fly at midnight with fiery trail through the air. Undoubtedly one is here on the border-land of myth. But in the actual poem the border is not crossed. Whatever the remote connection of Beowulf the hero with Beowa the god, whatever this god may have in him of the old Ingævonic deity whom men worshipped by North Sea and Baltic as god of fertility and peace and trade, whatever echo of myths about a destroying monster of invading ocean tides and storms may linger in the story of Grendel and his horrible mother, nothing of the sort comes out of the shadow of conjecture into the light of fact. To the poet of the epic its hero is a man, and the monsters are such as folk then believed to haunt sea and lake and moor. Hrothgar’s people who say they have seen the uncanny pair speak just as real rustics would speak about ghosts and strange monsters which they had actually encountered. In both cases one is dealing with folk-lore and not with mythology. When these crude superstitions are developed by priest and poet along polytheistic lines, and in large relations of time and space, myth is the result. But the actual epic of Beowulf knows nothing of this process; and there is no need to regard Grendel or his mother as backed by the artillery of doom, to regard Beowulf as the