Page:Gummere (1909) The Oldest English Epic.djvu/32

16 of English life at one of the Christianized courts. Weapons and armor are perhaps traditional in the main. The corselet or coat of mail was very carefully made, and required a year of one man’s time to forge it and to join its twenty thousand small rings,—the “ring-mail” of the poem. Shields are perpetually mentioned, and were mainly of wood, strengthened by leather and even by metal bands. The sword is so valued as to have name and pedigree. All this could be traditional; and so could be the use of runes or letters for inscriptions on the hilt or blade of a sword. The poet still held to old belief in the magic effects of such runes, as well as in the efficacy of spells and bannings generally. One must not too closely regard this attitude of the bard, his puerility and pettiness of tone. Even Chaucer sins in the same fashion, if it be a sin to breathe the intellectual and artistic air of one’s own day, and to reveal this habit in one’s work.

Metre and style of the epic are traditional; the art of the minstrel was unchanged by the poet. His rhythm holds to that four-stressed verse with initial rimes which dominates all Anglo-Saxon poetry and rests on the common Germanic tradition. Its essential principles, as observed in the present translation, may be stated as follows. The single verse consists of two obvious half-verses, each of which has two stressed syllables; and these stressed syllables of the verse must be also accented syllables of the word,—as in modern, but not as in classical metres. The first stressed syllable of the second half—third of the whole—is the “rime-giver.” With