Page:Gummere (1909) The Oldest English Epic.djvu/37

Rh Professor Hall’s translation, for their vocabulary is archaic or invented to an intolerable degree, and the rimes are not followed on any fixed principle. However, the present writer’s business lies not at all with the criticism of verse-translations of Beowulf; his affair consists in presenting to modern readers a rendering, faithful as he can make it, of the entire body of oldest traditional narrative poetry in English, as handed down by the minstrel, or as worked over into longer epic form.