Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 5.djvu/555

 ii s. v. JUNE s, i9i2. j NOTES AND QUERIES.

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Widsith : a Study in Old English Heroic Legend. By R. W. Chambers. (Cambridge University Press. )

THE Old English poem 'Widsith' is hardly more than a catalogue of tribes and chiefs Goths, Lombards, Burgundians, and the sea-folk of the Baltic and North Sea coasts that a minstrel fables to have met or heard of in his wanderings, with especial stress on the great rulers who bountifully rewarded his song. Some chiefs would seem to bear legendary names of such is Wade, " a kind of hoathon Christopher," in the beginning possibly a storm - divinity ; others, like Attila and Erinanaric, are historic characters, though already in the poem they are enmeshed in legend. These the author of ' Widsith ' has made contemporaries, when in truth any minstrel who received tokens of the munificence of Er- manaric, Gundahari, and Alboin must needs have a lifetime of, say, 200 years. The age of the poem is a nice point of controversy. One scholar, holding the main incident, the minstrel's visit to the Court of Ermanaric, to be a piece of auto- biography, attributes the kernel of the poem to the fourth century ; another, regarding the poem as a whole, fixes the date of its composition 500 years later ; while Mr. Chambers, following the older school of Miillenhoff and Ten Brink, places it in the seventh century, a view admitting the possibility of subsequent Christian " editing," as well as the incorporation within the poem of other extraneous matter, in particular an ancient mnemonic catalogue of tribes and kings contain- ing a glorification possibly interpolated of Offa of Angel. There is a fine equipment of scholarship and much controversial zest about Mr. Chambers's editing, but the chief merit of his contribution to the study of Old English letters lies in his recognition of the high poetic value of the epic tradition to which there is in ' Widsith ' such constant reference, and in his attempt to reconstruct on the basis of this poem, from material gathered from Jordanes and Walter Map, Saxo Grammaticus, Paul the Deacon, Widukind, the ' Elder Edda,' and many another source, the theme of heroic lays once no doubt, current in the English tongue. They are terrible tales ; the breath of the north wind is in them, and they are lit by the glint of the sword. Day by day after the battle Hild wakes the dead by magic, and the armies everlastingly renew the combat. Iring, tempted by Thiodric, turns traitor and slays his lord in the presence of the Prankish king ; but when that disloyal act is accomplished the traitor smites the tempter with his unsheathed sword, and laying his master's body over that of the Prank, " so that he might conquer even in death, he cleared a way for him- self and departed." whereby, says Widukind, " the Milky Way to this day is known by Iring's name." Some of these Continental tales must have sur- vived long among the English Thus the fame of Oft'a, hero of a duel on an island in the Eider, was transferred to Offa, son of a West Anglian ! king ruling at Warwick ; and eighteenth-century I antiquaries record the Yorkshire peasantry's lingering tribute to the memory of Wade, the

mysterious giant of the sea ; but for the mosjt- part the stories perished unnoticed by clerks, giving place to the romances of mediaeval chivalry.

The geography of the poem is discussed at some length, and there are two useful maps.

THE literary articles in this month's Nineteenth Century are few in number, but interesting. Miss Edith Sichel's ' Pauline de Beaumont ' has caught grace from its graceful subject one, moreover, fortunately chosen as not too great for a sketch. Dr. R. Y. Tyrrell provides some entertaining pages on ' Metrical Versions of the Odes of Horace,' in which Gladstone's performance comes in for well- deserved castigation. To read the article sets one, however, adopting his suggested motto "reddo quia impossible," and trying to turn things like "simplex munditiis" and " splendide mendax," or even a whole ode, into English. We are in hearty agreement with Prof. Marcus Hartog in his vigorous opposition to Sir William Ramsay's pro- posal that scholarships should be returnable : the effect of such a scheme, by burdening a young man at the very outset of a career with a heavy debt, would practically stultify the intention of the givers of scholarships, cripple learning, and also stifle the desire for learning, even more than all this is done in the present day. Mr. Mallock on 'Labour Unrest ' we found wordy and unconvincing : much of what he advances is incontrovertible in itself, but also of the nature of platitude, and belongs rather to the statenient of the problem than to its solution. Mr. Ellis Barker's discussion of 'The Failure of Post - Bismarckian Germany ' is pro- foundly interesting: there are factors in national life which he does not here take account of, and which might modify his conclusions, though they did not affect his figures ; none the less he gives matter for reflection, seeing that the facts he brings to notice go to show that Germany is at the moment on the down grade, owing to lack of a man equal to the control or her gigantic government machine and owing, too, to the mistaken concentration of her resources on her Navy. Lady Paget writes persuasively about ' The Crystal Palace, recalling the excitement and the misgivings which sur" rounded its first erection, and suggesting its use in the future as a " School of Health." On ' Welsh Disestablishment ' the Bishop of North Queensland illustrates the working of a disestablished Church from Australian experience; while Mr. St. Leger Westall makes effective rejoinder to Mr. Powell's, article in the May issue.

THE National Review has two articles on the- question of the relation between food and popula- tion : the one, by Mr. Frank Fox, ' The Empire's: Food,' an argument for Tariff Reform, not unhope- ful as to the capacity of the globe in general and the British Empire in particular to support swarm - ing generations for some time yet ; the other ' The Birth-Rate -and Afterwards,' by Mr. James Ed- mond, pessimistic, but alsoa little flippant, looking forward to all the woes of an overcrowded world" Mr. Arnold White's brief but weighty 'Gunnery and Pinchbeck,' directed to illustrating 'and enfor- cing the fact that, as he says, " the practice of leckoning the Two -Power Standard in terms of ships irrespective of the shooting capacity of those ships is misleading and unintelligent," will, we hope, receive attention in those quarters to which