THE STORY OF BEOWULF
Keith Williams
eBook
'Beowulf' may rightly be pronounced the great national epic of theAnglo-Saxon race. Not that it exalts the race so much as that itpresents the spirit of the Anglo-Saxon peoples, the ideals and aims,the manners and customs, of our ancestors, and that it does so insetting before us a great national hero. Beowulf himself was not anAnglo-Saxon. He was a Geat-Dane; but he belonged to that confraternityof nations that composed the Teutonic people. He lived in an heroicage, when the songs of the wandering singers were of the great deeds ofoutstanding men. The absolute epic of the English people has yet to bewritten. To some extent Arthur, though a British King--that is to say,though he was King of the Celtic British people, who were subsequentlydriven into the West, into Cornwall and Wales and Strathclyde, by ourSaxon ancestors--became nationalized by our Anglo-Norman ancestors asa typical King of the English people. He has become the epic King ofthe English in the poetry of Tennyson. It is always a mystery to thewriter that no competent singer among us has ever laid hands upon ourown Saxon hero, King Alfred. It is sometimes said that there is nothingnew under the sun, that there is nothing left for the modern singerto sing about, and that the realm of possible musical production isfast vanishing out of view. Certainly this is not true of poetry. BothAlfred and Arthur are waiting for the sympathetic voice that will tellforth to the world the immortal splendour of their personalities. Andjust as the Anglo-Normans idealized Arthur as a hero-king of theEnglish nation, though he really fought against the English, so theSaxon singer of Beowulf has idealized this Geatish chieftain, and insome way set him forth as the idealized chieftain of the Teutonic race.