The Four Funerals in "Beowulf" and the Structure of the Poem 0719054974, 9780719054976

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The four funerals in Beowulf

,

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

For my son Peter

The

four funerals in Beowul and the structure of the poem

Gale R. _9)ven-Crocker

Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed exclusively in the USA by St. Martin's Press

Copyright © Gale R. Owen-Crocker 2000 The right of Gale R. Owen-Crocker to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents A ct 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA http://www.man.ac.uk/mup Distributed exclusively in the USA by St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed exclusively in Canada by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 122 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN O 7190 5497 4 hardback First published 2000 07 06 OS 04 03 02 01 00

10 9 8 7 6 S 4 3 2 1

Typeset by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon Printed in Great Britain by Bookcraft (Bath) Ltd, Midsomer Norton

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements 1 Introduction

page vi v111

1

Part one: The four funerals 2 The first funeral: Scyld Scefing's ship of death 3 The second funeral: the cremation of Hildeburg's kin 4 The third funeral: the Last Survivor's lament 5 The fourth funeral: Beowulf's complex obsequies 6 Classicising the past

9 11 43 61 85 114

Part two: The funerals and the structure of the poem 7 Rings and fitts 8 The funerals and elliptical structures I: the inner funerals as frames 9 The funerals and elliptical structures II: the outer structures 10 The funerals and elliptical structures III: the funerals as centres 11 Coexistent structures: three movements and a coda: Beowulfs feminist middle; elements and seasons 12 Conclusions

131 133

Bibliography Index

15 8 178 202 217 234 241

255

Figures

1 The infancy of Moses from the Old English Hexateuch, BL MS Cotton Claudius B. iv, fol. 75r page 20 The burial of Moses from the Old English 21 Hexateuch, BL MS Cotton Claudius B. iv, fol. 139v 25 3 The prow of the Oseberg, Norway, funeral ship 4 Noah's ark from the Old English Hexateuch, BL MS Cotton Claudius B. iv, fol. 14r 26 29 5 The excavated remains of the Sutton Hoo ship 47 6 Reconstruction of helmet from Sutton Hoo 49 7 Helmet from Benty Grange, Derbyshire 8 X-ray photograph of helmet from Wollaston, Northamptonshire 50 9 Die for stamping metal plaques from Torslunda, 51 Sweden 10 Mary weeping at the foot of the Cross, BL MS Harley 2904, fol. 3v 52 11 Monolithic chambered tomb: Wayland's Smithy, Oxfordshire 63 12 Reconstruction of cremation grave, Vallentuna, Sweden 70 13 Graves of a youth and a small horse, Mound 17, Sutton Hoo 72 14 Reconstruction of the Sutton Hoo lyre 73 15 The Sutton Hoo purse-lid 75 16 The Sutton Hoo purse-lid: detail of bird of prey motif 75 17 The Beowulf manuscript, BL MS Cotton Vitellius A. xv, fol. 133r 139 18 The Beowulf manuscript, BL MS Cotton Vitellius A. xv, fol. l 69r 141

Figures vu

19 The Beowulf manuscript, BL MS Cotton Vitellius A. xv, fol. 172r 20 The Beowulf manuscript, BL MS Cotton Vitellius A. xv, fol. 174r

143 144

Acknowledgetnents

I wish to thank the University of Manchester and my colleagues in the Department of English and American Studies for research leave in the first semester of 1998-99, which enabled me to write this book. My interest in both Beowulf and the material culture of the Anglo­ Saxons was first awakened by the teaching of Professor Richard Bailey, for which I remain profoundly appreciative. I am grateful to the many undergraduates with whom I have discussed the text, particularly the classes of 1998 and 1999, and to the postgraduate students and colleagues who have contributed many ideas, references and acts of kindness, particularly Kath Barrar, Brad Bedingfield, John Briscoe, Elizabeth Coatsworth, Wendy Collier, John Highfield, Christina Lee, Jocelyn Price, Don Scragg, John Tanke and Patricia Williams. I wish to thank Michelle Brown and Justin Clegg of the British Library for making it possible for me to study the Beowulf manuscript. I am very appreciative of the support of my former colleague Douglas Brooks-Davies, my local vicar, Martin Collins, and my medical friends Colin Geary and John McNamara who have always responded positively to my unexpected phone calls with enquiries about obscure topics and have gone out of their way to supply additional material from their specialist fields. Particular thanks go to my colleague Susan Rosser and to Stephen Glosecki who read the work in draft and made many helpful sugges­ tions, and to my mother, Frances Owen, who read the typescript with her usual eagle eye despite its macabre content and her 91 years. Finally, this book would not have been written without the encour­ agement and support of my husband Richard and sons David and Peter who have always been willing to listen, to discuss and to tolerate my obsession with Beowulf.

1

Introduction

Since its first appearance as a printed text in the early nineteenth century, 1 the Old English heroic poem known as Beowulfhas attracted a great amount of critical attention and a dazzling variety of analyses and interpretations. Until now, however, Beowulf scholars have accepted that the poem contains three funerals (as there are three monster-fights}: two prominently placed at the beginning and end of the narrative (lines 26-52; 3 13 7-82)2 and a third embedded in the story of the conflict at Finnsburg which is narrated as entertainment to the protagonists in the poem (lines 1107-24). A digression within a digression, the latter has been conceived as less important themat­ ically and structurally than the funerals of S cyld Scefing and Beowulf. Studying the poem over many years, and in particular discussing it annually in selected 'chunks' with undergraduates, I have come to recognise that there are passages in the poem which establish, and modify, the audience response. The funeral of S cyld Scefing, awesome, dignified, magnificent and remote, is the earliest of these. The Finnsburg funeral, with its shocking physical detail and raw emotion, is another. Once my students have read this, they view heroic 'glory' with cynicism and the Danes as shallow and complacent. 3 Another of the passages which I have observed as changing the readers' per­ ceptions of the narrative is the lyridelegiac monologue popularly known as 'The Lay of the Last Survivor' (lines 2247-66). Treasure, established from the beginning of the poem as the most desirable commodity, no longer seems attractive once the Last Survivor has imagined it rusting and neglected without human beings to polish and maintain it. The inclusion in this passage of the living creatures, hawk and horse, and the implicit sound of the musical instrument, gives the section an immediacy which is lacking from the companion elegy known as 'The Father's Lament' which follows shortly after (lines 2rer zt hyde stod hringedstefna isig ond iitfiis, zpelinges fzr; aledon pa leofne peoden, beaga bryttan on bearm scipes, mreme be mzste. l>rer wzs madma fela of feorwegum frztwa gelreded; ne hyrde ic cymli cor ceol gegyrwan hildewrepnum ond headowredum, billum ond byrnum; him on bearme lzg madma mznigo, pa him mid scoldon on flooes reht feor gewitan. Nalzs hi hine lressan lacum teodan, peodgestreonum, pon pa dydon, pe hine �t frumsceafte ford onsendon renne ofer yde umborwesende. l>a gyt he him asetton segen gyldenne heah ofer heafod, leton holm beran, geafon on garsecg; him wzs geomor sefa, murnende mod. Men ne cunnon secgan to sode, selerredende, hzled under heofenum, hwa prem hlzste onfeng. (lines 26-52) (Scyld then went, at his fated time, [still] very vigorous, to go into the way of the Lord. Then they, dear companions, carried him to the water's current, as he himself commanded while the friend of the Scyldings ruled with words. The dear prince of the land ruled for a long time.

The fim funeral 13 There at the jetty stood the ring-prowed ship, icy and eager to be off, the prince's vessel. Then they laid the dear chief, distributor of rings, in the bosom of the ship, the famous one by the mast. A quantity of treasures, precious things from faraway places, was brought there. I have never heard of a ship more splendidly equipped with battle-weapons and war-garments, with swords and mail coats. In his lap lay a multitude of treasures which must accompany him, go far into the keeping of the flood. They did not at all furnish him with lesser gifts from the people's treasures than did those who, in the beginning, sent him forth alone over the waves, as a child. Then further, they set a golden standard high over his head, let the sea bear him, gave him to the ocean. Sad heart, mourning mind was theirs. Nobody knows, truth to tell, councillors in the hall [or] heroes under the heavens, who received the cargo.) The an:istry of the funeral passage

The ship funeral can be seen as a self-contained passage with an elab­ orate integral structure, of the type which Hieatt has called an 'envelope pattern' and Tonsfeldt 'ring structure'2 in which a central core passage is surrounded by statements which balance one another thematically. Temporarily abandoning the subject of the youth of Scyld's son Beowulf, the poet indicates that Scyld's fated time to die came, char­ acterising death as going into the way of the Lord. This will be balanced by another statement about the destination of Scyld at the close of the passage, that men do not know (though by implication, the Lord does)3 who received the cargo. Scyld is carried to the water's edge by dear companions, with the poet stressing their emotional ties to their lord. After everything is prepared the ocean carries him away from his retainers, whose emotion is again stressed. The king is laid in the ship, beside the mast. The mast is a graphic image which is balanced by the standard which is set high over his head. The poet speaks of the treasure in the ship, saying it came from far away, and compares the equipping of the ship favourably with any other he has ever heard of; then, after lingering on the treasure, repeats these themes in reverse order: the treasure is to go far away with him and it is compared favourably with that treasure which accompanied Scyld over

14

The four funerals in Beowulf

the waves when he was a child; the ocean takes him, his retainers mourn and his destination is a mystery to men. The poet then resumes the account of Beowulf (or Beow), son of Scyld, leading into the genealogy of the Danes down to Hrothgar. The structure of the passage could be expressed in tabular form: In order

In reverse order

Scyld's fated time to go A

A Who received S cyld?

Dear retainers carry S cyld to water B

B Ocean carries Scyld away from sad retainers

Laid by mast C

C Standard above head

Treasure from far away D

E Treasure compared with childhood treasure

Incomparable treasure E

D Treasure to go far away

Weapons and armour F

Alternatively, the structure could be expressed diagrammatically as a series of ellipses round the central details of the treasure:

A

This structural patterning is manifested in both the physical details of the description and the poet's commentary. The mast that rises up from the ship is paired with the standard that is raised above Scyld's head, visual images which frame the central passages with the treasure coming from far away and going far away and the assertions that the poet has never heard of a better equipped ship (i.e. since) and that there were no fewer treasures than Scyld arrived with (i.e. before). There are also verbal parallels in the balancing of the madma fela. laid with the king on bearm scipes, with the madma ma:n.igo which him on bearme /reg. The first bearm is part of the ship, the second is gener­ ally interpreted as referring to Scyld himself, who has been named at

The first funeral 15

line 26, and is the subject of three verbs at lines 29-3 1 (he selfa ba:?d., I penden wordum weold wine Scyldinga - I leof landfru'lltll lange ahte). 4 The grammar here reflects the e�bing of Scyld's power as he becomes the grammatical object of the clauses, and the hands of others take over the action (hyne, line 28 and, recalling his kingly qualities of power, generosity and fame, leofne peoden, beaga bryttan . . . mterne, lines 34-6) though he continues to dominate the action through retrospective nominatives in the adverbial clauses as the retainers c�rry out the orders Scyld gave when he was still capable of ruling (swa he selfo heed,/ penden wordum weold wine Scyldinga, lines 29-30). The poetry of this passage is rich in sound, and displays a sophis­ ticated use of the technique of repetition with variation, which is common in Old English poetry, and particularly so in Beowulf In allit­ erative patterns it goes far beyond the basic requirements of the Old English 'line' . 5 It opens with cross-alliteration (Him aa Scyld gewat to gesc�hwile, line 26) and continues with double alliteration (lines 27, 29) and back-linked interlinear alliteration creating an effect of enjambement (felahrqr firan on Frean wa:re;I hi hyne pa a:tba:ron to brimes forooe, lines 27-8; and hi hyne pa retbreron to brimes forooe,I swrese gesipas, swa he selfo hied, lines 28-9), and a further suggestion of back alliteration (though not on exactly the same consonant sound) together with alliteration on the unstressed swa at swrese gesipas, swa he selfa bred,/ penden wordum weold wine Scyldinga (lines 29-30). There is cross-alliteration in Prer a:t hjoe stod bringedstefna (line 32) and again at aledon ],ii leofne J,eoden (line 34). Double alliteration decorates the two consecutive lines beaga bryttan on bearm scipes,I mrerne be mreste. Prer wres miidma fela (lines 35-6) and the final stress is repeated by interlinear alliteration (Prer wres miidma felal of feonvegum frre-twa gelreded, lines 36-7). Lines 35-6 also exhibit an interweaving of vari­ ation (more complex than the usual simple linear apposition such as leofne peoden, beaga bryttan of lines 34-5). In beaga bryttan on bearm scipes,I m;erne be mreste (lines 35-6), ma::rne, 'the famous one' is in apposition to beaga bryttan 'distributor of rings' and both refer to Scyld Scefing, while be mreste 'by the mast', expands on bearm scipes 'amid­ ships', or 'in the lap of the ship' to explain the exact placing of the corpse in the funeral vessel. Lines 39-40, the structural and thematic core of the passage, are especially complex. Line 39 contains two poetic compound words for war-gear, balanced by double alliteration (bildewrepnum ond beaoowreaum), though as Donald Scragg has pointed out 'the metrical pattern is different in the two verses . . . and there is a subtle shift of meaning, from offensive weapons to defensive armour'. 6 There is an effect of chiasmus with the following

16 The four funerals in Beowulf half-line, billum ond byrnum ('with battle-weapons and war-garments, with swords and mail coats'). The chiasmus elaborates the variation here. Hildew;.epnum, 'battle-weapons' is defined by billum 'swords' while its metrical and alliterative partner hea&wa£dum is qualified by byrnum. There is double alliteration in line 40 (billum ond byrnum; him on bearme /reg) and also in lines 41 (madma mrn igo, pa him mid scoldon) and 43 (Nalres hi hine lressan liicum teodan) which involve stress on unusual parts of speech, preposition and adverb, respectively, as does line 44 with its stress on a demonstrative pronoun (],eodgestreonum, Jxm J,a dydon). Line 45 has a suggestion of cross-alliteration, though on slightly different sibilants (Pe hine a:t .frumsceafte ford onsendon; cf. lines 29-30) and line 46 double alliteration on vowels (enne ofer jde ambor­ wesende). Line 47 has transverse alliteration (Pa gjt he him ilsetton segen gyldenne) again with unusual stress on an adverb, and line 49 cross­ alliteration, and double alliteration as well, if the plosive g of gar was intended to alliterate with the palatal g sounds (geafon on garsecg; him wres geumor sefa). The remaining lines all have double alliteration (beah ofer heafod, leton holm beran, line 48; and murnende mod. Men ne cunnon/ secgan tosooe, seleriedende,I breled under beofenum, hwa pa:m blieste onftng, lines 50-2) with the additional alliteration on the pronoun hwa giving extra significance to the mysterious 'who' of the final line. There is also much assonance in the passage. Sometimes repetition of vowels of the same quality enhances the alliterative pattern (land­ frumallange, line 31; beagalhearm, line 35; mrernelma:ste, line 36; wiepnumlwreaum, line 39; Na/res . . . lressan, line 43; asetton . . . segen, line 47; and, dependent on Klaeber's reconstruction of illegible letters, gj t . . . gyldenne in the same line; heah . . . heafod, line 48; secgan and selerredende, line 51; hreled and hla:ste, line 52). Elsewhere the assonance works in counterpoint to the alliterative pattern (leofoe peoden, line 34; hjrde . . . cjmlicor . . . gegyrwan, line 38), sometimes linking metrical units which are not bound by alliteration (the modem concept of line boundary: lreg . . . mrn igo, lines 40-1, scoldon . . . Jlodes, lines 41-2, rredende, hreleo, lines 51-2). At lines 49-50 the combination of long diphthongs and back vowels gives an onomatopoeic quality to the verse as the lugubrious sounds mirror the mourning mood of the protago­ nists (geafon on garsecg; him wres geumor sefa,I murnende moa). The variation between front and back vowel in combination with an abun­ dance of liquid consonants (l and r) in leton holm heran� 'they let the sea bear him', mirrors the rocking of the waves, as did the earlier isig ond utfus, where two front vowels (i, i) are balanced by two back vowels (u, u). 7 Twice in the passage the poet strikingly fills an entire metrical unit with an alliterating pair of short words in which front vowel is

The first funeral 17

paired with a back vowel: fsig ond 1itfiis (line 33) and billum ond byrnum (line 40). The assonances add an intensity to certain lines. In contrast the lines where the vowel sounds have more variation are more matter­ of-fact, and tend to be used to further the narrative (Him da Scyld gewiit to gesc;rphwile, 'Then S cyld himself came, at his fated time' (line 26), Pa:r let hjde stod hringedstefaa, 'There at the harbour stood the ship' (line 3 2), /Jon Pii dydon,I Pe hine let frumsceafte ford onsendon/ ltTlne ofer jde umborwesende, 'than did those who in the beginning sent him forth alone over the waves as a child' (lines 44-6)).

Who and what is Scyld Scefing? Critical attitudes to the character Scyld Scefing, his son Beowulf (or Beow) and his other descendants have changed dramatically in recent years. Scyld Scefing, 'Shield son of Shear (or possibly 'Shield with the sheaf) is presented in the genealogical opening of Beowulf as the founding father of the Danish ('Scylding') dynasty. 8 His double name, which suggests a conflation of military tradition and fertility cult, is found only in Beowulf, but documentation elsewhere of the names 'Shield' and 'Shear together with Beo/Beow9 led scholars to believe that the opening of Beowulf invoked an established origin-myth, incor­ porating the arrival of a child in a boat, bearing a symbolic sheaf of corn. 1 0 Sceafa is mentioned (as ruler of the Langobards) in the Old English poem Widsith, a compendium of Germanic kings and king­ doms. 1 1 Sceaf, Sceldwa and Beaw appear as remote ancestors 1 2 in a genealogy of West Saxon kings in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 855, where five generations separate Sceaf and Sceldwa; Scef is there made the son of the biblical Noah and said to have been born in Noah's ark. 1 3 Figures named Scef, S cyld and Beo appear, without intervening generations, in A:thelweard's Chronicle which dates to post 975. 1 4 William of Malmesbury's twelfth-century Chronicle records the arrival of Sceaf, as a sleeping child in a boat without oars, with a sheaf of corn at his head. 1 5 Beowulf was, for a long time, assumed to be the earliest, and therefore the most reliable, of written records of a foun­ dation myth of great antiquity. Changing attitudes to the dating of the poem 1 6 have been accom­ panied by scepticism about the age of the origin myth. For much of the twentieth century it had been widely assumed that Beowulf was 'early', the product of the first centuries after the coming of Christianity and literacy to Anglo-Saxon England. 1 7 This judgement was made on linguistic and stylistic grounds; on the conviction, expressed by

18 The four funerals in Beowulf Dorothy Whitelock, that the English could not have composed a poem praising the Danes after the onset of Viking raids 1 8 and on subjective desires to link the much-loved poem with the best-known and well­ loved historical periods, 'The Age of Bede', 'The Age of Alcuin', 'The Age of Sutton Hoo', 'The Court of Offa of Mercia'. 1 9 The BeO'Wulf­ poet was accorded the authority due to the oldest source of many details of Germanic history and myth which found echoes (and contra­ dictions) in later Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian texts. Publications of the early 1980s undermined the assumptions of a pre-Viking Age date for the poem. Ashley Crandall Amos re-examined the linguistic and metrical criteria which had been applied to Old English poetry and found them unreliable, 2 0 and the collection of essays The Dating of BeO'Wulf edited by Colin Chase presented a variety of evidence supporting various dates. 2 1 The ninth century, at the height of Viking atrocities, is still not a popular candidate,22 but the possibility of 'late' (tenth- or even eleventh-century) composition is now strongly supported. It had long been recognised that the 'older' generations of the West Saxon ancestors in the genealogies were ninth-century additions. 2 3 Now Roberta Frank pointed out that the adoption of Scandinavian ancestors by the West Saxon kings marked 'a new social reality'. The names Scyld, Scef and Bea and the term Scylding were innovations of an Anglo-Danish society in England. 24 It had previ­ ously been assumed that the Beowulf-poet inherited the myth; now, it seems, the author had a hand in creating it. The conviction that Scyld was an established part of northern mythology has perhaps distracted the critical gaze from an obvious parallel to the infant in a boat: the biblical Moses. 2 5 The patriarch, like Scyld, who was fiasceaft funden ('found destitute', line 7), was placed alone in the water as a child, but having been recovered, went on to lead his people to greatness, though leaving his successor to continue his work. 26 Scyld shares with Moses a contact with the divine which his contemporaries and successors could not fully understand or share, and the heritage of a way of behaviour; in Moses' case of the Mosaic Law, and in Scyld's the heroic success which was divinely ordained for him27 and which is approved in the statement peer WB!S god cyning (line 11). 28 The Old English illustrated Hexateuch demonstrates the Anglo­ Saxons' consciousness that Moses' container was ship-like. The English translator ignores his Latin source's technicalities of bitumen and pitch, paraphrasing the Latin as heo nam a:nne risscenne windel on scyp wisan gesceapene 'she took a rush basket made like a ship' no doubt meaning by on scyp wisan gesceapene that the basket was made watertight, in the same

The first funeral

19

way that ships were. The artist who illustrated the passage interpreted the description literally and drew on fol. 7 5 r the basket shaped (gesceapene) like a ship, with protruding stem- and stem-posts (Figure 1). While the biblical writer details all the practicalities of Moses' rescue (see note 26) the identity of the unseen hands that sent the infant S cyld alone over the waves remains a mystery ([hi} pe hine ;,et frum­ sceafte ford onsendonl renne ofer jlJe umborwesende, 'those who, in the beginning, sent him alone over the waves as a child', lines 45-6) though the Beowulf-poet contrives that the audience is aware of them. It may take human hands to deck a ship with treasure, yet there is the sense that it is divine power which sends a saviour.29 Recognition of a Moses­ parallel clarifies that the Anglo-Saxon audience would have also understood the operation of divine power in the mystery of the funeral ship's destination (Men ne cunnon . . . hwa pa:m hlreste onfing, 'Men do not know . . . who received the cargo', lines 50-2). The funeral of Moses (Deuteronomy 34:6) is described in similar terms in the Old English Hexateuch: 7 he bebyrigde hine on drere dene moab lande. ongean phogor. 7 nyste nan man his byrgenne od dime andweardan dreg ('and he [the Lord] 3 0 buried him in the valley of the land of Moab, oppo­ site Phogor. And no man knows his grave up to this present day.' fol. 13 7r, lines 24-5). On 139v, a full-page illustration shows the Lord literally pushing Moses' shrouded body into the rock (Figure 2). 3 1 The writer and illustrator of the Hexateuch certainly understood that if a text said 'no man knows', it was because the matter was in God's hands. Though there may be biblical influence in the infancy and funeral myths, in terms of the scant details of his career S cyld is all Germanic hero king, subjugating and terrorising nations (lines 5-6) and exacting tribute from them (lines 9-11), achieving a state which the poet describes as weoromyndum pah ('he thrived in glories', line 8). His conquests are described in vague, idealistic terms, the only geograph­ ical detail coming in the account of the fame of his son Beowulf (or Beow) Scedelandum in ('in Skane' (southern Sweden), line 19). We are given no domestic details, only the fact of the birth of a son, and nothing, other than the founding of a dynasty with one child, to justify the 'fertility cult' -type name Scefing. The king's accumulation of a traditional Germanic comitatus is not described, but its existence is taken for granted in the account of the affection and obedience the retainers show in preparing S cyld's funeral: hi hyn e pa 1.etb;eron to brimes farotJe,I wrese gesipas, wa he selfa b;ed,/ penden wordum weold w ine Scyldinga - I leof landfruma lange ahte. ('Then they carried him to the water's edge, his dear retainers, as he himself commanded while he,

20

The four fonerals in Beowulf

Figure 1 The infancy of Moses from the Old English Hexateuch, BL MS Cotton Claudius B. iv, fol. 75r. The Moses basket is described at lines 4-5 and it is depicted literally 'shaped like a ship'. Source: © The British library

The first funeral 2 1

IIIIS.4ftlUI-.-_,. ...,._, , , • aaa _,.

tu.•

,rd,au;.:

Figure 2 The burial of Moses &om the Old English Hexateuch, BL MS Cotton Claudius B. iv, fol. 139v. Source: © The British Library

22 The four funerals in Beowulf friend of the Scyldings, ruled with words. The beloved prince of the land reigned a long time', lines 28-31). The focus here is not on Scyld as the powerful war king who conquered neighbouring nations, but on the affection which the man shared with his personal companions ('dear retainers', 'friend of the Scyldings', 'beloved'). They fulfil their last service to him ('they carried him') in the spirit of obedience which is a tenet of the Germanic heroic code3 2 and they carry out his wishes when he is beyond uttering them any more. The comment that he ruled for a long time reminds us that the people are accustomed to direction, that without a strong king to obey they are potentially lost, as the Danes were after the exile of Heremod, and as the Geats may be after the death of Beowulf at the end of the poem. It is part of Scyld's success, however, that he leaves a son who has already begun to build a comitatus (lines 20-4). The poet establishes at the beginning of his work that no one, whatever his worldly success, can resist a greater force than human power, his fate, the workings of the Lord. Him w Scyld gewiit to gescrephwile,I felahrur firan on Frean wrere ('Then Scyld, still very vigorous, went at his appointed time into the protection of the Lord', lines 26-7). 3 3 The poet has indicated by the earlier burst of 'C�dmonian' vocabulary on the birth of Scyld Scefing's son (Liffrea, 'the Lord of life', wuldres Wealdend, 'the Ruler of glory', lines 16-17) that his commmentary on his pagan protagonists reflects a Christian viewpoint, in which the Christian God is in charge of the world, whether the people who inhabit that world know it or not. Now, for the first time in the poem, we see two simultaneous perspectives. Scyld's people are giving him into the keeping of the flood (on jlodes rebt, line 42) as they commit his body to the ocean on its treasure­ laden ship; but the poet, from his superior viewpoint, knows that the souls of the righteous go into the keeping of the Lord and gives the audience a clue to what will remain a mystery to the retainers: the recipient of the cargo. This double perspective adds a poignancy to the immediate context, to all that Scyld's retainers do for him out of love and respect, but in the ignorance of paganism. In the wider frame of the poem as a whole, it establishes a 'knowingn ess' in the audience which can be suspended as we become involved in the events, or foregrounded whenever the poet wishes to call it up, distancing the characters and their world.

The first funeral 2 3

Sey/d's ship The strong and affectionate arms of Scyld's retainers only relinquish him to go into the protection of his ship. l>rer ret hyde stod hringedstefna 'i sig ond iitfiis, repelinges frer; aledon pa leofne peoden, beaga bryttan on bearm scipes, mrerne be mreste.

(lines 32-6)

(There at the jetty stood the ring-prowed ship, icy and eager to be off, the prince's vessel. Then they laid their beloved lord, distributor of rings, in the lap of the ship, the famous one by the mast.) Scyld's funeral ship is clearly personified. The verb which describes its mooring at the quay is an active, not a passive one ('stood', rather than 'was moored') and there is no mention of the sailors tying or anchoring it. The vessel is 'out-eager', ready to be off on its journey: Scyld's funeral ship was evidently imagined as an impatient beast. 3 4 Here, as at other points in the poem, the author exhibits a wide and varied vocabulary for ships, 3 5 including in this short passage three vari­ ants: the poetic fter, 'vessel', the more commonplace scip 'ship' and the kenning hringedstefna, literally 'ring-prow' where stefna 'prow' synecdochically represents 'ship' and hringed indicates ornament of soine kind. There are various possible interpretations of hringedstefna. In Old English literature rings are associated with kingship and with generosity. Kings give rings to reward or encourage. Rings are both currency and prestige. 3 6 In the pagan Germanic world, for which we have archaeological evidence, rings were evidently attached to precious objects which were themselves symbolic of masculinity, such as the sword3 7 shield or drinking horn3 8 and it is possible that they might have been attached to the prows of ships. Alternatively the epithet 'ring-prow' might refer descriptively to the shape of the prow itself. It might have been a simple loop, as evidenced on a picture-stone from Gotland, Sweden3 9 or, as I have suggested elsewhere, curved into a spiral shape like that of the ninth-century funeral ship from Oseberg in Norway. 40 However, plausible as all these possibilities are, it is possible that hringedstefaa indicated zoomorphic ornament of a kind particularly significant in relation to the larger narrative and structural

24

The four funerals in Beowulf

pattern of Beowulf. the Anglo-Saxons evidently thought of the coils of serpentine animals as rings - the dragon which causes Beowulf's death is called a hringboga (line 2 5 6 1 ; boga signifies something arched or curved) and the Oseberg ship's prow (Fi gure 3) teems with interlacing beasts, and ends in a serpent's head. If the poem was composed in the tenth century or later, it is possible that the poet envisaged a dragon­ headed ship of the type current at that time. Though elsewhere in Old English poetry ships are personified as 'sea-horses'4 1 rather than dragons, dreki is a common epithet for 'ship' in ninth- and tenth­ century Norse poetry and the association of dragons with ships was common enough for the term dreka-hiifu d, 'dragon-head', to be used of a vessel's prow.42 The Icelandic scholar Snorri Sturluson describes the construction of such a ship in Harold Hardradas Saga: 'On the stem was a dragon-head and on the stern a dragon-tail, and the sides of the bows of the ship were gilt.' Subsequently this dragon's head is called 'serpent-head with golden mane' .43 Though dragon ships in Old Norse literature seem to have been vessels of war, very special and unusual, late Anglo-Saxon artists demonstrate familiarity with animal­ headed ships in peaceful as well as war-like context: in the illustrated Hexateuch, BL MS Cotton Claudius B. iv, a manuscript probably contemporary with the Beowulf manuscript, Noah's ark is depicted as a vessel of this kind (Fi gure 4)44 similarly in MS Oxford, Bodleian Library Junius XI, a manuscript of biblical poetry.45 In the Bayeux 'Tapestry' transport ships as well as some of the invasion fleet have grotesque animal heads, many with protruding tongues which could represent a dragon's fire, 46 often embellished in the characteristic eleventh-century Ringerike Style. 47 That animal-headed ships were used as funerary vessels is confirmed by the Oseberg vessel (though here a more serene, serpentine dragon is depicted). Spiral iron bands, associated with funeral ships buried at Ladby, Denmark and Ile de Groix:, off Brittany, are thought to derive from the neck-curls of creatures like those in the Bayeux 'Tapestry'.48 The possibility that the imagery of Scyld's vessel is intended to be suggestive of a dragon ship, is reinforced by the parallelism which is characteristic of the Beowulf-poet's composition (see Chapters 8-1 0), for the body of Beowulf's last enemy, the dragon, is disposed of at sea in terms which echo S cyld's funeral (leton holm beran, line 48; leton Figure 3 The prow of a funeral ship from Oseberg, T0nsberg, Vestfold, Norway. Source:

© Universitttets 0/dsaksamling, Oslo. Photograph Eirik I. Johnsen

The first funeral 2 5

26

The fourfontrals in Beowulf

Figure 4 Noah's ark from the Old English Hexateuch, BL MS Cotton Claudius B. iv, fol. I 4r. The ark is depicted as a dragon shi p. Source:

© The British Library

The first funeral 27 weg niman, line 3132) and which, to John Leyerle, are reminiscent of 'the launching of a longship'.49 The structuring of the poem is subtle: the magnificent hringedstefaa (line 32), an inanimate object, but person­ ified as eager to go (utfos, line 33), is balanced against the dragon, once also referred to in terms of its rings (hringbogan, line 256 1) and with echoing reference to its eagerness (gefysed, line 256 1): oa Wll!S hringbogan heone gefysed/ saxce to seceanne ('then the heart of the coiled creature was impelled to seek the contest', lines 25 6 1 -2) but now dead and broken, its fire quenched and its mastery of the air ended. 50 Yet the ship is not only a lively and impatient beast, an incipient dragon. It is Scyld's coffin, his shelter and his monument. The retainers lay their precious burden on bearm scipes, which could be translated prosaically as 'amidships', the widest part of the vessel which could most practically accommodate the body and the cargo laid with it. More emotively bearm can be used of the human body. It is usually translated as 'bosom' but we might more appropriately render it as 'lap'. 5 1 Scyld is enclosed in the ship as if in the lap of the mother he never knew, or the boat which was his cradle when he came to Denmark umborwesende 'being a child'. The standard towers 'high', and so, by implication, does the mast, in a visible manifestation of Scyld's earthly magnificence; Hrothgar's hall and BeowuH's barrow will also tower splendidly high. The ship and its contents are emblematic of Scyld's reign. They establish military victory and the associated treasures, weapons and armour, as motifs which are at first unquestioned, but which will be undermined and found wanting as the poem progresses, with the funeral descriptions playing a major part in the disruption of the heroic ideal.

Ship funerals in archaeology, literature and Beowulf The practice of using a ship to contain the dead body of a high­ ranking person is well attested in both the archaeology and the literature of north-west Europe. Archaeological discoveries demon­ strate that boat burial was already old-established when the Germanic peoples entered their Mi gration Age, going as far back as the Late Neolithic, the Bronze and the Roman Iron Ages. The vessels in these early burials were either solid, dug-out boats, or constructions of planks stitched together with animal tendons or root fibres, 5 2 a detail which lingers in poetic descriptions of ships as 'bound'. 5 3 The characteristic later grave-boats were clinker-built, consisting of overlapping planks fastened together with iron rivets and nails. The iron fastenings are

28

The four funerals in Beowulf

a diagnostic feature, and have enabled archaeologists to identify boats even when the organic material has rotted away or been burnt. Clinker­ built boats appear in Scandinavian archaeology, in central eastern Sweden and in Norway, from about the fourth century to the sixth century, the late Roman and the Migration period. The earliest Anglo­ Saxon examples, from Snape, Suffolk, probably belong to the sixth century. The attention of Beowulf scholars has particularly focused on the boat-graves of the Vendel period (c. 600-c. 750), named for the culture of the Vendel region of Uppland, in eastern Sweden, since the celebrated Sutton Hoo Ship Burial (Figure 5), found under Mound 1 at Sutton Hoo, Suffolk, in 1939, dates to this period (c. 625). Another ship burial at the same site (Mound 2), where the vessel overlay the burial chamber, was deposited a few years earlier. 5 4 The Swedish boat­ graves at Vendel and Valsgarde have generally been considered the closest parallels to the English examples55 though Muller-Wille notes that there are less well-known instances in the same period from western Norway and south-west Finland. 5 6 The Sutton Hoo ship burials are among the latest furnished graves in Anglo-Saxon England, since the conversion to Christianity, which eventually eradicated burial with grave-goods, was virtually completed in the seventh century. In the years following the Vendel period the practice of boat-burial continued in Norway, but came into its greatest era of popularity in the Viking Age. Hundreds of examples have been found from this period. They are clustered along the Norwegian coast and are promi­ nent in eastern Sweden and southern Finland. Further south, in Denmark, they are found both on the mainland of Jutland and on the Danish islands. Outlying examples (Iceland, Orkney, the Isle of Man, the Brittany coast of northern France, Russia and the Ukraine) testify to the distances the Vikings travelled to conquer, trade or invade. 5 7 Boat burial has taken various forms. Muller-Wille summarises: 'Unburnt boats were usually buried in a trench or placed on the surface with supports; they were either covered with wood to form a flat surface, or covered with a barrow . . . usually the dead person was buried, together with his goods, in the middle of the boat. Sometimes, however, a chamber of wood . . . or a stone cist . . . was erected. The location of a boat above a grave-chamber . . . is unusual.' 58 Cremation boat graves have also been identified, both as flat graves and as barrows. In some instances the place of burial was the location of the pyre, but 'mostly' the remains of boat, grave-goods and bones were interred elsewhere, 5 9 in which cases the presence of the iron nails and rivets is important in identifying the boat. Boat graves can also take the form of upturned boats covering burials, boat-timbers being used as covering

The first funeral 29

Figure 5 The excavated remains of the Sutton Hoo ship. Source: © The British Museum

and boat-shaped enclosures of stones being placed around the grave. The Ship Burial60 discovered at Sutton Hoo in 1 939 was very soon related to Beowulf1 and archaeological material has since been used to illuminate the poem. 62 It has become standard practice to teach Beowulf to students with illustrations from the material culture of the Anglo-Saxons. However, at least one post-modern critic has become impatient with the comfortable confirmation that Beowulf and Sutton Hoo seem to give one another. Allen Frantzen writes: An example of how archaeology and literary criticism have cooperated in the past in interdisciplinary endeavors that produced identical results emerges in the Sutton Hoo ship burial and its impact on criticism of Beowulf. This interaction of material culture with a text resulted not in interdisciplinary investigation but rather in the confirmation of an aristocratic paradigm already existing in homologous relationship in the two disciplines. The evidence of Sutton Hoo has been read narrowly by both archaeologists and literary critic. 63

30

The four funerals in Beowulf

The inappropriateness of binding Sutton Hoo to BefJZVu/f-criticism and vice versa is now asserted by literary critics, particularly where the critic regards the poem as much later than the burial;64 and by archae­ ologists, who under the influence of anthropological theory are now less willing than some of their predecessors to tie specific archaeo­ logical sites to literary narrative65 and at the same time offer a wider range of material for interdisciplinary comparisons. However, post-modernism can be unnecessarily destructive. .It would be as wrong-headed to refuse admission of the Sutton Hoo evidence to BefJZVu/f as it would be to over-stress it or to blinker oneself to the possibility of evidence from other sources and other dates. In my study of the funerals in the poem I have found many close paral­ lels to Sutton Hoo; not merely parallels between Scyld Scefing's ship funeral and the Ship Burial under Sutton Hoo Mound 1, hut between all four funerals in BefJZVu/f and most of the mounds that have been excavated at Sutton Hoo, as well as other 'princely' graves in England and elsewhere which share cultural features with the East Anglian royal burial site. Individual details will be discussed in the course of examining each of the funerals, and the significance of the findings is considered in Chapter 6. Let us, then, enumerate and evaluate the parallels and the discrep­ ancies between Sutton Hoo and Scyld Scefing's funeral. In both the Mound 1 Ship Burial and the poem an ocean-going ship had been used as a container for the funeral deposit. At Sutton Hoo a wooden treasure chamber had been constructed amidships, the position in which Scyld was said to be laid (on bearm scipes, line 3 5). 66 Scyld's ship was evidently intended to be propelled by a sail, since the mast is mentioned. The Sutton Hoo ship may once have had a mast, but this had been removed and it has been assumed that the ship was conceived as being rowed and steered by the symbolic crew whose payments were contained in the purse. 67 Scyld was equipped with 'battle-weapons and war-garments, swords and corselets'(lines 39-40). The poet identifies high-status battle equip­ ment: swords evidently indicated elite status in Anglo-Saxon burials68 and the rarity of mail coats suggests that, as grave-goods, they were confined to the very highest rank. Anglo-Saxon archaeology suggests that if the poet was drawing on sixth- or seventh-century tradition for this ship funeral, there is poetic hyperbole in the quantity of weapons and war-garments enumerated by the poet. Pagan dead equipped as warriors69 were normally sent to the grave with no more than one shield and one spear. Swords were rarer and even a richly equipped person was not buried with more than one. Helmets are very rare and

The first funeral 3 1

we have only one mail coat from England. The Sutton Hoo Ship Burial, our richest deposit in this respect, contained a collection of spears for throwing and thrusting; but the more precious items of war­ gear, sword, helmet and mail shirt, all occurred in the singular rather than the plural of the poem. The sheer quantity of weapons indicated in the poem might be a reminiscence of the great weapon hoards of Migration Age Scandinavia, which, like S cyld's weapon collection, had presumably been won from defeated enemies. 70 Alternatively, the poet, perhaps composing much later in the Anglo-Saxon period, may have been influenced by the very different material culture of his own day. The eleventh-century Bayeux 'Tapestry' suggests that helmets and mail coats were 'standard issue' by the Norman Conquest and this may have been the case for some time before. The poet stresses the magnificence of the treasures which accom­ panied S cyld (lines 36, 41, 43-6) and that they came from far away (offeorwep;um, line 3 7). The Sutton Hoo treasure illustrates both points well. It includes many pieces of precious metal, silver and gold, not merely gilded but solid gold. The exquisite, detailed workmanship of the garnet jewellery and the sheer quantity of decorated material objects testified to a magnificence in the royal life of seventh-century England that had been undreamed of before the 193 9 excavation, even given the contemporary artefacts from Kent which had already been excavated. The Sutton Hoo material also included treasures from far away: Byzantine silver, an Egyptian bowl, a Swedish (or Swedish­ inspired) helmet, shield and sword hilt, Frankish coins, spears and sword blade, and Celtic hanging bowls, apart from the materials, which included about four thousand imported garnets. The court of Sutton Hoo obviously cultivated the exotic, with the local goldsmith incor­ porating Celtic-style millefiori glass into the design of the gold and garnet jewellery and the king commemorated by the Ship Burial adopting a Roman type of cuirass with shoulder clasps. The poet, however, does not give any details of the origin, materials or work­ manship of Scyld's treasure and does not mention gem-stones. Only weapons and armour are mentioned individually; there is nothing about personal jewellery or vessels. Though the poem gives an impression of magnificent treasures, there are no details of them to detract from the central focus on the presence of weapons and armour. The standard that is raised over S cyld's head also has its parallel in the 'standard' from Sutton Hoo, though the standard of the poem is (if the textual emendation is accepted) 'golden' and free-standing, looming 'high' over the head of the dead king (lines 47-8). The Sutton Hoo standard was designed to be carried in a holster, and is made of

32

The four funerals in Beowulf

iron. It probably supported an ornament of feathers or branches, and there was no gold about it, either in the framework or in the form of a gold-embroidered banner or a pennant (as seen in the Bayeux 'Tapestry'). However, the bronze stag which surmounts the Sutton Hoo standard, a traditional emblem of royalty, finds its echo in the name Scyld's descendant gives to his royal hall, 'Heorot' or 'hart' and that hall's horn-like gables and decoration of 'bone' (or 'antler'). 7 1 There were other objects emblematic of royalty at Sutton Hoo, the great whetstone which was probably used as a sceptre, and the rod decorated with gold and garnets which has been interpreted as a cere­ monial wand, neither of which is echoed in the poem. Scyld Scefing's body is laid, unburnt, in his ship. No skeleton has ever been found in the Sutton Hoo Ship Burial. There have been those who thought the burial was a cenotaph, with no body; those who thought there was a cremated body; and others, probably in the major­ ity today, who believe there was once a body in the vacant space, but that the combination of acid soil and damp conditions had destroyed it completely before excavation. 72 The absence of the body has probably only enhanced the relationship between Sutton Hoo and Beowulf, for the archaeological find, like the poem, has something mysterious about it, the whereabouts of the human cargo, and it has added Romance to the scientific study. It is almost certainly a red herring. There is more misleading similarity in the apparent absence of sac­ rifice from the Sutton Hoo ship. 7 3 There is no sacrifice of human or animal mentioned in the account of Scyld's funeral. The Sutton Hoo burial, which was deposited in conditions which destroyed most organic matter and excavated under the pressure of an imminent World War cannot be pronounced, with certainty, to have been without sacrifice. There was cremated bone on the Anastasius dish, and there is evidence of sacrifice elsewhere on the Sutton Hoo site. 74 Furthermore it is common in ship burials elsewhere. The Swedish Valsgarde 6 and 7, and Vendel III, roughly contemporary with Sutton Hoo, contained horses and dogs. The ninth-century Oseberg, Norway, ship contained the bodies of two women, one assumed to be the servant of a royal mis­ tress, perhaps a human sacrifice. A tenth-century example, at Ladby, Denmark, contained horses and dogs. The Christian poet may have been ignorant of this sacrificial aspect of ship funerals or may have chosen to ignore it (see Chapter 6). Literary examples of ship funerals include the practical, the elabo­ rately ritualised and the mythical. At the most down-to-earth end of the scale is the Icelander Snorri Sturluson's account of King Halcon the Good, who appropriated the ships which his enemies had abandoned

The first funeral 33 on the shore, had them drawn up and buried his own men in them, cov­ ering them with earth and stones and creating mounds which, Snorri claimed, could still be seen in his own day ( 1 1 78-1 24 1 ). 7 5 From Snorri, too, derives the story of King Haki which bears some resemblance to the account of Scyld's funeral. Like Scyld, Haki gave the orders for his funeral when he was near death {having been badly wounded in battle), and he was placed on his ship and sent out to sea. The differences are that other dead men as well as weapons were placed on the ship with him, he was placed on a pyre on the vessel, that Snorri includes in his account the practical details that the rudder was shipped and the sail raised and, most significantly, that the ship was blazing as it set out to sea. 76 The god Baldr of Norse mythology was also cremated on his ship - this ship had been intended to go out to sea, but would not move. 77 A Viking ship funeral famously described by the Arab traveller lbn Fadlan was also a cremation, but in this case the ritual took place entirely on land. It involved the sacrifice of living horses, cows, a dog, a cock, a hen and a slave-girl. 78 There is, of course, biblical and Christian tradition of trusting one­ self to God in a vessel on the sea. The ultimate example is Noah's refuge in the ark during the Flood (Genesis 6: 1 4-8: 1 9). Though the circum­ stances of Noah's journey are very different from Scyld's, the poet refers to the Deluge several times79 and may have received some influence from a description or image of Noah's ark. 80 This trusting oneself to the Lord in a vessel was re-enacted, both in life and death, by Celtic Christians: the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 89 1 records the arrival at King Alfred's court of three pilgrims who had set out from Ireland in a boat without oars. 8 1 It is echoed in the account of a funeral in the Latin Life of the Welsh St Gildas, attributed to a monk of Rhuys in Brittany, which has been considered a possible parallel or source for the Scyld Scefing funeral. Here the body of the saint, according to his own instructions, was sent out unburnt on a boat. 82 These Christian customs may have influenced the poet in his use of the ship voyage to demon­ strate that Scyld's destiny, alive and dead, was in God's hands; but the rite itself seems much closer to that of King Haki (although that was a cremation) than to any Christian custom. The Beowulf-poet's account of a ship funeral may have had more than one source: an Old Testament and a Christian theme of God controlling destiny, traditionally involving a boat; and a factual basis, originating in Germanic pagan customs. There is no doubt, however, that it was strongly imaginative. The placing of a body in a ship, which then travels out into the open sea, is improbable and impractical. The means by which the ship was set on its course is i gnored; it was not

34

The four fanerals in Beowulf

towed, and though it had a mast, the poet, unlike Snorri in describing King Haki's funeral, never mentions the sail or the wind. Rather the description is vague and idealised, mysterious and mythical, balancing the unexplained arrival which constitutes the dynastic foundation myth. It seems that with each of the funerals in Beowulf there is a factual basis, which is manifested in some of the details, plus a development which is poetic and/or imaginative. \Vhat is not certain is how old the factual basis is. In the case of Scyld's funeral, is the poet using a tradition which goes back to the period of Anglo-Saxon ship burials (the late sixth and seventh centuries) and if so, was it handed down in poetic form? Alternatively, is the factual material a later acquisition, deriving from the Viking Age? The prominent sound patterns of the passage might suggest that many of the phrases derived from an oral tradition, in which case the details which survive may have been very old and the omissions (especially sacrifice) the result of years of erosion in Christian centuries. On the other hand, the poetry is so highly polished, the passage so elaborately structured thematically, lexically and phonologically that it seems like the construction of a literate scholar. If so, it could be the Beowulf-poet's creation; or the author could have rebuilt it on very old poetic foundations. We will return to this question in Chapter 6.

Notes 1 2 3 4

5

The fitt numbers and their possible si gnificance are discussed in detail in Chapter 7. Strucrural patterns are discussed in detail in Chapter 7. See below, p. 1 9. I am not convinced by Isaacs' assertion that him on bearme lzg and pa him mid scoldon refer to the personified ship, though he is right to recog­ nise the last antecedent is the masculine noun ceol. At lines 43 and 45 the hine clearly refers to Scyld, since it is qualified by znne . . . umbor­ wesende, though there is no noun as antecedent. It is likely therefore that the indirect object him at lines 40 and 41 also refers to Scyld; see Neil D. Isaacs, 'The convention of personification in Beowulf, in Robert P. Creed (ed.), Old English Poetry: fifteen essays (Providence, Rhode Island, Brown University Press, 1 967), pp. 2 1 5-48, at p. 2 36 and p. 248 n. 40. The minimwn is that one stressed syllable in the first half-line alliter­ ates with the first stress of the second half-line. I take my labels for additional or ornamental alliteration from Andy Orchard, 'Artful allit­ eration in Anglo-Saxon song and story', Anglia, 1 1 3 ( 1 995), 429-63 . I am grateful to Susan Rosser for this reference.

The first funeral 3 5 6

I

x i

x

x

I

I x

hildewtepnum ond heaoowcedum

7 8 9 10

11 12

13 14 15

16

17

AC

Donald G. Scragg, 'The nature of Old English verse', in Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature (Cambridge, University Press, 1 99 1 ), pp. 5 5-70, at p. 60. Scragg continues, 'The metrical ingenuity [of lines 3 9-40] represents the craftsmanship displayed in the objects, but the poet has used only the most traditional of formulae and the most obvious words from heroic vocabu­ lary to suggest the glory of the passing of his archetypal king.' The observation of my colleague, Donald Scragg; unpublished. Though the S cyldings are usually assumed to have taken their name from Scyld, the poet refers to the Danes as S cyldings in the days of Heremod, Scyld's predecessor (line 9 1 3). The name of S cyld's son 'Beowulf' (line 1 8) has been assumed to be a corruption of this. Sheaf is not the only Germanic fertility cult fi gure to come over the sea. Ing is another; see Gale R. Owen, Rites and Religions of the Anglo­ Saxons (Newton Abbot and Totowa, NJ, David and Charles/Barnes and Noble, 1 98 1 ), p. 30. Line 3 2 ; Krapp and Dobbie, Exeter Book, ASPR, III ( 1 936), 1 50. Royal pedigrees originally went back to Woden. They were expanded backwards at a later stage. The relevant names appear in the genera­ tions before Woden (Kenneth Sisam, 'Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies', Proceedings of the British Academy, 39 ( 1 95 3), 2 87-346). The genealogies use numerological conventions which were probably of biblical origin and which betray their artificiality; Thomas D. Hill, 'Woden as "Ninth Father": numerical patterning in some Old English royal genealogies', in Daniel G. Calder and T. Craig Christy (eds), Germania: comparative studies in the Old Germanic languages and literatures (Wolfeboro, NH, and Woodbridge, D. S. Brewer, 1 988), pp. 1 6 1-74. Simon Taylor (ed.), The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: a collaborative edition, IV, MS B (Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 1 983), pp. 3 2-3 . Alistair Campbell (ed.), The Chronicle of IEthelweard (London, Nelson, 1 962), p. 3 3 . navi sine remige, pueru.Jus, poito ad caput frumenti manipulo, donn,iens; W Stubbs (ed.), Wille/mi Malmesbirimsis monachi de gestis regum Anglorom, 2 vols, Rolls Series, 90 (London, H. M. Stationery Office,

Eyre and Spottiswood, 1 887-89), I, Lib. II, para 1 1 6, p. 1 2 1 . For recent discussions of the dating question see Roy Michael Liuzza, 'On the dating of Beowulf, in Peter S. Baker (ed.), Beowulf: basic read­ ings (New York and London, Garland, 1 995), pp. 2 8 1-3 02 ; Robert E. Bjork and Anita Obermeier, 'Date, provenance, author, audiences', in Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles (eds), A Beowulf Handbook (Lincoln, NB, University of Nebraska Press, 1 997), pp. 1 3-34. In contrast, Schiicking had proposed that the poem was a ninth-century Danish composition in 1 9 1 7 (Levin L. Schiicking, 'Wann entstand der

36

The four funerals in Beowulf Beuwulf? Glossen, Zweifel und Fragen', Beitriige zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur, 42 ( 1 9 1 7), 347-4 1 0; also 'Die Beowulf­ datierung: eine Replik.', Beitriige zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur, 47 ( 1 92 3), 2 93-3 1 1) but the idea 'seemed to have died' until

18 19 20

21 22 23 24

25 26

27 28

the late 1 950s. There were still only a few challenges to the 'traditional' position until the 1 980s; Colin Chase, 'Opinions on the date of Beuwulf, 1 8 1 5-1980', in Colin Chase (ed.), The Dating of Beuwulf (Toronto, University Press, 1 98 1 ), pp. 3-8, at pp. 7-8. Dorothy Whitelock, The Audience of Beuwulf (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1 95 1 , rev. edn 1 967). Respective dates: pre-73 5 (death of Bede); pre-804 (death of Alcuin); 62 5/63 5 (current and former dating of Sutton Hoo Ship Burial); 796 (death of Offa of Mercia). Systematic Viking attacks began in 8 3 5 . Ashley Crandall Amos, Linguistic Means of Determining the Dates of Old English Literary Texts (Cambridge, MA, Medieval Academy of America, 1 98 1 ). Chase, Dating (198 1 ). But see Alexander Callender Murray, 'Beuwulf, the Danish invasions and royal genealogy' in Chase, Dating (198 1 ), pp. 1 0 1-1 l . Sisam, 'Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies' ( 1 95 3), passim. Roberta Frank, 'Skaldic verse and the date of Beuwulf, in Chase, Dating ( 1 98 1), pp. 1 2 3-3 9. Frank points out (pp. 1 26-7) that the term S cylding was not documented until the Beuwulf-poet used it and that it was partic­ ularly associated in eleventh-century skaldic poetry with Scandinavian kings who had an interest in England. For what may be a balancing parallel with Moses at the end of the poem see pp. 1 03-4. There the resemblance appears to end, for the narrator of the biblical book of Exodus carefully explains the way in which the womenfolk of his tribe and family save the infant Moses from Pharaoh and contrive his discovery among the reeds of the river by Pharaoh's daughter. The mid­ wives, ordered to kill male babies, deceive Pharaoh (Exodus 1 : 1 5-2 1 ); he gives the order (1 :22) to cast male babies into the Nile; (2 : 1-10) the wife of Levi has a son. She makes watertight a basket of bulrushes by daubing it with bitumen and pitch, and puts it among the reeds at the water's edge. Observed by the child's si1ter, Pharaoh's daughter finds the baby when she comes down to bathe. The sister arranges for her mother to wet-nurse the child, who is named and adopted as a son by Pharaoh's daughter. There is a major difference between the two in that Moses is denied the Promised Land for breaking faith with God (Deuteronomy 3 2 :5 1-2) whereas Scyld is god cyning and lives to see his achievement. I take. it the receiving of frofre 'comfort' or 'consolation' mentioned at line 7 implies divine intervention in human affairs, just as it does at lines 1 3-1 4. This may not simply mean 'he was a good king', or 'he was an excellent king', that is, an efficient conqueror, as it is often translated. Old English

The first funeral 3 7 god often means 'good' in the sense of 'virtuous' or morally good.

29 30 31

32 33

Alternatively, it is possible to read the half-line ironically, implying that to subjuga te all of one's neighbours is anything but good. I have heard it performed this way to responsive laughter, but this interpretation supposes a pacifism in the Anglo-Saxon audience which is not justifiable. Any irony is retrospective and comparative. By the time we have seen Beowulf's additional qualities, heroes who only ellen fremedon seem limited. The poet specifies },one God sende ('whom God sent', line 1 3) in intro­ ducing Scyld's son. There is no grammatical antecedent for he other than drihten, 'the Lord'. It is unusual to find God incarnate in Anglo-Saxon art. He is usually represented by a disembodied hand in this manuscript and elsewhere, though MS Junius XI adopts a similar solution to the Hexateuch artist faced with the problem of representing the biblical material. Here (Figure 2) the manuscript faithfully represents what the Bible tells us about Moses' relationship with the Deity, that he knew God face to face (Deuteronomy 34: 1 0). At the top right of this illustration God shows Moses the Promised Land, and at top left buries him, standing on the earth and handling the shrouded corpse.The label Moises obiit is over the corpse and an abbreviation of dominus over the top of the picture. God is dressed in the 'classical' costume of saints and evange­ lists and has a cruciform nimbus, conventionally used for Christ. The representation of the Deity in the Moses scene was evidently an inno­ vation of the Hexateuch artist: though the illumination has a Carolingian parallel (one of the few in the Hexateuch to have a traceable similarity to other works, C. R. Dodwell and P. Clemoes (eds), The Old English Illustrated Hexateuch: British Museum Cotton Claudius B.IV, Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile, 1 8 (Copenhagen, Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1 974), p. 67), in the ninth-century continental version a winged, flying angel attends the corpse of Moses (Rome, San Paolo fuori le Mura, Bible of San Callisto, fol. 49v, Dodwell and Clemoes, plate IXd; Hanns Swarzenski, Monuments of Romanesque Art: the art of church treasures in north-western Europe (London, Faber and Faber, 1 954), p. 48, plate 5 8, fig. 1 3 1 .). Tacitus, Germania, 1 4; W. Peterson and M. Hutton, Tacitus Dialogues, Agricola, Germania, Loeb Classical Library (London, William Heinemann, 1 9 1 4), pp. 2 82-4. The capital which indicates immediately to the modem reader that Frea is a name of the Christian God is an editorial modification which reflects the editor's interpretation. Frea, a term found mostly, though not exclu­ sively, in poetry, is well documented as a common noun, meaning 'lord', 'leader' and is used as such elsewhere in Beowulf (King Hrothga r is repeatedly called .freon Scy/dinga, 'the lord of the Danes', lines 29 1 , 500, 1 1 66, and Beowulf is referred to as Wiglaf's frean, line 2853). Reading the term with this interpretation it is conceivable that the phrase

38

34

35 36

37

38

39 40

41 42 43 44 45

The four funerals in Beowulf indicates merely that S cyld's time was come to die as lords have to do and that the matter would be managed in a lordly way. However, the word, which was common to several Germanic languages, acquired specialist use as the name for a deity, both in Old Norse, where the cognate term Freyr became the name of a pagan god, and in Old English where it came to mean the Christian God. It is used in this way in Credmon's Hymn, reputedly the first Christian poem in Old English (line 9; Dobbie, Minor Poems, ASPR, VI ( 1 942), 1 06) and in King Alfred's metrical paraphrase of Boethius (Metre 1 7, line 9; Krapp, The Paris Psalter and the Metres of Boethius, ASPR, V ( 1 93 3), 1 75). The ship eager to be out on its journey 'into the way of the Lord' will find an ironic contrast in Grendel, hinfus, 'eager to get away' to darkness and the swarm of devils (lines 75 5-6). I am grateful to Stephen Glosecki for pointing out this echo. See BeowuH's journeys to and from Denmark, lines 207-26 and 1 894-9 1 9. In the Old English poem The Battle of Ma/don the Vikings are drama­ tised as demanding beagas wid gebeorge, 'rings in return for protection' (line 3 1 ) though the English leader's scornful reply speaks more prosaically of the Vikings making off with urum sceattum 'our cash' (line 56); Dobbie, Minor Poems, ASPR, VI ( 1 942), 7, 8. Vera I. Evison, 'The Dover ring-sword and other sword-rings and beads', Archaeologia, 5 1 ( 1 967), 63-1 1 8. R. L . S . Bruce-Mitford (ed.), The Sutton Hoo Ship Burial, II ( 1 978), 1 2 9-3 7 notes that a gilt-bronze ring was attached to the Sutton Hoo shield. Both shield and ring are of Scandinavian type. A ring was attached to a drinking horn at Valsgarde 7, Sweden (ibid., p. 1 34). James Graham-Campbell and Dafydd Kidd, The Vikings (London, Trustees of the British Museum, 1 980), plate 8, p. 28. In this example the ship has a loop at both stem and stern. Such spirals seem to have been common. They are depicted on a sketch of a ship incised into a stone from southern Sweden (Graham-Campbell and Kidd, The Vikings ( 1 980), plate 7b, p. 2 7) and on a picture-stone from Lillbjars, Gotland, Sweden (Graham-Campbell and Kidd, plate 4 7, p. 90). Sundhengest in Christ (lines 852, 862), merehengest in Riddle 14 (line 6) and scemearh in Elene (line 228) (Krapp and Dobbie, &eter Book, ASPR, III ( 1 93 6), 26, 2 7, 1 87; Krapp, Vercelli Book, ASPR, II ( 1 932) 72). See DREKI in Richard Cleasby and Gudbrand Vigfusson, An Icelandic-English Dictionary, 2nd edn with supplement by William A. Craigie (Oxford, Clarendon, 1 957, 1 975 reprint), p. 1 04. Laing, Snorri Sturluson Heimskringla, Harold the Stern, LIX, p. 2 03 and LX, p. 303 . Also fos 1 4v and 1 5r. The ship is not depicted consistently; the animal head is shown facing both inwards and outwards. Sir Israel Gollancz, The Ccrdmon Manuscript ofAnglo-Saxon biblical poetry, Junius XI in the Bodleian Library (Oxford, University Press, 1 92 7), pp. 66, 68.

The first funeral 3 9 46

47 48 49

50 51 52 53

54

55

It should be said, however, that not all animal heads on ships repre­ sented dragons. St Olaf had a ship called Bison [ V,sund] with gilded head and tail (mentioned in Olafs Saga) (Laing, Snom Sturluson Heimskringla, Magnus the Good, XIX, p. 1 42). The animal heads of the Bayeux 'Tapestry' ships exhibit considerable variety. (I intend to explore this in a forthcoming paper, 'Embroidered wood: animal-head termi­ nals in the Bayeux "Tapestry"' .) Again the representation is inconsistent. Some of the ships have heads and tails, as suggested by the Norse texts. Some do not have a decorated tail; some have heads at both stem and stem. Else Roesdahl, The Vikings (London, Guild Publishing, by arrangement with Penguin, 1 99 1 ), p. 87. Leyerle, drawing on unpublished remarks attributed to Jess B. Bessinger Jr., draws specific verbal parallels between Scyld's funeral and the dragon's (see also Chapter 5). John Leyerle, 'Beowulf the hero and the king', Medium IEvum, 34 (1 965), 89- 1 02 , at p. 9 1 , n. 7. Howard Shilton, developing this point, brings the argument full circle when he, too, notes that if the dragon here reminds us of a ship, ships were built to look like dragons. Howard Shilton, 'The nature of Beowulfs dragon', in Gale R. Owen-Crocker (ed.), Anglo-Saxon Texts and Contexts, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 79.3 ( 1 997), 67-77, at p. 76. The poet reminds us of the dragon's fire and power of flight as he describes it lying dead, a fifty-foot corpse on the ground, lines 3 040-6. A bearmclath is an apron, or covering for the thighs and loins. M. Muller-Wille, 'Boat-graves in northern Europe', The International Journal of Nautical Archaeology and Underwater &ploration, 3 (1 974), 1 87-204, at p. 1 87. For example wudu bundenne ('bound wood', line 2 1 6) and bunden-stefna ('bound prow', line 1 9 1 0), epithets which occur at the outset and end of Beowulrs Danish voyages. Internal lashing was sometimes used even after the introduction of clench nails; Gillian R. Hutchinson, 'Ships', in Michael Lapidge et al., The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, Blackwell, 1 999), pp. 4 1 9-20, at p. 4 1 9. Mound 2 was excavated in 1 93 8, but as it had already been disturbed and robbed, it has received less attention than the 1 939 discovery which was intact. It must, however, have been of similar rank. Carver dates it to the late sixth/early seventh century. The exact nature of this burial, a ship placed at ground level over a subterranean burial chamber, was only recognised at the re-excavation of 1 986-88; Martin Carver, 'The Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Sutton Hoo', in Martin Carver (ed.), The Age of Sutton Hoo (Woodbridge, Boydell, 1 992), pp. 343-7 1 , at pp. 344--6, 3 5 5-7, 367; Martin Carver, Sutton Hoo: burial ground of kings? (London, British Museum Press, 1 998), pp. 79-8 1 , 1 1 6-2 1 , 1 79, 1 82 . 'The Swedish connection' has been a chapter title in the British Museum's series of interim publications on Sutton Hoo.

40 The four foneralr in Beowulf 56

57 58 59 60 61

62 63 64

65 66 67

68 69

Muller-Wille, 'Boat-graves' ( 1 97 4), p. 1 97. Ibid. , pp. 1 97-8. Ibid. , p. 1 97. Ibid. As the 1 939 discovery under Mound 1 is particularly famous and signifi­ cant I distinguish it from other ship burials (including that in Sutton Hoo Mound 2) with capital letters. The parallel was made as early as 1 5 August 1 939 in The Times and, with quotations from the poem, in the 'East Anglian Daily Times for 1 7 August, though the story that extracts from the poem were read at the inquest on the Sutton Hoo treasure is apocryphal, and dates from a 1 948 essay by Lindqvist. It was popularised by Wrenn and has enjoyed widespread acceptance; see Roberta Frank, 'Beowulfand Sutton Hoo: the odd couple', in Calvin B. Kendall and Peter S. Wells (eds), Voyage to the Other World: the legacy of Sutton Hoo, Medieval Studies at Minnesota, 5 (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1 992), 47-64. Many of the major figures in Anglo-Saxon archaeology of the twen­ tieth century had originally read English at University, and an approach which linked the two disciplines was accepted as natural. Allen J . Frantzen (ed.), Speaking Two Languages: traditional disciplines and contemporary theory in medieval studies (New York, State University of New York Press, 1 99 1 ), p. 20. Roberta Frank humorously charts the facts, misunderstandings and suppositions which have linked the poem and the Ship Burial in 'Beuwulf and Sutton Hoo: the odd couple', in Kendall and Wells, Voyage to the Other World ( 1 992), pp. 47-64. She does not, however, propose that Beowulf scholars abandon Sutton Hoo or archaeologists Beowulf. 'Like any marriage, that of Beowulf and Sutton Hoo has limited the couple's options . . . [but] Neither Beowulf nor Sutton Hoo is about to throw over fifty years of shared learning and experience' (pp. 5 8-9). See Catherine M. Hills, 'Beowulf and archaeology', in Bjork and Niles, A Beowulf Handbook (1 997), pp. 2 9 1 -3 1 0. Mound 2 was different in that the burial chamber was beneath the ship. There were forty coins (or coin-like pieces) supposedly for the oarsmen and two small ingots for the other crew. This, among other things, made the funeral a cultural hybrid; paying the ferryman (Charon) is a feature of Roman pagan burial practice; see, for example, Carver, Sutton Hoo: burial ground of kings? ( 1 998), p. 3 5 . Heinrich Harke, 'Changing symbols in a changing society: the Anglo­ Saxon weapon burial rite in the seventh century', in Carver, Age of Sutton Hoo ( 1 992), pp. 1 49-65, at pp. 1 57-8. Harke argues that weapon burial marked ethnic and social affiliation; not all the males buried with weapons were of the age or physique to be warriors, and many able-bodied men of fighting age were buried without weapons. There is no correlation between bodies buried with wounds and weapon burial (Harke, 'Changing symbols', in Carver, Age

The first funeral 41

70

71 72 73

74 75 76 77 78 79

80

81

of Sutton Hoo ( 1 992), pp. 1 5 3-5). The type and quantity of weapons buried also appear to relate to age; Heinrich Harke, 'Early Anglo-Saxon social structure', inJohn Hines (ed.), The Anglo-Saxonsfrom the Migration Period to the Eighth Century: an ethnographic perspective, Studies in Historical Archaeoethnology, 2 (Woodbridge, Boydell, 1 997), 1 2 5-60, at pp. 1 2 7-8. Hines suggests that though in Anglo-Saxon England the provision of grave-goods is assumed to replace the ritual hoarding of the Continent, the deposition of weapons dissociated from burials continues in the prac­ tice of disposing of weapons in rivers. (John Hines, 'Religion: the limits of knowledge', in Hines, The Anglo-Saxonsfrom the Migration Period to the Eighth Century ( 1 997), 3 75-40 1 , at pp. 3 80-1 .) Some of these items date well within the Christian period. (See, for example, Janet Backhouse and Leslie Webster (eds), The Making ofEngland: Anglo-Saxon Art and Culture AD 600-900, British Museum Exhibition Catalogue (London, British Museum, 1 99 1 ), no. 2 50, from Fiskerton, p. 2 76; no. 2 5 1 , from Gilling Beck, p. 2 7 7). The poet may have known of this custom of consigning weapons to water. horngeap, line 82 , banfog, line 780. A view endorsed by Martin Carver, Director of the most recent exca­ vations; Carver, Sutton Hoo: burial ground ofkings? ( 1 998), pp. 1 2 5 , 1 2 8-9, fi gs 78-9. In the 1 965 re-excavation of Sutton Hoo, Rupert Bruce-Mitford specifi­ cally looked for the remains of horse sacrifice outside the hull of the ship, by analogy with Sweden; but none was found; Carver, Sutton Hoo: burial ground of kings? ( I 998), pp. 3 7, 4 1 . Carver, 'Sutton Hoo' (1 992), pp. 368, 3 70-1 . Hakon the Good, Snorri Sagas Chapter XXVII; Laing, Snom Stur/uson Heimskringla (1 978), p. 1 03 . Heimskringla, 2 3 . Translated in Garmonsway and Simpson, Analogues ( 1 968), pp. 348-9. From Snorri Sturluson, &Jda; Gylfaginning Chapter 49. Translated in ibid. , pp. 347-8. Translated in ibid., pp. 341-5 . Lines 1 14, 1 5 5 3-6, 1 605- 1 1 (arguably, see p. 1 66), 1 689-93 , 1 80 1 and perhaps, analogously, by the whole episode of Beowulf's victory over monsters in the mere (Gernot Wieland, 'Manna mi/dost: Moses and Beowulf', Pacific Coast Philology , 2 3 ( 1 988), 86-93 , at pp. 90- 1 ). Noah is not mentioned by name in the poem, but his significance may be reflected in the fact that the first scribe originally wrote the name of his son Shem, at line 1 05 (cames), later correcting it to Cain (caines). I do not suggest any symbolic or allegorical interpretation, merely an association of ideas, probably visual; cf. Lewis E. Nicholson, 'The literal meaning and symbolic structure of Beowulf, Classica et Mediaevalia, 2 5 ( 1964), 1 5 1 -20 1 , at pp. 1 86-7. Bately, Chronicle: MS A ( 1 986), p. 54.

42

The four funerals in Beowulf

82

Angus F. Cameron, 'Saint Gildas and S cyld Scefing', Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 70 ( 1 969), 240-6; Audrey L. Meaney, 'S cyld Scefing and the dating of Beowulf - again', Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 7 1 (1 989), 7-40. Meaney (pp. 3 0-2) notes a similar hagiographic tradition of funeral ships among a small group of Rhenish saints; in these cases the ships were placed in rivers for God to decide the resting place of the bodies. Meaney also notes (pp. 3 6-7) that though the St Gildas funeral may have influenced Anglo-Saxon scholars (the manuscript of the Vita was at Fleury where, among others, Oda, archbishop of Canterbury and Oswald, archbishop of York studied), it may itself have been influenced by the customs of the Vikings who were very active in Brittany in the ninth and tenth centuries.

3

The second funeral: the creination of Hildeburg's kin

The second funeral is part of the recitation of the minstrel who enter­ tains the company in Heorot as they celebrate BeowuH's victory. The subject matter of the narration can be seen as suitable entertainment at a celebration of the fight in Heorot, for the story of Finnsburg also included a defence of a hall. 1 The poet uses indirect speech, 2 and the narrator's paraphrase of the minstrel's tale is selective and 'allusive', probably assuming the Beowulf-audience had prior knowledg� of the facts. The modern reader is fortunate to have another source for the story, the incomplete poem now known as The Finnsburg Fragment, which includes characters with the same or similar names and obviously deals with the same legendary event. 3 By drawing on both the Beowulf version and the Fragment we can reconstruct the story as follows: Hnref has come with a band of retainers to visit Finnsburg in Frisia, where his sister Hildeburg is wife of King Finn. (Finn's people are repeatedly called 'Jutes', Eotan, in Beowulf>. Hnref and Hildeburg are the children of Hoc, and they are Danes (or Half-Danes, or Scyldings). Hnref and his men are evidently ambushed at night in a hall by Finn's men. There is no indication whether the attack was premeditated or not, but the fight continues for days without result. At some point Hnref is killed, and so is the son (or sons) of Finn and Hildeburg, fighting on the opposite side to Hnref. The conflict having reached deadlock, with both sides so depleted that neither can hope for victory, Hengest, who has inherited the leadership of the Danes, accepts Finn's offer of a truce, under which the Danes have some independence (a hall of their own) but become Finn's retainers. Evidently it is dishon­ ourable to accept such terms from the slayer of one's lord; but Hengest is trapped in Frisia by the winter which makes the sea-journey home impossible. Oaths are sworn. Finn promises equal treannent of the Danes in terms of gift-giving, and threatens to punish with death anyone who taunts the Danes. Clearly this is an uneasy peace. The

44 The four funerals in Beowulf truce provides a respite in which the dead of both sides are cremated, and the winter passes in anguish for Hengest. In the spring, inspired by the symbolic laying of a sword in his lap by his retainers, he rebels against Finn, killing him in his hall and taking possession of his trea­ sure. The Beowulf minstrel's lay ends as Hildeburg is returned to Denmark by Hengest's troop, having lost brother, sons and husband. The surviving part of The Finnsburg Fragment focuses on the ambush of Hnzf and his men in a hall and their subsequent defence of the build­ ing, which continues for five days without any of them falling. Hengest is mentioned, in significant terms (Hengest sylf, 'Hengest himself", line 1 7) but not Hildeburg. The Fragment exploits stock heroic motifs: speeches, the 'beasts of battle', several references to warriors using weapons or wearing armour and the acceptance that their behaviour is glorious. Comparison between the two poems demonstrates how very different Beowulf is. The BeO'Wulf-poet's treatment of the subject is anti­ heroic. It focuses on the grief of two survivors of the conflict, on Hildeburg, mother and sister of the slain, and on Hengest, who, with the leadership of the Half-Danes takes on the responsibilities that go with it and an agonising conflict of heroic loyalties. The paraphrase of the minstrel's song begins abruptly and un-hero ­ ically with warriors as victims of violence ( . . . [be] Finnes eaferom, di

hie se frer begeat,I htelelJ Healf-Dena, Hnaf Scyldingal in Freswtele feallan scolde, '. . . [about] the sons of Finn, when disaster befell them; the

hero of the Half-Danes, Hnzf of the Scyldings, must fall in Frisian slaughter', lines 1 068-70) and an accusation of treachery (Ne hiiru Hildeburh herian j,orfte Eotena treowe, 'Hildeburg did not indeed think to praise the fidelity of the Jutes', lines 1 07 1-2). The poet focuses on the figure of the woman, Hildeburg, emphasising that she herself is guiltless, bereaved through fate. The reversal of fortune motif which recurs throughout the poem is employed effectively here, with refer­ ence to the situation of finding, in the morning, that one's kin are dead. This of, course, recalls the situation that Hrothgar had suffered repeatedly for twelve years, and, though he does not know it, antici­ pates what he will suffer again the very next morning with the loss of .tEschere.4 Attention then transfers to Finn and Hengest and the terms of the peace treaty they make, Finn having vowed himself to keep the terms (iioum benemde, 'declared with oaths', line 1 097) and silenced his own men's contempt for the turncoat Danes with threat of violent punishment (sweordes ecg, 'sword's edge', line 1 1 06). Two descriptive passages reflect the anguish of the two characters. In what is probably stock (gendered) imagery5 Hengest's grief at the loss of his lord and his frustration at the impasse in which he finds

The second funeral 45

himself are reflected in the vocabulary of winter, storm, ice and frozen waves, while Hildeburg's anguish is reflected in the greedy fire which consumes the bodies of her loved ones. In each passage the physical cruelty of heat or cold reflects the mental anguish endured by Hildeburg and Hengest. 6 Similar half-lines end the descriptions: wies hira bleed scacen (line 1124), and Di Wll!S winter scacen (line 1136), but for Hengest the passing of winter marks the coming of spring and a change to positive action; for Hildeburg the passing of her kinsmen's glory is terminal. "While the description of the Finnsburg funeral lacks the complex ornament which distinguishes the description of Scyld's, it is marked by elaborate alliteration. Every line of the passage (lines 1107-24), except the last, contains double alliteration, which is a much higher proportion than in the poem as a whole. 7 The last line divides syntac­ tically: its first half is unobtrusively attached to the preceding block of text by echoing the (unstressed) f sounds (Lig ealle forswealg,I gresta gifrost, para de pa:r gulJ fornaml bega folces). The second half of the line is a self-contained statement in the passive voice, wies hira bleed scacen ('their glory was passed'), the sibilant of the final word scacen a whisper of the powerful end-linked alliteration of lines 1121-2 (the destructive verbs a:tspranc . . . forswealg). There are a number of subtleties of assonance, alliteration and onomatopoeia (discussed below) which mark the artistry of the passage. The funeral scene might be considered as beginning at line 1107-8, Ad Wll!S geafned, ond icge gold/ ahefen, of horde ('The pyre was prepared and gold brought up from the hoard'), 8 in which case the reference to gold might mean the grave-goods which were to be sacrificed on the pyre. However, Klaeber's id is an emendation of the manuscript's ad ('oath'), an unnecessary change since the manuscript reading makes sense, repeating, with grammatical variation, the word which was used of Finn's vows ten lines earlier. 9 This ad at line 1107 is perhaps Hengest's formal, reciprocal vow to Finn, in which case the gold which is brought up from the hoard may be a gift which Hengest publicly accepts on becoming Finn's follower. 1 0 The funeral passage proper begins with Hnzf"s corpse: Here-Scyldinga betst beadorinca wzs on bzl gearu.

(lines 1108-9)

(fhe best of battle-warriors of the War-Scyldings was ready on the pyre.)

46

The four funerals i11 Beowulf

The superlative is sad, perhaps ironic here, as 'the best of battle­ warriors' is dead, and the only sense in which he is 'ready' is that other hands have prepared his body for cremation. He will never again be 'ready for action', the more usual use of the word. 1 1 The poet's enumeraton of items on the pyre is strongly visual: .!Et ):>rem ade wres e):>gesyne swattah syrce, swyn ealgylden, eofer i renheard, re):>eling manig wundum awyrded; sume on wrele crungon! (lines 1 1 1 0- 1 3 ) (On the pyre was easily seen the blood-stained shirt, the swine all-golden, the boar hard-as-iron, many a prince injured with wounds; some perished in the carnage.) Chain mail and helmet are mentioned first; they are 'easily seen' (epgesjne, line 1 1 1 0), a point sharpened by interlinear alliteration and assonance (wre.s epgesjnel swatfoh syrce, nvjn ealgylden). The poet comes only secondarily to the dead men, numerous and anonymous. Since the mail shirt is stained with blood, 1 2 the armour is not merely a funeral offering from the treasury placed on the pyre as the 'battle­ weapons and war-garments' were laid in Scyld's ship. These grave­ goods must be the fighting garments in which the men died. The synecdoche (one mail shirt for a host of armed warriors, one golden boar-figure from a single helmet) achieves a close-up view. The poet has already referred to gilded boar images on helmets (Eoforlic sciononl ofer hleorber{g]an gehroden go/de, 'Boar-images shone over cheek-protec­ tors, adorned with gold', lines 303-4), and will make it clear that the role of the boar is protective: [helm] . . . smi