Chapter XX: Section III: Theories as to the Structure of "beowulf."

Certain peculiarities in the structure of _Beowulf_ can hardly fail to strike the reader. (1) The poem is not a biography of Beowulf, nor yet an episode in his life: it is two distinct episodes: the Grendel business and the dragon business, joined by a narrow bridge. (2) Both these stories are broken in upon by digressions: some of these concern Beowulf himself, so that we get a fairly complete idea of the life of our hero: but for the most part these digressions are not strictly apposite. (3) Even apart from these digressions, the narrative is often hampered: the poet begins his story, diverges and returns. (4) The traces of Christian thought and knowledge which meet us from time to time seem to belong to a different world from that of the Germanic life in which our poem has its roots.

Now in the middle of the nineteenth century it was widely believed that the great epics of the world had been formed from collections of original shorter lays fitted together (often unskilfully) by later redactors. For a critic starting from this assumption, better material than the _Beowulf_ could hardly be found. And it _was_ with such assumptions that Carl Muellenhoff, the greatest of the scholars who have dissected the _Beowulf_, set to work. He attended the lectures of Lachmann, and formed, {113} a biographer tells us, the fixed resolve to do for one epic what his admired master had done for another[256].

Muellenhoff claimed for his theories that they were simple[257] and straightforward: and so they were, if we may be allowed to assume as a basis that the _Beowulf_ is made up out of shorter lays, and that the only business of the critic is to define the scope of these lays. In the story of Beowulf's fight with Grendel (ll. 194-836: Muellenhoff's Sect. I) and with the dragon (ll. 2200-3183: Muellenhoff's Sect. IV) Muellenhoff saw the much interpolated remains of two original lays by different authors. But, before it was united to the dragon story, the Grendel story, Muellenhoff held, had already undergone many interpolations and additions. The story of Grendel's mother (ll. 837-1623: Sect. II) was added, Muellenhoff held, by one continuator as a sequel to the story of Grendel, and ll. 1-193 were added by another hand as an introduction. Then this Grendel story was finally rounded off by an interpolator (A) who added the account of Beowulf's return home (Sect. III, ll. 1629-2199) and at the same time inserted passages into the poem throughout. Finally came Interpolator B, who was the first to combine the Grendel story, thus elaborated, with the dragon story. Interpolator B was responsible for the great bulk of the interpolations: episodes from other cycles and "theologizing" matter.

Ten Brink, like Muellenhoff, regarded the poem as falling into four sections: the Grendel fight, the fight with Grendel's mother, the return home, the dragon fight. But Muellenhoff had imagined the epic composed out of one set of lays: incoherences, he thought, were due to the bungling of successive interpolators. Ten Brink assumed that in the case of all three fights, with Grendel, with Grendel's mother, and with the dragon, there had been two _parallel_ versions, which a later redactor had combined together, and that it was to this combination that the frequent repetitions in the {114} narrative were due: he believed that not only were the different episodes of the poem originally distinct, but that each episode was compounded of two originally distinct lays, combined together.

Now it cannot be denied that the process postulated by Muellenhoff _might_ have taken place: a lay on Grendel and a lay on the dragon-fight might have been combined by some later compiler. Ten Brink's theory, too, is inherently not improbable: that there should have been two or more versions current of a popular story is probable enough: that a scribe should have tried to fit these two parallel versions together is not without precedent: very good examples of such attempts at harmonizing different versions can be got from an examination of the MSS of _Piers Plowman_.

It is only here and there that we are struck by an inherent improbability in Muellenhoff's scheme. Thus the form in which Muellenhoff assumes the poem to have existed before Interpolator A set to work on it, is hardly a credible one. The "original poet" has brought Beowulf from his home to the Danish court, to slay Grendel, and the "continuator" has taken him to the haunted lake: Beowulf has plunged down, slain Grendel's mother, come back to land. Here Muellenhoff believed the poem to have ended, until "Interpolator A" came along, and told how Beowulf returned in triumph to Hrothgar, was thanked and rewarded, and then betook himself home, and was welcomed by Hygelac. That it would have been left to an interpolator to supply what from the old point of view was so necessary a part of the story as the return to Hrothgar is an assumption perilous indeed. "An epic poem only closes when everything is really concluded: not, like a modern novel, at a point where the reader can imagine the rest for himself[258]."

Generally speaking, however, the theories of the "dissecting school" are not in themselves faulty, if we admit the assumptions on which they rest. They fail however in two ways. An examination of the short lay and the long epic, so far as these are represented in extant documents, does not bear out {115} well the assumptions of the theorizers. Secondly, the minute scrutiny to which the poem has been subjected in matters of syntax, metre, dialect and tradition has failed to show any difference between the parts attributed to the different authors, such as we must certainly have expected to find, had the theories of the "dissecting school" been correct.

That behind our extant _Beowulf_, and connecting it with the events of the sixth century, there must have been a number of older lays, may indeed well be admitted: also that to these lays our poem owes its plot, its traditions of metre and its phraseology, and perhaps (but this is a perilous assumption) continuous passages of its text. But what Muellenhoff and ten Brink go on to assume is that these original oral lays were simple in outline and treated a single well-defined episode in a straightforward manner; that later redactors and scribes corrupted this primitive simplicity; but that the modern critic, by demanding it, and using its presence or absence as a criterion, can still disentangle from the complex composite poem the simpler elements out of which it was built up.

Here are rather large assumptions. What right have we to postulate that this primitive "literature without letters[259]," these short oral ballads and lays, dealt with a single episode without digression or confusion: whilst the later age,--the civilized, Christianized age of written literature during which _Beowulf_ in the form in which we now have it was produced,--is assumed to have been tolerant of both?

No doubt, here and there, in different literatures, groups of short lays can be found which one can imagine might be combined into an orderly narrative poem, without much hacking about. But on the other hand a short lay will often tell, in less than a hundred lines, a story more complex than that of the _Iliad_ or the _Odyssey_. Its shortness may be due, not to any limitation in the scope of the plot, but rather to the passionate haste with which it rushes through a long story. It is one thing to admit that there must have been short lays on the story of Beowulf: it is another to assume that these lays were of such a character that nothing was needed but compilers {116} with a taste for arrangement and interpolation in order to turn them into the extant epic of _Beowulf_.

When we find nearly five hundred lines spent in describing the reception of the hero in Hrothgar's land, we may well doubt whether this passage can have found its way into our poem through any such process of fitting together as Muellenhoff postulated. It would be out of scale in any narrative shorter than the _Beowulf_ as we have it. It suggests to us that the epic is developed out of the lay, not by a process of fitting together, but rather by a retelling of the story in a more leisurely way.

A comparison of extant short lays or ballads with extant epics has shown that, if these epics were made by stringing lays together, such lays must have been different from the great majority of the short lays now known. "The lays into which this theory dissects the epics, or which it assumes as the sources of the epics, differ in two ways from extant lays: they deal with short, incomplete subjects and they have an epic breadth of style[260]."

It has been shown by W. P. Ker[261] that a comparison of such fragments as have survived of the Germanic short lay (_Finnsburg_, _Hildebrand_) does not bear out the theory that the epic is a conglomeration of such lays. "It is the change and development in style rather than any increase in the complexity of the themes that accounts for the difference in scale between the shorter and the longer poems."

A similar conclusion is reached by Professor Hart: "It might be illuminating to base a _Liedertheorie_ in part, at least, upon a study of existing _Lieder_, rather than wholly upon an attempt to dismember the epic in question. Such study reveals indeed a certain similarity in kind of Ballad and Epic, but it reveals at the same time an enormous difference in degree, in stage of development. If the _Beowulf_, then, was made up of a series of heroic songs, strung together with little or no modification, these songs must have been something very different from the popular ballad[262]."

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And subsequent investigations into the history and folk-lore of our poem have not confirmed Muellenhoff's theory: in some cases indeed they have hit it very hard. When a new light was thrown upon the story by the discovery of the parallels between _Beowulf_ and the _Grettis saga_, it became clear that passages which Muellenhoff had condemned as otiose interpolations were likely to be genuine elements in the tale. Dr Olrik's minute investigations into the history of the Danish kings have shown from yet another point of view how allusions, which were rashly condemned by Muellenhoff and ten Brink as idle amplifications, are, in fact, essential.

How the investigation of the metre, form, and syntax of _Beowulf_ has disclosed an archaic strictness of usage has been explained above (Sect. II). This usage is in striking contrast with the practice of later poets like Cynewulf. How far we are justified in relying upon such differences of usage as criteria of _exact_ date is open to dispute. But it seems clear that, had Muellenhoff's theories been accurate, we might reasonably have expected to have been able to differentiate between the earlier and the later strata in so composite a poem.

The composite theory has lately been strongly supported by Schuecking[263]. Schuecking starts from the fact, upon which we are all agreed, that the poem falls into two main divisions: the story of how Beowulf at Heorot slew Grendel and Grendel's mother, and the story of the dragon, which fifty years later he slew at his home. These are connected by the section which tells how Beowulf returned from Heorot to his own home and was honourably received by his king, Hygelac.

It is now admitted that the ways of Old English narrative were not necessarily our ways, and that we must not postulate, because our poem falls into two somewhat clumsily connected sections, that therefore it is compounded out of two originally distinct lays. But, on the other hand, as Schuecking rightly urges, instances _are_ forthcoming of two O.E. poems having been clumsily connected into one[264]. Therefore, whilst no one would now urge that _Beowulf_ is put together out of two older {118} lays, _merely_ because it can so easily be divided into two sections, this fact does suggest that a case exists for examination.

Now if a later poet had connected together two old lays, one on the Grendel and Grendel's mother business, and one on the dragon business, we might fairly expect that this connecting link would show traces of a different style. It is accordingly on the connecting link, the story of _Beowulf's Return_ and reception by Hygelac, that Schuecking concentrates his attention, submitting it to the most elaborate tests to see if it betrays metrical, stylistic or syntactical divergencies from the rest of the poem.

Various tests are applied, which admittedly give no result, such as the frequency of the repetition in the _Return_ of half verse formulas which occur elsewhere in _Beowulf_[265], or the way in which compound nouns fit into the metrical scheme[266]. Metrical criteria are very little more helpful[267]. We have seen that the antiquity of _Beowulf_ is proved by the cases where metre demands the substitution of an older uncontracted form for the existing shorter one. Schuecking argues that no instance occurs in the 267 lines of the _Return_. But, even if this were the case, it might well be mere accident, since examples only occur at rare intervals anywhere in _Beowulf_. As a matter of fact, however, examples are to be found in the _Return_[268] (quite up to the normal proportion), though two of the clearest come in a portion of it which Schuecking rather arbitrarily excludes.

Coming to syntax in its broadest sense, and especially the method of constructing and connecting sentences, Schuecking enumerates several constructions which are found in the _Return_, but not elsewhere in _Beowulf_. Syntax is a subject to which he has given special study, and his opinion upon it must be of value. But I doubt whether anyone as expert in the subject as Schuecking could not find in every passage of like length in _Beowulf_ some constructions not to be exactly paralleled elsewhere in the poem.

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The fact that we find here, and here only, passages introduced by the clauses _ic sceal fordh sprecan_[269], and _t[=o] lang ys t[=o] reccenne_[270], is natural when we realize that we have here the longest speech in the whole poem, which obviously calls for such apologies for prolixity.

The fact that no parentheses occur in the _Return_ does not differentiate it from the rest of _Beowulf_: for, as Schuecking himself points out elsewhere, there are three other passages in the poem, longer than the _Return_, which are equally devoid of parentheses[271].

There remain a few _hapax legomena_[272], but very inconclusive.

There are, in addition, examples which occur only in the _Return_, and in certain other episodic passages. These episodic passages also, Schuecking supposes, may have been added by the same reviser who added the _Return_. But this is a perilous change of position. For example, a certain peculiarity is found only in the _Return_ and the introductory genealogical section[273]; or in the _Return_ and the _Finn Episode_[274]. But when Schuecking proceeds to the suggestion that the _Introduction_ or the _Finn Episode_ may have been added by the same reviser who added _Beowulf's Return_, he knocks the bottom out of some of his previous arguments. The argument from the absence of parentheses (whatever it was worth) must go: for according to Schuecking's own punctuation, such parentheses are found both in the _Introduction_ and in the _Finn Episode_. If these are by the author of the _Return_, then doubt is thrown upon one of the alleged peculiarities of that author; we find the author of the _Return_ no more averse _on the whole_ to parentheses than the author or authors of the rest of the poem.

Peculiar usages of the moods and tenses are found twice in the _Return_[275], and once again in the episode where Beowulf {120} recalls his youth[276]. Supposing this episode to be also the work of the author of the _Return_, we get peculiar constructions used three times by this author, which cannot be paralleled elsewhere in _Beowulf_[277].

Now a large number of instances like this last might afford basis for argument; but they must be in bulk in order to prove anything. By the laws of chance we might expect, in any passage of three hundred lines, taken at random anywhere in _Beowulf_, to find something which occurred only in one other passage elsewhere in the poem. We cannot forthwith declare the two passages to be the work of an interpolator. One swallow does not make a summer.

And the arguments as to style are not helped by arguments as to matter. Even if it be granted--which I do not grant--that the long repetition narrating Beowulf's contest with Grendel and Grendel's mother is tedious, there is no reason why this tedious repetition should not as well be the work of the original poet as of a later reviser. Must we find many different authors for _The Ring and the Book_? It must be granted that there are details (such as the mention of Grendel's glove) found in the Grendel struggle as narrated in _Beowulf's Return_, but not found in the original account of the struggle. Obviously the object is to avoid monotony, by introducing a new feature: but this might as well have been aimed at by the old poet retelling the tale as by a new poet retelling it.

To me, the fact that so careful and elaborate a study of the story of _Beowulf's Return_ fails to betray any satisfactory evidence of separate authorship, is a confirmation of the verdict of "not proven" against the "dividers[278]." But there can be no doubt that Schuecking's method, his attempt to prove differences in treatment, grammar, and style, is the right one. If any satisfactory results are to be attained, it must be in this way.

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