ld argue about the origin
and date of the poem, ingenious theorists who would fain use all the
fragmentary tales and rhymes of the nursery as parts of a vast jig-saw
puzzle of nature myths, or merely simple folk who read a tale for a
tale's sake, every reader of the poem of Beowulf must own that it is
one of the finest stories ever written.

It is "the most ancient heroic poem in the Germanic language," and was
brought to Britain by the "Winged Hats" who sailed across the grey
North Sea to conquer and to help to weld that great amalgam of peoples
into what is now the British Race.

But once it had arrived in England, the legend was put into a dress
that the British-born could more readily appreciate. In all
probability the scene of the story was a corner of that island of
Saeland upon which Copenhagen now stands, but he who wrote down the
poem for his countrymen and who wrote it in the pure literary
Anglo-Saxon of Wessex, painted the scenery from the places that he and
his readers knew best. And if you should walk along the breezy,
magnificent, rugged Yorkshire coast for twelve miles, from Whitby
northward to the top of Bowlby Cliff, you would find it quite easy to
believe that it was there amongst the high sea-cliffs that Beowulf
and his hearth-sharers once lived, and there, on the highest ness of
our eastern coast, under a great barrow, that Beowulf was buried.
_Beowulfesby_--_Bowlby_ seems a quite easy transition. But the people
of our island race have undoubtedly a gift for seizing the imports of
other lands and hall-marking them as their own, and, in all
probability, the Beowulf of the heroic poem was one who lived and died
in the land of Scandinavia.

In Denmark, so goes the story, when the people were longing for a
king, to their shores there drifted, on a day when the white birds
were screaming over the sea-tangle and wreckage that a stormy sea, now
sinking to rest, was sweeping up on the shore, a little boat in which,
on a sheaf of ripe wheat and surrounded by priceless weapons and
jewels, there lay a most beautiful babe, who smiled in his sleep. That
he was the son of Odin they had no doubt, and they made him their
king, and served him faithfully and loyally for the rest of his life.

A worthy and a noble king was King Scyld Scefing, a ruler on land and
on the sea, of which even as an infant he had had no fear. But when
many years had come and gone, and when Scyld Scefing felt that death
drew near, he cal