. These warriors, after this one
appearance, vanish altogether from English literature, but their
literary life was continued on the Continent; their fate was told in
Latin in the tenth century by a monk of St. Gall, and again they had a
part to play in the German "Nibelungenlied." Beowulf, on the contrary,
Scandinavian as he was, is known only through the Anglo-Saxon poet. In
"Beowulf," as in "Waldhere," feelings, speeches, manners, ideal of life
are the same as with the heroes of the "Corpus Poeticum Boreale." The
whole obviously belongs to the same group of nations.[54]

The strange poem of "Beowulf,"[55] the most important monument of
Anglo-Saxon literature, was discovered at the end of the last century,
in a manuscript written about the year 1000,[56] and is now preserved in
the British Museum. Few works have been more discussed; it has been the
cause of literary wars, in which the learned men of England, Denmark,
Sweden, Germany, France, and America have taken part; and peace is not
yet signed.

This poem, like the old Celtic tales, is a medley of pagan legends,
which did not originally concern Beowulf in particular,[57] and of
historical facts, the various parts, after a separate literary life,
having been put together, perhaps in the eighth century, perhaps later,
by an Anglo-Saxon Christian, who added new discrepancies in trying to
adapt the old tale to the faith of his day. No need to expatiate on the
incoherence of a poem formed of such elements. Its heroes are at once
pagan and Christian; they believe in Christ and in Weland; they fight
against the monsters of Scandinavian mythology, and see in them the
descendants of Cain; historical facts, such as a battle of the sixth
century, mentioned by Gregory of Tours, where the victory remained to
the Frankish ancestor,[58] are mixed up with tales of fantastic duels
below the waves.

According to a legend partly reproduced in the poem, the Danes had no
chief. They beheld one day a small ship on the sea, and in it a child,
and with him one of those ever-recurring treasures. They saw in this
mysterious gift a sign from above, and took the child for their ruler;
"and he was a good king." When that king, Scyld, died, they placed him
once more on a bark with treasures, and the waters bore him away, no one
ever knew whither.

One of his successors, Hrothgar,[59] who held his court, like the Danish
kings of to-day, in the isle of Seeland, built in his old age a splendi