Such was
the existence led by those companions of Hrothgar, who are described as
enjoying the happiest of lives before the appearance of Grendel, and who
"knew no care." All that is tender, and would most arouse the
sensibility of the sensitive men of to-day, is considered childish, and
awakes no echo: "Better it is for every one that he should avenge his
friend than that he should mourn exceedingly," says Beowulf; very
different from Roland, the hero of France, he too of Germanic origin,
but living in a different _milieu_, where his soul has been softened.
"When Earl Roland saw that his peers lay dead, and Oliver too, whom he
so dearly loved, his heart melted; he began to weep; colour left his
face."

Li cons Rodlanz, quant il veit morz ses pers
Ed Olivier qu'il tant podeit amer,
Tendror en out, commencet a plorer,
En son visage fut molt descolorez.[64]

Beowulf crushes all he touches; in his fights he upsets monsters, in his
talks he tumbles his interlocutors headlong. His retorts have nothing
winged about them; he does not use the feathered arrow, but the iron
hammer. Hunferth taunts him with not having had the best in a swimming
match. Beowulf replies by a strong speech, which can be summed up in few
words: liar, drunkard, coward, murderer! It seems an echo from the
banqueting hall of the Scandinavian gods; in the same manner Loki and
the goddesses played with words. For the assembled warriors of
Hrothgar's court Beowulf goes in nowise beyond bounds; they are not
indignant, they would rather laugh. So did the gods.

Landscape painting in the Anglo-Saxon poems is adapted to men of this
stamp. Their souls delight in the bleak boreal climes, the north wind,
frost, hail, ice, howling tempest and raging seas, recur as often in
this literature as blue waves and sunlit blossoms in the writings of men
to whom these exquisite marvels are familiar. Their descriptions are all
short, save when they refer to ice or snow, or the surge of the sea. The
Anglo-Saxon poets dwell on such sights complacently; their tongue then
is loosened. In "Beowulf," the longest and truest description is that of
the abode of the monsters: "They inhabit the dark land, wolf-haunted
slopes, windy headlands, the rough fen-way, where the mountain stream,
under the dark shade of the headlands, runneth down, water under land.
It is not far from hence, a mile by measure, that the mere lies; over it
hang groves of [rimy] trees, a wood fas