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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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4 PREFACE SOMETHING ABOUT THE POEM BEOWULF The story of Beowulf, the Strong Man and the Helper of Mankind, comes from pretty far away and pretty long ago. It was a story that grew up across the seas in the fjords of Western Scandinavia and the marshy coasts and low plains of Denmark, in the times when the chiefs and their retainers in their halls and the farmer-folk in their homesteads, during the long winter evenings of the north, used to enjoy make-believe and song of the harp. It was really a collection of stories, some of them historical traditions of Viking voyages and real battles, but most of them stories invented by the folk-imagination, like Jack the Giant Killer and other fairy stories about strange and tremendous adventures. But they were invented in such a lively manner that doubtless both the tellers and the listeners came to half-believe them true-just as every child half- believes the story of Jack the Giant Killer to be true. And they were told over many times by many different storytellers; and presumably almost every new story-teller added something new and interesting of his own invention. The same thing happens around the fires and in the shacks of our own lumber-camps, when the lumber-jacks tell year after year about a gigantic strong man, like Beowulf, whom they call Paul Bunyan. And when some of these folks from Scandinavia and from Denmark and from the flat country on the coast south of Denmark sailed in their crowded boats to the island of Britain, they brought along these stories-along with their swords and shields and cattle and language and wooden images of their gods. And the stories continued to grow in the new island home. Then sometime about seven hundred and fifty, a period of some prosperity and culture, when the descendants of these old Germanic invaders and settlers had established walled towns and green homesteads, and built bridges and churches and monasteries and schools, some nameless poet took these stories (perhaps preserved in ballads) and made them into a long, stirring poem. He was not a heathen, unlettered man; but a man who knew the Bible and perhaps some Latin books like Vergil. Yet he loved the old stories of the days when his ancestors were heathen and ignorant of books, and he loved them so much and he told them so well that he ought to have left out the Bible references and the Christian piety. And the poet of the Beowulf-stories was a man rather clever in putting different stories together as one larger story, clever too in telling about one thing in a way to make us all ears to hear about |
