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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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103 CHAPTER XLIII The Scop chants the funeral rites, how they built a Pyre and hung it with wargear and set on it the body of Beowulf, and how they all mourned about the flames. And with them his Wife. (The Scop has not mentioned his wife before had Beowulf perhaps married Hygelac’s widow, Hygd, who, it seems, had liked him?) Then the Geats raised, as Beowulf had bidden, a memorial mound on the headland, and they surrounded the place of the burning with a wall, and they laid away in the mound all the treasure that Beowulf thought he had won for his people’s joy. And then,- last scene of all that ends this strange, eventful history twelve of the Geats rode around the mound singing their sorrow and their praise. It must have been a beautiful and majestic ceremony. But is it not strange that Beowulf should have been honored with such purely pagan rites, and that no cross was set over the mound? Not really strange. For, in spite of all the Scop says about the Christian’s God, Beowulf and Hrothgar and Hygelac and all of those bygone worthies were still little touched in their real feelings and customs by the new doctrines and customs of the Christian missionaries and monks; and the Scop, for all his wistful piety, was at heart something of a pagan too. But Beowulf was a good man and great, for all that. Then for him the Geats made the pyre, firm on earth, And hung it with helmets, with byrnies a-sheen, And with battle-bucklers, as his prayer had been. And they laid amid it the Prince of wondrous worth, Laid their Lord beloved, weeping in their dearth. And upon the hill-top the warriors awoke The mightiest of bale- fires. Rose the wood-smoke, Swart above the blazing. And the roar of flame Blended was with wailing, as still the winds became, Till, hot unto his heart, it broke the Geat’s bone-frame. Unglad of mood, in grief they mourned their great Chief dead. And his with hair bound, her song of sorrow said, Over and over: how ‘t was hers to dread Days of harm and hardship, warriors’ fall and grame, The terror of the raider, captivity and shame. The sky the reek had swallowed. The Weders raised thereby A mound upon the headland, that was broad and high, Seen afar from ocean by sailors on their ways, And built the battle-bold One a beacon in ten days. Around the brands and ashes a wall they ran and wrought, The worthiest contriving of men of wisest thought. |
