Page:Gummere (1909) The Oldest English Epic.djvu/40

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THE OLDEST ENGLISH EPIC

35on the breast of the boat, the breaker-of-rings,[1]
by the mast the mighty one. Many a treasure
fetched from far was freighted with him.
No ship have I known so nobly dight
with weapons of war and weeds of battle,[2]
40with breastplate and blade: on his bosom lay
a heapéd hoard that hence should go
far o’er the flood with him floating away.
No less[3] these loaded the lordly gifts,
thanes’ huge treasure, than those had done
45who in former time forth had sent him
sole on the seas, a suckling child.
High o’er his head they hoist the standard,
a gold-wove banner; let billows take him,
gave him to ocean. Grave were their spirits,
50mournful their mood. No man is able
to say in sooth, no son of the halls,
no hero ’neath heaven,—who harbored that freight![4]

  1. Kenning for king or chieftain of a comitatus: he breaks off gold from the spiral rings—often worn on the arm—and so rewards his followers. In Ælfric’s famous Colloquy, early in the eleventh century, the huntsman says he sometimes gets gift of a horse or an arm-ring from his king.
  2. Professor Garnett’s rendering.
  3. The poet’s favorite figure of litotes or understatement. He means that the treasure which they sent out with the dead king far exceeded what came with him in the boat that brought him, a helpless child, to their shores.
  4. While the reader should guard against putting into these effective lines sentiment and suggestion which they do not really contain, he should compare this close with the close of Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur. The classical passage for ship-burial among the old Germans is the description of Balder’s funeral in the prose Edda. On the “greatest of all ships” was laid the corpse of the god; and a balefire was made there; and rings, and costly trappings, and Balder’s own horse, were consumed along with the body.