Bloody the billows were boiling there,
turbid the tide of tumbling waves
horribly seething, with sword-blood hot,
850by that doomed one dyed, who in den of the moor
laid forlorn his life adown,
his heathen soul,—and hell received it.
Home then rode the hoary clansmen
from that merry journey, and many a youth,
855on horses white, the hardy warriors,
back from the mere. Then Beowulf’s glory
eager they echoed, and all averred
that from sea to sea, or south or north,
there was no other in earth’s domain,
860under vault of heaven, more valiant found,
of warriors none more worthy to rule!
(On their lord beloved they laid no slight,
gracious Hrothgar: a good king he!)
From time to time, the tried-in-battle
865their gray[1] steeds set to gallop amain,
and ran a race when the road seemed fair.
- ↑ “Fallow.” Just now the horses were “white”; and in v. 916 it will he the roads that are “fallow.” Color schemes are not very exact in our old poetry, and color was not used to any extent in visualizing a scene. The popular ballads show the same lack of clearness.
- ↑ Warriors often improvised lays of their own battles, and so laid the foundation of epic; thus Gaston Paris, in his Histoire Poétique de Charlemagne, for French sources. This thane of Hrothgar may have been a professional minstrel in the eyes of the epic poet who made the Beowulf; but there is a possibility of his amateur standing. In any case, he improvises a lay on Beowulf’s adventure, as he rides along, and uses his store of traditional phrase and comment in the process. If the epithet applied to him
water-hell was familiar to Germanic traditions; in Scandinavia it takes very definite form; and even in the Heliand, translation of the gospels, we read of the punishments of the waters, wateres witi.
