Its terms were somewhat more concrete and physical than the Latin, but readily lent themselves to figurative meanings. More palpably the poetry with its reflection upon life shows the endowment of the race. Marked is its elegiac mood. In an old poem is heard the voice of one who sails with hapless care the exile's way, and must forego his dear lord's gifts: in sleep he kisses him, and again lays hands and head upon those knees, as in times past. Then wakes the friendless man, and sees the ocean's waves, the gulls spreading their wings, rime and snow falling. More impersonal is the heavy tone of a meditative fragment over the ruins, apparently, of a Roman city:
"Wondrous is this wall-stone,
fates have broken it,
have burst the stronghold,
roofs are fallen,
towers tottering,
hoar gate-towers despoiled,
shattered the battlements,
riven, fallen.
•••••Earth's grasp holdeth
the mighty workmen
worn away, done for,
in the hard grip of the grave."
But the noblest presentation of character in pagan Anglo-Saxon poetry is afforded by the epic poem of Beowulf, which tells the story of a Geatic hero who sets out for Denmark to slay a monster, accomplishes the feat, is nobly rewarded by the Danish king, and returns to rule his own people justly for fifty winters, when his valiant and beneficent life ends in a last victorious conflict with a hoard-guarding dragon. Here myth and tradition were not peculiarly Anglo-Saxon; but the finally recast and finished work, noble in diction, sentiment, and action, expresses the highest ethics of Anglo-Saxon heathendom. Beowulf does what he ought to do, heroically; and finds
salvation, and damnation) were all translated into sheer Anglo-Saxon. See Toller, Outlines of the History of the English Language (Macmillan & Co., 1900), pp. 90-101. Some hundreds of years before, Ulfilas's fourth century Gothic translation had shown a Teutonic tongue capable of rendering the thought of the Pauline epistles.
