glish appropriation which gathers the treasures of every tongue to enrich our own, so that the choice of words becomes a question not of origin but of effective expression. IV ANGLO-SAXON TO ENGLISH SPEECH THE English-speaking man who attemps to read one of the Anglo-Saxon poems with a literal translation feels at first that he is puzzling over an uncouth foreign tongue, until suddenly he says, "Why, this word is English, a little differently spelled;" or, "This word is English, with a little change of meaning," and soon he feels that he is dealing with far-off kindred. There is something homelike in the language that is not in Latin, Greek, or Italian, for instance. The scholar soon traces a multitude of points of contact. Modern English is the ancient English, transformed, but not superseded. The earliest pictures of the Anglo-Saxon civilization are found in ancient poems or poetical fragments. Among these stands preeminent the poem of Beowulf, which has been termed "The Old English Epic." It seems to belong to the period preceding the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Britain, as it contains no mention of England or Britain, and lays its scenes in South Sweden and Denmark. The one manuscript containing the poem, now in the British Museum, is assigned by scholars to the tenth century, and the composition of the poem is believed to date back to the eighth century. The poem contains 3,183 lines. All probably came to England in a series of lays transmitted from bard to bard, united at length by some master mind into a continuous work, yet introducing at intervals fragments of older lays not connected with the general movement of the poem. Touches of Christian thought, appearing at various points, are believed to have been inwrought in the later recension and not to have belonged to the original, which was probably wholly heathen. The hero, Beowulf, was the nephew of Hygelac, a king of the Geatas, of south Sweden, and was in his youth a famed sea-rover and warrior. In his home in Sweden he heard that Heorot, the hall of Hrothgar, a king of Jutland or Denmark, was haunted by a monster named Grendel, half-human, half-fiend, the "moor mark-stepper," who beset the moors and the wilderness, and would come night after night to bear away whomsoever he might find asleep in the great hall, to be devoured by him in his ocean-cave. The young and mighty Beowulf, who has already done many deeds of prowess, and who has the strength of thirty men, resolves to set Hrothgar free from this curse. The poem opens abruptly, as a minstrel's song. We can imagine the bard striking some chords on his harp, while the audience waits expectant, when suddenly he bursts into song: |