The Deeds of Beowulf - 1892 Author:John Earle Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ixxviii namely the land of the Ge'atas, the realm of Hygelac. We must investigate Hygelac and his realm. As far back as 1839, the observation was made by L... more »eo, that this member of the narrative has been 1nserted by the poet, that he did not find it in the traditional story. To this I will add a further observation, that its insertion was in the nature of a second edition of the poem; that we can see behind the present poem the traces of an earlier framework in which nothing was said of Hygelac and his realm. I shall go still farther and maintain that this king and his dynasty, however they may seem to lean upon history, had no place either in myth or in history, and that it is pure fiction. If I can make these positions good, I think that the signs already indicated of personal and political aims must be admitted to rank as substantial data for the interpretation of the poem. First then, Hygelac has been inserted, not merely into the web of the story, but into the fabric of this very poem, after it had been cast upon a simpler plan1. (a) Even now, it does not constitute an organic part of the poem. It is not entwined with the action in any such a manner as to make it at all difficult to disengage and detach it. The deeds of Beowulf might be told, in all essentials, as they are told in this poem, without any mention of Hygelac or his realm. Indeed, if the story had to be told succinctly, Hygelac would certainly be little noticed, or disappear altogether. In order to exhibit this fact, I wanted a brief resume of the tale, and for this end I preferred to adopt that of Messrs. Harrison and Sharp (after Mr. Sweet) rather than tomake one of my own. (See p. Ixxiv.) In that short sketch, the part relating to Hygelac is printed in Italics, to afford the eye a ready measure of the p...« less