Of course no songs of the old heathen period were committed to writing either in Sleswick or in Britain.  The minstrels who composed them taught them by word of mouth to their pupils, and so handed them down from generation to generation, much as the Achaean rhapsodists handed down the Homeric poems.  Nevertheless, two or three such old songs were afterwards written out in Christian Northumbria or Wessex; and though their heathendom has been greatly toned down by the transcribers, enough remains to give us a graphic glimpse of the fierce and gloomy old English nature which we could not otherwise obtain.  One fragment, known as the Fight at Finnesburh (rescued from a book-cover into which it had been pasted), probably dates back before the colonisation of Britain, and closely resembles in style the above-quoted ode.  Two other early pieces, the Traveller’s Song and the Lament of Deor, are inserted from pagan tradition in a book of later devotional poems preserved at Exeter.  But the great epic of Beowulf, a work composed when the English and the Danes were still living in close connexion with one another by the shores of the Baltic, has been handed down to us entire, thanks to the kind intervention of some Northumbrian monk, who, by Christianising the most flagrantly heathen portions, has saved the entire work from the fate which would otherwise have overtaken it.  As a striking representation of early English life and thought, this great epic deserves a fuller description.[2]

 [2] It is right to state, however, that many scholars regard
     Beowulf as a late translation from a Danish original.

Beowulf is written in the same short alliterative metre as that of the Brunanburh ballad, and takes its name from its hero, a servant or companion of the mighty Hygelac, king of the Geatas (Jutes or Goths).  At a distance from his home lay the kingdom of the Scyldings, a Danish tribe, ruled over by Hrothgar.  There stood Heorot, the high hall of heroes, the greatest mead-house ever raised.  But the land of the Danes was haunted by a terrible fiend, known as Grendel, who dwelt in a dark fen in the forest belt, girt round with shadows and lit up at eve by flitting flames.  Every night Grendel came forth and carried off some of the Danes to devour in his home.  The description of the monster himself and of the marshland where he had his lair is full of that weird and gloomy superstition which everywhere darkens and overshadows the life of the savage and the heathen barbarian.  The terror inspired in the rude English mind by the mark and the woodland, the home of wild beasts and of hostile ghosts, of deadly spirits and of fierce enemies, gleams luridly through every line.  The fen and the forest are dim and dark; will-o’-the-wisps flit above them, and gloom closes them in; wolves and wild boars lurk there, the quagmire opens its jaws and swallows the horse and his rider; the foeman comes through