it to bring fire and slaughter to the clan-village at the dead of night.  To these real terrors and dangers of the mark are added the fancied ones of superstition.  There the terrible forms begotten of man’s vague dread of the unknown—­elves and nickors and fiends—­have their murky dwelling-place.  The atmosphere of the strange old heathen epic is oppressive in its gloominess.  Nevertheless, its poetry sometimes rises to a height of great, though barbaric, sublimity.  Beowulf himself, hearing of the evil wrought by Grendel, set sail from his home for the land of the Danes.  Hrothgar received him kindly, and entertained him and his Goths with ale and song in Heorot.  Wealtheow, Hrothgar’s queen, gold-decked, served them with mead.  But when all had retired to rest on the couches of the great hall, in the murky night, Grendel came.  He seized and slew one of Beowulf’s companions.  Then the warrior of the Goths followed the monster, and wounded him sorely with his hands.  Grendel fled to his lair to die.  But after the contest, Grendel’s mother, a no less hateful creature—­the “Devil’s dam” of our mediaeval legends—­carries on the war against the slayer of her son.  Beowulf descends to her home beneath the water, grapples with her in her cave, turns against her the weapons he finds there, and is again victorious.  The Goths return to their own country laden with gifts by Hrothgar.  After the death of Hygelac, Beowulf succeeds to the kingship of the Geatas, whom he rules well and prosperously for many years.  At length a mysterious being, named the Fire Drake, a sort of dragon guarding a hidden treasure, some of which has been stolen while its guardian sleeps, comes out to slaughter his people.  The old hero buckles on his rune-covered sword again, and goes forth to battle with the monster.  He slays it, indeed, but is blasted by its fiery breath, and dies after the encounter.  His companions light his pyre upon a lofty spit of land jutting out into the winter sea.  Weapons and jewels and drinking bowls, taken from the Fire Drake’s treasure, were thrown into the tomb for the use of the ghost in the other world; and a mighty barrow was raised upon the spot to be a beacon far and wide to seafaring men.  So ends the great heathen epic.  It gives us the most valuable picture which we possess of the daily life led by our pagan forefathers.

But though these poems are the oldest in tone, they are not the oldest in form of all that we possess.  It is probable that the most primitive Anglo-Saxon verse was identical with prose, and consisted merely of sentences bound together by parallelism.  As alliteration, at first a mere memoria technica, became an ornamental adjunct, and grew more developed, the parallelism gradually dropped out.  Gnomes or short proverbs of this character were in common use, and they closely resembled the mediaeval proverbs current in England to the present day.