Beowulf is an old English Epic....  There is not one word about our England in the poem....  The whole poem, pagan as it is, is English to its very root.  It is sacred to us; our Genesis, the book of our origins.

Now I am not only incompetent to discuss with you the more recondite beauties of “Beowulf” but providentially forbidden the attempt by the conditions laid down for this Chair.  I gather—­and my own perusal of the poem and of much writing about it confirms the belief—­that it has been largely over-praised by some critics, who have thus naturally provoked others to underrate it.  Such things happen.  I note, but without subscribing to it, the opinion of Vigfusson and York Powell, the learned editors of the “Corpus Poeticum Boreale,” that in the “Beowulf” we have ’an epic completely metamorphosed in form, blown out with long-winded empty repetitions and comments by a book poet, so that one must be careful not to take it as a type of the old poetry,’ and I seem to hear as from the grave the very voice of my old friend the younger editor in that unfaltering pronouncement.  But on the whole I rather incline to accept the cautious surmise of Professor W. P. Ker that ’a reasonable view of the merit of Beowulf is not impossible, though rash enthusiasm may have made too much of it; while a correct and sober taste may have too contemptuously refused to attend to Grendel and the Firedrake,’ and to leave it at that.  I speak very cautiously because the manner of the late Professor Freeman, in especial, had a knack of provoking in gentle breasts a resentment which the mind in its frailty too easily converted to a prejudice against his matter:  while to men trained to admire Thucydides and Tacitus and acquainted with Lucian’s ’Way to Write History’ ([Greek:  Pos dei istorian suggraphein]) his loud insistence that the art was not an art but a science, and moreover recently invented by Bishop Stubbs, was a perpetual irritant.

But to return to “Beowulf”—­You have just heard the opinions of scholars whose names you must respect.  I, who construe Anglo-Saxon with difficulty, must admit the poem to contain many fine, even noble, passages.  Take for example Hrothgar’s lament for AEschere:—­

     Hrothgar mathelode, helm Scyldinga: 
     ’Ne frin thu aefter saelum; sorh is geniwod
     Denigea leodum; dead is AEschere,
     Yrmenlafes yldra brothor,
     Min run-wita, ond min raed-bora;
     Eaxl-gestealla, thonne we on orlege
     Hafelan weredon, thonne hniton fethan,
     Eoferas cnysedan:  swylc scolde eorl wesan
     AEtheling aer-god, swylc AEschere waes.’