the virtues of Beowulf are not those of a fictitious paragon king, but of a man who would be missed in the day when the enemies of the Gauts should come upon them. The epic keeps its hold upon what went before, and on what is to come. Its construction is solid, not flat. It is exposed to the attractions of all kinds of subordinate and partial literature,--the fairy story, the conventional romance, the pathetic legend,--and it escapes them all by taking them all up as moments, as episodes and points of view, governed by the conception, or the comprehension, of some of the possibilities of human character in a certain form of society. It does not impose any one view on the reader; it gives what it is the proper task of the higher kind of fiction to give--the play of life in different moods and under different aspects. CHAPTER III THE ICELANDIC SAGAS I ICELAND AND THE HEROIC AGE The epic poetry of the Germans came to an end in different ways and at different seasons among the several nations of that stock. In England and the Continent it had to compete with the new romantic subjects and new forms of verse. In Germany the rhyming measures prevailed very early, but the themes of German tradition were not surrendered at the same time. The rhyming verse of Germany, foreign in its origin, continued to be applied for centuries in the rendering of German myths and heroic stories, sometimes in a style with more or less pretence to courtliness, as in the _Nibelungenlied_ and _Kudrun_; sometimes in open parade of the travelling minstrel's "public manners" and simple appetites. England had exactly the opposite fortune in regard to verse and subject-matter. In England the alliterative verse survived the changes of inflexion and pronunciation for more than five hundred years after _Maldon_, and uttered its last words in a poem written like the _Song of Byrhtnoth_ on a contemporary battle,--the poem of _Scottish Field_.[46] [Footnote 46: Ed. Robson, Chetham Society, 1855, from the Lyme MS.; ed. Furnivall and Hales, _Percy Folio Manuscript_, 1867.] There was girding forth of guns, with many great stones; Archers uttered out their arrows and eagerly they shotten; They proched us with spears and put many over; That the blood outbrast at their broken harness. There was swinging out of swords, and swapping of heads, We blanked them with bills through all their bright armour, That all the dale dinned of the derf strokes.