"For him then did the people of the Geáts prepare upon the earth a funeral pile, strong, hung round with helmets, with war-boards and bright Byrnies, as he had requested: weeping the heroes then laid down, in the midst their dear lord; then began the warriors to awake upon the hill the mightiest of bale fires; the wood-smoke rose aloft, dark from the foe of wood; noisily it went, mingled with weeping: the mixture of the wind lay on till it had broken the bonehouse, hot in his breast: sad in mind, sorry of mood they moaned the death of their lord:--The people of the Westerns wrought then a mound over the sea, it was high and broad, easy to behold by the sailors over the waves, and during ten days they built up the beacon of the war-renowned, the mightiest of fires; they surrounded it with a wall, in the most honourable manner that wise men could devise it: they put into the mound rings and bright gems,--all such ornaments as the fierce-minded men had before taken from the hoard; they suffered the earth to hold the treasure of warriors, gold on the the sand, there it yet remaineth as useless to men as it was of old. Then round the mound rode a troop of beasts of war, of nobles, twelve in all: they would speak about the king, they would call him to mind, they would relate the song of words, they would themselves speak: they praised his valour, and his deeds of bravery they judged with praise, even as it is fitting that a man should extol his friendly Lord, should love him in his soul, when he must depart from the body to become valueless. Thus the people of the Geáts, his domestic comrades, mourned their dear Lord; they said that he was of the kings of the world, the mildest and gentlest of men, the most gracious to his people, and the most jealous of glory." That Norse, Frisian, Angle, and other Germanic elements are combined in this poem is certain; and, looking to the extent to which Beowulf, the hero, besides other points of indistinctness in respect to his personality, is Geat as well as Angle, I cannot but suspect an incorporation of some Slavonic and Lithuanic ones as well. _Finn_, too, as a hero, not of the Laps and Finlanders (to whom he would be the proper eponymus), but of the Frisians, creates a further complication. Hroðgar, too, the Dane or Jute, has a name inconveniently unlike that of the more historical Radiger who will soon come under notice. The chief fact we get from Beowulf is, as is generally the case with early poems, one in the history of Fiction; and, to guard against disparaging such facts as these, let us remember that the history of Fiction is the history of the Commerce of Ideas.