There is no apparent effort on the part of the poet to enlighten the reader or those who heard him either upon the pedigrees of the persons mentioned in his story or upon the rules of Scandinavian tribal custom. But it happens that, by incidental hints dropped in the telling of the tale, the pedigree of each of the kindreds involved can be fairly made out, and has already been made out by translators and critics. [Sidenote: involving blood feuds between Beowulf’s paternal and maternal kindred.] And as the story involves a homicide within Beowulf’s maternal kindred, and fighting and bloodshed between the kindreds in spite of the marriage link, and as it deals also with outside feuds, it happens to present remarkable opportunities for studying the action of tribal custom in various cases. The evidence it gives is made all the more valuable by its being an Anglian version of Scandinavian traditions, inasmuch as the poet, or his Anglian interpreter, assumes throughout that the laws of the game, under Scandinavian tribal custom, were too well known to need explanation to his Anglian audience. So that by inference it would seem that the customs of Baltic chieftains were familiar at the court of Offa, and not very far removed from those of Anglian tradition. [Sidenote: The Scyldings.] The poet introduces us first to a tribe of _Gar-Danes_ and the clan or kindred of Scyldings. Scyld the son of Scef is the ancestor of the Scyldings. He is an Adeling who has torn their meadthrones from many tribes (mægdum) and in true tribal fashion compelled them to pay tribute. Surrounded in his old age by numerous descendants and other _gesiths_ who have resorted to him, the chieftain has become a great hero in his tribe (mægdh). [Sidenote: The burial of Scyld by his ‘gesiths.’] A graphic description of the burial of Scyld in his ships by his gesiths is a fitting introduction to the poem. Let us mark in passing that the word mægd evidently may mean a much wider kindred than the near family of a great-grandfather’s descendants (the Welsh gwely). One mægd conquers another and makes it pay tribute. Again the word gesith evidently includes, with members of the near kin, such others, not necessarily blood relations, as may have joined the warrior band of the hero. They may or may not have been adopted into his kindred in becoming his men, but this extension of comradeship or kinship, as the case may be, to these gesiths adds to the greatness and power of his mægd.