The Cambridge Old English Reader

By a rare chance, one of the most prominent episodes in Beowulf – the tale of the tragedy at Finnsburh, in which a marriage alliance is shattered by fighting between ostensible allies (Text 31b) – has come down to us in a second version, albeit fragmentarily. A single sheet of parchment containing forty-seven lines from an apparent ‘lay’ about the incident (i.e. a simple narrative poem or ballad) survived at least until the early eighteenth century, when the antiquarian George Hickes found it in a manuscript codex in the library of Lambeth Palace, the London residence of the archbishops of Canterbury. The fragment has since disappeared and we must rely for the text on the version printed by Hickes, among other old items, in 1705.

Even from the few preserved lines, it is clear that the lay had a different purpose from the Finnsburh episode as told by the poet of Beowulf. For him it is an exemplum, reminding the revelling Danes (and us) that the cycle of victory and defeat is relentless in the feud-driven heroic world. His concern is with the social and ethical dimensions of the episode, and with the personal tragedy of the Danish princess Hildeburh, who loses brother, son and husband (Finn) in the feud. Furthermore, he is addressing an audience to whom the details are already well known, for he gives none of them.

In the fragment, however, we have a detailed account of one part of the fighting between Frisians and Danes in Finnsburh, the citadel of the Frisian leader, Finn. It is a fast-moving narrative in which the focus is on the individual warriors, who are named. The poet marshals all the rhetorical devices of heroic war poetry, including vaunting speeches, the sounds of weapons clashing, and the gathering of the beasts of battle. A lay would have been comparatively short, perhaps two or three hundred lines. Among surviving OE poems, only The Battle of Maldon is comparable (Text 30); there also the fate of individual warriors is traced within the framework of a code of loyalty based on hall-companionship and the obligations due to a gift-giving lord.