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Germanic and Celtic Heroic Traditions 31
to Iceland, but when we must admit the combination of
Danish heroic fable and Celtic tale, this cannot have been
but exclusively English. Now it seems impossible that
an English poem, even if it should have been a much
simpler forerunner of the Beowulf, should have found its
way to Denmark and that the scene of the fight with
Grendel should have reached the Icelandic story-teller by
the intercourse between Denmark and Iceland.
Many scholars have treated this problem. A clear
solution seems difficult to find. Doubts are always
creeping up, however ingenious the theories of the scholars
may appear to be. Over and over again it has been said
that several details of the account of the battle with
Grendel and his mother are absent from Germanic
tradition. Perhaps such an affirmation may be too rash.
Are we really so sure about what was possible and not
possible in Scandinavian stories about encounters with
supernatural monsters? Such man-like beings as trolls,
dwarfs, water-spirits and the like were liable to playa role
in tales of this kind. Some such tale may have been
connected with the royal hall of Lejre. Can we say with
certainty how such a tale in the seventh century would
have been told?
If Schneider is right in stressing the character of the
landscape and the elegiac mood of the scene, we might
come to the conclusion that the alleged Celtic character
lies more in the accompanying circumstances than in the
plot itself. This is, however, a point which is not without
importance. For the author of the English epic did not
borrow this colouring from a casual visitor to his
monastery, but he bore it himself in the depth of his own
mind. Then we may recall the elegiac spirit in which
such wonderful poems as The Wanderer and The Seafarer
were written, and then we may arrive at the conclusion
that this is not due to a more or less superficial mingling
of Celtic and Germanic themes, but the consequence of
a symbiosis, by which the Anglo-Saxon soul was affected