It so happens that in the Anglo-Saxon epic poem of _Beowulf_, one
of the most remarkable and precious of our early poems, there is a
splendid and graphic description of a lonely mere, such as would have
delighted the heart of Edgar Allan Poe, the author of _Ulalume_. In
Professor Earle's prose translation of this passage, given in his
_Deeds of Beowulf_, at p. 44, is a description of two mysterious
monsters, of whom it is said that "they inhabit unvisited land,
wolf-crags, windy bluffs, the dread fen-track, where the mountain
waterfall amid precipitous gloom vanisheth beneath--flood under
earth. Not far hence it is, reckoning by miles, that the Mere
standeth, and over it hang rimy groves; a wood with clenched roots
overshrouds the water." The word to be noted here is the word _rimy_,
i.e. covered with rime or hoar-frost. The original Anglo-Saxon text
has the form _hrinde_, the meaning of which was long doubtful. Grein,
the great German scholar, writing in 1864, acknowledged that he did
not know what was intended, and it was not till 1880 that light was
first thrown upon the passage. In that year Dr Morris edited, for
the first time, some Anglo-Saxon homilies (commonly known as the
_Blickling Homilies_, because the MS. is in the library of Blickling
Hall, Norfolk); and he called attention to a passage (at p. 209) where
the homilist was obviously referring to the lonely mere of the
old poem, in which its overhanging groves were described as being
_hrimige_, which is nothing but the true old spelling of _rimy_. He
naturally concluded that the word _hrinde_ (in the MS. of Beowulf) was
miswritten, and that the scribe had inadvertently put down _hrinde_
instead of _hrimge_, which is a legitimate contraction of _hrimige_.
Many scholars accepted this solution; but a further light was yet to
come, viz. in 1904. In that year, Dr Joseph Wright printed the fifth
volume of the _English Dialect Dictionary_, showing that in the