Fated they Fell. The Field lay gory
With Swordsmen's blood Since the Sun rose
On Morning tide a Mighty globe,
To Glide o'er the Ground, God's candle bright,
The endless Lord's taper, till the great Light
Sank to its Setting. There Soldiers lay,
Warriors Wounded, Northern Wights,
Shot over Shields; and so Scotsmen eke,
Wearied with War. The West Saxon onwards,
The Live-Long day in Linkèd order
Followed the Footsteps of the Foul Foe.

Of course no songs of the old heathen period were committed to writing
either in Sleswick or in Britain. The minstrels who composed them taught
them by word of mouth to their pupils, and so handed them down from
generation to generation, much as the Achæan rhapsodists handed down the
Homeric poems. Nevertheless, two or three such old songs were afterwards
written out in Christian Northumbria or Wessex; and though their
heathendom has been greatly toned down by the transcribers, enough
remains to give us a graphic glimpse of the fierce and gloomy old
English nature which we could not otherwise obtain. One fragment, known
as the _Fight at Finnesburh_ (rescued from a book-cover into which it
had been pasted), probably dates back before the colonisation of
Britain, and closely resembles in style the above-quoted ode. Two other
early pieces, the _Traveller's Song_ and the _Lament of Deor_, are
inserted from pagan tradition in a book of later devotional poems
preserved at Exeter. But the great epic of _Beowulf_, a work composed
when the English and the Danes were still living in close connexion with
one another by the shores of the Baltic, has been handed down to us
entire, thanks to the kind intervention of some Northumbrian monk, who,