applied to women of high degree.

The Saxon pottery is known to us by the burial urns. These are marked by
a local character for the various districts, but still with a generic
resemblance, which is based upon the comprehensive fact that although
they appear like inferior copies from Roman work, yet they are at the
same time like the urns found in Old Saxony and Franconia.

The glass drinking-vessels are very peculiar, and they are noticed as
such in the poetry.[38] The hooped buckets that have been found in men's
graves only, seem also to answer to expressions in convivial
descriptions.

Of the tumular remains this general remark may be made, that they richly
illustrate the elder poetry. The abundance and variety of the objects
which remain after so long a time unperished, give a strong impression
of the lavish generosity with which the dead were sent on their way.
Answering to these finds there are two descriptions in the "Beowulf,"
one in the beginning where the mythic hero Scyld Scefing is (not buried
but) shipped off to sea; and the other the funeral of Beowulf with which
the poem closes.

The graves also afford illustration negative as well as positive. The
comparative rarity of swords is a fact that has been particularly
remarked. This too agrees with the poetry in which there are swords of
fame, which are known by their own proper names, and which have an
established pedigree of illustrious owners at the head of which often
stands the name of the divine fabricator, Weland. Perhaps it would not
be too much to say that affinity with the tumular deposits is one of the
notes of the primary poetry.