sometimes in the company of their wives, but the women retire before the
later revelry which often leaves the men drunk on the floor. Sometimes, it
seems, there are sleeping-rooms or niches about the sides of the hall, but
in 'Beowulf' Hrothgar and his followers retire to other quarters. War,
feasting, and hunting are the only occupations in which the warriors care
to be thought to take an interest.

The spirit of the poem is somber and grim. There is no unqualified
happiness of mood, and only brief hints of delight in the beauty and joy of
the world. Rather, there is stern satisfaction in the performance of the
warrior's and the sea-king's task, the determination of a strong-willed
race to assert itself, and do, with much barbarian boasting, what its hand
finds to do in the midst of a difficult life and a hostile nature. For the
ultimate force in the universe of these fighters and their poets (in spite
of certain Christian touches inserted by later poetic editors before the
poem crystallized into its present form) is Wyrd, the Fate of the Germanic
peoples, cold as their own winters and the bleak northern sea,
irresistible, despotic, and unmoved by sympathy for man. Great as the
differences are, very much of this Anglo-Saxon pagan spirit persists
centuries later in the English Puritans.

For the finer artistic graces, also, and the structural subtilties of a
more developed literary period, we must not, of course, look in 'Beowulf.'
The narrative is often more dramatic than clear, and there is no thought of
any minuteness of characterization. A few typical characters stand out
clearly, and they were all that the poet's turbulent and not very attentive
audience could understand. But the barbaric vividness and power of the poem
give it much more than a merely historical interest; and the careful reader
cannot fail to realize that it is after all the product of a long period of
poetic development.