y, and entertained him and
his Goths with ale and song in Heorot. Wealtheow, Hrothgar's queen,
gold-decked, served them with mead. But when all had retired to rest on
the couches of the great hall, in the murky night, Grendel came. He
seized and slew one of Beowulf's companions. Then the warrior of the
Goths followed the monster, and wounded him sorely with his hands.
Grendel fled to his lair to die. But after the contest, Grendel's
mother, a no less hateful creature--the "Devil's dam" of our mediaeval
legends--carries on the war against the slayer of her son. Beowulf
descends to her home beneath the water, grapples with her in her cave,
turns against her the weapons he finds there, and is again victorious.
The Goths return to their own country laden with gifts by Hrothgar.
After the death of Hygelac, Beowulf succeeds to the kingship of the
Geatas, whom he rules well and prosperously for many years. At length a
mysterious being, named the Fire Drake, a sort of dragon guarding a
hidden treasure, some of which has been stolen while its guardian
sleeps, comes out to slaughter his people. The old hero buckles on his
rune-covered sword again, and goes forth to battle with the monster. He
slays it, indeed, but is blasted by its fiery breath, and dies after the
encounter. His companions light his pyre upon a lofty spit of land
jutting out into the winter sea. Weapons and jewels and drinking bowls,
taken from the Fire Drake's treasure, were thrown into the tomb for the
use of the ghost in the other world; and a mighty barrow was raised upon
the spot to be a beacon far and wide to seafaring men. So ends the great
heathen epic. It gives us the most valuable picture which we possess of
the daily life led by our pagan forefathers.

But though these poems are the oldest in tone, they are not the oldest
in form of all that we possess. It is probable that the most primitive
Anglo-Saxon verse was identical with prose, and consisted merely of
sentences bound together by parallelism. As alliteration, at first a
mere _memoria technica_, became an ornamental adjunct, and grew more
developed, the parallelism gradually dropped out. Gnomes or short
proverbs of this character were in common use, and they closely
resembled the mediaeval proverbs current in England to the present day.

With the introduction of Christianity, English verse took a new
direction. It was chiefly occupied in devotional and sacred poetry, or
rather, such poems only ha