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praise.” Nothing is said about his courage. However, we have seen that courage exemplified throughout the entire poem.
    There’s another curious aspect of this poem, and this is the appearance of a minstrel, and this minstrel sings—but doesn’t finish—a Germanic legend predating
Beowulf
: the story of a princess from Denmark named Hildeburh. Her name means “castle of war” or “castle of the battle.” Now, this fragment as sung by the minstrel might not be the same as the song—the old ballad—because the language is like the rest of
Beowulf
. That is, it is in rhetorical language with an abundance of metaphors, and undoubtedly Germanic primitive poetry was much simpler. We can see this, for example, in
The Lay of Hildebrand
; although composed more or less at the same time as
Beowulf
, it corresponds to a much more primitive era, for there are few alliterations, and I believe there is only one metaphor, and even that is a dubious one: armor is called “battle vestments,” or “war vestments,” which may or may not be a metaphor. It is far from the complexity of “weave of men” for “battle,” as we find among the Norsemen, or “swan-road” for “sea.”
    Now, this story is told only in part, and it is the subject of the other ancient Anglo-Saxon epic fragment,Finnsburh Fragment, which contains about sixty lines and must be, I suspect, prior to
Beowulf
because of the directness of the language. 8
    The fable chosen by the author of
Beowulf
does not lend itself to pathos. In it we have two feats performed by the same hero. The two are separated by an interval of fifty years, and there is no conflict in the poem. In other words, Beowulf always fulfills his duty as a brave man, and that’s all. He dies bravely. The poem is full of pious pronouncements. Some are obviously pagan, for example, when it says that it is “better to avenge than mourn a dead friend.” This is clearly pagan. It belongs to an era when revenge was not only a right but a duty—a man was obliged to avenge the death of his friend. So there is no conflict. The story of Hildeburh, on the other hand, which is interpolated into
Beowulf
, contains conflict. This is the story. There is a princess in Denmark named Hildeburh, and there is discord between the Danes and the Frisians, the people from the Low Countries. And so it is decided that a princess, the princess of Denmark, will marry the king of the Frisians, so that through this alliance between the two royal houses, the conflict will be resolved. This practice was so common that one of the metaphors for the princess used in the Saxon poem is “peace-weaver,” not because she was particularly peaceful but because she served to weave peace between neighboring, rival nations. Hildeburh marries the king of the Frisians and then her brother comes to visit her, arriving at court with sixty warriors. They are received hospitably and given lodgings in rooms that surround a central hall with two doors. Identical, let’s say, to Hrothgar’s palace. But at night, the Frisians attack. The Danes defend themselves and fight for several days, during which the princess of Denmark’s brother kills his nephew. Finally, the Frisians realize that they are no match for the Danes. Both Anglo-Saxon poems express true sympathy for the Danes and for the Geats, that is, for the Norsemen. After a few days, when [the Frisians] realize that they can no longer fight, that they are unable to defeat them [the Danes], they propose a truce, which the princess’s brother accepts. He waits for the winter to be over to set sail—because during the winter, the sea was obstructed by ice—then he returns to his country. There he assembles a force larger than the one with sixty warriors that previously accompanied him. He returns, attacks the Frisians, kills the king, and carries his sister, the princess, back with him to his country.
    Now, if this poem existed in its entirety—and we have to assume that it once