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The gods made a man called Kvásir who was so wise you couldn’t ask him any question he hadn’t got an answer to. He travelled all over the world teaching men things, until he became the guest of two dwarfs. They got him talking and managed to kill him. Then they mixed honey with his blood and made such a mead of it that anybody who drinks it becomes a poet.

Abridged from Bragaröþur, lvii.

In the foregoing account of Primary Epic the reader may have noticed that no mention is made of one characteristic which later critics have sometimes thought essential. Nothing has been said about greatness of subject. No doubt, the epics we have been considering do not deal with comic or idyllic matters; but what of the epic theme as later ages have conceived it—the large national or cosmic subject of super-personal interest?

In my opinion the great subject (“the life of Arthur, or Jerusalem’s fall”) was not a mark of primary epic. It enters the epic with Virgil, whose position in this story is central and who has altered the very notion of epic; so much so that I believe we are now tempted to read the great subject into primary epic where it does not exist. But since this may be disputed, let us consider Beowulf and the Homeric poems from this point of view.

The Odyssey is clearly out of the running. The mere fact that these adventures happened to Odysseus while he was returning from the Trojan War does not make that war the subject of the poem. Our interest is in the fortunes of an individual. If he is a king, he is the king of a very small country, and there is hardly any attempt to make Ithaca seem important, save as the hero’s home and estate are important in any story. There is no pretence, indeed no possibility of pretending, that the world, or even Greece, would have been much altered if Odysseus had never got home at all. The poem is an adventure story. As far as greatness of subject goes, it is much closer to Tom Jones or Ivanhoe than to the Aeneid or the Gierusalemme Liberata.

For the Iliad a much more plausible case could be made out. It has been treated as an epic about the clash between East and West; and even in ancient times Isocrates praised Homer for celebrating those who fought against the “Barbarian.” Professor Murray to some extent favours this view. It is perhaps presumptuous of me to differ from so great a scholar; and it is certainly disagreeable to differ from one whose books, eagerly read in my teens, are now in my very bones, and whose lectures are still among the most rapturous memories of my undergraduate days. But on this matter I cannot go with him. Professor Murray asks of the Iliad, “Is it not the story of the battle of All-Greeks against the barbarian of Asia? ‘All-Greeks’: the wonderful word rings out again and again in the poems.”^[4] This is not the impression I get. If we examine the nine places where the index of the Oxford Iliad mentions the word Παναχαιῶν as occurring (and four of them occur in a single book) we find that on eight of the occasions it is preceded by ἀριστῆες or ἀριστῆας—“the champions of the Panachaeoi.” There is no contrast suggested between the All-Greeks and the Barbarians; only between the All-Greeks, the Greeks as a whole, and their own best men. In the ninth passage (ix, 301) Odysseus bids Achilles, even if he hates Agamemnon, to pity the other All-Greeks. Here again, the “All” seems to point a contrast between the totality of the Greeks and one member of that totality: there is no idea, so far as I can see, of the Greeks united against the Barbarians. One begins to wonder whether the first syllable of Παναχαιῶν is much more than a metrical convenience.

When I survey the poem as a whole I am even less convinced. The Trojan War is not the subject of the Iliad. It is merely the background to a purely personal story—that of Achilles’ wrath, suffering, repentance, and killing of Hector. About the fall of Troy, Homer has nothing to say, save incidentally. It has been argued that he does not need to, because the fall of Troy was inevitable after Hector’s death; but it is, to me, hardly credible that the climax of a story—and the fall would be the climax if the siege were the theme—should be left to be inferred. At best, it would be an extreme subtlety; the art of Kipling rather than of Homer. Nor do I find any anti-Trojan feeling in the Iliad. The noblest character is a Trojan, and nearly all the atrocities are on the Greek side. I find even no hint (except possibly in iii, 2-9) that the Trojans are regarded, either for better or for worse, as being a different kind of people from the Greeks. No doubt it is possible to suppose an earlier version in which the Trojans were hated—just as it is possible to suppose an earlier Beowulf free from all the Christian passages, or a ‘historical’ Jesus totally different from the figure in the Synoptic tradition. But that, I confess, is a mode of ‘research’ I heartily distrust. “Entities are not to be feigned without necessity,” and there is no necessity here. Parallels from other literatures suggest that Primary Epic simply wants a heroic story and cares nothing about a “great national subject.” Professor Chadwick, speaking of the Germanic epics remarks “how singularly free the poems are from anything in the nature of national interest or sentiment.”^[5] The greatest hero of Icelandic poetry is a Burgundian. In Beowulf Professor Chadwick’s statement is very well illustrated. The poem is English. The scene is at first laid in Zealand, and the hero comes from Sweden. Hengest, who ought to have been the Aeneas of our epic if the poet had had Virgil’s notion of an epic subject, is mentioned only parenthetically.

The truth is that Primary Epic neither had, nor could have, a great subject in the later sense. That kind of greatness arises only when some event can be held to effect a profound and more or less permanent change in the history of the world, as the founding of Rome did, or still more, the fall of man. Before any event can have that significance, history must have some degree of pattern, some design. The mere endless up and down, the constant aimless alternations of glory and misery, which make up the terrible phenomenon called a Heroic Age, admit no such design. No one event is really very much more important than another. No achievement can be permanent: to-day we kill and feast, to-morrow we are killed, and our women led away as slaves. Nothing ‘stays put’, nothing has a significance beyond the moment. Heroism and tragedy there are in plenty, therefore good stories in plenty; but no “large design that brings the world out of the good to ill.” The total effect is not a pattern, but a kaleidoscope. If Troy falls, woe to the Trojans, no doubt, but what of it? “Zeus has loosened the heads of many cities, and many more will he loosen yet” (Il. ix, 25). Heorot has been built nobly, but in the end what of it? From the very outset, “High, horn-gabled, the hall rises, Waits the welter of war’s surges, And the fire, its foe” (Beow. 81).

Much has been talked of the melancholy of Virgil; but an inch beneath the bright surface of Homer we find not melancholy but despair. “Hell” was the word Goethe used of it. It is all the more terrible because the poet takes it all for granted, makes no complaint. It comes out casually, in similes.

As when the smoke ascends to the sky from a city afar

Set in an isle, which foes have compassed round in war,

And all day long they struggle as hateful Ares bids.

(Il. xviii, 207.)

Or again,

As when a woman upon the body falls

Of her husband, killed in battle before the city walls ....

She sees him down and listens how he gasps his life away,

And clings to the body, crying, amid the foes; but they

Beating her back and shoulders with butts of spears amain

Pull her away to slavery to learn of toil and pain.

(Od. viii, 523.)

Notice how different this is from the sack of Troy in Aeneid ii. This is a mere simile—the sort of thing that happens every day. The fall of Virgil’s Troy is a catastrophe, the end of an epoch. Urbs antiqua ruit—“an ancient city, empress of long ages, falls.” For Homer it is all in the day’s work. Beowulf strikes the same note. Once the king is dead, we know what is in store for us: that little island of happiness, like many another before it and many another in the years that follow, is submerged, and the great tide of the Heroic Age rolls over it:

Laughter has left us with our Lord’s slaying,

And mirth and music. Many a spearshaft

Shall freeze our fingers in frightened dawn,

As our hands hold it. No harp’s delight

Shall waken warriors. The wan raven

Keen for carrion, his call sending,

Shall utter to the eagle how he ate his fill

At War’s banquet; the wolf shared it.

(Beow. 3020.)

Primary Epic is great, but not with the greatness of the later kind. In Homer, its greatness lies in the human and personal tragedy built up against this background of meaningless flux. It is all the more tragic because there hangs over the heroic world a certain futility. “And here I sit in Troy,” says Achilles to Priam, “afflicting you and your children.” Not “protecting Greece,” not even “winning glory,” not called by any vocation to afflict Priam, but just doing it because that is the way things come about. We are in a different world here from Virgil’s mens immota manet. There the suffering has a meaning, and is the price of a high resolve. Here there is just the suffering. Perhaps this was in Goethe’s mind when he said, “The lesson of the Iliad is that on this earth we must enact Hell.” Only the style—the unwearying, unmoved, angelic speech of Homer—makes it endurable. Without that the Iliad would be a poem beside which the grimmest modern realism is child’s play.

Beowulf is a little different. In Homer the background of accepted, matter-of-fact despair is, after all, a background. In Beowulf that fundamental darkness comes out into the foreground and is partly embodied in the monsters. And against those monsters the hero fights. No one in Homer had fought against the darkness. In the English poem we have the characteristic theme of Northern mythology—the gods and men ranged in battle against the giants. To that extent the poem is more cheerful at heart, though not on the surface, and has the first hint of the Great Subject. In this way, as in several others, it stands between the Iliad and Virgil. But it does not approach Virgil very closely. The monsters only partly embody the darkness. Their defeat—or its defeat in them—is not permanent or even long lasting. Like every other Primary Epic it leaves matters much as it found them: the Heroic Age is still going on at the end.

[4]	Rise of the Greek Epic, p. 211.

[5]	The Heroic Age, p. 34.