THE VIEWS on Old English poetry held by Sweet, who had a full and first-hand knowledge of the material, and also by J.R. Green, who did not, correspond to the preconceptions underlying the two principal activities on which the writers of dissertations and school programmes trained in the universities of Germany spent their immense energies. The first of these two activities was disintegration: poems held to be pagan (among them Beowulf, the Old English elegies, and the Gnomic Poems) were freed from what were thought Christian accretions, the genuine was freed from the spurious. The second activity was the reading of the Anglo-Saxon ‘Christian epics’ for Germanic and even pagan antiquities. The guiding method here was that employed by Grimm for Andreas and Elene and by Vilmar for the Old Saxon Heliand.

Disintegration

The excision of Christian elements is based on the wishful thought that such Old English literature as is not obviously Christian in subject-matter is pre-Christian and therefore early. It is part of a wider view, well described by Gösta Langenfelt in connection with Widsith:

The principal reason why Widsith is considered to be an ancient piece of OE poetry is, however, that it began to be analysed, examined, investigated, dug into, at a date in the 19th cent. when philologists were enthusiastic about the discovery of the kinship of I[ndo-]Eur[opean] languages, when they compared roots of words of different languages in the light of sound-laws, and when, hence, Germanic linguistic antiquity was lifted out of its misty regions and assumed a regular shape. Then Widsith was numbered among the early specimens (the first specimen) of Germanic literary activities. In the case of Widsith there lingers over the views, and the results, of 19th cent. research a Germanic `nationalism', so to speak, ± which would have been quite improbable if the Widsith matter had been handled by scholars of the Mediterranean countries. The results of folkloristic research: tales, stories, poems, `Merkverse', traditions, etc., were also mobilized, and behind every name there always hung a (popular; tribal; Germanic folk-)tale the existence of which could not be proved, but was persistently assumed.