we know we are dealing with an essentially noble man, not a savage; we are face to face with that profound reverence for womanhood which inspires the greater part of all good poetry, and we begin to honor as well as understand our ancestors.  So in the matter of glory or honor; it was, apparently, not the love of fighting, but rather the love of honor resulting from fighting well, which animated our forefathers in every campaign.  “He was a man deserving of remembrance” was the highest thing that could be said of a dead warrior; and “He is a man deserving of praise” was the highest tribute to the living.  The whole secret of Beowulf’s mighty life is summed up in the last line, “Ever yearning for his people’s praise.”  So every tribe had its scop, or poet, more important than any warrior, who put the deeds of its heroes into the expressive words that constitute literature; and every banquet hall had its gleeman, who sang the scop’s poetry in order that the deed and the man might be remembered.  Oriental peoples built monuments to perpetuate the memory of their dead; but our ancestors made poems, which should live and stir men’s souls long after monuments of brick and stone had crumbled away.  It is to this intense love of glory and the desire to be remembered that we are indebted for Anglo-Saxon literature.

OUR FIRST SPEECH.  Our first recorded speech begins with the songs of Widsith and Deor, which the Anglo-Saxons may have brought with them when they first conquered Britain.  At first glance these songs in their native dress look strange as a foreign tongue; but when we examine them carefully we find many words that have been familiar since childhood.  We have seen this in Beowulf; but in prose the resemblance of this old speech to our own is even more striking.  Here, for instance, is a fragment of the simple story of the conquest of Britain by our Anglo-Saxon ancestors: 

Her Hengest and AEsc his sunu gefuhton with Bryttas, on thaere stowe the is gecweden Creccanford, and thaer ofslogon feower thusenda wera.  And tha Bryttas tha forleton Cent-lond, and mid myclum ege flugon to Lundenbyrig. (At this time Hengest and Aesc, his son, fought against the Britons at the place which is called Crayford and there slew four thousand men.  And then the Britons forsook Kentland, and with much fear fled to London town.)[26]

The reader who utters these words aloud a few times will speedily recognize his own tongue, not simply in the words but also in the whole structure of the sentences.

From such records we see that our speech is Teutonic in its origin; and when we examine any Teutonic language we learn that it is only a branch of the great Aryan or Indo-European family of languages.  In life and language, therefore, we are related first to the Teutonic races, and through them to all the nations of this Indo-European family, which, starting with enormous vigor from their original home (probably in central Europe)[27] spread southward and westward,