Scyld is the eponymous ancestor of the Scyldingas, the Danish royal house to which Hrothgar King of the Danes in this poem belongs. His name is simply ‘Shield’: and he is a ‘fiction’, that is a name derived from the ‘heraldic’ family name Scyldingas after they became famous. This process was aided by the fact that the Old English (and Germanic) ending -ing, which could mean ‘connected with, associated with, provided with’, etc., was also the usual patronymic ending. The invention of this eponymous ‘Shield’ was probably Danish, that is actually the work of Danish dynastic historians (þylas) and alliterative poets (scopas) in the lifetime of the kings of whom we hear in Beowulf, the certainly historical Healfdene and Hrothgar.
As for Scēfing, it can thus, as we see, mean ‘provided with a sheaf, connected in some way with a sheaf of corn’, or son of a figure called Sheaf. In favour of the latter is the fact that there are English traditions of a mythical (not the same as eponymous and fictitious) ancestor called Sceaf, or Sceafa, belonging to ancient culture-myths of the North; and of his special association with Danes. In favour of the former is the fact that Scyld comes out of the unknown, a babe, and the name of his father, if he had any, could not be known by him or the Danes who received him. But such poetic matters are not strictly logical. Only in Beowulf are the two divergent traditions about the Danes blended in this way, the heraldic and the mythical. I think the poet meant (Shield) Sheafing as a patronymic. He was blending the vague and fictitious warlike glory of the eponymous ancestor of the conquering house with the more mysterious, far older and more poetical myths of the mysterious arrival of the babe, the corn-god or the culture-hero his descendant, at the beginning of a people’s history, and adding to it a mysterious Arthurian departure, back into the unknown, enriched by traditions of ship-burials in the not very remote heathen past – to make a magnificent and suggestive exordium, and background to his tale.
Beowulf, son of Scyld Scefing, who appears in the exordium (to every reader’s initial confusion, since he is wholly unconnected with the hero of the poem) my father held to be a corruption of Beow (‘Barley’) – which is the name found in the genealogies (p. 92).
To my mind it is overwhelmingly probable [he wrote] that the Beowulf name properly belongs only to the story of the bear-boy (that is of Beowulf the Geat); and that it is a fairy-tale name, in fact a ‘kenning’ for bear: ‘Bee-wolf’, that is ‘honey-raider’. Such a name would be very unlikely to be transferred to the Scylding line by the poet, or at any time while the stories and legends which are the main fabric of the poem had any existence independent of it. I believe that Beow was turned into Beowulf after the poet’s time, in the process of scribal tradition, either deliberately (and unhappily), or merely casually and erroneously.
Elsewhere he wrote:
A complete and entirely satisfactory explanation of the peculiarities of the exordium has naturally never been given. Here is what seems to me the most probable view.
The exordium is poetry, not (in intent) history. It was composed for its present place, and its main purpose was to glorify Scyld and his family, and so enhance the background against which the struggle of Grendel and Beowulf takes place. The choice of a marvellous legend, rather than a mere dynastic invention, was therefore natural. That our author was working principally on the blended form: Beow < Scyld < Sceaf [found in the genealogies, see p. 92] is shown by his retention of the patronymic Scefing. This title has indeed little point in his version, and certainly would not have appeared, had he really drawn on a story in which it was Scyld that came in a boat; while certain points in his account (the little destitute child) belong clearly to the Sheaf-Barley legends.
Why then did he make Scyld the child in the boat? – plainly his own device: it occurs nowhere else. Here are some probable reasons:
(a) He was concentrating all the glamour on Scyld and the Scylding name.
(b) A departure over sea – a sea-burial – was already associated with northern chieftains in old poems and lore, possibly already with the name of Scyld. This gains much in power and suggestiveness, if the same hero arrives and departs in a boat. The great heights to which Scyld climbed is also emphasized (explicitly) by the contrast thus made with his forlorn arrival.
(c) Older and even more mysterious traditions may well still have been current concerning Danish origins: the legend of Ing who came and went back over the waves [see II. 305]. Our poet’s Scyld has (as it were) replaced Ing.
Sheaf and Barley were after all in origin only rustic legends of no great splendour. But their legend here catches echoes of heroic traditions of the North going back into a remote past, into what philologists would call Primitive Germanic times, and are at the same time touched with the martial glories of the House of the Shield. In this way the poet contrives to clothe the lords of the golden hall of Hart with a glory and mystery, more archaic and simple but hardly less magnificent than that which adorns the king of Camelot, Arthur son of Uther. This is our poet’s way throughout, seen especially in the exaltation among the great heroes that he has achieved for the Bear-boy of the old fairy-tale, who becomes in his poem Beowulf last king of the Geatas.
I give a final quotation from my father’s lectures on this subject, where in discussing the concluding lines of the exordium he wrote of
the suggestion – it is hardly more; the poet is not explicit, and the idea was probably not fully formed in his mind – that Scyld went back to some mysterious land whence he had come. He came out of the Unknown beyond the Great Sea, and returned into It: a miraculous intrusion into history, which nonetheless left real historical effects: a new Denmark, and the heirs of Scyld in Scedeland. Such must have been his feeling.
In the last lines ‘Men can give no certain account of the havens where that ship was unladed’ we catch an echo of the ‘mood’ of pagan times in which ship-burial was practised. A mood in which the symbolism (what we should call the ritual) of a departure over the sea whose further shore was unknown; and an actual belief in a magical land or otherworld located ‘over the sea’, can hardly be distinguished – and for neither of these elements or motives is conscious symbolism, or real belief, a true description. It was a murnende mōd, filled with doubt and darkness.
There remains to notice an element in my father’s legend of Sheaf which was not derived from the English traditions. This is found only in the prose version (p. 86), where in the account of the great peace in the Northern isles in the time of ‘the Sheaf-lords’ (so deep a peace that a gold ring lying on the highway would be left untouched) he wrote of ‘the great mill of Sheaf’, which ‘was guarded still in the island sanctuary of the North.’ In this he was drawing on (and transforming) the Scandinavian traditions concerned with Freyr, the god of fruitfulness, and King Fróthi the Dane.
I cite here the story told by the Icelander Snorri Sturluson (c. 1179–1241) in his work known as the Prose Edda, which is given to explain the meaning of the ‘kenning’ mjöl Fróða (‘Fróthi’s meal’) for ‘gold’. According to Snorri, Fróthi was the grandson of Skjöldr (corresponding to Old English Scyld).
Fróthi succeeded to the kingdom after his father, in the time when Augustus Caesar imposed peace on the whole world; in that time Christ was born. But because Fróthi was the mightiest of all kings in the Northlands