Chapter XXXIV: Section VIII: The Weight of Proof: the Eotens

Finn is surely entitled to be held innocent till he can be proved guilty. And the argument for his guilt comes to this: the trouble was due to the bad faith of the Eotens: "Eotens" means "Jutes": "Jutes" means "Frisians": "Frisians" means "Finn": therefore the trouble was due to the treachery of Finn.

Now I agree that it is probable that _Eotenas_ means Jutes; and, as I have said, there is nothing improbable in a Frisian king having had a clan of Jutes, or a body of Jutish mercenaries, subject to him. But that the Frisians as a whole should be called Jutes is, _per se_, exceedingly improbable, and we have no shadow of evidence for it. Lawrence tries to justify it by the authority of Siebs:

"Siebs, perhaps the foremost authority on Frisian conditions,
conjectures that ... the occupation by the Frisians of Jutish territory
after the conquest of Britain assisted the confusion between the two
names."

But _did_ the Frisians occupy Jutish territory? When we ask what is Siebs' authority for the hypothesis that Frisians occupied Jutish territory, we find it to be this: that because in _Beowulf_ "Jute" means "Frisian," some such event must have taken place to account for this nomenclature[489]. So it comes to this: the Frisians must have been called Jutes, because they occupied {273} Jutish territory: the Frisians must have occupied Jutish territory because they are called Jutes. I do not think we could have a better example of what Prof. Tupper calls "philological legend."

Siebs rejects Bede's statement, which places the Jutes in what is now Jutland: he believes them to have been immediately adjacent to the Frisians. For this belief that the Jutes were immediate neighbours of the Frisians there is, of course, some support, though not of a very convincing kind: but the belief that the Frisians occupied the territory of these adjacent Jutes rests, so far as I know, solely upon this identification of the _Eotenas_-Jutes with the Frisians, which it is then in turn used to prove.

But if by Jutes we understand (following Bede) a people dwelling north of the Angles, in or near the peninsula of Jutland, then it is of course true that (at a much later date) a colony of Frisians _did_ occupy territory which is near Jutland, and which is sometimes included in the name "Jutland." But, as I have tried to show above, this "North Frisian" colony belongs to a period much later than that of the Finn-story: we have no reason whatever to suppose that the Frisians of the Finn story are the North Frisians of Sylt and the adjoining islands and mainland--the _Frisiones qui habitabant Juthlandie_[490].

And when we have assumed, without evidence, that, at the period with which we are dealing, Frisians had occupied Jutish territory, we are then further asked to assume that, from this settlement in Jutish territory, such Frisians came to be called Jutes. Now this is an hypothesis _per se_ conceivable, but very improbable. Throughout the whole Heroic Age, for a thousand years after the time of Tacitus, Germanic tribes were moving, and occupying the territory of other people. During this period, how many instances can we find in which a tribe took the name of the people whose territory it occupied? Even where the name of the new home is adopted, the old tribal name is _not_ adopted. For instance, the Bavarians occupied the territory of the Celtic Boii, but they did not call themselves Boii, but Bai(haim)varii, "the dwellers in the land of the Boii"--a very {274} different thing. In the same way the Jutes who settled in the land of the Cantii did not call themselves _Kente_, but _Cantware_, "dwellers in Cantium." Of course, where the old name of a country survives, it does often _in the long run_ come to be applied to its new inhabitants; but this takes many ages. It was not till a good thousand years after the English had conquered the land of the Britons, that Englishmen began to speak and think of themselves as "Britons." In feudal or 18th century days all the subjects of the ruler of Britain, Prussia, Austria, may come to be called British, Prussians, Austrians. But this is no argument for the period with which we are dealing. The assumption, then, that a body of Frisians, simply because they inhabited land which had once been inhabited by Jutes, should have called themselves Jutes, is so contrary to all we know of tribal nomenclature at this date, that one could only accept it if compelled by very definite evidence to do so. And of such evidence there is no scrap[491]. Neither is there a scrap of evidence for the underlying hypothesis that any Frisians _were_ settled at this date in Jutish territory.

And as if this were not hypothetical enough, a further hypothesis has then to be built upon it: viz., that this name "Jutes," belonging to such of the Frisians as had settled in Jutish territory, somehow became applicable to Frisians as a whole. Now this might conceivably have happened, but only as a result of certain political events. If the Jutish Frisians had become the governing element in Frisia, it would be conceivable. But after all, we know something about Frisian history, and I do not {275} think we are at liberty to assume any such changes as would have enabled the Frisian people, as a whole, to be called Jutes. How is it that we never get any hint anywhere of this Jutish preponderance and Jutish ascendancy?

The argument that the "treachery of the Jutes" means the treachery of Finn, King of the Frisians, has, then, no support at all.

One further argument there is, for attributing treason to Finn.

It has been urged that in other stories a husband entraps and betrays the brother of his wife. But we are not justified in reading pieces of one story into another, unless we believe the two stories to be really connected. The Signy of the _V[o,]lsunga Saga_ has been quoted as a parallel to Hildeburh[492]. Signy leaves the home of her father Volsung and her brother Sigmund to wed King Siggeir. Siggeir invites the kin of his wife to visit him, and then slays Volsung and all his sons, save Sigmund. But it is the difference of the story, rather than its likeness, which is striking. No hint is ever made of any possibility of reconciliation between Siggeir and the kin of the men he has slain. The feud admits of no atonement, and is continued to the utterance. Siggeir's very wife helps her brother Sigmund to his revenge.

How different from the attitude of Sigmund and Signy is the willingness of Hengest to come to terms, and the merely passive and elegiac bearing of Hildeburh! These things do not suggest that we ought to read a King Siggeir treachery into the story of Finn.

Again, the fact that Atli entices the brother of his wife into his power, has been urged as a parallel. But surely it is rather unfair to erect this into a kind of standard of conduct for the early Germanic brother-in-law, and to assume as a matter of course that, because Finn is Hnaef's brother-in-law, therefore he must have sought to betray him. The whole atmosphere of the Finn-Hnaef story, with its attempted reconciliation, is as opposed to that of the story of Atli as it is to the story of Siggeir.

{276}

The only epithet applied to Finn is _ferhdh-freca_, "valiant in soul." Though _freca_ is not necessarily a good word, and is applied to the dragon as well as to Beowulf, yet it denotes grim, fierce, almost reckless courage. It does not suggest a traitor who invites his foes to his house, and murders them by night.

I interpret the lines, then, as meaning that the trouble arose from the Jutes, and, since the context shows that these Jutes were on Finn's side, and against the Danes, we must hold them to be a body of Jutes in the service of Finn[493].

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