Beowulf - Institutionen för arkeologi och antik historia

106
You have adopted the custom of the old Roman stock waging war with arms,
dispensing justice peacefully. How fair (good) that he is the first whom every
decoration favours supported by both advantages (goods), weapons as well as
laws! The vigour you possess, with a prosperity granted by heaven, is proved by
the promptly vanquished Saxon and Danish peoples. Where the river Bardaa runs
with a meandering course, there the enemy’s army was defeated by your leader
ship. You held the command over half the army at that time; how well-deserved
does he win who does what you bid! (55) As a victor you were sweating under
the weight of the coat of mail and you were flashing in the cloud of dust, and
fighting you pursued the fleeing army, until the transparent waves of the Lagona
(the Lahn) set bounds. To him who powerless fled the river gave a sepulchre: For
the prosperous leader the rivers wage war.
To begin with the intruders are called Saxons and Danes. That may of course be just
a paraphrase for enemies, but Venantius is on the other hand well informed about the
northern peoples since in Book ix, poem 1 he knows something that we also know,
namely that the Jutes lived between the Danes and the Saxons.
Generally speaking, enemies whom the Merovingian army set out to destroy after
negotiating with their emissaries would have been known by their proper names in
Metz because the embassy itself would hardly conceal its identity from its antagonists.
The most intriguing part of the description is the introduction of the two rivers Lagona
and Bordaa. They testify to a surprisingly minute interest in rivers in a poem in which the
only other river mentioned is the Nile ‘recreating Egypt when it rises’(v. 35).
Lagona is Latin for the river Lahn, a tributary to the Rhine, but Bordaa is the
purely Germanic name for a river which we do not know precisely where to locate.
When the enemy panic they are driven into the transparent waves of the Lahn and
that indicates somewhere at the lower part of the river. Saxons and Danes must
originate from the north and their following the Lahn Valley is most reasonable if they
want to cross the Rhine either at Koblenz or at Mainz in order to pillage more central
parts of Austrasia. Lupus, on the other hand, comes from the south with the army.
We may wonder why Venantius should find it essential to inform us that Lupus was in
command of half the army, rather than an army. The information stands out as so
peculiar that it is probably a fact and an indication that during the campaign the
Merovingian army was actually divided into two halves.
There is a point in this division since if the King was at Metz and the enemy
standing in the Lahn Valley, then there were two ways in which to meet it, depending
on where the enemy was planning to cross the Rhine, at Koblenz or Mainz. Lupus
commands one half and he proceeds either via Trier or Mainz. We find a similar
piece of precise information in line 56 when Lupus wins the battle and Venantius says
that ‘fighting you pursued the fleeing army’, thus indicating that the intruders panicked
in defeat.
This brings us to the identification of Bordaa. The meaning of the word is simple
enough. Bord means swamp or moor water and the suffix -aa means running water