In an earlier chapter (p. 3) it was mentioned that the English heroic poems are usually ascribed to the seventh or eighth centuries. We must now try to see whether any means are to be found of dating their composition more precisely.

Unfortunately very few references to the poems or their subjects occur in works which can be dated with anything like certainty. The most important is contained in a letter from Alcuin to Hygebald, bishop of Lindisfarne, written in the year 797: “When priests dine together let the words of God be read. It is fitting on such occasions to listen to a reader, not to a harpist, to the discourses of the fathers, not to the poems of the heathen. What has Ingeld to do with Christ? Strait is the house; it will not be able to hold them both. The king of heaven will have no part with so-called kings who are heathen and damned; for the one king reigns eternally in heaven, the other, the heathen, is damned and groans in hell. In your houses the voices of those who read should be heard, not a rabble of those who make merry in the streets.” From this passage it is clear that at the end of the eighth century there were current in Northumbria certain poems, probably well known poems, dealing with a heathen king named Ingeld, whom we need not hesitate to identify with Ingeld the son of Froda, who figures in Beowulf.