The Composition of Beowulf 315 



Of him Chadwick says (Origin of the English Nation, p. 131) : 

 'We may infer with some probabiHty that Offa was the most 

 famous of the kings of Angel.' 



The most famous Ofifa that ever existed in England was the one 

 who ruled over Mercia from 757 to 796. With him Charlemagne 

 dealt almost as an equal, and he seems to have been regarded on 

 the Continent as monarch of the whole English nation.^ It was 

 he who founded the monastery of St. Albans. He, it is evident, 

 can not be, for reasons of chronology, the Ofifa of Widsith and 

 Beozviilf. However, there was produced in the monastery 

 of St. Albans, about the year 1200, as we have seen, the Lives 

 of tire Two Off as — that is, of the Continental and the Mer- 

 cian. The life of the Mercian Ofifa has much to say concerning 

 the murderous disposition of his wife Drida— which is evidently 

 only another form of Thryth or Thrytho. This can not be 

 accounted for by any known historical fact. Offa's wife was 

 named Cynethryth, the second element in which name may account 

 for the Drida, or Thryth ; but Cynethryth, being known for her 

 piety, was of a totally different nature.^ 



As an inference from the thirteenth-century Lives of the Two 

 Off as, and from the fact that the Continental Offa appears in the 

 Mercian genealogy, Ten Brink was led to conclude^ that those who 

 were most interested in the Beowulfian reference to Offa would 

 naturally have been Mercian, especially as the passage in question 

 is quite episodic, and its introduction seems decidedly forced. 

 He next asked whether, after all, there might not have been a 

 historic character from whom the traits ascribed to Thryth might 

 have been derived. Such a historic original he found in Osthryth, 

 wife of King ^thelred of Mercia, who reigned from 675 to 704, 

 and finally retired to the monastery of Bardney, where he died in 716. 

 Of Osthryth we know but little : Eddi"* tells us that her husband 

 and she, under the influence of Ecgfrith of Northumbria, her 

 brother, refused in 681 to allow Wilfrith, who had taken refuge 

 in IMercia, to stay there another day after they were apprised of 

 his presence ; and the next incident we learn concerning her is 



^ Oman, pp. 340-1. 



^ Chadwick, Origin, p. 121. 



^ Pp. 116, 221-2; cf. Brandl, p. 61. 



* Chap. 40. 



