Scop

1900, Reuben Post Halleck, History of English Literature, quoted in 1927, Thomas Tapper, Percy Goetschius, Essentials in Music History, 2011, Facsimile Edition, page 42, The kings and nobles often attached to them a scop, or maker of verses. […] The banquet was not complete without the songs of the scop. While the warriors ate the flesh of boar and deer and warmed their blood with horns of foaming ale, the scop, standing where the blaze from a pile of logs disclosed to him the grizzly features of the men, sang his most stirring songs, often accompanying them with the music of a rude harp.

Jealous and full of anger, they leered as the soft song of the scop praised the All-Powerful.

The poem is, therefore, entitled Widsith which means a great traveller. The scop was moving from place to place to find a Lord in his desolate mind here.[…]The Lament of Deor tells a different story. It is the story of sorrow, clearly defined, the sorrow of a similar scop who may have been thrown out of favour and led into an eager search of a new master.

During the feast held in Heorot to celebrate Beowulf's mortal wounding of Grendel, the poet has King Hrothgar's scop perform a 'lay' whose theme of death and disaster is clearly meant to act as a sort of balance to the unbridled joy of the hall-people.

The beginning of the poem introduces a speech by Widsith (lines 1—4a), with an accompanying account of his life and travels as a scop:[…].