“Hwæt!” This Old English expression marks the prelude to Beowulf, a remnant of a people from an age now vastly distinct from ours in various ways. Beowulf has survived ages of conquests and wars, yet just a few people truly understand the profound themes its highly sophisticated society presents within the work. Many who have studied it have a tendency to misinterpret its content, and the very scholars of English literature fail to comprehend the literary powers at work. Indeed, its unfamiliar references make it a foreign tale to many. Quests for everlasting personal glory and unbreakable bonds of kinship, for instance, may seem to modern readers to be aspects of life so far removed from theirs that they may be deemed as elements present only in works of pure fiction. Yet the ancient English people and their Germanic cousins steadfastly clung to these beliefs, and from this way of life there sprouted stories and legendary heroes whose splendour remains unmatched today.
Accordingly, it may be said of Beowulf that it is a literary work of the highest order, being a poetry that incorporates heroic elements (insinuated with mythological allusions) along with historical insights and an awareness of its society’s present conditions. We see its author weaving the themes to form a reflection, an insight, and a criticism of the ancient Anglo-Saxon society and its legends. We may say then that the author was to Anglo-Saxon literature what Snorri Sturluson was to that of the Icelanders: with the antiquarian knowledge he has obtained, he uses the stories we see in Beowulf as instruments to draw up, with reverence, visions of their glorious past, and at the same time to point out their faults. Beowulf’s penman is retelling something of an ancient, probably well-known legend with a different perspective. Its story is indeed set in the past, but its people are of its author’s period, making the characters entirely relatable to the readership. Beowulf should thus be treated not only as a poem, but also as a classic literature (in the modern sense) of the Anglo-Saxon world – an evaluation of a preceding society towards which the poet, the scop, felt a strong sense of piety; a work which both the laymen and the learned of that period read or heard to better understand their present identity, as we do now with the works, for example, of Shakespeare or Dickens.
In comparing Beowulf’s author with Sturluson, we can therefore reasonably apply to him Arthur Brodeur’s descriptions of Sturluson’s trait as a writer who cherished the tales of the past:
His interest in these wondrous things, like Scott’s love for the heroes, beliefs, and customs of the Scottish folk, was, I think, primarily antiquarian. Indefatigable in research, with an artist’s eye for the picturesque, a poet’s feeling for the dramatic and the human, he created the most vivid, vital histories that have yet been penned. Accurate beyond the manner of his age, gifted with the genius for expression, divining the human personalities, the comic or tragic interplay of ambitions, passions, and destinies behind the mere chronicled events, he had almost ideal qualities as an historian….Poet he was too… (Edda xii).
These historian-like qualities of Beowulf’s author, reflected in the poem, must have been the source of the mistakes in approach that Tolkien refers to in his revolutionary essay, Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics. He claims that “the illusion of historical truth and perspective, that has made Beowulf seem such an attractive quarry, is largely a product of art”, and that “the seekers after history must beware lest the glamour of Poesis overcome them” (7). However, we should not view Beowulf only as a work of art, nor simply as a work of poetry, but also as a work in which the author reflects upon the connections of the past and present. He recounts the ancient days, the traditions of which were not entirely forgotten back then, and makes his audiences aware of the inherent dangers of those traditions – all the while still highlighting its many virtues. Every figure integrated in Beowulf is the author’s way of representing to his audiences, in a way more comprehensible and memorable, the abstract ideals of their inherited traditions. In discovering the meaning of the poem, one must take heed the words which Snorri implies to his readership: “‘Do not lose sight of these splendid tales of the fathers, but remember always that these old legends are to be used to point a moral or adorn a tale, and not to be believed, or to be altered without authority of ancient skalds who knew them’” (Brodeur, Edda xvi-xvii). With this instruction and understanding, we may, with fresh, keen eyes, look deeper into the interplay of the themes in Beowulf.
Beowulf provides an excellent source of insight into the Germanic heroic society, to which the Anglo-Saxons belong. However, even during the estimated time of its composition, “the heroic world of poetry…was already remote from the Christian world of Anglo-Saxon England” (Greenblatt et al. 1: 8). This is true, at least perhaps if it pertains to the change of their beliefs and not their heroic culture. Harold Bloom, in his book Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Beowulf, further explains this relationship:
Rather than reflecting the static conditions of a single or simple age, Beowulf represents a broad collective response to changes that affected a complex society during a period of major crisis and transformation. To note only the most obvious of these transformations: by the time that this poem was put down in writing, the English-speaking peoples of Britain had turned away from pagan beliefs and had embraced the teachings of Christianity. They had weathered the storm of Viking invasions and had established control of a mixed and somewhat turbulent Anglo-Scandinavian society (37).
What with the given conditions of his diverse country, Beowulf’s author was supplied with enough materials from the past and a sufficient understanding of his present time to form a poem that could recount the old days with a certain novelty; it is, in the words of Tolkien, “a poem by an Englishman using afresh ancient and largely traditional material” (9). He also describes it as “a fusion that has occurred at a given point of contact between old and new, a product of thought and deep emotion” (20). The creatures of Germanic mythology and folklore are thus given a new essence, whilst their native symbolisms endure; traditional themes are provided with a new perspective. Beowulf reflects the state of Anglo-Saxon England in a way that it combines the ideals of both its local Germanic heroic society and that of the Christian faith.
It is now an established fact (after years of scholarly arguments) that Beowulf’s author was a Christian – and here all the unanimity ends. The opinions regarding the Christian elements in the poem vary greatly. There are plenty of scholars who claim that the fusion of the heroic code and Christian ideals creates conflicts; this is, for the most part, simply wrong. It is true that in every society there arises a certain degree of disharmony among beliefs and traditions; but in the case of Beowulf, Christianity actually complements the heroic ideals more than opposes them. It is of the opinion of many that Christianity is a faith disposed to be tender and mild, teaching its followers to “turn the other cheek”. This is a serious misconception that stems from a quote being taken out of context. The misunderstanding of this factor may lead to mistranslations and misinterpretations of Beowulf’s themes. It is something far from gentle, that which teaches its believers to “be strong and courageous” (New International Version, Joshua 1:9), and even repeats this commandment frequently enough (Deut. 31:7; 31:23; Joshua 1:6; 1:18). The Bible agrees with the heroic warriors’ readiness for battle when it says, “Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Eph. 6:11).
Much of the confusion also arises from the conception that Beowulf is a muddled mixture of Christianity and Germanic paganism. Clarity can be attained if we think of the latter ingredient simply as Germanic tradition. To refer to it as paganism is imply that the people (or at least the main characters) in the story worshiped the heathen gods. In no case is this true, save for a brief moment when the author laments of the Danes backsliding into “their heathenish hope” (179). To add to this confusion, there is written the even more baffling lines 180-182: “The Almighty Judge / of good deeds and bad, the Lord God, / Head of the Heavens and High King of the World, / was unknown to them”. This has often been quoted to imply the Danes’ lack of knowledge of God; but when we translate this literally, suggests otherwise. The original Old English quote runs so: “…Metod hie ne cuþon, / dæda Demend, ne wiston hie Drihten God / ne hie huru heofena Helm herian ne cuþon, / wuldres Wealdend”. All poetic fanciness aside, the lines (thanks to John Hall’s A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary) would translate into “…they knew not Metod, the dæda Demend; they knew not Drihten God, nor did they even know how to praise heofena Helm, wuldres Wealdend” – entirely different from most modern translations. For the most part, they lack the keyword “to praise”. To further lessen the complications, and thus better understand the lines, it is necessary to comprehend how “the Lord God…was unknown to them [the Danes or their counsellors in particular]”. The same unawareness of God can be compared to that described in the Book of Isaiah: “The ox knows his master, the donkey his owner’s manger, but Israel does not know, my people do not understand” (1:3). This unawareness is thus not an actual unfamiliarity with God but simply a refusal to acknowledge him and his presence as wuldres Wealdend. What remains then is a more reasonable conclusion that the Danes merely refused to praise or to be conscious of God. Either way, this regression to pagan beliefs did not refer to an act of the general population, but only that of the Danish counsellors. And such an inconsistency – if it is one – is common in older works of gargantuan proportion where the authors neither had the materials nor a reason to alter mistakes which to them were maybe only trivial.
Simpson and David noted that “it is difficult and probably futile to draw a line between ‘heroic’ and ‘Christian’, for the best poetry crosses that boundary” (Greenblatt et al. 1: 8). There is truth in this: for the Christian enhances the heroic; and the heroic, more often than not, emphasises the Christian. This beautiful synthesis can be seen all throughout the poem, as personified by the characters and as idealised in its themes. “In the figure of Beowulf the heroic ideals of Germanic paganism and of Anglo-Saxon Christendom have been reconciled and fused, so that the hero exemplifies the best of both” (Brodeur, Beowulf 183). Beowulf personified the Christian heroic warrior, a warrior of God. He “was mindful of his mighty strength, / the wondrous gifts God has showered on him: / he relied for help on the Lord of All, / on His care and favor” (lines 1270- 1273). The Danish king Hrothgar depicts the Christian heroic king. Throughout the poem, he put his trust in God, the Ælmightiga; “Friends and kinsmen flocked to his ranks, / young followers, a force that grew / to be a mighty army” (lines 65-67). Moreover, as rich as Beowulf is with many Christian ideals, its heroic themes also overflow and echoes from its Germanic traditions resonate in its passages.
The Anglo-Saxon audience of Beowulf represented a fraction of a huge network of Germanic tribes who, generally speaking, shared very similar beliefs. When viewed as a historical document (though Tolkien strongly admonishes against the folly of overdoing this), it can be said of Beowulf that it depicts this cultural relationship. This close-knit relationship is evident in the fact that the events in the poem, though written in the Old English tongue, concern the tribal Danes and the Geats, with occasional references to the Swedes, Franks, and Frisians. Most specially, among other tribal ties, bountiful similarities can be drawn between the Norse and Anglo-Saxon cultures and their surviving works of literature. The abundance of Anglo-Saxon heroic themes and practices that parallel and allude to those of Norse society proves the author’s (and his readers’) familiarity and connection with the history and culture of their Scandinavian neighbours.
The Germanic heroic society, as exemplified in Beowulf, paid particular attention to bonds of kinship, especially the “relationships…which existed between the warrior – the thane – and his lord” (Greenblatt et al. 1: 37). Kinship, along with its different forms and the duties that go along with it, are therefore central themes in many of the great sagas and poems of the North. Fragments of this culture survive today, fragments which have worked their way into our words, though we may not be aware of their presence. Both the modern English words king and kin are descended from the same word in Old English: “the king…is called cyning – a son or descendant or a member of the cyn [kin]” (Earl 108). It was the duty of a lord to protect his people – as the word lord implied in Old English, having been “derived from…hlaf, ‘loaf,’ plus weard, ‘protector’” (Greenblatt et al. 1: 8). The kings and lords, therefore, were responsible for providing for their kin; and kinsmen and warriors were to protect their lords and fellow kinsmen. Of this complex relationship, James Earl observes:
Conflicts that arise in the system, between blood ties and marriage ties, or between kinship obligations and sword obligations, have always been recognized as one of the great themes in Anglo-Saxon and other Germanic literature – the unavoidable and unresolvable clash of loyalties that results in tragedy. Much of the fascination of northern literature lies in the picture it presents of a society governed largely by the arcane rules and complications of the kin-feud (107).
These conflicts appear in the Finnsburg Episode, a poem within Beowulf, which demonstrates the absurdity of the blood feuds. The problems depicted in this lay are products of the inherent moral obligation of kinsmen to avenge their slain (whether their death be accidental or deliberate). In their society, they must either accept compensation in the form of money (called wergild, or man-price), or take revenge upon the offenders – and often this vengeance ends up as a bloody feud. The feuds for a time may seem to be settled, but circumstances oftentimes call for them to be rekindled. In Vikings: A History of the Norse People, Michael Dougherty thoroughly explains this process (though the actual Anglo-Saxon version may have differed to a slight degree):
A feud was socially acceptable and was often seen as necessary to restore honour after an insult or to take vengeance for a crime. It essentially took the form of small war declared between the feuding parties. There were rules in place governing who was allowed to take part in a feud, which went some way towards preventing a minor incident from expanding to include every kinsman, friend and neighbour of the feuding parties, plus anyone else they could persuade to help out.
A feud could simmer for a long time, especially where the enemies were all matched and needed to be cautious about attacking one another. Without a clear advantage, escalating the level of violence was highly risky and while Viking men were not overly concerned with personal safety, losing a feud might have consequences beyond simply dying in battle….Feuds were characterized by acts of violence, even when started by something as trivial as a perceived insult (59).
We see moreover in Hrothgar’s position the effects of the responsibilities of avenging one’s kin. After Grendel’s devastating attack on Heorot, Hrothgar “sat stricken and helpless, / humiliated by the loss of his guard, / bewildered and stunned, staring aghast / at the demon’s trail, in deep distress” (130-133). “Hrothgar’s anguish over the murders committed by Grendel is not only for the loss of his men but also for the shame of his inability either to kill Grendel or to exact a ‘death-price’ from the killer” (Greenblatt et al. 1: 38). One can only imagine the pressure he faces, having been descended from a line of “good kings” and being a protector of his people. Failure to redress the death of his kinsmen would mean that “he must endure woes / and live with grief for as long as his hall / stands at the horizon on its high ground” (283- 285).
Beowulf’s author shows the readers of the vanity of these seemingly never-ending feuds also in the character of Grendel’s mother. She “sallied forth on a savage journey, / grief-racked and ravenous, desperate for revenge” (1277-1278). Vengeance seems to be the sole reason for her attacks. Hrothgar expected this calamity (1340) – he understands that one day the desperate feuds would take their toll on their society. Indeed it would seem that the characters in the story have enough sagacity to realise the pointlessness of these blood-feuds. Beowulf, in a conversation with his uncle Hygelac, observes, “generally the spear / is prompt to retaliate when a prince is killed, / no matter how admirable the bride may be” (2029-2031). This is his comment on the engagement of Freawaru, Hrothgar’s daughter, to Ingeld, whose father was killed by the Danes. Additionally, he expresses that there is only a fine line that keeps the wronged from further pursuing the feud, saying that it may only take “some heirloom that brings alive / memories of the massacre…until one…lies / spattered in blood” (2042-2043, 2059-2060). In these passages, the readers can hear the poet’s remorse for this tradition. Valiant it may seem at first, to protect one’s own kin; however, he reminds them that, when taken too far, all the nobility of this bond will crumble their society into ruins.
The poet describes as well the state of Heorot, having been brought low by Grendel: “the greatest house / in the world stood empty, a deserted wallstead” (145-146). The impact of the onslaught upon Heorot must have been to the beholders in the poem as well as to the readers of it, extremely distressing; for the hall was not only a feasting place for the nobles and warriors, or even as the headquarters of their defence – it stood as the very heart of their society. Earl best explains the hall’s significance:
When the Anglo-Saxons invaded Britain, they settled in scattered villages instead of cities, and they built their houses of wood instead of stone – an apparent regress from the Romano-British civilization they supplanted…
The stubborn preservation of this ancient form of building is related to the hall’s symbolism. Originally, the hall was not primarily a form of habitation; it was a meðelstede, a formal place. In its traditional form and usages the hall defined and structured a traditional way of life. It preserved a constellation of values and distinctions essential to the culture and therefore was not to be exchanged lightly for some more “advanced” form, such as the city, the villa, the castle, or the palace (114-115).
Furthermore, the most important of relationships in Germanic heroic society thrived in their mead-halls. “The life of lord and warrior was centred in the hall where the lord had his throne and he and his warriors shared its pleasures” (Mitchell, 200). We begin to understand the implications of Grendel’s attacks on Heorot and Beowulf’s defending it once we explore in depth the symbolisms of the hall. According the Seamus Heaney:
…each lord’s hall is an actual and a symbolic refuge. Here is heat and light, rank and ceremony, human solidarity and culture; the duguð share the mead-benches with the geogoð, the veterans with their tales of warrior kings and hero-saviours from the past rub shoulders with young braves – þegnas, eorlas, thanes, retainers – keen to win such renown in the future. The prospect of gaining a glorious name in the wael-raes, in the rush of battle-slaughter, the pride of defending one’s lord and bearing heroic witness to the integrity of the bond between him and his hall-companions – a bond sealed in the gleo and gidd of peace-time feasting and ring-giving – this is what gave drive and sanction to the Germanic warrior-culture enshrined in Beowulf.
Heorot and Hygelac’s hall are the hubs of this value system upon which the poem’s action turns (xv-xvi).
To this insight we might attach Earl’s, taken from his book Thinking About Beowulf:
The hall symbolizes not only this world but the other one too. The only clear image of an afterlife we find in northern myth is Valhalla, the hall of the slain…. It serves the same function in the mythic world that the hall does in society: it is from Valhalla that the heroes venture out against the forces of chaos at Ragnarök, the final battle.
Beowulf provides the most detailed picture we have of the cosmic hall. The building of the great hall is a metaphor for the birth of civilization in the poem; it is celebrated with a hymn of God’s creation. The whole poem takes place in a world defined by the hall. Fully alive in language, Beowulf seems to throw a bright light into the darkest corner of Anglo-Saxon history, illuminating the hall as the vital center of the human world (115-116).
The mead-hall was thus the life-force of the Germanic heroic society. It was a symbol that was not to be put down lightly; an attack upon it would be an affront against the very soul of that society. And yet the hall’s sacred significance would naturally make it a prime target of evil. There live in Beowulf’s world (perhaps as a reflection of ours) creatures and men who live simply to hate what is innocent and noble, not caring what waste they lay upon their wake. Grendel, as described by the scop, embodies those characters:
…a powerful demon, a prowler through the dark,
nursed a hard grievance. It harrowed him
to hear the din of the loud banquet
every day in the hall, the harp being struck
and the clear song of a skilled poet
telling with mastery of man’s beginnings…(lines 86-91).
He aptly represents the forces that sought to destroy the world of Germanic heroic society – a monster constantly lurking in the dark outside the hall, a creature grim ond grædig, “greedy and grim” (122). A reason for his grudge comes from him being an outcast of that society, a being bereft of company, joy, and a chance at personal glory. Yet another, rather darker, reason perhaps would be because Grendel is a God-cursed and heaven-forsaken descendant of Cain. Upon hearing the mirth of the Danes echoing from the warmth of their hall, and their singing of how God – the Metod, the Scyppend – created the world, Grendel, in a fit of demonic reaction, becomes filled with extreme resentment; and the outpouring of this hatred is expressed in his “vicious raids and ravages…his long and unrelenting feud, / nothing but war…his lonely war” (152-154, 164). We see then that Grendel is a twofold force of evil. The author uses him as the personification of the physical threat against their society, and also of the spiritual threat against the newfound faith of the Anglo-Saxons. Tolkien remarks of Grendel and his kind:
They are directly connected with Scripture, yet they cannot be dissociated from the creatures of northern myth, the ever-watchful foes of the gods (and men). The undoubtedly scriptural Cain is connected with eotenas and ylfe, which are the jötnar and the álfar of Norse. But this is not due to mere confusion – it is rather an indication of the precise point at which an imagination, pondering old and new, was kindled. At this point new Scripture and old tradition touched and ignited. It is for this reason that these elements of Scripture alone appear in a poem dealing of design with the noble pagan of old days. For they are precisely the elements which bear upon this theme. Man alien in a hostile world, engaged in a struggle which he cannot win while the world lasts, is assured that his foes are the foes also of Dryhten, that his courage noble in itself is also the highest loyalty… (26).
And so evil was not meant to win. Grendel, from the beginning, was already a twice-damned creature, being a reject of society and a cursed descendant of Cain (whose damnation interestingly is a result of him killing his brother, his own kin), whose plans were inherently bound to fail. Grendel’s killing spree ends as Beowulf comes to defend the Danes and Hrothgar’s honour. Heorot endures: “The hall clattered and hammered, but somehow / survived the onslaught and kept standing” (770-771). Beowulf’s victory meant not only the important preservation of Heorot, the life and light of the Beowulfian society – it also meant the restoration of Hrothgar’s honour and especially the advancing of Beowulf’s glory.
The bard understood the importance of glory in the life of a heroic warrior – and, indeed, of any worthy man in his society. In their life in the mortal world, this quest for glory was the warrior’s primary goal. This belief can be exactly paralleled to that of the Anglo-Saxons’ Norse neighbours, which in turn was mirrored in their old religion:
Odin came to know that the world would end in a great battle known as Ragnarök, during which the wolf Fenrir would swallow him. His son Vidar would then avenge him. Odin knew the fate of all the gods – who among them would survive Ragnarök and who would not – and also that the universe would be largely destroyed. His foreknowledge in some ways echoes the Norse warrior’s fatalism: death is inevitable, but word-fame lasts forever.
…The Twilight of the Gods is in many ways a metaphor for the personal Ragnarök that each Viking warrior faces when his time comes. His fate was decided long ago, just like those of his gods, and he goes to meet it with a brave heart, although he is spared the burden of knowledge that Odin carried. If it is his time, then he will die and go to wait for the day of Ragnarök. If not, then he can hope that there will be other battles.
It is not hard to see how these beliefs tended to produce fearless warriors who would face any odds and were not deterred by hardship. A hopeless battle was not something to be avoided; it was an opportunity to win undying word-fame in the mortal world and ultimately a place in the golden age after Ragnarök (Dougherty 28, 39).
This belief – at least the quest for glory – got carried on even until the poet’s time. The poet intended, of course, for Beowulf to be both a heroic warrior and a Christian man. It may be said that he is not meant to be the ideal Christian man – no mortal may ever be. However Beowulf is, at the core, the ideal Germanic hero, someone the author’s audiences can look up to; and at that, one whose courage is strengthened by his Christian faith. Fearless as tradition already raises him to be, even more so is this courage strengthened when he follows the commandment to “be strong and courageous”. Furthermore, Beowulf grounded his life upon wyrd, or fate, as designed by God the Metod. He states: “Fate goes ever as fate must…may the Divine Lord / in His wisdom grant the glory of victory / to whichever side He sees fit” (455, 685-687). “Thus Beowulf bore himself with valor; / he was formidable in battle yet behaved with honor and took no advantage; never cut down a comrade who was drunk, kept his temper / and, warrior that he was, watched and controlled / his God-sent strength and his outstanding natural powers” (2177-2183).
Consequently, only a glorious and fame-worthy death would give justice to the life of this already-glorified hero. It is therefore even necessary, if Beowulf wishes his life to not reach a plateau. In many ways, the characters of the Germanic gods reflected the life of the Germanic peoples, so that once more, we may compare their fate to that of our hero. Upon an initial perception, Loki’s only role in mythology would seem to be purely to bring about chaos upon the gods. But when we understand the significance of a glorious death in the beliefs of the Germanic tribes, we see that Loki is, in fact, a necessary evil:
This is a common theme in Viking mythology – heroes and gods who die fighting or just after vanquishing their greatest foe. It may seem tragic from a modern perspective but to the Vikings a heroic death battling one’s sworn enemy was the very best way to go – what remained to a warrior after his arch-nemesis was defeated? Any further deeds would be anticlimactic and he might even suffer the terrible fate of dying of old age, forgotten or eclipsed by younger warriors.
Thus Loki provided several of the Norse gods with a suitable ending to their tale. Heimdall died fighting a kinsman-god turned evil, and other gods were provided with their ultimate challenge by Loki’s deeds. In this, he is one of the most important of the Norse gods – heroes are, after all, defined by the magnitude of the challenges they face (Dougherty 33-34).
Hence, the scop provides Beowulf with the dragon: most stupendous of the monsters, a beast legendary even within legends, whose majesty transcends the mythological. The dragon, the wyrm, is shown as an other-worldly creature, vastly different from Grendel and his mother, and in degrees far more terrible and dangerous:
Once he is wakened, there is something glorious in the way he manifests himself, a Fourth of July effulgence fire-working its path across the night sky; and yet, because of the centuries he has spent dormant in the tumulus, there is a foundedness as well as a lambency about him. He is at once a stratum of the earth and a streamer in the air, no painted dragon but a figure or real, oneiric power, one that can easily survive the prejudice which arises at the very mention of the word “dragon.” Whether in medieval art or in modern Disney cartoons, the dragon can strike us as far less horrific than he is meant to be, but in the final movement of Beowulf, he lodges himself in the imagination as wyrd rather than wyrm, more a destiny than a set of reptilian vertebrae.
…Dragon equals shadow-line, the psalmist’s valley of the shadow of death, the embodiment of a knowledge deeply ingrained in the species which is the very knowledge of the price to be paid for physical and spiritual survival (Heaney xix).
Upon seeing this dire beast, Beowulf aptly recognises his own death. The poet shows his readers that this brave warrior, renowned for his courage and might, displays a very human emotion. “It threw the hero / into deep anguish and darkened his mood….His mind was in turmoil, / unaccustomed anxiety and gloom / confused his brain” (2327-2328, 2331-2333). Such was the effect of the terror of this beast. Beowulf did not express this type of fear when he fought against Grendel and his mother. And yet, despite all this, Beowulf was “ready, sensing his death” (2420). One can only imagine the internal turmoil with which Beowulf is struggling. We see here the genius of the poet in creating the character of Beowulf. He uses irony and contrasts to exhibit the conflicts within Beowulf’s mind. The readers are presented with the now aged Beowulf, who, in physicality, is far from the younger and stronger warrior, as we would reasonably expect. The encounter serves as his final test: would he, in his fear, back down? Or would he fight and so defend his glory and that of his own people?
The fight against the dragon, among many others, is prefigured for the audience in the story of Sigemund. The story is a fitting celebration of Beowulf’s triumph against Grendel; and, as a case of dramatic irony, it also foreshadows Beowulf’s eventual meeting and slaying of the dragon. It echoes Odin’s prescience about the end of the world and of Thor’s battle against the Midgard wyrm, Jörmungand. Tolkien remarks:
…dragons, real dragons, essential both to the machinery and the ideas of a poem or tale, are actually rare. In northern literature there are only two that are significant. If we omit from consideration the vast and vague Encircler of the World, Miðgarðsormr, the doom of the great gods and no matter for heroes, we have but the dragon of the Völsungs, Fáfnir, and Beowulf’s bane. It is true that both of these are in Beowulf, one in the main story, and the other spoken of by a minstrel praising Beowulf himself. But this is not a wilderness of dragons. Indeed the allusion to the more renowned worm killed by the Wælsing is sufficient indication that the poet selected a dragon of well-founded purpose (or saw its significance in the plot as it had reached him), even as he was careful to compare this hero, Beowulf son of Ecgtheow, to the prince of the heroes of the North, the dragon-slaying Wælsing.
…As for the dragon: as far as we know anything about these old poets, we know this: the prince of the heroes of the North, supremely memorable – hans nafn mun uppi meðan veröldin stendr – was a dragon-slayer. And his most renowned deed, from which in Norse he derived his title Fáfnirsbani, was the slaying of the prince of legendary worms. Although there is plainly considerable difference between the later Norse and the ancient English form of the story alluded to in Beowulf, already there it had these two primary features: the dragon, and the slaying of him as the chief deed of the greatest heroes – he wæs wreccena wide mærost (9, 16).
Yet we will not disregard Jörmungand simply because there is no reason to do so. Similarities then begin to arise between the stories of Thor and Beowulf. Thor, in one final and glorious act, slays the Midgard serpent, who symbolised perhaps the evil that encircled the world. Beowulf too, must slay the nameless wyrm to save his kingdom from ruin. Both of them die shortly afterward. But it is for these deeds that they are best known, as it is for the warrior entitled Fáfnirsbani, bane of the dragon Fáfnir. A parallelism may be drawn as well between the endings of Beowulf and Norse mythology. A Geat woman laments of “her nation [being] invaded, / enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles, / slavery and abasement. Heaven swallowed the smoke” (3153-3155). So does Odin too, with his foreknowledge, upon seeing Nidhögg, who heralded Ragnarök and the end of days. But we see in this mythology that the end is not an end, rather the beginning of a better world’s rebirth, where the sons of the martyr gods rule and the great evil is finally vanquished. We may say the same of Beowulf’s ending. The coming of the Swedes, Franks, and Frisians prefigures the beginning of a better heroic society – one that perhaps would resemble that of the author’s.
In a way, Beowulf is a poetic social assessment. In many aspects, it is a metaphor of Germanic heroic society. Of its poetic magnificence, Tolkien praises:
The lines do not go according to a tune. They are founded on a balance; an opposition between two halves of roughly equivalent phonetic weight, and significant content, which are more often rhythmically contrasted than similar. They are more like masonry than music. In this fundamental fact of poetic expression I think there is a parallel to the total structure of Beowulf. Beowulf is indeed the most successful Old English poem because in its elements, language, metre, theme, structure, are all most nearly in harmony….We have none the less in Beowulf a method and structure that within the limits of the verse-kind approaches rather to sculpture or painting. It is a composition not a tune.
…When new Beowulf was already antiquarian, in a good sense, and it now produces a singular effect. For it is now to us itself ancient; and yet its maker was telling of things already old and weighted with regret, and he expended his art in making keen that touch upon the heart which sorrows have that are both poignant and remote. If the funeral of Beowulf moved once like the echo of an ancient dirge, far-off and hopeless, it is to us as a memory brought over the hills, an echo of an echo. There is not much poetry in the world like this; and though Beowulf may not be among the very greatest poems of our western world and its tradition, it has its own individual character, and peculiar solemnity; it would still have power had it been written in some time or place unknown and without posterity, if it contained no named that could now be recognized or identified by research (30, 33).
Truly there are only a few poems like this in the world that exist. Beowulf is indeed one of the few works that remain in our hands that can give us an insight into Anglo-Saxon society – and we are lucky to have such a rich resource. As a work of classic Anglo-Saxon literature it rivals those in our modern time. We see such beauty in the poem that we may rightfully remark of the scop what Brodeur remarked of Snorri: he, “though a Christian, tells the old pagan tales with obvious relish, and often, in the enthusiasm of the true antiquary, rises to magnificent heights” (Edda xv). We see in Beowulf a wonderful fusion of the Christian and the heroic, a moving interplay of Germanic elements, and a beautiful picture of its ancient society – all within a poem that is so skilfully written by an author whose passion is expressly woven in its passages. It is a shame that, as a work of English literature, it is severely understudied and undervalued. For, as a work of art, it is extremely majestic; as a social criticism, it is revealing; and as a story, it is legendary. Beowulf’s glory has stood the test of time; and, as our hero’s pyre, it continues to shine and light the way for those seeking to understand the past. Hwæt, Beowulf’s fame shall continue to be remembered.
Works Cited
A. and E. Keary. The Heroes of Asgard. New York: Mayflower Books, 1979. Print.
Bloom, Harold. Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Beowulf, Updated Edition. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2007.
Brodeur, Arthur. The Art of Beowulf. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969. Print.
—. The Prose Edda. New York: American Scandinavian Foundation, 1916. Print.
Dougherty, Martin. Vikings. London: Amber Books, 2013. Print.
Earl, James. Thinking About Beowulf. California: Stanford University Press, 1994. Print.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Simpson, and Alfred David. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 2 vols. New York: W.W. Norton &Company, 1962-2013. Print.
Hall, John. A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916. Print.
Heaney, Seamus. Beowulf. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000. Print.
Mitchell, Bruce. An Invitation to Old English and Anglo-Saxon England. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995. Print.
New International Version. Caloocan: Image Builders Services and Publishing Foundation, 1984.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London: George Allen & Unwin Publishers, 1983. Print.
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