Grace under Pressure: "Hand-Words," "Wyrd," and Free Will in "Beowulf"

Author(s): Susanne Weil

Source: Pacific Coast Philology, Vol. 24, No. 1/2 (Nov., 1989), pp. 94-104
Published by: Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1316605
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 Grace Under Pressure: "Hand-Words," Wyrd,
and Free Will in Beowulf
Susanne Weil
University of California, Berkeley
Who is the "Shaper"in Beowulf?Is it wyrd, the fixed fate that shaped the pa-
gan world of the Anglo-Saxons? Or is it the Christian God whose worship they
adopted? As the story of Beowulf was told and retold through the centuries, it
seems to have picked up the verbal vestiges of cultural change like a snowball
rolling through time: so many pagan and Christian ideas exist side by side in the
poem that critics have long argued whether it is essentially a pagan or a Christian
work. Some insist that it is a pagan poem which Christian transcribers defaced
with dogma; others contend that its pagan pronouncements are relics of a time its
culture outgrew-the poetic equivalent of the human appendix. Neither view
gives much credit to the poet's intentions and artistry. Is Beowulf, then, a literary
fossil in which two opposing belief systems are frozen together, fascinating from
the standpoint of cultural anthropology, but ultimately lacking a unified theme?
Or does the poem contain a genuine synthesis of two world-views? I believe that
the latter is true, and shall attempt to show how a striking pattern of "hand-
words" helped the Beowulfpoet to establish that synthesis.

To begin with the language itself: many words that express the concept of wyrd
are derived from the Old English root meaning "to shape." Gescipe, "destiny,"
means literally "that which is shaped"; the verb sceppen means "to destine, to
shape"; one of the most frequently used words for "God" is Sceppend, literally
"Shaper."Since the motif of wyrd as the implacable arbiter of men's struggles re-
sounds throughout the Anglo-Saxon canon like a perpetual minor chord, the
synonymous nature of fate and shaping in Old English should not be surprising:
the singers of the canon were always aware that the events of their lives had been
"shaped" by a force (or forces) beyond their control. Given the primacy of tactile
imagery throughout their poetry, their vision of destiny as a process of shaping is
characteristic.It is as if their Shaper were a sculptor, carefully crafting the form of
each man's fate, molding a rough edge here, a smooth curve there, until the work
took on its final cast in the moment of death.

As monks moved into Britain and began to record Anglo-Saxon writings, the
Sceppendwas assumed to be the Christian God: but who was he before that? The
Anglo-Saxon tongue existed before the Christianization of Britain, and yet the
Germanic religion which had held sway there had no supreme Shaper. According
to the Icelandic Eddas(the best record remaining of Germanic, and by extension of
ancient Anglo-Saxon beliefs), the Aesir shaped the first man and woman from
trees but had few of the other powers we normally attribute to gods; not even
immortal, they were themselves hostages to wyrd in the form of Ragnarrok, the
day when the forces of chaos would overwhelm them (Green, 17-28; 203-208). Life
"Hand-Words,"
HnWdWvrd,
Wd and Free Will
and___F
Wil in Beowulf
in Beowuif 95
95
- -

began in the Germanic universe with giants being mysteriously shaped out of va-
por; the Aesir themselves came to being because a hungry cow licked an ice floe
until her lickings inadvertently shaped their progenitor (16)-but who created the
cow? Even the three Norns who spun and snipped the threads of fate for each
man were shadowy figures, spinning, not quite shaping, apparently acting with-
out a purpose of their own. As we push the parameters of the mythology, every
possible explanation seems to lead to another mystery. The Anglo-Saxon uni-
verse seems curiously without cause, yet brimming with effects-all subsumed
under the murky heading of wyrd, which remains a force, not a figure. Who,
then, is the Shaper?
A look at the proliferation of pronouncements about the power of wyrd in
Beowulf suggests an answer to this question. Beowulf, repeating the received
wisdom of his age, says that Gaeaa wyrd swa hio scel (Fate always goes as it must!:
445b), yet also that Wyrdoft nerea/unfxgne eorl, ponne his ellen deah (Fate often
saves an undoomed man if his courage is good: 572b-573). The narratorsays that
... pone anne heht
golde forgyldan,poneae Grendelaer
mane acwealde,swa he hyra ma wolde,
nefnehim witig god wyrd forstode
ond daesmannesmod.Metodeallumweold
gumenacynnes,swa he nu git dea.
Forpanbia andgit aeghwarselest,
ferhaes forepanc.Fela sceal gebidan
leofes ond lapesse pe longe her
on yssumwindagumworoldebrucea.
(1053b-1062)1

[... he ordered that gold be given

for thatone whom Grendelhad before
cruellykilled, as he would have killed more
if wise God and the man'scouragehad not
forestalledthat fate. God ruled all
the raceof men,as he now yet does.
Yet is discernmenteverywherebest,
forethoughtof mind.He shall endure much
Of what is dear and dreadfulwho here
In these trouble-dayslong uses this world.]
(italics mine)

In the first of these axioms, fate is unalterable; in the second, it plays favorites; in
the narrator's aside, it is subordinate to both "wise God" and "the man's courage."
Someone is confused here, and I would suggest that it is neither Beowulf nor the
narrator: rather, it is the modern audience, tending to miss the point of these
pronouncements. Critics who see the poem as primarily Christian (Margaret
Goldsmith comes to mind) view the narrator's pronouncement on the power of
God as evidence that Christian providence, not wyrd, was the Shaper of the
96 an. -
-e.i-. l-.-- - - :- :- . ............-
Susanne
. - -. Weil

Anglo-Saxon world-ignoring other pronouncements that the narrator makes

elsewhere about the supreme power of fate. If proving God to be the sole power
were the narrator'spurpose, why would he immediately append the caveat "yet is
discernment everywhere best, forethought of mind?" He seems to be telling his
audience not to count on the power of God or wyrd: the future will be a mixture
of satisfaction and suffering even though God (or fate) "rule(s) all the race of
men." What a man can depend on is his "forethought of mind": this is the core of
the individual's power to endure. Pronouncements about the importance of self-
reliance outnumber pronouncements about anyone's power: for example, when
Beowulf discovers that his borrowed sword cannot harm Grendel's mother, the
poet tells us:
... strengegetruwode,
mundgripemaegenes.Swascealmandon,
ponneheaetguaegeganpencea
longsumnelof;naymbhislif cearaa.
(1533-1536)
[... he trustedin his strength,
in hisstronghand-grip.Soshallmando
whenhe thinksto winat war
praise;he doesnotcareabouthislife.]
long-lasting
Beowulf wastes no time wondering what fate has written about this battle: he
thinks ahead to the reputation he wants to win and fights on. Swa sceal man don
was not praise, but a cultural imperative which epitomized the Anglo-Saxon
modge3anc ("way of thinking"): what mattered was not who shaped a man's
death, or when he died, but how he died.
This is where modern debates on the meaning of wyrd in Anglo-Saxon
poetry
go awry, for in considering whom the Anglo-Saxons believed shaped their fate,
we need to understand fate as they would have defined it. The
excerpt above
strongly suggests that a man's reputation was as integral to his fate as the time
and place of his death: that reputation was Anglo-Saxon
immortality. Call it God's
providence or the mysterious, ubiquitous wyrd: an arrow by any other name
would kill you. Your choice, then, was whether you took that arrow in the back or
head-on, and how you chose determined whether you would be sung as a hero, a
villain-or not at all. Your reputation at death even affected your
family's future,
determined whether your sons would be powerful lords' retainers and whether
your daughters would marry well. Most important, it was a matter of personal
honor to be remembered as a man of courage. It would be a good fate, indeed the
best, to die gloriously in the protection of your people as Beowulf does-an igno-
ble fate to live after deserting your lord, as Beowulf's
cowardly retainers do at the
end of the poem. Bravery in extremity, grace under pressure: these are choices,
and these a man could shape. Because the Anglo-Saxons believed this, I would
 yrd, and Free Will
Wyrd,
"Hand-Words," Wl in Beowulf 97
- - --- -i -Beowuif--
-- -- -- - --- .. 97- -

like to suggest that the power behind the words of shaping in Anglo-Saxon poetry
was, in the sense that mattered most to them, the power of the individual.
The unusual preponderance of words meaning "hand" (hereafter "hand-
words") in Beowulf supports my contention that the individual was the primary
shaper of his fate in Anglo-Saxon poetry. Folm, mund, and hond are not com-
monly used in Old English (compared with words meaning "battle," "warrior,"or
"sword," etc.), and yet they appear sixty-five times in the 3,182 lines of Beowulf(a
sizeable number of their 435 appearances in what remains of the canon2). Forty-
seven of those appearances, a full two-thirds, occur in clusters during episodes in
which Beowulf's life or reputation hangs in the balance, either in episodes of ac-
tual combat such as the above example (in which Beowulf trusts in his "strong
handgrip") or in the scenes of his political testing at the hands of Hrothgar,
Unferth, or Hygelac. I believe that these hand-words constitute an oral formula
little remarked but crucial, for Beowulf, through the "strength of thirty" in his
hands, transforms himself from the son of an outcast to a great hero and king in a
culture where ancestry determined one's role in society. If Beowulf did not "shape
his fate," no character in Anglo-Saxon legend ever did.

The hand-words are distributed in nine substantial clusters which coincide

with particularly significant scenes. In the first 450 lines of the poem, hand-words
appear only three times; yet during the first "court scene" (450-558), from
Hrothgar's greeting to Beowulf through Unferth's fliting and Beowulf's response
to it, the words appear six times within 108 lines. This pattern of "feast and
famine" typifies the poet's use of the hand-words. The other eight significant clus-
ters (and relative absences) occur as follows:
559-664: no occurrences
665-835: seven occurrences(Beowulfs boastbeforethe battlewith Grendel,the battle
itself, and Beowulfs victory)
836-924: no occurrences
925-992: eight occurrences(fromHrothgar'sspeech at the victoryfeast through
Beowulfs accountof the fight)
993-1289: no occurrences
1290-1343: five occurrences(Grendel'smother'sassaulton Heorotand Hrothgar'sre-
quest that Beowulfdispose of her)
1344-1442: nooccurrences
1443-1584: six occurrences(thebattlebetweenBeowulfand Grendel'smother)
1585-1976: twooccurrences
1977-2176: seven occurrences(Beowulf'sreturnto Geatlandand his audiencewith
Hygelac)
2177-2487: threeoccurrences
98 SusanneWeil

2488-2537: fouroccurrences(Beowulf,now king,tellsof his exploitsof old in battleon

behalfof Hygelacand vows to do no less now thatGeatlandis threatenedby
the dragon)
2538-2723: six occurrences(Beowulf'slast boastand his battlewith the dragon)
2724-3182: eight occurrences(the aftermathof the battle with the dragon,Beowulf's
death, and his funeralelegy: the fulfillmentof his fate)

It seems more than coincidence that so many hand-words occur in these im-
portant scenes. Hands shape: they reach, grasp, manipulate; in short, they are the
physical means by which we control our world. Anglo-Saxon culture left behind a
literature which displays an almost obsessive fascination with description of
physical things, and particularly with hand-wundor: "handwork(s)," or, literally,
"hand-wonder(s)." Objects at courts, whether treasures, chairs, weapons, jewelry,
or clothing, are lavishly depicted; ships, buildings, tools, all are described in a de-
gree of detail remarkable in a literature that seems primarily concerned with
recording legends and history, the feats of men. Poets even endowed hand-
worked objects with their own chronologies: for example, Unferth's sword
Hrunting, or the armor of Heorogar. That armor comes down to Hrothgar, who
gives it to Beowulf, who, when he returns to Gautland, presents it to Hygelac as a
gesture of both munificence and good faith: with each transmission, the armor
gains prestige. Hands shape these objects out of the raw material of the world and
then pass them on to kinsmen to help cement the bonds of the comitatus. When
the hand-words appear in strong concentrations, they seem to represent men's at-
tempts to control their experience, to shape their fate.
In the famous battle between Beowulf and Grendel, the handwords appear
eight times in 170 lines-and that does not take into account the several refer-
ences to both Beowulf's and Grendel's "grip" and "fingers."The scene begins with
Beowulf's boast before battle: he declares that since Grendel, a benighted monster,
has no weapons to fight with, he will forgo his weapons too. He wants it to be a
fair fight, and that is what he prays for:
... and sipfan witig god
on swa hwaeberehond, halig dryhten,
maeraodeme, swa him gemetpince.
(685-687)

[... And afterward wise God

on whicheverhand, holy Lord,
seems good to Him, will assignvictory!]

Beowulf asks for victory to be granted "on whichever hand"-not side, not
person-"seems good" to God. This is one of the poem's more clearly Christian
moments, and yet the emphasis is not on the deity to whom Beowulf prays, but
on what he prays for: not his own victory as such, but that victory should go to
 H
"Hand-Words,"-- d and
W
-Words/' Wyrd,aI- Free
Fe Will
Wil in B w
Beowulf
_ . II I- 99

the most worthy. He is not asking for favoritism, but for confirmation of his
value.
After prayer, Beowulf lies awake as his troop sleeps, waiting for Grendel to ap-
pear. When he does, he breaks the iron-fast door-hinges with his hand (722), not
his arm or shoulder. Before Beowulf can act, Grendel devours a warrior named
"Hondscio." Hondscio means "hand-glove" or "hand-shoe:" might this suggest
that his power is somehow dampened? Clearly Hondscio's power is inadequate to
the task of confronting Grendel, who devours him foet and folma (feet and
hands, 745). Foet and folma seems to be a minor formula in Anglo-Saxon poetry,
appearing in 1 Genesis (2903), the Christ (1065) and Elene (1110), as well as other
texts, always in contexts in which it signifies complete helplessness-as when
Abraham ties Isaac for the sacrifice in 1 Genesis,or in references to the Crucifixion
in Christ and Elene. In Beowulf, the formula emphasizes the utter impotence of
ordinary men in the face of monstrous Grendel just before our hero must come
to grips with him in the lines that follow:
... Fora near aetstop,
nampa mid handa hygepihtigne
rincon raeste,raehteongean
feond mid folme;he onfenghrape
inwitpancumond wipearmgesaet.
Sonapaetonfundefyrenahyrde,
poethe ne mettemiddangeardes,
eorpansceata,on elranmen
mundgripemaran.
(745b-753a)

[... he came forthnearer,

Thenhe seized with his hand the strong-mindedone,
The warriorin his resting-place;then reachedfor him
The fiend with his hand;quicklyhe seized,
With a lightning thought,and set himself against the arm.
Soon that hoarderof crimeslearned,
Thathe had never met on middle-earth,
On any placeon earthamongall men,
A harderhand-grip.]

The moment of actual physical contact between Beowulf and Grendel is de-
scribed with an intense concentration of hand-words: three within eight lines.
(This is not simply because the two fight without weapons and thus must use
their hands, as I shall attempt to prove below.) The first hand is Grendel's, but,
foreshadowing the outcome of the fight, the next two "hands" are Beowulf's: his
is the superior power. Whereas Grendel is immediately terrified (Hyge weashim
hinfus, wolde on heolster fleon,/ secan deofla gedrxg. . . [755-756]; His mind was
wild within him, he would flee to the mere/ Seek his rabble of devils . ..),
Beowulf thinks of his evening's speech (Gemunde pa se goda, meg Higelaces/
efensprece, 758-759), of the boast he has made, and of the fame he hopes to gain.
100 100....S....anne....We..l. _ _. ...............................
SusanneWeil

The decisive moment in the battle has passed; Grendel finally knows fear and is
ready to retreat. Just before Beowulf inflicts Grendel's fatal wound, we have the
hand-word again:
Da paet onfunde...
paethim se lichomalaestannolde,
ac hine se modegamag Hygelaces
haefdebe honda;waesgehwapero3nmm
lifigende laa. Licsargebad
atol aegleca;him on eaxle weara
syndolhsweotol,seonoweonsprungon,
burstonbanlocan.
(809-818a)

[... He found...
Thathis body would not last for him,
But the bravekinsmanof Hygelac
Had him by the hand;each was to the other
Hateful alive. Life-painhe endured,
The awful lone-walker;for him, in his shoulder,he endured
Animmensewound,thesinewssprungopen,
His bone-locksbroke.]

Just before Beowulf tears Grendel's arm off at the shoulder, the poet again uses
the hand-word. The poet emphasizes the connection between the metaphorical
power of the hand and the power of the individual at the close of the scene:
... honde alegde,
earmond eaxle (paerwaeseal geador
Grendlesgrape)undergeapnehr[of].
(834-837)

[... He raisedup the hand,

The arm and the shoulder-there was all together
Grendel'sgrasp-under the high roof.]

That was all of Grendel's grasp-or all of his power. When Hrothgar and the
rest of the Scieldings come to view the evidence that Beowulf has mortally
wounded their enemy, the poet refers only to the hand (927; 983; 1303): it has be-
come his "shorthand" for the formula. Beowulf, through the power of his hand,
has fulfilled his vow and made his reputation as a protector of men. Grendel,
through the loss of his hand, has lost the power to make men suffer for his out-
cast status: through the loss of his hand, he dies and is damned.
It would be reasonable to ask whether most Heroic Age scenes of battle would
necessarily involve mentions of hands; after all how else would warriors swing
their swords? In any other Old English poem, that objection might make sense,
but not here. Beowulf does his most impressive deeds not with swords, like other
heroes in the canon, but with his bare hands-which, as Hrothgar tells us, have
 Wyrd,and Free Will in
Will 101
"Hand-Words," --e -Words, Beowulf
"Hand-
Fe inBewuf W - 0
--- "- d--, - 'I- -

the "strength of thirty" (380) in their grip. He kills Grendel with his bare hands;
he grapples with Grendel's mother using only his hands until he spots the an-
cient giants' sword; and after his final fight with the dragon, the poet tells us that
his death actually is owed to the excessive strength of his hands. They were, he
tells us, always too strong for swords, straining them to the point of breaking:
... Him paetgifeaene waes
paethim irennaecge mihton
helpanaethilde;was sio hond to strong,
se ae mecagehwaneminegefraege
swenge ofersohte,ponnehe to saeccebaer
waepenwund[r]umheard;nas him wihteoe sel.
(2682b-2687)

[... It was not given to him

Thatiron edges might for him
Help in battle;his hand was too strong,
Forany sword,it was told to me,
Was overstrainedby his stroke,when he bore to battle
Weaponshardfromwounds.It was not any betterforhim!]
Beowulf's special hand-prowess could simply have been a tradition that came
down to the scop, but that does not make it insignificant; details of legends were
not transmitted because they were trivial. Beowulf may be the only hero in a
Germanic saga not to have a famous ancestral sword, complete with its own ge-
nealogy. Hrunting is only borrowed, and he presents the ancient sword hilt to
Hrothgar after its blade melts in Grendel's mother's blood.
This omission becomes more intriguing when we consider that Beowulf's
own pedigree is none too illustrious. Hrothgar tells us that Beowulf's father, Ecg-
theow, almost caused a war between the Geats and the Wylfings when he killed
Heatholaf; the Geats exiled him to avoid this, and he remained an outcast until
Hrothgar redeemed him with wergild. When Beowulf returns to Geatland, we
find that he was suspected of being a sluggish coward in his youth (2183b-2188).
Beowulf achieves a transformation worthy of Shakespeare's Prince Hal without
the advantage of being a prince-he is only a minor cousin to Hygelac, and held
in low esteem at the beginning of his quest-in a world in which ancestry and
reputation are almost destiny. Because of this, I would suggest that Beowulf, with
that strength of thirty in his omnipresent hands, functions in the poem as a walk-
ing metaphor for the power of one's own will and courage to shape one's fate.
The pragmatic objection that one must fight using one's hands (whether they
are on a sword or on one's opponent) fails to explain away a number of things. As
we have seen in the occurrence of the hand-words during Beowulf's battle with
Grendel, the words do not always refer to actual combat. Nor does pragmatism
readily explain the compound words involving hands which occur like minor
formulas throughout the poem. Why should Beowulf's retainers repeatedly be
102 0
- I- - l -
SusanneWeil
Se nn W

called his handgesteallan: his "hand-troop?" Why should a treasure be called

hand-wundor: "hand-wonder?" Why should a killer be called mund-bora
("hand-bane") or hand-bana ("hand-killer")? Why the redundancy of mund-grip
("hand-grip")?Why should chain-mail armor repeatedly be described as hand-lo-
cen ("hand-linked")? If we assume that formulas come into being for a reason,
these composites seem to indicate that the words for "hand" carried a certain in-
tensifying significance for the Anglo-Saxons, an emphasis on the ability of man to
act, to destroy or create. If there was no such significance, bana, locen, regesteal-
lan, wundor and the rest could have been left to do their work alone. Surely the
poet could have come up with equally simple words of one syllable to eke out his
alliterative meter.

The pragmatic objection also fails to explain away the frequency of hand-words
in scenes of court politics, when no fighting whatsoever is going on. It is true that
some of the "testing" to which Beowulf is subjected comes in the form of stories
told either by him or about him, and that these stories tend to involve warfare.
Although some of the hand-words occur in the context of recounted battles, it is
far from true that all do. At 510, Unferth, describing Beowulf and Breca's swim-
ming contest, says that Beowulf swam with his hands-surely one swims with
one's entire body, but the contest was one of prowess and reputation, and so the
hand-word is present even when there is no practical need for it. Likewise, as
noted above, before the battle with Grendel, Beowulf prays that God will assign
victory "on whatever hand seems good to him." When, during the initial episode
at Hrothgar's court, Hrothgar reminds Beowulf of his father's crime (Geslohpin
fxder faehae maeste,/ wearp he Heapolafe to handbonan/ mid Wilfingum [459-
461]; "he forged a great feud, he became the hand-killer of Heatholaf among the
Wylfings"), the wording may remind us that the phrase "with (one's) own
hands" survives in contemporary English, and serves the same function, that of
adding emphasis to a deed. Why else should there be a hand-word present, when
a reflexive pronoun (you yourself, he himself, did x) would suffice? In Hrothgar's
example, Ecg-theow had to be exiled to prevent a war; it seems that to emphasize
the magnitude of the deed, the poet used the hand-word.

Understanding the significance of the hand-words may help disentangle the

critical controversy arising from attempts to make Beowulf square with the tenets
of modern Christianity. Some critics tend to see wyrd as purely restrictive, and
thus as implicitly contradicting the New Testament notion of free will: because
they see Beowulf as an early example of Anglo-Saxon Christian poetry, they tend
to label the references to wyrd as vestiges of an outworn creed. Others have
asserted that the passages naming God and his power are only insertions by prose-
lytizing monks: to them, the poem we have is marred, the name of God scribbled
across the vellum like medieval graffiti. Given the void that is our concrete evi-
dence about the poem's transmission, surely we have an obligation to consider
whether references to wyrd and God in the same poem are necessarily so self-con-
"Hn-od, Wyrd and
"Hand-Words,"
Wvrd,an Free
reWl i Beowulf
Will in ewi 103
0

tradictory as to render impossible the notion that the original significance of wyrd
in the poem might not have been distorted beyond recognition in transcription.
In his examination of wyrd in King Alfred's translation of Boethius' The
Consolation of Philosophy, B. J. Timmer notes that Alfred translated Boethius'
Latin fatum ("fate") as wyrd where it appears in Book IV (Timmer 124-25). This
could be taken to mean that by the time Alfred translated Boethius (between 892
and 899 A. D.) (Stanton 247), not significantly later than the earliest dates postu-
lated for Beowulf (Stanley 69; Whitelock 72-75), the Anglo-Saxons had come to
see wyrd as subordinate to God. But to see wyrd as subordinate to God in this con-
text is to misunderstand Lady Philosophy's proof that fate is actually God's provi-
dence realized through the unfolding of events. The only difference between fate
and providence in the Boethian system is the human perception of time: for
man, the future is going to express God's providence, whereas the past (fate) al-
ready has. The question becomes then whether God createsfate and providence: if
he creates it, then clearly he controls it, and the Anglo-Saxons would have been
accepting a new supreme power in accepting Christianity. However, the relevant
argument in the Consolationis Lady Philosophy's proof that God does not create
fate and that, therefore, men have free will. She argues that since God is greater
than time, necessarily true if God is omnipotent, for he is outside of time. Thus,
he sees our lives in their entirety, as completed works-but he does not author
those works. In other words, God sees what we will do without forcing us to do it.
This was an ingenious solution to the central logical problem of the Christian
system: if there were an all-powerful Shaper in the equation of creation, all
shapings seem to refer to him. What the Boethian system emphasizes is that part
of being all-powerful is having the power not to exercise your power-to leave
your creatures free to act on their own initiative.
The motif of the hand in Beowulf, emphasizing as it does the human reaction
to fated or providential events, suggests true compatibility between pagan and
Christian ideas about the relationships of men to whatever force controlled the
universe. If Beowulf was typical of Anglo-Saxon epic, then the Anglo-Saxons
were less concerned with what to name the force behind events (fate or God) than
they were with their own responsibility to shape noble reactions to those events.
This would explain the coexistence in the poem of prayers to an evidently
Christian God and pronouncements about the ancient force of wyrd. When
Christianity came to the English, then, it seems that those able to grasp the argu-
ment that the Boethian concept of God's foreknowledge of our acts did not equal
foreordination of those acts may have welcomed the idea as a fresh approach to
an old problem. Those who could not read, but were told of the shift in doctrine
might have shrugged: they knew that they bore responsibility for their own ac-
tions, whether foreknown by God or forecast by fate.
Of course, in trading in their ancient religion for Christianity, the Anglo-
Saxons made at least one major shift in world-view: they replaced the bleak pic-
104 104 SusanneWeil
Susanne
Weil~~~~~~~~~I

ture of chaos overwhelming all human effort with the brighter vista afforded by
the promise of eternal life in Christ. It would be absurd to contend that this did
not happen in Anglo-Saxon culture; I merely contend that it does not happen in
Beowulf. The only form of eternal life mentioned by the scop is that of reputa-
tion: langsum lof ("long-lasting praise"). He tells us that Beowulf goes to heaven,
but whether the heaven in which Anglo-Saxon warriors fought and feasted away
the ages, or the New Testament heaven, is never made clear.

If adopting Christianity had forced the Anglo-Saxons to dispense with their

entire system of belief, would they have done it? Did the missionaries convince
them that their old ways were wanting? Beowulf does not read like a confession
of cultural inferiority; as Stanley Greenfield points out, it is written in the celebra-
tory style of fin-de-siecleepic (Greenfield 105). It makes more sense to suggest that
the Anglo-Saxons adopted Christianity because, in the Boethian form in which it
came to them, it matched their notion that one held the responsibility-and, in
the form of reputation, the credit-for one's acts, no matter who or what con-
trolled the universe. It would have seemed an added benefit that Boethian
Christianity emphasized the importance of personal honor and self-reliance in a
context where those qualities could earn an eternal reward. But it is important to
remember that, as elaborated in The Consolation of Philosophy, Christianity's
eternal reward is not the religion's most significant element: its emphasis is on
the preservation of personal integrity as its own reward, not as the key to the
kingdom of heaven, though it was also that. The only Christianity that the
Anglo-Saxons could have adopted was one that meshed with their own
modgepanc: after all, it was not news to them that salvation, if attainable, was in
their own hands.
NOTES

1. All passages from Beowulf are from Dobbie, E.V.K.,Beowulfand Judith,vol. 4 of The Anglo-
SaxonPoeticRecords.New York:ColumbiaUP, 1953.All translationsare my own.

2. See A Concordance
to the Anglo-SaxonPoeticRecords.

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