Beowulf

The finest and most considerable heroic poem in Old English, has survived in a
single manuscript, which, to judge by the handwriting of its two scribes, must have
been written c.1000. It first aroused scholarly interest in 1705, when Humphrey
Wanley described and quoted from it in his catalogue of manuscripts, but in 1731 it
was damaged by fire, and has since deteriorated. However, two copies were
completed by 1787 for the Icelander Grimur Jonsson Thorkelin; the first, Thorkelin A,
by a professional copyist, and the second, Thorkelin B, by Thorkelin himself. These
two transcripts are indispensable to modern scholars since much of the manuscript
which has now vanished was then visible. Thorkelin’s transcript was the basis of the
first printed edition (1815). The name of the hero, Beowulf, whose exploits and
character provide the connecting theme of the work, is accepted as the title of the
poem, which in the manuscript is untitled.

Content of the Poem

A summary of the events in the poem gives some impression of its scope
though nothing compared to the total effect, which is gained by the superb
harmonizing of the theme with the poetic method.

The royal house of Denmark, once renowned for its power through the
northern world, is now shamed by the attacks of an anthropomorphous monster,
Grendel, who nightly carries off men from King Hroðgar’s great hall Heorot, until no
Danish warrior dare remain there after dark. Beowulf, a young noble of the Geatas (a
people who lived in southern Sweden) sails to Denmark with 14 companions to offer
his help. He is welcomed by King Hroðgar (Hrothgar) who, after a banquet where the
hero’s character and achievements are explored, entrusts the hall to his charge.
Grendel comes, and devours one of Beowulf’s companions, but Beowulf, unarmed,
mortally wounds the monster by tearing off his arm in a tremendous battle.

The next day all is rejoicing in Heorot, and Beowulf is feted and honoured with
gifts, but that same night, when Beowulf and his Geatas sleep elsewhere, Grendel’s
death is avenged by his mother, who carries off from the hall one of Hroðgar’s most
eminent retainers. Beowulf offers to seek her out in her home at the bottom of a lonely
mere in the hills. Fully armed the hero dives into the mere and the monster drags him
into her home where Grendel lies dead. Beowulf is nearly worsted when his sword
fails against her, but he is saved by noticing a giant sword hanging on the wall with
which he manages to kill her. The hilt of this sword and Grendel’s head he takes as
trophies back to Heorot.

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 Enriched with honour and princely gifts Beowulf sails home and tells the story
of his exploits to his uncle King Hygelac who rewards him with lands and an
honoured position in his kingdom. Beowulf serves the king and his son Heardred
until Heardred is killed in battle against the Swedes. Then by popular consent Beowulf
becomes king and reigns wisely, maintaining peace and justice for 50 years. The events
of his reign are quickly passed over but the poet describes his last battle in detail.

A dragon, roused by a theft from the treasure it has guarded for 300 years,
ravages the land and to save his people Beowulf goes out to kill it. This fight is much
slower than the two of Beowulf’s youth. Memories of the hero’s past achievements
and speeches which sum up the experiences of his life give the prelude to the fight a
dreamlike quality, but when the dragon is eventually roused its appearance is so
terrible that the aged king’s 11 followers flee and leave him to struggle, mortally
wounded, in the dragon’s grip. Only his young kinsman Wiglaf comes to his aid and
together they kill the monster. Before Beowulf dies, Wiglaf shows him part of the
treasure that he has won for his people. However, Wiglaf, who succeds to the
kingship, and also conducts Beowulf’s magnificent funeral, decrees that the people
shall not benefit from the ill-fated treasure and prophesies disaster for the Geatish
nation who so failed their king.

Beowulf is cremated and his ashes, with the dragon’s treasure, are buried in a
great mound. The poem ends with the Geatish warriors’ lament for their king: “the
kindest and gentlest of men, the most considerate to his people, and most eager for
glory.”

Nature of the Poem

We do not know whether a historical Beowulf ever existed, but if he did his
deeds were certainly not those of the hero of the poem. As critics have shown, exploits
such as the tearing off of the monster’s arm and the underwater fight can be paralleled
in ancient stories as far apart as Ireland and Mexico. Nevertheless his story gains in
effect by being set in a historical background of 6 th-century Scandinavia, peopled by
figures that we, like the original audience, know to have existed. The Old English
audiences liked their stories to be “adorned with truth” and the detailed reminiscences
in Beowulf of the wars between the Sweedes and the Geatas, the ancient rivalries of the
Danes and the Heaðobards, and the Hygelac’s ill-fated attack on the Rhineland,
satisfied this desire.

References to such wars and to characters from traditional heroic stories, the
retrospective allusions to Beowulf’s achievements, and the long speeches which take
up 1,300 lines, have been considered irrelevant hindrances to the advance of the story
by critics who have attempted to apply classical standards of narrative structure to the

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poem. The main story, also, has not escaped stricture both because of the seemingly
imperfect balance of the three combats and because the hero is shown solely as a
monster killer. However, on the whole modern critics have tended to applaud the
poet’s achievement. The poem’s division into two narrative blocks (the second
beginning with Beowulf’s recapitulaton of his exploits in Denmark) could be
explained by the exigencies of oral delivery, but artistically the balance between the
combats of the hero’s youth and age, with their skilfully differentiated tone and subtle
narrative links, justifies itself.

The evidence of English place names testifies to the reality of Beowulf’s

monsters to the Anglo-Saxon audience, and archaeology provides some evidence that
the man-against-beast combat was a well-known theme in pagan Germanic times. Yet
in tracing the descent of the Grendel tribe from Cain, the poet gives the struggle a
further dimension: Grendel and his mother are not entirely symbolic, but like the
dragon –otherwise a different type of antagonist, as befits the slayer of the hero– they
are irredeemably destructive and malignant to mankind.

Against the poem’s background of feuds, divided loyalties and self-seeking

ambition Beowulf’s “noble, disinterested deeds for the good of the human race” (D.
Whitelock, The Audience of Beowulf, Oxford University Press, 1951) shine the more
brightly, although he is neither a symbol nor a superman but a human being whose
achievements are necessarily incomplete.

The formal technique of the Beowulf poet largely conforms to traditional

Germanic practice. The metrical unit is that of all Old English poetry, a line divided
into two halves of equal weight linked by alliteration. The five basic stress patterns can
be emphasized by the alliteration and coincide with the stress in sense. Much of the
vocabulary of Beowulf must have had a long poetic descent, but the poetic diction as a
whole is richer in both quantity and quality than that of other Old English poems. This
is shown most clearly in the stylistic devices of contrast and variation, and these are
used even in the total narrative structure of the poem where the hero’s character and
achievements are built up in a series of contrasting references. Also, apparent
identities in the human situation are shown to cover subtle and often ironically
dramatic differences, as in the way Hroðgar and Beowulf face the troubles that beset
them in their old age. One of the most polished examples of subsidiary narrative
variation is seen in the account of Grendel’s approach to Heorot: here by repetition
and variation the poet conveys not only the monster’s menacing advance and his state
of mind but gives an increasingly clear impression of him, from the first introduction
as sceadugenga (“walker in the shadows”), to the more substantial fiend whose eyes
shine fearsomely in the darkness as he finally bursts into the hall.

It is in the creation of compounds like “sceadugenga,” known only in Beowulf,

that the poet is most original and characteristic. Such appellations, which highlight

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one aspect of the subject’s being, he uses most freely to achieve particularly solemn
and elevated effects, for example in the account of Scyld’s ship burial:

Then last they set a golden banner high over his head,

let the sea carry him off, gave him to the stormy ocean;

they were sad at heart, oppressed in spirit.

No man can truly say, neither the retainers in the hall

nor the heroes under the heavens, who received that cargo.

Here the sharp picture of the golden banner is followed by the repetition of
Scyld’s committal to the sea varied in two traditional terms, but the sea plays an
active, then a passive role, and this is mirrored in the stress patterns. The variation in
diction and metre to express the feelings of the grieving followers, and the
qualification of men into two traditional groups, are typical examples of the poet’s
effective marriage of style and content.

Dating of the Poem

When exactly the poem as we know it first came into being and where, is still
impossible to decide. It seems clear that the work, with its lenghy descriptions of
fighting and armour, political events, court life and the social and moral problems of
the layman, was intended for the entertainment of a secular audience. However
Christianty has so deeply penetrated the language, metaphor and thought of the poem
that we must assume an audience with some tradition of Christianity and most
probably Christian poetry behind it. The poet naturally presupposes also a wide
knowledge of traditional heroic stories but he penetrates below the surface of such
stories and their conventional situations, sympatheticaly considering the sufferings of
innocent participants, the impermanence of success and happiness, and the courage of
the heroes who had to live without the consolation of Christianity. We do not know if
the author of Beowulf was the first to provide this sort of treatment of the traditional
past since the poem is unique of its type, but it is normally assumed today that such
poetry could hardly have evolved before the 8 th century. At that time however, the
courts of several of the English kingdoms could have provided a sympathetic
audience, although there are features in the language of the poem that point to the
Anglican origin.

It has sometimes been assumed that archaeological evidence can date the poem
more exactly by providing dated parallels for the material conditions of the aristocratic
life the poet describes. Unfortunately the evidence is still incomplete. Most of the
illustrative material comes from grave goods buried in the pagan manner with the

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dead, and as this custom had ceased by the end of the 7 th century the material
conditions of that time are little known. Consequently, it is impossible to know how
far the poet modernized his story and how far he drew on traditional descriptions
form earlier heroic poetry. It seems likely that certain descriptions, for example of the
battle equipment of the heroes of the past, became appropriate by long usage but it
must also be remembered that such equipment was much prized by the earliest
English and handed down as heirlooms. A poet with a historical sense could describe
such heirlooms accurately when, like the author of Beowulf, he specifically mentions
that a certain piece was ancient.

The rich 7th-century ship burial discovered in 1939 at Sutton Hoo, Suffolk, with
its wealth of imported silverware, its weapons and armor adorned with gold and
jewels, has shown that the Beowulf poet’s descriptions of the equipment and lavish
burials of kings was neither exaggerated nor dependent on pre-English traditions.
Moreover Sutton Hoo, showing as it does close links with Swedish art and customs,
helps to explain why traditional stories from Scandinavia should have been current
among the English.

There is a curious mixture of heathen and Christian elements in the burial and
there was no trace at Sutton Hoo (or in Beowulf) of the human or animal sacrifices
which were a feature of fully pagan burial rites. It is not certain however whether the
poet only knew traditions of such transitional-type funerals or whether he edited fully
heathen accounts for himself.

Sutton Hoo does not tell us the date of Beowulf, but does at least provide the
closest parallels yet known for conditions described in the poem. Likewise, the
excavation of the first Anglo-Saxon royal buildings, at Yeavering in Northumberland,
is an eloquent illustration of how the great wooden halls such as Heorot must have
appeared to the original audience. Archaeological evidence can considerably enrich a
study of the poem. It provides proof of the tastes, the external splendour, the delight
in craftsmanship, of a society for which Beowulf is otherwise our solitary witness.

Beowulf, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Volume 3

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