Beowulf różne

Beowulf Criticism

Beowulf: some critical perspectives

What follows are excerpts from 5 critics writing on Beowulf. The excerpts are arranged chronologically. All texts are in the library (along with many more. Should you find a passage from a critic you find wonderful, show it to me and I will post it.).

Archibald Strong. A Short History of English Literature. Oxford U P: 1921

Beowulf is the picture of a whole civilization, of the Germania which Tacitus describes. The main interest which the poem has for us is thus not a purely literary interest. Beowulf is an important historical document (2-3)

J.R.R. Tolkein. Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics .1936. Rep. Folcroft Press: 1969

.the monsters are not an inexplicable blunder of taste; they are essential, fundamentally allied to the underlying ideas of the poem, which give it its lofty tone and high seriousness..Most important is it to consider how and why the monsters become 'adversaries of God,' and so begin to symbolize (and ultimately to become identified with) the powers of evil, even while they remain, as they do remain in Beowulf, mortal denizens of the material world..(16-18)

It would really have been preposterous, if the poet had recounted Beowulf's rise to fame in a 'typical' or 'commonplace' war in Frisia, and then ended him with a dragon. If the dragon is the right end for Beowulf, and I agree with the author that it is, then Grendel is an eminently suitable beginning. They are creatures, feond mancynnes, of a similar order and kindred significance. Triumph over the lesser and more nearly human is cancelled by defeat before the older and more elemental. .It is just because the main foes in Beowulf are inhuman that the story is larger and more significant. It glimpses the cosmic and moves with the thought of all men concerning the fate of human life and efforts; it stands amid but above the petty wars of princes, and surpasses the dates and limits of historical periods, however important..

Beowulf is not a 'primitive' poem; it is a late one, using the materials (then still plentiful) preserved from a day already changing and passing, a time that has now for ever vanished, swallowed in oblivion; using them for a new purpose, with a wider sweep of imagination, if with a less bitter and concentrated force. It is in fact written in a language that after many centuries has still essential kinship with our own, it was made in this land, and moves in our northern world beneath our northern sky, and for those who are native to that tongue and land, it must ever call with a profound appeal-until the dragon comes . ( 32-34)

James W. Earl. Thinking about 'Beowulf' Stanford U P: 1994.

Beowulf depicts a struggle to impose order on real social chaos (44)..

Like heroic literature everywhere, Beowulf takes place in an age set between myth and history. Heroes, the founders of civilization, are descended from the gods, as we are in turn descended from the heroes. The Heroic Age mediates temporally between this world and the other. A culture projects into its Heroic Age its own ideal forms, against which it can measure itself, and the hero is an ideal type against whom men can measure their behavior-although by this measure cultures and men will always be found deficient. The Heroic Age always reveals the fallen nature of the present age by contrast. .Although the heroic world is symbolic it is not mythical, because it shades imperceptibly into the historical, whereas myth remains transcendent; so in the heroic world mythological themes can be explored in human-historical terms, and in this regard a Heroic Age resembles sacred history. If the mythical world is separate from the historical, the heroic world fills the gap between the two.

The heroic world of Beowulf occupies this intermediate zone between myth and history (45-46).

John M. Hill. The Cultural World in Beowulf.. U of Toronto P: 1995.

The poet's double-perspective on the world of his noble characters might have led him to a Christian distancing from his material. Instead, I have argued, he everywhere underwrites the essential values of that world, which he owns as well, and which he sanctions by every means available to him. If the poet's theistic Christianity has done anything for him in his view of the heroic past it has extended ultimate truth to the rightly oriented perceptions of his noble characters. Thus Grendel is not simply an evil-minded, misbegotten creature; he is of the lineage of Cain by association, of devils in some way, and thus of mankind's enemy in the cosmic sense. But the world goes on in its changeable and violent ways; there is no clear view in the poem that times have got better since those days. Beowulf is both an unsurpassble battle-king and an ideal social king for all times; his death and the subsequent plight of his Geats are poignant aspects of life, not part of a doomed past from which Christians have miraculously escaped through Christ's intervention. (145)

Alvin A. Lee Gold-Hall and Earth-Dragon: Beowulf as Metaphor. U of Toronto P:1998.

It is a main contention of this book that Beowulf belongs to an area or mode of language in which metaphor is both functional and pervasive. There is a large difference between explicit metaphor, which announces its presence by a 'this is that' predication ('the ship is a bird'), and implicit metaphor, which is based on juxtaposition, association, and intensified uses of language. Whatever imagination fashioned Beowulf, it is clear that it did not feel a need to spell out or grammatically announce for prosaic, analytic, descriptive minds the host of metaphorical identities that are established by the interconnections which exist in the verbal patterns of this text . The world of the poem is intensely alive emotionally. A radically anthropocentric ontology informs its mode of language. It is pervaded by an animism that finds numerous interconnections between the human and the non-human, both within created nature (.'winter locked the waves in ice-bonds,' 1132b-3a;.'Heaven swallowed the smoke,' 3155b) and in human actions(.'until a word's point [or 'front'] broke through a breast-hoard,' 2791b-2a).

The contents of the poem are not objectified by a seeing, observing, and describing mind separate from those contents. Rather, the narrator presents and characterizes the contents. Often he identifies and comments sympathetically or negatively on the things, people, places, and events within the story.(57).

The essence of the tragedy in Beowulf is an intense vision of what it is that sustains a human society and life itself and what it is that destroys them (243).

Beowulf: discussion questions

1. It appears that Grendel is not angered until after Heorot was built. What does Heorot represent ? What is the relationship between the building of Heorot and Grendel's anger?

2.. Why does Beowulf want to help Hrothgar? Explain the motivations you find.

3. List the qualities you find mentioned in the poem that make Beowulf admired as a hero or worthy man? Was he always marked for greatness?

4. Discuss the presentation of Grendel, Grendel's Mother, and the Dragon. Are they allied with a Christian view of evil? Are they symbols in the context of the poem? (read the Tolkein excerpt) Find passages that support your claim.

5. Many critics have noted a kind of design for terror in the total structure of the poem. Is each of Beowulf's battles more dangerous? On more unfamiliar ground? With fewer companions to accompany him? With more doubt regarding the outcome? Find passages that support your views.

6. "The epic-as opposed to the merely heroic-potentialities of this story are activated by its relation to the wider theme of human social order. The story of Beowulf is not of a hero's fortune's against three monsters but of a hero defending mankind against its enemies." Michael Alexander. "Introduction." Beowulf: A verse Translation by Michael Alexander. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973: 31.

7. Do the long digressions, such as the story of Finn, extend and complement the poem or do they pull you away from the poem. Explain your position.

8. There are 5 ways of looking at Beowulf's death:

The aged hero is indeed perfect, either as a secular hero or as an exemplar of Christ, making his death a great and wondrous gift liberating his people from evil.
Beowulf's eagerness for treasure and adventure is a character flaw that causes his death
Beowulf is a secular hero and falls short of the Christian virtues demanded by the poet and as such, his death is a sad but fitting fate.
He dies because he is an old king, as Hrothgar was, except no young heroes will come forward to fight for him.
He dies because we all die. "Beowulf resists evil for a time, but what hurts us, finally kills him. The ethical life of the poem, then, depends.[on the idea] that evil can sometimes be identified, that those who fight it are good and those who conquer forms of it are wonderful, but that finally the evil that is part of this life is too much for the preeminent man, as it is for the rest of us." A. Kent Hieatt. "Introduction." Beowulf and other Old English Poems. Indianapolis: Odyssey, 1967: 9.

Is Beowulf a Christian hero or is he a pagan ? Is the worldview of the poem positive or dark?
Does the poet regret the passing of the Geats? See them as deserving their fate? See their fate as the inevitable fate of all mankind?
Explain the operation and attitude to wyrd in the poem. Is Beowulf favored or does he win by his own skill? If you believe that wyrd operates, what dimension does that add to the poem and the audience's view of Beowulf's role in civilization?

Myth Elements

Inclusiveness of scope

Lifecycle of a hero and a people
Contains history of Sweden over 3 generations, some of Danish and Geatish people
Incorporates earlier myths of Germanic people-Sigemund as well as Old Testament Creation

Unity of ethos rather than action.

Sense of acceptance of world of hero and that society
Occasional voice of nostalgia, even moralizing
Sense of a cycle of life

Objectivity of treatment

No oversimplification of good and bad.

Traditional presentation of life in heroic world, with voyage, welcome, feast, boasts, arming, fights, reward, homecoming, death.
Contains a self-sustaining order and coherence
Detachment from the human viewpoint, so we can see an incident as a tableau-invested with meaning.
Overall is wyrd, the inevitable shape and pattern of things.

Hero is the centre of story

Hero is a man but also an emblem of the human social order

Hero's story seems to resonate with forces of

life and death and tensions between life and death,
harmony and chaos,
good and evil,
civilization and light against the wasteland and darkness

Boewulf - context

Though it is often viewed both as the archetypal Anglo-Saxon literary work and as a cornerstone of modern literature, Beowulf has a peculiar history that complicates both its historical and its canonical position in English literature. By the time the story of Beowulf was composed by an unknown Anglo-Saxon poet around 700 A.D., much of its material had been in circulation in oral narrative for many years. The Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian peoples had invaded the island of Britain and settled there several hundred years earlier, bringing with them several closely related Germanic languages that would evolve into Old English. Elements of the Beowulf story—including its setting and characters—date back to the period before the migration. The action of the poem takes place around 500 A.D. Many of the characters in the poem—the Swedish and Danish royal family members, for example—correspond to actual historical figures. Originally pagan warriors, the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian invaders experienced a large-scale conversion to Christianity at the end of the sixth century. Though still an old pagan story, Beowulf thus came to be told by a Christian poet. The Beowulf poet is often at pains to attribute Christian thoughts and motives to his characters, who frequently behave in distinctly un-Christian ways. The Beowulf that we read today is therefore probably quite unlike the Beowulf with which the first Anglo- Saxon audiences were familiar. The element of religious tension is quite common in Christian Anglo-Saxon writings (The Dream of the Rood, for example), but the combination of a pagan story with a Christian narrator is fairly unusual. The plot of the poem concerns Scandinavian culture, but much of the poem's narrative intervention reveals that the poet's culture was somewhat different from that of his ancestors, and that of his characters as well.

The world that Beowulf depicts and the heroic code of honor that defines much of the story is a relic of pre-Anglo-Saxon culture. The story is set in Scandinavia, before the migration. Though it is a traditional story—part of a Germanic oral tradition—the poem as we have it is thought to be the work of a single poet. It was composed in England (not in Scandinavia) and is historical in its perspective, recording the values and culture of a bygone era. Many of those values, including the heroic code, were still operative to some degree in when the poem was written. These values had evolved to some extent in the intervening centuries and were continuing to change. In the Scandinavian world of the story, tiny tribes of people rally around strong kings, who protect their people from danger—especially from confrontations with other tribes. The warrior culture that results from this early feudal arrangement is extremely important, both to the story and to our understanding of Saxon civilization. Strong kings demand bravery and loyalty from their warriors, whom they repay with treasures won in war. Mead-halls such as Heorot in Beowulf were places where warriors would gather in the presence of their lord to drink, boast, tell stories, and receive gifts. Although these mead-halls offered sanctuary, the early Middle Ages were a dangerous time, and the paranoid sense of foreboding and doom that runs throughout Beowulf evidences the constant fear of invasion that plagued Scandinavian society.

Only a single manuscript of Beowulf survived the Anglo-Saxon era. For many centuries, the manuscript was all but forgotten, and, in the 1700s, it was nearly destroyed in a fire. It was not until the nineteenth century that widespread interest in the document emerged among scholars and translators of Old English. For the first hundred years of Beowulf's prominence, interest in the poem was primarily historical—the text was viewed as a source of information about the Anglo-Saxon era. It was not until 1936, when the Oxford scholar J.R.R. Tolkien (who later wrote The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, works heavily influenced by Beowulf) published a groundbreaking paper entitled "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" that the manuscript gained recognition as a serious work of art.

Beowulf is now widely taught and is often presented as the first important work of English literature, creating the impression that Beowulf is in some way the source of the English canon. But because it was not widely read until the 1800s and not widely regarded as an important artwork until the 1900s, Beowulf has had little direct impact on the development of English poetry. In fact, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Pope, Shelley, Keats, and most other important English writers before the 1930s had little or no knowledge of the epic. It was not until the mid-to-late twentieth century that Beowulf began to influence writers, and, since then, it has had a marked impact on the work of many important novelists and poets, including W.H. Auden, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, and Seamus Heaney, the 1995 recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature, whose recent translation of the epic is the edition used for this SparkNote.

BEOWULF

Plot Overview

King Hrothgar of Denmark, a descendant of the great king Shield Sheafson, enjoys a prosperous and successful reign. He builds a great mead-hall, called Heorot, where his warriors can gather to drink, receive gifts from their lord, and listen to stories sung by the scops, or bards. But the jubilant noise from Heorot angers Grendel, a horrible demon who lives in the swamplands of Hrothgar's kingdom. Grendel begins terrorizing the Danes every night, killing them and easily defeating their efforts to fight back. The Danes suffer many years of fear, danger, and death at the hands of Grendel. Eventually, however, a young Geatish warrior named Beowulf hears of Hrothgar's plight. Inspired by the challenge, Beowulf sails to Denmark with a small company of men, determined to defeat Grendel.

Hrothgar, who had once done a great favor for Beowulf's father Ecgtheow, accepts Beowulf's offer to fight Grendel and holds a feast in the hero's honor. During the feast, an envious Dane named Unferth taunts Beowulf and accuses him of being unworthy of his reputation. Beowulf responds with a boastful description of some of his past accomplishments. His confidence cheers the Danish warriors, and the feast lasts merrily into the night. At last, however, Grendel arrives. Beowulf fights him unarmed, proving himself stronger than the demon, who is terrified. As Grendel struggles to escape, Beowulf tears the monster's arm off. Mortally wounded, Grendel slinks back into the swamp to die. The severed arm is hung high in the mead-hall as a trophy of victory.

Overjoyed, Hrothgar showers Beowulf with gifts and treasure at a feast in his honor. Songs are sung in praise of Beowulf, and the celebration lasts late into the night. But another threat is approaching. Grendel's mother, a swamp-hag who lives in a desolate lake, comes to Heorot seeking revenge for her son's death. She murders Aeschere, one of Hrothgar's most trusted advisers, before slinking away. To avenge Aeschere's death, the company travels to the murky swamp, where Beowulf dives into the water and fights Grendel's mother in her underwater lair. He kills her with a sword forged for a giant, then, finding Grendel's corpse, decapitates it and brings the head as a prize to Hrothgar. The Danish countryside is now purged of its treacherous monsters.

The Danes are again overjoyed, and Beowulf's fame spreads across the kingdom. Beowulf departs after a sorrowful goodbye to Hrothgar, who has treated him like a son. He returns to Geatland, where he and his men are reunited with their king and queen, Hygelac and Hygd, to whom Beowulf recounts his adventures in Denmark. Beowulf then hands over most of his treasure to Hygelac, who, in turn, rewards him.

In time, Hygelac is killed in a war against the Shylfings, and, after Hygelac's son dies, Beowulf ascends to the throne of the Geats. He rules wisely for fifty years, bringing prosperity to Geatland. When Beowulf is an old man, however, a thief disturbs a barrow, or mound, where a great dragon lies guarding a horde of treasure. Enraged, the dragon emerges from the barrow and begins unleashing fiery destruction upon the Geats. Sensing his own death approaching, Beowulf goes to fight the dragon. With the aid of Wiglaf, he succeeds in killing the beast, but at a heavy cost. The dragon bites Beowulf in the neck, and its fiery venom kills him moments after their encounter. The Geats fear that their enemies will attack them now that Beowulf is dead. According to Beowulf's wishes, they burn their departed king's body on a huge funeral pyre and then bury him with a massive treasure in a barrow overlooking the sea.

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Beowulf (In-Depth Analysis)

Beowulf exemplifies the traits of the perfect hero. The poem explores his heroism in two separate phases—youth and age—and through three separate and increasingly difficult conflicts—with Grendel, Grendel's mother, and the dragon. Although we can view these three encounters as expressions of the heroic code, there is perhaps a clearer division between Beowulf's youthful heroism as an unfettered warrior and his mature heroism as a reliable king. These two phases of his life, separated by fifty years, correspond to two different models of virtue, and much of the moral reflection in the story centers on differentiating these two models and on showing how Beowulf makes the transition from one to the other.

In his youth, Beowulf is a great warrior, characterized predominantly by his feats of strength and courage, including his fabled swimming match against Breca. He also perfectly embodies the manners and values dictated by the Germanic heroic code, including loyalty, courtesy, and pride. His defeat of Grendel and Grendel's mother validates his reputation for bravery and establishes him fully as a hero. In first part of the poem, Beowulf matures little, as he possesses heroic qualities in abundance from the start. Having purged Denmark of its plagues and established himself as a hero, however, he is ready to enter into a new phase of his life. Hrothgar, who becomes a mentor and father figure to the young warrior, begins to deliver advice about how to act as a wise ruler. Though Beowulf does not become king for many years, his exemplary career as a warrior has served in part to prepare him for his ascension to the throne.

The second part of the story, set in Geatland, skips over the middle of Beowulf's career and focuses on the very end of his life. Through a series of retrospectives, however, we recover much of what happens during this gap and therefore are able to see how Beowulf comports himself as both a warrior and a king. The period following Hygelac's death is an important transitional moment for Beowulf. Instead of rushing for the throne himself, as Hrothulf does in Denmark, he supports Hygelac's son, the rightful heir. With this gesture of loyalty and respect for the throne, he proves himself worthy of kingship

In the final episode—the encounter with the dragon—the poet reflects further on how the responsibilities of a king, who must act for the good of the people and not just for his own glory, differ from those of the heroic warrior. In light of these meditations, Beowulf's moral status becomes somewhat ambiguous at the poem's end. Though he is deservedly celebrated as a great hero and leader, his last courageous fight is also somewhat rash. The poem suggests that, by sacrificing himself, Beowulf unnecessarily leaves his people without a king, exposing them to danger from other tribes. To understand Beowulf's death strictly as a personal failure, however, is to neglect the overwhelming emphasis given to fate in this last portion of the poem. The conflict with the dragon has an aura of inevitability about it. Rather than a conscious choice, the battle can also be interpreted as a matter in which Beowulf has very little choice or free will at all. Additionally, it is hard to blame him for acting according to the dictates of his warrior culture.

GRENDEL

Likely the poem's most memorable creation, Grendel is one of the three monsters that Beowulf battles. His nature is ambiguous. Though he has many animal attributes and a grotesque, monstrous appearance, he seems to be guided by vaguely human emotions and impulses, and he shows more of an interior life than one might expect. Exiled to the swamplands outside the boundaries of human society, Grendel is an outcast who seems to long to be reinstated. The poet hints that behind Grendel's aggression against the Danes lies loneliness and jealousy. By lineage, Grendel is a member of "Cain's clan, whom the creator had outlawed / and condemned as outcasts." (106-107). He is thus descended from a figure who epitomizes resentment and malice. While the poet somewhat sympathetically suggests that Grendel's deep bitterness about being excluded from the revelry in the mead-hall owes, in part, to his accursed status, he also points out that Grendel is "[m]alignant by nature" and that he has "never show[n] remorse" (137).

Analysis of Major Characters

Beowulf - Beowulf exemplifies the traits of the perfect hero. The poem explores his heroism in two separate phases—youth and age—and through three separate and increasingly difficult conflicts—with Grendel, Grendel's mother, and the dragon. Although we can view these three encounters as expressions of the heroic code, there is perhaps a clearer division between Beowulf's youthful heroism as an unfettered warrior and his mature heroism as a reliable king. These two phases of his life, separated by fifty years, correspond to two different models of virtue, and much of the moral reflection in the story centers on differentiating these two models and on showing how Beowulf makes the transition from one to the other.

Grendel - Likely the poem's most memorable creation, Grendel is one of the three monsters that Beowulf battles. His nature is ambiguous. Though he has many animal attributes and a grotesque, monstrous appearance, he seems to be guided by vaguely human emotions and impulses, and he shows more of an interior life than one might expect. Exiled to the swamplands outside the boundaries of human society, Grendel is an outcast who seems to long to be reinstated. The poet hints that behind Grendel's aggression against the Danes lies loneliness and jealousy. By lineage, Grendel is a member of "Cain's clan, whom the creator had outlawed / and condemned as outcasts." (106-107). He is thus descended from a figure who epitomizes resentment and malice. While the poet somewhat sympathetically suggests that Grendel's deep bitterness about being excluded from the revelry in the mead-hall owes, in part, to his accursed status, he also points out that Grendel is "[m]alignant by nature" and that he has "never show[n] remorse" (137).

Hrothgar - Hrothgar, the aged ruler of the Danes who accepts Beowulf's help in the first part of the story, aids Beowulf's development into maturity. Hrothgar is a relatively static character, a force of stability in the social realm. Although he is as solidly rooted in the heroic code as Beowulf is, his old age and his experience with both good and ill fortune have caused him to develop a more reflective attitude toward heroism than Beowulf possesses. He is aware of both the privileges and the dangers of power, and he warns his young protégé not to give in to pride and always to remember that blessings may turn to grief. Hrothgar's meditations on heroism and leadership, which take into account a hero's entire life span rather than just his valiant youth, reveal the contrast between youth and old age that forms the turning point in Beowulf's own development.

Unferth - Unferth's challenge to Beowulf's honor differentiates him from Beowulf and helps to reveal some of the subtleties of the heroic code that the warriors must follow. Unferth is presented as a lesser man, a foil for the near-perfect Beowulf. (A foil is a character whose traits contrast with and thereby accentuate those of another character) The bitterness of Unferth's chiding of Beowulf about his swimming match with Breca clearly reflects his jealousy of the attention that Beowulf receives. It probably also stems from his shame at being unable to protect Heorot himself—he is clearly not the sort of great warrior whom legend will remember. While boasting is a proper and acceptable form of self-assertion, Unferth's harsh words show that it ought not to be bitter or disparaging of others. Rather than heroism, Unferth's blustering reveals pride and resentment. Later, Unferth's gift of his sword for Beowulf's fight against Grendel's mother heals Unferth's breach of hospitality, but it does little to improve his heroic status. Unlike Beowulf, Unferth is clearly afraid to fight the monster himself.

Wiglaf - Wiglaf, one of Beowulf's kinsmen and thanes, is the only warrior brave enough to help the hero in his fight against the dragon. Wiglaf conforms perfectly to the heroic code in that he is willing to die attempting to defeat the opponent and, more importantly, to save his lord. In this regard, Wiglaf appears as a reflection of the young Beowulf in the first part of the story—a warrior who is strong, fearless, valiant, and loyal. He embodies Beowulf's statement from the early scenes of the poem that it is always better to act than to grieve. Wiglaf thus represents the next generation of heroism and the future of the kingdom. His bravery and solid bearing provide the single glint of optimism in the final part of the story, which, for the most part, is dominated by a tone of despair at what the future holds.

Themes, Motifs, and Symbols

Themes

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work

The Importance of Establishing Identity - As Beowulf is essentially a record of heroic deeds, the concept of identity—of which the two principal components are ancestral heritage and individual reputation—is clearly central to the poem. The opening passages introduce the reader to a world in which every male figure is known as his father's son. Characters in the poem are unable to talk about their identity or even introduce themselves without referring to family lineage. This concern with family history is so prominent because of the poem's emphasis on kinship bonds. Characters take pride in ancestors who have acted valiantly, and they attempt to live up to the same standards as those ancestors.

While heritage may provide models for behavior and help to establish identity—as with the line of Danish kings discussed early on—a good reputation is the key to solidifying and augmenting one's identity. For example, Shield Sheafson, the legendary originator of the Danish royal line, was orphaned; because he was in a sense fatherless, valiant deeds were the only means by which he could construct an identity for himself. While Beowulf's pagan warrior culture seems not to have a concept of the afterlife, it sees fame as a way of ensuring that an individual's memory will continue on after death—an understandable preoccupation in a world where death seems always to be knocking at the door.

Tensions between the Heroic Code and other Value Systems - Much of Beowulf is devoted to articulating and illustrating the Germanic heroic code, which values strength, courage, and loyalty in warriors; hospitality, generosity, and political skill in kings; ceremoniousness in women; and good reputation in all people. Traditional and much respected, this code is vital to warrior societies as a means of understanding their relationships to the world and the menaces lurking beyond their boundaries. All of the characters' moral judgments stem from the code's mandates. Thus individual actions can be seen only as either conforming to or violating the code.

The poem highlights the code's points of tension by recounting situations that expose its internal contradictions in values. The poem contains several stories that concern divided loyalties, situations for which the code offers no practical guidance about how to act. For example, the poet relates that the Danish Hildeburh marries the Frisian king. When, in the war between the Danes and the Frisians, both her Danish brother and her Frisian son are killed, Hildeburh is left doubly grieved. The code is also often in tension with the values of medieval Christianity. While the code maintains that honor is gained during life through deeds, Christianity asserts that glory lies in the afterlife. Similarly, while the warrior culture dictates that it is always better to retaliate than to mourn, Christian doctrine advocates a peaceful, forgiving attitude toward one's enemies. Throughout the poem, the poet strains to accommodate these two sets of values. Though he is Christian, he cannot (and does not seem to want to) deny the fundamental pagan values of the story.

The Difference between a Good Warrior and a Good King - Over the course of the poem, Beowulf matures from a valiant combatant into a wise leader. His transition demonstrates that a differing set of values accompanies each of his two roles. The difference between these two sets of values manifests itself early on in the outlooks of Beowulf and King Hrothgar. Whereas the youthful Beowulf, having nothing to lose, desires personal glory, the aged Hrothgar, having much to lose, seeks protection for his people. Though these two outlooks are somewhat oppositional, each character acts as society dictates he should given his particular role in society.

While the values of the warrior become clear to us through Beowulf's example throughout the poem, only in the poem's more didactic moments are the responsibilities of a king in relation to his people discussed. The heroic code requires that a king reward the loyal service of his warriors with gifts and praise. It also holds that he must provide them with protection and the sanctuary of a lavish mead-hall. Hrothgar's speeches, in particular, emphasize the value of creating stability in a precarious and chaotic world. He also speaks at length about the king's role in diplomacy, both with his own warriors and with other tribes.

Beowulf's own tenure as king elaborates on many of the same points. His transition from warrior to king, and, in particular, his final battle with the dragon, rehash the dichotomy between the duties of a heroic warrior and those of a heroic king. In the eyes of several of the Geats, Beowulf's bold encounter with the dragon is morally ambiguous because it dooms them to a kingless state in which they remain vulnerable to attack by their enemies. Yet Beowulf also demonstrates the sort of restraint proper to kings when, earlier in his life, he refrains from usurping Hygelac's throne, choosing instead to uphold the line of succession by supporting the appointment of Hygelac's son. But since all of these pagan kings were great warriors in their youth, the tension between these two important roles seems inevitable and ultimately irreconcilable.

Motifs

Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text's major themes.

Monsters - In Christian medieval culture, "monster" was the word that referred to birth defects, which were always understood as an ominous sign from God—a sign of transgression or of bad things to come. In keeping with this idea, the monsters that Beowulf must fight in this Old English poem shape the poem's plot and seem to represent an inhuman or alien presence in society that must be exorcised for the society's safety. They are all outsiders, existing beyond the boundaries of human realms. Grendel's and his mother's encroachment upon human society—they wreak havoc in Heorot—forces Beowulf to kill the two beasts for order to be restored.

To many readers, the three monsters that Beowulf slays all seem to have a symbolic or allegorical meaning. For instance, since Grendel is descended from the biblical figure Cain, who slew his own brother, Grendel often has been understood to represent the evil in Scandinavian society of marauding and killing others. A traditional figure of medieval folklore and a common Christian symbol of sin, the dragon may represent an external malice that must be conquered to prove a hero's goodness. Because Beowulf's encounter with the dragon ends in mutual destruction, the dragon may also be interpreted as a symbolic representation of the inevitable encounter with death itself.

The Oral Tradition - Intimately connected to the theme of the importance of establishing one's identity is the oral tradition, which preserves the lessons and lineages of the past, and helps to spread reputations. Indeed, in a culture that has little interaction with writing, only the spoken word can allow individuals to learn about others and make their own stories known. This emphasis on oral communication explains the prevalence of bards' tales (such as the Heorot scop's relating of the Finnsburg episode) and warriors' boastings (such as Beowulf's telling of the Breca story). From a broader perspective, Beowulf itself contributes to the tradition of oral celebration of cultural heroes. Like Homer's Iliad and Odyssey,Beowulf was passed on orally over many generations before being written down.

The Mead-Hall - The poem contains two examples of mead-halls: Hrothgar's great hall of Heorot, in Denmark, and Hygelac's hall in Geatland. Both function as important cultural institutions that provide light and warmth, food and drink, and singing and revelry. Historically, the mead-hall represented a safe haven for warriors returning from battle, a small zone of refuge within a dangerous and precarious external world that continuously offered the threat of attack by neighboring peoples. The mead-hall was also a place of community, where traditions were preserved, loyalty was rewarded, and, perhaps most important, stories were told and reputations were spread.

Symbols

Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

Because ritual behaviors and tokens of loyalty are so central to pagan Germanic culture, most of the objects mentioned in Beowulf have symbolic status not just for the readers but also for the characters in the poem.

The Golden Torque - The collar or necklace that Wealhtheow gives Beowulf is a symbol of the bond of loyalty between her people and Beowulf—and, by extension, the Geats. Its status as a symbolic object is renewed when we learn that Hygelac died in battle wearing it, furthering the ideas of kinship and continuity.

The Banquet - The great banquet at Heorot after the defeat of Grendel represents the restoration of order and harmony to the Danish people. The preparation involves the rebuilding of the damaged mead-hall, which, in conjunction with the banquet itself, symbolizes the rebirth of the community. The speeches and giving of gifts, essential components of this society's interactions, contribute as well to the sense of wholeness renewed.

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Lines 1-300

Summary

So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.

The narrator opens the poem with a discussion of Shield Sheafson, a great king of the ancient Danes and the founder of their royal line. He began life as a foundling (an infant abandoned by his parents) but quickly rose to be strong and powerful. All of the clans had to pay him tribute, and, when he died, he was honored with an elaborate funeral ceremony. His body was put into a boat, covered with treasures and armor, and cast off to sea. Shield Sheafson's life ended as it began, with him cast adrift on the water.

Sheafson's son, the renowned Beow, inherited the kingdom after his father's death. In time, Beow too passed away and Halfdane, his son, became king. After Halfdane, Hrothgar stepped forward to rule the Danes. Under Hrothgar, the kingdom prospered and enjoyed great military success, and Hrothgar decided to construct a monument to his success—a mead-hall where he would distribute booty to his retainers. The hall was called Heorot, and there the men gathered with their lord to drink mead, a beerlike beverage, and listen to the songs of the bards.

For a time, the kingdom enjoyed peace and prosperity. But, one night, Grendel, a demon descended from Cain (who, according to the Bible, slew his brother Abel), emerged from the swampy low lands, to listen to the nightly entertainment at Heorot. The bards' songs about God's creation of the earth angered the monster. Once the men in the mead-hall fell asleep, Grendel lumbered inside and slaughtered thirty men. Hrothgar's warriors were powerless against him.

The following night, Grendel struck again, and he has continued to wreak havoc on the Danes for twelve years. He has taken over Heorot, and Hrothgar and his men remain unable to challenge him. They make offerings at pagan shrines in hopes of harming Grendel, but their efforts are fruitless. The Danes endure constant terror, and their suffering is so extreme that the news of it travels far and wide.

At this time, Beowulf, nephew of the Geatish king Hygelac, is the greatest hero in the world. He lives in Geatland, a realm not far from Denmark, in what is now southern Sweden. When Beowulf hears tales of the destruction wrought by Grendel, he decides to travel to the land of the Danes and help Hrothgar defeat the demon. He voyages across the sea with fourteen of his bravest warriors until he reaches Hrothgar's kingdom.

Seeing that the newcomers are dressed in armor and carrying shields and other equipment for combat, the watchman who guards the Danish coast stops Beowulf and his crew and demands to know their business. He admits that he has never seen outsiders come ashore so fearlessly and guesses that Beowulf is a noble hero. Beowulf explains that he is the son of Ecgtheow and owes his loyalty to Hygelac. He says that he has heard about the monster wreaking havoc on the Danes and has come to help Hrothgar. The watchman gives his consent and tells Beowulf that he believes his story. He tells the Geats to follow him, mentioning that he will order one of the Danes to watch Beowulf's ship for him.

Behaviour that's admired
is the path to power among people everywhere.

Analysis

It is not surprising that Beowulf begins with a tribute to the ancestry of King Hrothgar, since within the warrior culture that the poem depicts, patriarchal lineage is an extremely important component of one's identity. Characters are regularly named as the sons of their fathers—Beowulf, for example, is often referred to as "Ecgtheow's son." Patriarchal history anchors the story in a linear time frame that stretches forward and backward through the generations. In light of the great importance of familial lineage in this culture, it is interesting that Shield Sheafson, who inaugurates the Danish royal line, is an orphan—he is both founder and "foundling." The reader has the sense that if this ordinary personage had not been fatherless, of unknown lineage, the story could have no definitive starting point. We later learn that Beowulf was also left fatherless at a young age.

The delineation of a heroic code is one of the most important preoccupations of the poem. In this first section, some of the central tenets of this code become apparent. In the story of Sheafson in the poem's opening lines, the poet offers a sketch of the life of a successful hero. Sheafson's greatness is measured by the number of clans that he conquers. As the defeated have to pay him tribute, it is clear that strength leads to the acquisition of treasure and gold. In the world of the poem, warriors are bound to their lords by ties of deep loyalty, which the lords maintain through their protection of their warriors and also through ritualized gestures of generosity, or gift-giving. Because their king is powerful, Sheafson's warriors receive treasure. A hero is therefore defined, in part, by his ability to help his community by performing heroic deeds and by doling out heroic sums of treasure. Because Sheafson receives so much booty from his conquests, the poet says of him, "That was one good king" (11). Hrothgar is likewise presented as a good leader, because he erects the mead-hall Heorot for his men.

Another major aspect of the heroic code in Beowulf is eloquence in speech. Beowulf is imposing not only because of his physical presence but also because of his powerful oratorical skill. Speech and poetry were extremely important among the Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians, as they often are in civilizations that rely on oral narratives to preserve history and myth (characters in Homer's Iliad are also judged by how they speak). Beowulf's boastful demeanor as he declares his intention to slay the monster is not an indication of undue vanity but rather a customary part of heroic behavior. The watchman's reply that

[a]nyone with gumption
and a sharp mind will take the measure
of two things: what's said and what's done

follows logically from Beowulf's value of eloquence. In the watchman's eyes, brave words must be backed up by brave deeds (287-289).

A well-won reputation ensures that a warrior will become a part of history, of the social fabric of his culture, as the inclusion of the story of Sheafson in the poem immediately reminds us. Throughout the epic, fame is presented as a bulwark against the oblivion of death, which lurks everywhere in the poem and casts a sobering pall over even the most shining acts of heroism. The description of Sheafson's funeral foreshadows the poem's final scene, which depicts the funeral of another heroic king. The tales of heroism that unfold in the intervening lines are thus framed, like life itself, within the envelope of death. The sea acts as another important and ever-present boundary in Beowulf; the sea-burial with which the poem begins helps to establish the inexorable margins of life in the story.

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BEOWULF

650 AD

Lewis Warsh

SERIES EDITOR Michael Spring, Editor Literary Cavalcade, Scholastic Inc.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to acknowledge the many painstaking hours of work Holly Hughes and Thomas F. Hirsch have devoted to making the Book Notes series a success.

Beowulf (~650-~750) - A Germanic tribal epic poem of the adventures of Beowulf. Though this poem does include some actual historic figures, its events are legendary.

Table Of Contents

THE AUTHOR AND HIS TIMES

A STEP BEYOND: TESTS AND ANSWERS

TERM PAPER IDEAS

GLOSSARY

CRITICS

BIBLIOGRAPHY: FURTHER READING

THE AUTHOR AND HIS TIMES

Who wrote Beowulf- the oldest known epic poem written in English- is a question that has mystified readers for centuries. It's generally thought that the poem was performed orally by the poet before a “live” audience, and that in this way it eventually passed down to readers and listeners. Another theory is that the poem was recited by memory by a “scop,” a traveling entertainer who went from court to court, singing songs and telling stories, until it was finally written down at the request of a king who wanted to hear it again.

Because there are three major battle scenes in the poem, some readers believe that Beowulf was composed by three different authors. Other readers claim that the sections that take place in Denmark and the sections that occur after Beowulf returns to Geatland were the work of different authors. The majority of critics agree that because of the unified structure of the poem, with its interweaving of historical information into the flow of the main narrative, the poem was most likely composed by one person.

As you read the poem try to imagine yourself in the banquet hall of a large castle, eating and drinking with your friends. The court entertainer- much like a stand-up comedian in a nightclub- begins telling his story. Your presence in the hall means that you're probably a member of the aristocratic class, either a descendant of the founder of a particular tribe or one of your king's followers. (AngloSaxon society was divided into two main classes: the aristocracy and the proletariat. Beowulf, as you'll see, gives us very little information about the life of the average person in Anglo-Saxon society, but concerns itself exclusively with life in the court and on the battlefield.) Most of the stories were written and recited during this time to entertain and instruct the members of the aristocratic class. The scop assumed that his audience was familiar with the stories of ancient times. It was his job to make them as interesting and as vivid as possible.

THE POEM

PLOT

Beowulf begins with a history of the Danish kings, starting with Shild (whose funeral is described in the Prologue) and leading up to the reign of King Hrothgar, Shild's great-grandson. Hrothgar is well loved by his people and successful in war. He builds a lavish hall, called Herot, to house his vast army, and when the hall is finished the Danish soldiers gather under its roof to celebrate.

Grendel, a monster in human shape who lives at the bottom of a nearby swamp, is provoked by the singing and carousing of Hrothgar's followers. He appears at the hall late one night and kills thirty of the warriors in their sleep. For the next twelve years the fear of Grendel's potential fury casts a shadow over the lives of the Danes. Hrothgar and his advisers can think of nothing to appease the monster's anger.

Beowulf, prince of the Geats, hears about Hrothgar's troubles, gathers fourteen of the bravest Geat warriors, and sets sail from his home in southern Sweden. The Geats are greeted by the members of Hrothgar's court, and Beowulf boasts to the king of his previous successes as a warrior, particularly his success in fighting sea monsters. Hrothgar welcomes the arrival of the Geats, hoping that Beowulf will live up to his reputation. During the banquet that follows Beowulf's arrival, Unferth, a Danish soldier, voices doubt about Beowulf's past accomplishments, and Beowulf, in turn, accuses Unferth of killing brothers. Before retiring for the night, Hrothgar promises Beowulf great treasures if he meets with success against the monster. Grendel appears on the night of the Geats' arrival at Herot. Beowulf, true to his word, wrestles the monster barehanded. He tears off the monster's arm at the shoulder, but Grendel escapes, only to die soon afterward at the bottom of his snake-infested swamp. The Danish warriors, who had fled the hall in fear, return singing songs in praise of Beowulf's triumph. The heroic stories of Siegmund and Hermod, and of the Frisian king Finn, are performed in Beowulf's honor. Hrothgar rewards Beowulf with a great store of treasures. After another banquet the warriors of both the Geats and the Danes retire for the night.

Unknown to the warriors, however, Grendel's mother is plotting revenge. She arrives at the hall when all the warriors are sleeping and carries off Esher, Hrothgar's chief adviser. Beowulf, rising to the occasion, offers to dive to the bottom of the lake, find the monster's dwelling place, and destroy her. He and his men follow the monster's tracks to the cliff overlooking the lake where Grendel's mother lives. They see Esher's bloody head floating on the surface of the lake. While preparing for battle, Beowulf asks Hrothgar to protect his warriors, and to send his treasures to his uncle, King Higlac, if he doesn't return safely. During the ensuing battle Grendel's mother carries Beowulf to her underwater home. After a terrible fight Beowulf kills the monster with a magical sword that he finds on the wall of her home. He also finds Grendel's dead body, cuts off the head, and returns to land, where the Geat and Danish warriors are waiting expectantly. Beowulf has now purged Denmark of the race of evil monsters.

The warriors return to Hrothgar's court, where the Danish king delivers a sermon to Beowulf on the dangers of pride and on the fleeting nature of fame and power. The Danes and Geats prepare a feast in celebration of the death of the monsters. In the morning the Geats hurry to their boat, anxious to begin the trip home. Beowulf bids farewell to Hrothgar and tells the old king that if the Danes ever again need help he will gladly come to their assistance. Hrothgar presents Beowulf with more treasures and they embrace, emotionally, like father and son.

The Geats sail home. After recounting the story of his battles with Grendel and Grendel's mother, Beowulf tells King Higlac about the feud between Denmark and their enemies, the Hathobards. He describes the proposed peace settlement, in which Hrothgar will give his daughter Freaw to Ingeld, king of the Hathobards, but predicts that the peace will not last long. Higlac rewards Beowulf for his bravery with parcels of land, swords, and houses.

The meeting between Higlac and Beowulf marks the end of the first part of the poem. In the next part Higlac is dead, and Beowulf has been king of the Geats for fifty years. A thief steals a jeweled cup from a sleeping dragon who avenges his loss by flying through the night burning down houses, including Beowulf's own hall and throne. Beowulf goes to the cave where the dragon lives, vowing to destroy it single-handed. He's an old man now, however, and his strength is not as great as it was when he fought against Grendel. During the battle Beowulf breaks his sword against the dragon's side; the dragon, enraged, engulfs Beowulf in flames and wounds him in the neck. All of Beowulf's followers flee except Wiglaf, who rushes through the flames to assist the aging warrior. Wiglaf stabs the dragon with his sword, and Beowulf, in a final act of courage, cuts the dragon in half with his knife. Yet the damage is done. Beowulf realizes that he's dying, that he has fought his last battle. He asks Wiglaf to bring him the dragon's storehouse of treasures; seeing the jewels and gold will make him feel that the effort has been worthwhile. He instructs Wiglaf to build a tomb to be known as “Beowulf's tower” on the edge of the sea. After Beowulf dies, Wiglaf admonishes the troops who deserted their leader when he was fighting against the dragon. He tells them that they have been untrue to the standards of bravery, courage, and loyalty that Beowulf has taught. Wiglaf sends a messenger to a nearby encampment of Geat soldiers with instructions to report the outcome of the battle. The messenger predicts that the enemies of the Geats will feel free to attack them now that their king is dead. Wiglaf supervises the building of the funeral pyre. In keeping with Beowulf's instructions, the dragon's treasure is buried alongside Beowulf's ashes in the tomb. The poem ends as it began- with the funeral of a great warrior.

NOTE: Beowulf is written in an early form of English called Old English, or Anglo-Saxon. The Beowulf you read today is a translation from Anglo-Saxon into modern English. If the translation you have shows different spellings of characters' names from what appears here, do not be alarmed. It is the translator's choice to interpret the AngloSaxon in a particular way, and thus minor differences do occur. To avoid any possible confusion, read the glossary near the end of this study guide. Line references and spellings in this guide are based on the popular Burton Raffel translation (New American Library).

CHARACTERS

BEOWULF A hero must be judged by the things he does and the way he reacts and relates to other people. His deeds must be marked by a nobility of purpose, and he must be willing to risk his life for his ideals. Though Beowulf obviously meets these requirements, he's also a mortal human being. To understand Beowulf it's important to understand how the poet attempts to reconcile the “human” and the “heroic” sides of his personality.

The poet first describes Beowulf as “...greater/And stronger than anyone anywhere in this world” (195), without informing us about what he did to acquire this reputation. We see him initially through the awestruck eyes of the Danish soldier patrolling the cliffs. “Nor have I ever seen/,” the soldier says, addressing the

Geats, “Out of all the men on earth, one greater/Than has come with you” (24749). Beowulf's appearance- his size, his armor- obviously commands immediate respect and attention.

We learn about his character from the speeches he makes to the soldier and to Wulfgar, the Danish warrior who again asks the Geats to identify themselves. Beowulf- anxious to meet with Hrothgar, from whom he hopes to receive permission to battle Grendel- is courteous, patient, and diplomatic. His manner lacks the brusqueness and coldness of a person whose previous accomplishments make him feel superior to other people. His fame as the world's bravest person hasn't gone to his head.

Yet he's also a person with a definite purpose. If he expects to battle Grendel, he must convince Hrothgar of his bravery. Some of you might find his boastfulness disturbing- as Unferth does- but for Beowulf it's simply a means of getting what he wants.

The question remains, however: What does Beowulf want? Is he motivated to perform heroic acts simply by a need to help other people? Are fame and glory uppermost in his mind? Or is he interested mainly in accumulating as much wealth as possible? It might be best to assume that Beowulf is motivated by a combination of all these things. A hero, the poet is telling us, isn't immune from inner conflicts. He may act selflessly, governed by a code of ethics and an intuitive understanding of other people. But part of him- and this is perhaps the tragic flaw in Beowulf's character- has no real idea of why he acts the way he does.

His capacity for forgiveness and generosity is most evident in his relationship with Unferth. When the Danish warrior jealously attempts to slander Beowulf's reputation, Beowulf accuses him of cowardice for not having killed Grendel himself. Beowulf feels that it's important to defend himself, to set the record straight, but he isn't interested in holding grudges. When Unferth later offers him his special sword to fight Grendel's mother, Beowulf accepts, forgivingly, as if the initial encounter had never happened.

Some of you will want to interpret Beowulf's heroic nature as a kind of inner quest, a search for something beyond the ordinary run of existence. Part of this quest involves the search for a true father. In his desire to impress Hrothgar and Higlac, he acts very much the way a son might act toward his father. One of the reasons he comes to help Hrothgar, we learn, is to pay his father's debt. He has no great desire to become king of the Geats. When first offered the throne, he refuses, preferring to play the role of warrior-son. (the father-son relationship runs parallel to the relationship between king and warrior, where a warrior has a duty to serve his king.) Beowulf's spiritual conflicts,- whether to act selflessly for the good of others, or to accumulate rewards and personal fame- are also a key to his personality. In the same sense, he's never certain whether his success as a warrior is due to his own strength or to God's help. The conflict between the material and the spiritual is never more evident than in his dying words: “'For this, this gold, these jewels, I thank/Our Father in Heaven, Ruler of the Earth'” (2794-95). Whether Beowulf's inability to resolve this conflict makes him any less worthy of being called a hero is for you to decide.

HROTHGAR Hrothgar is the most human character in the poem, and the person with whom we can most easily identify. He isn't afraid to hide his emotions in a society where it is a sign of weakness for a man to show his feelings, and this characteristic gives him a heroic quality of his own.

When we first meet him he's coming to the end of his reign over the Danish kingdom. To commemorate his various successes he builds a huge hall, Herot, to house his warriors. He's under the illusion that this hall will be a permanent monument to his achievements, something that will exist long after he's dead.

This modest show of vanity is Hrothgar's only flaw, and in a way the entire poem revolves around the building of the great hall. (It's as if any display of pride or vanity brings out the evil in the world; if Herot hadn't been built, Grendel might never have attacked the Danish people.) His world outlook is typical of most of the people in Anglo-Saxon society, but less extreme; the poet makes no mention of treachery or conspiracy in Hrothgar's past. Though the world exists in a constant state of flux, everyone desires a feeling of permanence and security. Hrothgar, by building Herot, wants to deny the transitoriness of life. The first part of the poem- dominated by Beowulf's battles with Grendel and Grendel's mother- illustrates the impossibility of his dream.

The virtues of a good warrior are wisdom and courage. A good king, however, must possess not only these qualities, but he also must be concerned for the welfare of his people. Hrothgar possesses wisdom, but his courage- when we meet him he is, after all, an old man- is lacking. When Grendel attacks the hall, all Hrothgar can do is hold his head in despair. Lacking the strength of his youth, he can no longer make decisions in situations involving violence. After Grendel's mother attacks the hall- and escapes with the body of Esher, Hrothgar's closest friend- we see Hrothgar trembling “in anger and grief” (1308).

When Beowulf comes to find out what's wrong, Hrothgar practically begs him to kill the monster. His grief, at this point, verges on hysteria. But given the same circumstances, who wouldn't feel the same? If age robs you of the power to act decisively, it also puts you in touch with your emotions. Hrothgar is wise enough to realize that he isn't strong enough to battle the monster alone. (In this sense, he's unlike Beowulf, who, as an aging king, attempts to relive his youth by fighting the dragon.) Hrothgar's strongest moment occurs after the battle between Beowulf and Grendel's mother. He delivers a sermon to Beowulf on the evils of pride, advising Beowulf to guard against wickedness and to use his powers for the betterment of other people. He cites the example of Hermod, a king who might have performed great acts of courage, but who instead abused his potential and brought only destruction and slaughter to his people. He warns Beowulf against thinking that just because he's defeated Grendel and Grendel's mother, he has rid the world of evil forever. Death will come to everyone, even those blessed by God. Before you know it, all your strength and power are gone.

Hrothgar's understanding of human nature is based on his long experience as the king of the Danes. He isn't jealous of Beowulf's strength and fame; all he wants is to die knowing he did his best to protect his people from the evils of the world.

Hrothgar's most emotional scene occurs just before Beowulf and his men are ready to depart from Denmark (Verse 26). Beowulf offers to come to Hrothgar's assistance when and if he ever needs it and Hrothgar predicts that one day Beowulf will be king of the Geats. Their relationship is more like father and son than king and warrior. Hrothgar realizes that he'll probably never see the young warrior again. He embraces and kisses him, bursting into tears. Some readers feel he's crying not so much because Beowulf is departing but as a way of releasing all the tension that built up during the years when the Danish people were being tormented by the monsters.

Hrothgar's generosity and dignity are the human counterparts to the violence of the battles between Beowulf and the monsters. He is the model against whom all the other kings and warriors in the poem must be compared.

WIGLAF As a character, Wiglaf is of tremendous importance to the overall structure of the poem. He's the young warrior who helps Beowulf, the aging king, in his battle against the dragon, in much the same way the younger Beowulf helped King Hrothgar in part one. In this sense Wiglaf is the link between the two parts of the poem. He's also a perfect example of the idea of comitatus, the loyalty of the warrior to his leader. While all his fellow warriors flee in fear, Wiglaf alone comes to the aid of his king.

Wiglaf is described by the poet as being of Swedish descent. He's the son of Wextan, and it's with his father's sword that he wounds the dragon. He enters the battle fearlessly, ignoring the dragon's flames when they engulf his armor. But he's not only brave; he has his head on his shoulders as well. Instead of attempting to strike the dragon's head, he pierces the dragon “lower down,” sapping its strength so much that Beowulf- with one blow of his sword- is able to sever its head.

Wiglaf plays the role of Beowulf's son, in much the same way Hrothgar performed the role of Beowulf's father. Even though he's filled with grief at the death of his king, he's still able to sound clear-headed and dignified when he addresses his cowardly comrades. Like the young Beowulf, he's a model of self-control, determined to act in a way that he believes is right.

UNFERTH The name Unferth means “strife” (un-peace), and when we first meet this character he certainly seems to be living up to his name. A courtier in King Hrothgar's court, he's jealous of Beowulf, and drunkenly accuses the young hero of foolishly risking his life in a swimming match with Brecca years before. He's anxious to dent Beowulf's self-confidence, and tells the hero that his luck will change when he goes up against Grendel. Beowulf responds by telling the correct version of his swimming match with Brecca. He taunts Unferth, accusing him of cowardice for not defeating Grendel himself, and for having killed his own brother.

Later the poet mentions Unferth in connection with Hrothulf, the king's nephew, implying that Unferth is connected with Hrothulf's ambition to seize the throne after Hrothgar's death. He appears in the poem a third time, as Beowulf is about to descend into the lake to battle with Grendel's mother. Unferth, obviously impressed by Beowulf's strength against Grendel, presents Beowulf with his sword, called Hrunting, as a sign of reconciliation. (Beowulf accepts the gift, but the sword proves useless against the monster.) We last see Unferth as Beowulf is about to depart from Denmark. Once again he offers the hero his sword as a gift, and Beowulf, not wanting to leave Denmark with any ill feeling, accepts it, making it clear to Unferth that he's forgiven him for his jealous outburst.

What is Unferth's relevance to the story? As a typical warrior of the time- yet one not frightened to speak his mind- he must be seen purely in relation to Beowulf. By presenting an opponent to the young hero, the poet reveals Beowulf's strength of character, his generosity, and his capacity for forgiveness. If Unferth considered himself, and was considered by others, a brave warrior, how much more courageous Beowulf must seem in comparison.

GRENDEL Grendel, the first of the three monsters Beowulf kills, lives in the bottom of a lake, or mere, not far from Herot, the great hall that Hrothgar built to house his warriors. According to the poet, the monster is a descendant of Cain, one of many monsters whom God punished for the crime of Abel's death. Grendel is hostile to humanity. He's inspired to attack Herot after hearing the joyous singing of the warriors. He is enormous, possessing superhuman strength, and appears only at night. For twelve years he has terrorized Denmark, bringing suffering and misery to Hrothgar and his warriors. Like the Devil, to whom he's often compared, Grendel is an extreme example of evil and corruption. He possesses no human feelings except hatred and bitterness toward mankind. Unlike human beings, however, who can contain elements of good and evil, there's no way Grendel can ever be converted to goodness. As much as he stands for a symbol of evil, he also represents disorder and chaos- a projection of what was most frightening to the Anglo-Saxon mind.

THEMES

1. GOOD AND EVIL The conflict between good and evil is the poem's most important theme. The poet makes it clear, however, that good and evil don't exist as mutually exclusive opposites, but that both qualities are present in everyone. Beowulf represents the potential to do good- to perform acts selflessly and in the service of others- while Grendel, Grendel's mother, and the dragon are consumed with the blind desire to act against people and to destroy them.

Yet pride, a human quality, is also a sign that evil exists. It's important, as Hrothgar points out to Beowulf, to protect oneself against feeling self-satisfied; you must not ignore the powers to do good with which you've been blessed. The transitoriness and instability of human existence make it essential that you never feel too self-important about what you've done.

The poet also makes clear our need for a code of ethics. Such a code allows members of society to relate to one another with understanding and trust. The most important bond in Anglo-Saxon society was the relation between king and warrior. When the Geat warriors break the bond by refusing to assist Beowulf in his battle with the dragon, the foundation of society collapses, and chaos rules.

2. THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY Beowulf is a link between two traditions, the pagan and the Christian. The virtues of courage in war and the acceptance of feuds between men and countries as a fact of life stem from the older pagan tradition. Beowulf is buried in accordance with pagan ritual. (Note that the poet, obviously a Christian himself, makes no adverse comment on Beowulf's cremation.) When Hrothgar and his counselors turn to their stone gods in an attempt to rid the country of Grendel, the poet makes it clear that idol worshiping is a definite threat to Christianity.

Beowulf, himself, is distinctly more generous in nature than the normal warrior of the time, men like Efor and Wulf who care only about the rewards they'll receive for killing their enemies. Though he possesses spiritual strength, Beowulf isn't particularly concerned with Christian virtues like meekness and poverty. He wants to help people, in a Christian way, but his motivation for doing so is complicated. The poet makes no negative comments about Beowulf's eagerness for material rewards and earthly fame, and gives the impression that these attributes were still acceptable, even to an audience of Christians.

Of all the characters in the poem, Hrothgar is perhaps the one who least fits into the old pagan tradition. His sermon to Beowulf on pride, and his ability to express emotions and love, are certainly in keeping with the new morality of Christianity. Though he's still caught up in the feuds, conspiracies, and wars that are going on around him, he ultimately seems more concerned with his belief in God.

(Note that the pagans were more inspired by the Old Testament than the New, and that some readers see Hrothgar as modeled after a king in the old Testament.)

STYLE

The Anglo-Saxon term for poet was scop, or “maker.” His role was to travel around from court to court, entertaining the warriors and kings with stories of heroes and their adventures. Often he composed these stories very rapidly, choosing from a reservoir of formulas that had been developed by other poets over a long period of time.

The poet depended on a number of stylistic devices, most notably alliteration, the repetition of the same sounds or syllables in two or more words in a line. Here's an example of alliterative verse from the Prologue:

Him oa Scyld gewat to gescaep-hwile

fela-hror feran on Frean waere.

When his time was come the old king died,

Still strong but called to the Lord's hands.

26-27

Notice that the first line has two alliterative words, gewat and gescaep. What are the alliterative words in the second line?

The poet also used a stylistic device called the kenning, a method of naming a person or thing by using a phrase that signified a quality of that person or thing. A warrior might be described as “the helmet-bearing one,” or the ocean might be called “the riding place of the whales.” By means of the kenning the poet was able to vary his language, and create new and dazzling word combinations. (Describing every king as a “ring-giver” is an example of the overuse of a particular kenning.) The poet was always aware that his audience knew the outcome of the story he was telling. In order to make the story interesting he had to tell it in a new way.

Another characteristic of the poet's style is his use of litotes, a form of understatement, often with negative overtones, which is intended to create a sense of irony. An example of a litote can be found in the poet's description of Beowulf after he returns to Geatland and presents his treasures to Higlac: “Beowulf had brought his king/Horses and treasure- as a man must,/Not weaving nets of malice for his comrades,/ Preparing their death in the dark, with secret,/Cunning tricks” (2165-69). By telling us what Beowulf hasn't done, the poet creates a stronger sense of his heroic nature.

LANGUAGE

Beowulf is written in a dialect known as Old English (also referred to as Anglo-Saxon). Though there are many similarities between Old English and the English we speak today, a knowledge of the earlier dialect is necessary in order to read the original text. This is why Beowulf requires a translation, much as if it had been written in a foreign language. The language of a country often evolves when the country is invaded by people who speak a different dialect. Old English became the language of its time in the early part of the sixth century A.D., following the occupation of the Romans. The language was also affected by the influence of Christianity that occurred when the Roman invasions took place.

Old English is a heavily accented language and its poetry is known for its emphasis on alliteration and rhythm. Each line of Beowulf is divided into two distinct half-lines separated by a pause and related by the repetition of sounds. Each half-line contains at least four syllables. Almost no lines in Old English poetry end in rhymes in the conventional sense, but the alliterative quality of the verse gives the poetry its music and rhythm.

The Norman Conquest in A.D. 1066 introduced many French words into the English language. This date marks the start of the Period known as Middle English. It lasted several hundred years and produced very little great literature that was predominately English until the appearance of Chaucer, the author of Canterbury Tales, at the end of the thirteenth century. Most of the themes and the dominant verse forms during this period were influenced by the French invasions.

When the Tudor king Henry VII took the throne of England in 1485, the language once again began to change, and the English language started to resemble the language we speak today.

POINT OF VIEW

Many of you will feel that the weakest aspect of the poem is the poet's retelling of the same event again and again, especially Beowulf's battle with Grendel.

When Beowulf reports the story of his conquests in Denmark to Higlac, he adds no truly significant detail. Nor does Beowulf's view of the battle tell us anything significant about the hero himself. There's almost no difference between Beowulf's version of the story and the poet's.

Notice that the characters in the poem don't talk to each other as we do. There are no real conversations. Most often the characters just deliver speeches to one another. When Hrothgar, for instance, delivers his sermon on pride, the poet gives us no indication of what Beowulf is thinking. When Beowulf tells Higlac about the upcoming feud between the Danes and the Hathobards, the Geat king says nothing in response.

Also notice the way the poet keeps the story moving by leaping quickly from one event to another. His use of historical digressions is similar to the use of flashbacks in movies and novels. In the middle of Beowulf's fight with Grendel, the poet shifts the point of view to the Danes who are sleeping in another part of the hall. We see them in their beds (782), terrified by the sound of Grendel's screams.

Also, during Beowulf's battle with Grendel's mother, the poet shifts from the struggle beneath the surface of the lake to show us the reactions of the warriors waiting on land. In every battle there's an audience looking on. By using this technique the poet can describe the battle as it's actually happening, and give us the reactions of the audience at the same time.

STRUCTURE

The poet's main structural device is to interweave the events of the present and the past. He frequently interrupts the main narrative with historical digressions that relate, both directly and indirectly, to what's taking place in the main story. For instance, the theme of revenge in the Finnsburg Episode (Verses 16-17) is linked to the revenge sought by the dragon, and to the revenge of Grendel's mother for her son's death. Some critics use the word interlacing to describe this structure. Both the digressions and the main narrative contain many common elements. All the major events in the poem deal with feuds: man against man, man against monster. The image of the hero- Beowulf himself- stands at the center of the poem like a rock in a whirlpool, with all the various stones swirling around him. The poem is also struck around the theme of youth and age. In part one we see Beowulf as the young, daring prince, in contrast with Hrothgar, the wise but aging king. In part two Beowulf, as the aging but still heroic warrior, is contrasted with his young follower, Wiglaf. Part of the magic of reading Beowulf is to see the way the two parts parallel one another so accurately, and how an the major events in the poem reflect and echo one another.

THE EPIC POEM

When reading Beowulf it's important to see it as part of the tradition of epic poetry that began with the poems of Homer- The Iliad and The Odyssey- and with Virgil's Aeneid. (Whether the Beowulf poet himself was familiar himself with these epics isn't known.) All these poems deal with the affairs and deeds of brave men, and focus on the exploits and deeds of one man in particular. Note that epic poetry usually concerns a few events in the life of a single person; it makes no attempt to portray a whole life chronologically from beginning to end. The epic poet treats all his subjects fairly and objectively. He presents his characters as they are- in realistic fashion- and as they ought to be. Occasionally he breaks the objective tone to offer a moral judgment on one of his characters. For the most part, however, he lets the actions of the characters speak for themselves. Scenes such as the voyages of the Geats to Denmark (and then home again) and the giving of rewards for acts of bravery are typical scenes- “set pieces”- of almost all epic writing.

The epic poet is concerned with human values and moral choices. The characters are capable of performing acts of great courage; they are also capable of suffering intensely for their deeds. Some of you will feel that Beowulf is a mixture of both tragedy and comedy, and that its hero is ultimately a tragic figure. Others of you will find fault in Beowulf for its lack of humor. As you read the poem, try to notice characters and events that could be described as being either tragic or comic.

The epic poet also functions as a historian, blending past, present, and future in a unique, all-encompassing way. His pace is leisurely, and allows him to include as many different stories as possible. Remember that the scop's success as an entertainer depended on his ability to re-create these stories in a new way. In Beowulf the poet is both telling a story and connecting it to events that have taken place in the past. Beowulf is not just a simple tale about a man who kills monsters and dragons, but a large-scale vision of human history.

SOURCES

Although the poem originates in England, it doesn't deal specifically with Anglo-Saxon society. Instead it concerns the lives of various Scandinavian tribes, especially the Danes and the Geats. The work is a blend of fact and fiction; there is no evidence that a hero named Beowulf ever existed. (The only character mentioned in any of the chronicles of the period is Higlac, Beowulf's uncle, whose defeat by the Franks in the year 521 is referred to by the French historian Gregory of Tours.) The Germanic invaders of Britain brought with them numerous stories and folktales they had heard in their wanderings through Europe between the third and sixth centuries. The poet incorporated many of these stories into his poem, most notably the conflicts between Hengest and Finn, and Ingeld and King Hrothgar.

Monsters resembling Grendel and his mother also appear in a number of Scandinavian folk legends of the time. Grendel, however, is described as a descendant of Cain, and this biblical reference links both the Germanic and Christian influences that pervade the poem. Those of you who interpret the dragon as a Christian symbol of evil will want to ask yourselves how much the poet depended on Christian literature as the main source of his poem.

The importance of Beowulf lies in the way the poet was able to infuse all these elements and to create out of these various sources a unified and unique work of literature. Beowulf critics agree that the poem was composed, at the earliest, between 673 and 735. The latest possible date of composition is usually set at 790. By the middle of the eighth century the Danes had invaded England; scholars assume it was unlikely that an Anglo-Saxon would have written a poem sympathetic to the Danes at that time. Some critics say that the poem originated in either the court of King Aldfrith of Northumbria or the court of King Offa of Mercia, both courts known for their high level of Anglo-Saxon culture. It's also possible, because of the atmosphere of Christianity that pervades the poem, that Beowulf was composed in a monastery. Though the earliest manuscript of the poem dates from the year 1000, none of the theories of authorship, date, and place of composition can be definitely proved.

THE STORY

PROLOGUE

The Prologue begins with the words “Hear me!”, a rousing cry meant to capture the audience's attention. Remember as you read the poem that Beowulf was recited orally long before it was ever written down, and that the first performance probably took place in the middle of a great hall or court where people were eating and drinking. The job of the court poet was to educate and entertain, and most of all to keep his audience interested.

Almost immediately the poet introduces the main subject of the poem: the stories of ancient kings and heroes and how they won glory by acts of courage and bravery. We meet Shild, founder of the Danish dynasty, and his son Beo, who inherits his father's throne. Before Shild appeared, the poet tells us, the Danish people were “kingless and miserable.” Under his rule they became a great power.

We're entering a world dominated by kings and their warriors. Though Shild is depicted as a “brave king,” his fame is based on turning his enemies into slaves, of terrorizing them into submission. His job as king is to protect his people in whatever way he can, and to accumulate as much wealth as possible for his country. He acquires this wealth by plundering the treasuries of his enemies. A successful king is also one who is generous to his warriors, who rewards them with rings and gold in exchange for their loyalty. This bond between king and warrior is known as comitatus. “...wealth,” we learn, “is shaped with a sword” (25). The poet informs us that Shild overcame enormous obstacles before he became a king: he was abandoned as a child and arrived in Denmark alone.

NOTE: We'll discover later in the poem that Beowulf himself was considered “worthless” when he was young, and that he, too, had to overcome personal difficulties before becoming a great hero. The poet is saying here that it's possible to alter the course of one's life by means of courage, perseverance, strength of character, and will power, that you can become anything- a king, or a president for that matter- if you possess and cultivate these qualities.

The Prologue ends with a description of Shild's funeral. His warriors place his body on the deck of a ship, surround it with helmets, swords, and coats of mail, and set it adrift.

NOTE: The objects of war obviously play an important role in the lives of these people. The ritual of burying someone alongside his most precious possessions is a way of linking the person's life on earth to the afterlife, whether it be heaven or hell. As we read further, we'll see how religion and ritual gave meaning to the lives of the people in Anglo-Saxon times.

VERSE 1

The first verse tells us about the line of Danish kings. Beo, maintaining the same standard of success set by his father, begets a son, Healfdane, who inherits the throne when Beo dies. Healfdane, “a fierce fighter,” fathers three sons- Hergar, Hrothgar, and Halga the Good- and a daughter,- Yrs, who later becomes wife of Onela, king of Sweden.

NOTE: Historical sources claim that Hergar and Halga the Good died when they were young. This explains why Hrothgar, the second son, assumes the throne upon Healfdane's death.

Hrothgar is described as possibly the most successful Danish king so far. As he grows older, after a happy and successful life, he yearns to build a hall to house his vast army of warriors. Like most people, Hrothgar desires some outward show of his greatness, a monument that will live on after he dies. The building of this hall, called Herot, is one way of achieving immortality.

Notice the way the poet comments on the story, foreshadowing events in the distant future. Herot is completed, but to think that it will last forever is an illusion:

That towering place, gabled and huge,

Stood waiting for time to pass, for war

To begin, for flames to leap as high

As the feud that would light them, and for Herot to burn.

(82-85)

Eventually another war will break out, the poet says, and Herot, like everything else, will be destroyed.

The great hall is built. Hrothgar prepares a festive banquet for his warriors. The court poet entertains the warriors with songs of the creation of the earth, recalling how the Almighty shaped “These beautiful plains marked off by oceans,/Then proudly setting the sun and moon/To glow across the land and light it” (93-95). All is well- or seems to be. Then, as now, we live in a time of contrasts, where the best of times, as Charles Dickens wrote, is also the worst of times. As the festivities at Herot continue night after night, a powerful monster named Grendel is awakened by the carousing of Hrothgar and his men. Grendel hates the idea that people on earth can be happy, and the sound of the men celebrating- especially the poet playing on his harp- stirs him into action.

NOTE: Notice the Christian motifs that run through the poem, and how they contrast with the pagan system of values that underlies the actions of the kings and the warriors. The influence of Christianity was just beginning to make its mark in this world, and most of the characters are torn between their newly discovered religious feelings and their old, heathen way of perceiving things. The idea that there's a higher being that controls one's actions revolutionized people's concepts of themselves, and infused their day-to-day lives with a sense of wonder.

We see Grendel lurking in the shadows, a creature in exile, banished by God.

NOTE: The poet leaves it up to your imagination to supply your own image of a monster. You might compare him to other “monsters”- like King Kong- who have become part of recent American folklore. Grendel walks, thinks, and has a hand and a mouth. He has human qualities but he's also larger than life, capable, as we'll soon learn, of tearing men into pieces and devouring them whole.

VERSE 2

Grendel appears at Herot in the middle of the night. The warriors, sated by drink and food, are “sprawled in sleep,” unaware of any imminent danger. Notice that the motif of feasting, followed by going to bed, is another pattern that the poet weaves into the texture of his poem. (In this instance, bed means “death.”) The monster steals silently into the hall, kills thirty of the sleeping Danish warriors, and returns to his home in the swamp, “delighted with his night's slaughter” (125).

NOTE: At one moment everyone was happy and self-satisfied. How often we've felt that way ourselves, only to be rudely awakened by the harshness of reality! In this case Grendel acts as the terrible reminder that evil lurks in the world, and that all pleasures exist only in the moment and then pass away.

In the morning, Hrothgar, stunned by the loss of his friends, weeps inconsolably, uncertain whether Grendel's attack is just an isolated incident or whether, as the poet says, “the beginning might not be the end.” You might think that Grendel would be satisfied with his first night's work, but his hatred of mankind is insatiable. When he returns a second time, the Danish warriors make no attempt to fight against him. It's every man for himself.- the only way to escape death is to flee.

NOTE: Doesn't it seem that the Danish warriors, whose reputations depend so much on their courage in the face of danger, should attempt to defend their hall? When we meet Beowulf himself later in the poem, we'll realize the difference between the Danish soldiers, who are ultimately just ordinary mortals like ourselves, and a true hero, for whom no danger is too great.

Twelve years pass. Herot, built as a symbol of Hrothgar's success as a king, remains empty. The story of Grendel, and of Hrothgar's inability to restrain the monster's wrath, spreads across the seas, and is sung “in all men's ears.” Grendel appears everywhere, stalking the Danish warriors, lurking in the shadows. At night he lives in Herot, where only Hrothgar's throne, protected by God (“whose love Grendel could not know”), remains unharmed.

Hrothgar and his counselors make useless attempts to appease the monster. They can't offer him gold or land, as they might an ordinary enemy. Like most people in a time of crisis they slip back into old ways of thinking. Instead of praying to God for support, they sacrifice to the stone idols of their pagan past. Though enlightened by Christianity, the poet is saying, pagan rituals were still very much a part of these people's lives.

VERSES 3-4

News of the problems in Denmark have traveled far and wide. Beowulf, a member of the Geat tribe, and described by the poet as “greater/And stronger than anyone anywhere in this world” (195-96), commandeers a boat, enlists fourteen of the strongest and most courageous members of his tribe, and sets sail for the Danish shore.

NOTE: Notice that Hrothgar doesn't ask for help from Beowulf- or from anyone else, for that matter- but that the Geat warrior takes it upon himself to come to the aid of the Danish people. Is Beowulf truly acting selflessly, or is he using the situation to enhance his reputation as the world's bravest man? Later in the poem we'll learn more about Beowulf's character, and get a clearer sense of what makes him tick.

The Geats arrive safely in Denmark, moor their ship, and thank God for a calm voyage. They're greeted by a Danish soldier who's patrolling the cliff above the shore, and who demands to know where they came from and who they are. The soldier is diplomatic, defensive, and most especially curious, because in his own words no one has ever entered Danish territory “more openly” than the Geats. It quickly becomes apparent to him that the Geats have come to help the Danes, not to rob or attack them. They are open because their intentions are honorable; they have nothing to hide. The more open you are, the poet seems to be saying, the more people will trust you.

Beowulf responds to the Danish soldier bluntly and with great self-confidence. He identifies himself as a Geat, a follower of Higlac, and the son of Edgetho. He assures the bewildered soldier that there's nothing ill-intentioned about the purpose of his visit. Talking to the soldier, Beowulf manages to be both dignified and boastful at the same time. (The ability to resolve contradictory elements in one's personality is a trademark, we learn, of the heroic character.) He's obviously someone who believes in himself and wants others to believe in him as well.

NOTE: Outward appearances are important to both the Geats and the Danes. Throughout the poem we read detailed descriptions of the armor and weapons of the soldiers. When the Danish watchman finally offers to lead the Geats to Herot, we see their “golden helmets” on top of which “wild boar heads gleamed.” The animal embossed on the helmet gives the warrior an additional form of protection; it's almost as if the animal is with him as he marches into battle. Weapons and armor not only have functional purposes for these people, but possess magical properties as well.

VERSES 5-6

On their way to Hrothgar's palace, the Geats are stopped by a Danish warrior, Wulfgar, who also asks them to identify themselves. At this point the action of the poem has slowed down considerably. Beowulf steps forth a second time, identifies himself and his men, and requests an audience with Hrothgar. Wulfgar is satisfied that the visitors are well intentioned- it's hard not to be impressed by the nobility of their weapons and armor- and encourages Hrothgar to receive them.

NOTE: The conversations between Beowulf and the watchman, and between Beowulf and Wulfgar, are obviously repetitive. There are many such instances throughout the poem where the poet repeats himself, often telling the same incident from different points of view. When this occurs, ask yourself whether this technique adds or detracts from the drama of the story. Is it necessary for Beowulf to introduce himself twice, and yet a third time, even more elaborately, when he finally meets Hrothgar? What do the speeches reveal about Beowulf's character?

His willingness to endure the questions of the king's intermediaries reveals an ability to comply with the formalities of any given situation. Be patient, not arrogant, the poet is telling us, and you'll get what you want.

All the speeches in the poem resemble the lines spoken by an actor or actress in a play. It's important to remember that the poem was first recited orally, and that the performer acted each part to the best of his ability.

Though suspicious of strangers, the Danes are an intuitive people. Wulfgar is described as being famous not only for his strength and courage, but also for his wisdom. Wisdom, in this case, might be defined as an understanding of human nature.

Hrothgar tells Wulfgar that he knew Beowulf when he was a boy. He senses that Beowulf's arrival is a sign that the luck of the Danes is changing, and that God is now acting in their favor. Beowulf's prowess as a warrior is well known, and Hrothgar is confident that he'll be able to defeat Grendel.

Beowulf's speech to Hrothgar is a combination of youthful boastfulness and an understanding that, as one critic has put it, “the wages of heroism is death.” It's his self-proclaimed mission in life to enter into situations where death is a possibility. He's also aware that it's ultimately up to God whether he achieves success against Grendel or whether he's killed by the monster.

NOTE: Beowulf's character embodies the major conflict of his timesthe conflict between the old pagan rituals and the influence of Christianity. Recall the definition of epic poetry, and ask yourself whether Beowulf's personality conforms to the definition of the epic hero.

There's nothing offensive about Beowulf's boastfulness, he's merely stating what he believes to be true, almost as if he were talking about another person. Telling Hrothgar about his past exploits as a warrior against the Geats' enemies and as a hunter of sea monsters, he's presenting the king with his credentials. Fighting Grendel is a job he feels he was born to do. If he has any doubts about himself, he's not going to reveal them at this moment.

VERSE 7

Hrothgar's response to Beowulf reveals something we didn't previously know: years before, Hrothgar befriended and helped Edgetho, Beowulf's father. We can assume that Beowulf knew about his father's past relationship with the Danish king, and that consequently his instinct to travel to Denmark didn't occur in a vacuum. Part of his incentive- besides the opportunity to rise to new heights of fame and glory- is to repay an old debt.

Hrothgar's modesty, which he reveals when he recounts how he helped Edgetho, acts as a perfect foil for Beowulf's self-confidence. The old, wise king is contrasted with the brash, young warrior. Hrothgar represents a mirror-image, or model, of what Beowulf's own future might be.

The brief story of Edgetho and Hrothgar is the first of many historical digressions that interrupt the flow of the narrative. According to Hrothgar, Edgetho became embroiled in a feud with a tribe called the Wulfings, but Edgetho's countrymen were frightened of going to war. Edgetho turned to the Danes for help, and Hrothgar, a young man “new to the throne,” sent treasures to the Wulfings to appease them and end the quarrel, (Notice as you read the poem the many different ways that feuds or disagreements can be resolved.)

Hrothgar passes abruptly from the story of his friendship with Edgetho to a description of the present troubles with Grendel. Though he doesn't say so directly, he implies that Beowulf will be given the chance to prove his courage against the monster. Hrothgar tells Beowulf of all the Danish warriors who have died- foolishly and drunkenly- in an attempt to rid the country of the evil monster.

NOTE: Does Hrothgar's response to Beowulf's arrival seem too restrained, considering what's at stake? How do you think you'd act under similar circumstances?

VERSES 8-9

Verse 8 introduces the character of Unferth, one of Hrothgar's main courtiers, and the son of Eclaf.

During the banquet that follows the arrival of the Geats, Unferth, jealous of Beowulf's reputation and insecure about his own, publicly accuses the visitor of acting foolishly during a swimming match with Brecca, chief of a tribe known as the Brondings. According to Unferth, Beowulf not only lost the match, he needlessly risked his life. Unferth implies that Beowulf's successes so far have been the result of good luck, not strength or courage, and that the young, Geat warrior will need more than luck if he expects to defeat Grendel.

Beowulf isn't threatened by Unferth's assault on his character. He accuses Unferth of having had too much to drink. He refutes the Danish courtier's version of the story, and uses the episode to extol his own bravery. He says that both he and Brecca knew they were risking their lives, but were too young to know better. For five days, he says, the two young warriors swam together side by side, each of them carrying a sword to protect them from the whales and the needlefish. Then a flood separated the two rivals, and Beowulf was attacked by a monster who dragged him toward the bottom of the sea where Beowulf pierced its heart with his sword. (Compare this scene with Beowulf's underwater battle with Grendel's mother later in the poem.)

Beowulf escapes one sea monster only to be surrounded by others. The poet describes Beowulf offering the edge of his “razor-sharp sword” to the monsters:

But the feast, I think, did not please them, filled

Their evil bellies with no banquet-rich food,

Thrashing there at the bottom of the sea (562-64)

Note how the images of “feasting” and “battle” are intertwined throughout the poem.

Beowulf's tone is lighthearted as he describes his escape from the monsters. His self-confidence sometimes seems overwhelming. He sees himself fighting alone, a single individual against the evil in the world. It's not so much that he has faith in God, but that because of his courage, God has faith in him.

After his digression about the sea monsters, Beowulf addresses Unferth directly, accusing him of murdering his brothers and allowing Grendel to ravage his country. He predicts that Unferth's soul will “suffer hell's fires... forever tormented.” What right, Beowulf asks, does Unferth have to question his courage, when Unferth himself has done nothing to end Grendel's reign of terror? He calls the Danes a passive nation (“the quiet Danes”) compared to the Geats. In each of his speeches Beowulf appears to be working himself up to his eventual meeting with Grendel.

Hrothgar has been listening to the confrontation between Unferth and Beowulf. He has succumbed to Beowulf's boastfulness and charm, certain, now, that the young warrior will fulfill his promise. The atmosphere in the hall, despite the impending battle, is full of good feelings. You have the impression that Unferth has challenged other visitors in the same way, and that the Danish warriors do not take him very seriously.

Queen Welthow, Hrothgar's wife, “a noble woman who knew/What was right” (614), makes her first appearance in the middle of this scene. Despite her aristocratic bearing, her job is to offer mead- a mixture of alcohol, honey, and water- to her husband and his warriors. When the poet describes her as a woman “who knew what was right,” he means, in effect, that she knows her place among men. Indeed, the poet's description of Welthow as a “gold-ringed queen” or a “bracelet-wearing queen” gives us the impression of a mannequin rather than a living human being.

After Welthow fills his cup, Beowulf takes the occasion to boast once again of his determination to defeat Grendel. The ritual of accepting the cup from Welthow, however, gives him added incentive. The agreement between Beowulf and the Danish people has been formalized at last, much in the same way two people might sign a legal document or contract.

There are two alternatives: Beowulf will either defeat the monster, or die in the process. “Let me live in greatness/And courage,” he says, “or here in this hall welcome/My death!” (636-38).

As the banquet draws to a close, Hrothgar embraces the Geat warrior, and promises him great treasures if he meets with success.

VERSE 10

Hrothgar and his warriors leave the hall, and Beowulf begins to prepare himself for his battle against Grendel. As the time grows near, the outcome of the battle is placed clearly in God's hands. It's God who sent Beowulf to Herot to protect the Danes, and it's God, as well, who will “...reward/Whom He chooses!” (687).

Beowulf removes his armor: his mailshirt, his helmet, his sword. He feels that he can easily kill the monster without the weapons- that Grendel, with his claws, teeth, and clumsy fists, is no match against his sword. Killing the monster isn't the only issue at stake in Beowulf's mind. The more risk involved, the more fame and glory he will receive if he succeeds. Possibly the monster, Beowulf exclaims, seeing a warrior with no weapons, will be so shocked that his heart will fail him! Beowulf's confidence in himself is so great that he's even capable of feeling sympathy for the monster. He wants the battle to be as fair as possible.

The other Geat warriors, assembled around him in their various beds, do not share Beowulf's boundless self-confidence. They fall asleep thinking of all the Danish warriors whom Grendel has already murdered, and wondering if they'll ever return home safely. The poet reassures his audience at this point by revealing the outcome:

But God's dread loom

Was woven with defeat for the monster, good fortune

For the Geats; help against Grendel was with them,

And through the might of a single man

They would win. (696-99)

The juxtaposition of the lines, in this anticipatory verse, is essential to the tension of the narrative. Though God is on the side of the Geats, Grendel is still lurking outside; the battle is still to come. The poet gives reassurance without lessening the sense of danger. While the Geat warriors lie in their beds, tossing restlessly, thinking of the friends and homes they left behind, and as Beowulf lies wakeful, “eager to meet his enemy,” the monster begins his walk in the darkness. Knowing the outcome of the battle doesn't make the scene any less terrifying.

VERSES 11-12

We see Grendel coming from a distance, over the hills and bogs, half hidden by the mist. He knows his way to Herot, the poet tells us; he's been here before. He, too, is filled with self-confidence, not realizing what awaits him, or that this will be his last visit to the great hall.

He tears the door from its hinges and strides across the threshold. He sees the sleeping warriors and snatches one of them from his bed, ripping the warrior apart, and literally eating him, bit by bit: “death/And Grendel's great teeth came together,/Snapping life shut” (743-45). This scene is described in great vividness, but it leaves us with the question of why Beowulf, lying awake in his own bed nearby, would allow Grendel to kill one of his men. This inability to act more quickly seems irresponsible on Beowulf's part. Is one person's life less important than any other?

Perhaps there's a logic to Beowulf's thinking. Watching Grendel devour the Geat warrior gives him time to assess the strength of his enemy. Killing one warrior, the monster probably assumes that he'll be able to devour them all, that no one will dare to challenge him. If you could read Grendel's mind he'd probably be thinking that this night at Herot will be no different from any other, and that he'll have free run of the hall, just like the time before. Beowulf obviously feels that the element of surprise- catching Grendel off-guard- is worth the price of the life of one of his comrades.

Grendel approaches Beowulf's bed and clutches at him with his claws. This is the moment Beowulf has been waiting for. He instantly strikes back, bending the monster's claws and cracking them in his fist. Grendel realizes almost immediately that he's met his match; his first impulse is to flee and return to his home in the swamp. Is it surprising that Grendel, after all we've heard about him, succumbs so easily?

Grendel tries to escape from Beowulf's grip. His shrieks of pain awaken the Danish warriors. The other Geat warriors leap from their beds, their swords raised, none of them knowing that Grendel is immune to ordinary weapons. In the middle of the battle the poet comments on the possible future destruction of Herot by fire. Even though Beowulf will defeat the monster, at some time in the future their great hall will be destroyed, and all of Beowulf's heroics rendered ultimately meaningless.

NOTE: Notice how the poet varies the point of view in this sectionhow we see the action from Grendel's point of view, through Beowulf's eyes, and through the poet's own comments on the reactions of the Danish warriors. Shifting the point of view is a technique used more frequently in novels than in poems. Do you feel that the technique is successful here?

Beowulf wants to hold onto the monster until it dies, but Grendel manages to twist free, though not before losing his arm. The “bloodthirsty fiend” will escape to his home at the bottom of the swamp, where he will die and descend to hell, into “the waiting hands of still worse fiends” than even himself. Much in the same way a hunter hangs a trophy above his fireplace, so Beowulf hangs Grendel's arm from the rafters of the hall. It's the unquestionable proof of what he has done.

NOTE: The drama of the battle is heightened, some readers feel, by the presence of the audience of Geat and Danish warriors. Though we know the outcome, they don't. When the poet describes how “the Danes started/In new terror, cowering in their beds as the terrible/Screams of the Almighty's enemy sang/In the darkness” (783-86) the reader feels the horror of the situation along with them.

VERSE 13

News of Grendel's death spreads quickly. The Danish princes and warriors flock to Herot to inspect the monster's footprints and follow them from the great hall to the edge of the swamp. They stare into the water, “steaming and boiling in horrible pounding waves,” as if unable to believe Grendel is finally dead. This is a verse of great celebration, an exultant hymn of praise on behalf of the Danes to Beowulf.

Notice the way the poet describes the Danes as they return to Herot from Grendel's swamp. At first they jog along, slowly, retelling the story of Beowulf's battle with the monster. Then, as their excitement builds, they let their horses run free, “red and brown and pale yellow backs streaming down the road.” Finally, one of the king's minstrels bursts into a song of praise, skillfully interweaving Beowulf's triumph over Grendel with the adventures of two other Danish heroes, Siegmund and Hermod.

NOTE: The choice of Siegmund and Hermod is no accident. Siegmund's adventures include a battle with “a treasure-rich dragon,” a story that foreshadows Beowulf's own battle with a dragon later in the poem. Both Siegmund and Beowulf, as heroes, are cut from the same mold- they are committed to purge the world of evil and treachery. Hermod, however, is a failed hero. Considered at one time one of “the mightiest of men,” he was overcome by vanity and pride. Instead of easing the pain of other people, his exploits only added to their suffering. (Keep this scene in mind when you come to Hrothgar's speech to Beowulf on the dangers of pride.)

Contrasting these warriors, the poet is saying that courage alone is not enough to make a person a hero. The true hero possesses a code of ethics that includes taking other people's feelings into consideration. A warrior like Hermod who acts out of his own self-interest is doomed.

VERSES 14-15

Hrothgar's speech to Beowulf is more than an expression of gratitude. “Let me take you to my heart,” he says, “make you my son too,/And love you” (94748). When a person performs a great favor for you, as Beowulf has done for Hrothgar and the Danes, the immediate, human response is to accept the person into your family. If someone were to save your life wouldn't you feel that way toward her or him? (Remember, too, that Beowulf and Hrothgar are connected by Hrothgar's relationship to Beowulf's father.) Accepting Beowulf as a son is more important than all the material wealth Hrothgar can offer.

NOTE: Again, notice how the influence of Christianity pervades Hrothgar's speech to Beowulf. It was the Almighty who sent Beowulf to Denmark and it was “with the Lord's help” that Beowulf was able to defeat Grendel. Beowulf's mother “knew the grace of the God of our fathers” for giving birth to such a great hero. Do you think that Hrothgar is minimizing Beowulf's achievement by attributing his defeat of Grendel to the will of God?

Beowulf's response is almost apologetic (especially in comparison to his more boastful speeches in the previous verses). Though Grendel is obviously dead, and his severed arm hangs from the rafters, Beowulf isn't completely satisfied with his accomplishment. His retelling of the story of his battle with Grendel is an example of the poet's technique of describing the same scenes from different points of view.

NOTE: The contrast between age and youth, father and son, is one of the major themes of the poem, and the speeches by Beowulf and Hrothgar provide one of the best examples. Although Beowulf is described as being youthful, his exact age is never stated. When he first arrives in Herot he announces to Hrothgar that “the days/Of my youth have been filled with glory” (408-09). He is already known throughout the world as the strongest man alive and a proven hero. It's this quality of agelessness, as if his life were suspended in time, that sets him apart from other men, and defines him as a truly heroic individual.

Notice the poet's ability to describe things with precision. At the start of Verse 14 we see Grendel's claw “swinging high from that gold-shining roof.” At the end of the verse the poet returns to the image of the claw:

swinging high

From Hrothgar's mead-hall roof, the fingers

Of that loathsome hand ending in nails

As hard as bright steel (983-86)

Now that Grendel is dead it's time to prepare a great banquet. The poet takes the opportunity to refer to the battle between Beowulf and Grendel (996) and again we see the monster and the hero wrestling together under Herot's roof. The poet gives momentum to his material by describing the same thing in different ways. In this way he's similar to a jazz musician, improvising the same melody and chords, never repeating himself exactly, but always on the lookout for new ways of stating his themes.

NOTE: The image of the feast (1008) comes up again and again; eating and death are interrelated. Here human life itself is described as a feast. After every banquet the tired warriors go to bed where in the darkness as we'll see soon enough- they'll meet their death.

Hrothgar and his nephew Hrothulf enter the hall and begin the celebration by toasting each other. The poet points out that for this moment, at least, all the Danes are genuinely happy (1018-19). No one is plotting any new conspiracy. Such unity of good spirits is rare; this moment, like all others, is transitory. Who knows what new horror the next night will bring? And isn't the poet hinting that some future act of treachery will occur? Why does he choose this moment to mention Hrothulf?

VERSES 16-17

More gift-giving is in order. Hrothgar presents armor and swords to all the Geat warriors who accompanied Beowulf on his voyage. For the Geat warrior who was eaten in his sleep by Grendel, Hrothgar gives the Geats gold, presumably to be paid over to the slain warrior's family. Hrothgar's actions are generous and compassionate.

The poet briefly interrupts the narrative to comment on God's role in the battle between Beowulf and Grendel. Both God and Beowulf's own courage are given equal importance in the poet's eyes. People, the poet says, must open themselves to God's power and be aware, whether they like it or not, that both good and evil exist in the world.

The court poet entertains the jubilant warriors with stories and tales from Danish history. He tells of how a band of Danes, under the leadership of Hnaf, are killed- for unspecified reasons- by the followers of the Frisian king, Finn, at his hall in Finnsburg. (Some readers refer to this digression as the Finnsburg Episode.) Both Hnaf and his nephew die in the battle. Hnaf's sister is Finn's wife; she feels her husband betrayed her by attacking her brother, and for starting a battle in which both her brother and her son lost their lives. (Though her identity is not mentioned in the poem, historical sources report that her name is Hildeburh.)

Hengest, Hnaf's follower, refuses to leave the hall. As a gesture of peace, Finn offers to divide the hall with the Danes. Hengest agrees, even though he hates Finn. As part of the agreement Finn promises to punish any of his men who attempt to rekindle the feud.

A funeral pyre is built for the dead warriors. Notice the vividness with which the poet describes the cremation, the way “the greedy fire-demons drank flesh and bones/From the dead of both sides, until nothing was left” (1123-24). Notice, also, the way the poet uses the image of feasting to describe the fire. Compare this funeral with Shild's in the Prologue, and- when you come to it- Beowulf's own funeral at the end of the poem.

All winter Hengest and a few of his men live in the hall at Finnsburg; the sea is too rough for them to return to Denmark. Hengest is torn between his desire for revenge against Finn, and his moral obligation to comply with the peace offering. Though he hates Finn, he still possesses a sense of honor. It's only when spring finally comes that Hengest resolves his inner conflict by killing Finn, ransacking his hall, and taking Hildeburh back to Denmark.

After the court poet finishes his story, Welthow steps forward and advises Hrothgar not to be carried away by his feelings of gratitude toward Beowulf. She's worried that he'll treat Beowulf more like a son than his own sons. She asks Hrothgar to have confidence in Hrothulf, his nephew. She tries to convince him that when he dies his sons “will be safe,/Sheltered in Hrothulf's gracious protection” (1180-81).

The Finnsburg Episode deals with treachery and revenge. Because all the historical digressions have relevance to the main narrative, the poet didn't choose to tell this particular story at this point without good reason. The main characters in the Finnsburg Episode are Hildeburh- whose fate is to be torn apart by her bonds of kinship with the Finns and the Danes- and Hengest, whose code of ethics is upset by the conflict between honor and revenge.

NOTE: In the previous verse the poet let us know that for a rare moment- during the celebration for Beowulf- there was an absence of conspiratorial feelings. Yet treachery, conspiracy, and evil are part of life, and the poet is implying through the Finnsburg Episode that this moment of calm isn't going to last. You might read this section as you would a mystery story, where the author is supplying hints and clues about what's going to happen next.

The most mysterious character in this section is Hrothulf. He's first mentioned in line 1014, at the start of the banquet for Beowulf. Then, as Welthow makes her appearance in the hall after the Finnsburg Episode, he's described sitting “peacefully together” with Hrothgar, “their friendship and Hrothulf's good faith still unbroken” (1164-65). The poet is once again hinting that at some future date Hrothulf will be involved in a conspiracy against the king- that his good faith will be broken and he's not a person to be trusted.

At this moment the poet chooses to mention Unferth, who's sitting at Hrothgar's feet, and to remind us that although “everyone trusted him” no one forgot that “he'd spilled his relatives' blood.” The poet is in the process of weaving a very complicated drama involving loyalty and kinship.

The poet intends us to compare Welthow and Hildeburh. Welthow advises Hrothgar to put his faith in Hrothulf- in much the same way Hildeburh put her faith in Finn. The poem at this point is like a tapestry, where all events and stories are interconnected.

VERSE 18

Beowulf is rewarded with yet another gift, “the most beautiful necklace known to men.” At a certain point, all these material objects- the swords, the armor, the helmets, the horses, the jewels- seem to lose their value. Do you think the Danes have gone overboard in their expression of thanks toward Beowulf? Is the accumulation of wealth Beowulf's primary concern?

NOTE: By telling us the history of the necklace of the Brosings the poet seems to be mimicking the endless gift-giving. Is any object, he's asking, worth fighting about? The emphasis on objects is connected to the pagan, nonreligious world that existed before the advent of Christianity. Objects are like idols, symbolizing fame and wealth. Beowulf can be seen as the hero of the future. Though he accepts the gifts (fame and wealth are obviously important to him), he's more interested in pleasing God, and he knows that the way to do this is by acting ethically and with concern for others.

Welthow presents Beowulf with these valuable jewels and asks him to lend his strength and wisdom to her two sons. In her speech, the poet reveals her to be innocent of the forces of evil, an uncynical person who believes that among the Danes “men speak softly” and “trust their neighbors.” She describes the Danes as “loyal followers who would fight as joyfully as they drink.”

Welthow is under the illusion that now that Grendel is dead the world will return to the way it was before. Yet the poet has hinted- in the Finnsburg Episode, especially- that disaster and unexpected turns of fate are facts of life. Nothing can be taken for granted.

The soldiers fall asleep as they did after the first banquet. Again, the poet foreshadows the theme of “bed after feast.” He implies that something terrible is about to happen. By now we must realize that the world described by the poet is in a constant state of change, passing from exultation to tragedy in the course of a day.

VERSE 19

It's the middle of the night and all the warriors, both Danes and Geats, are asleep. Beowulf and his men aren't sleeping in the great hall, however, but “had been given better beds.” By now we can expect almost anything to happen. All the drama of the last few verses has been directed toward this moment.

The main theme of the Finnsburg Episode was revenge. Now Grendel's mother appears- from out of the same swamp where her son had lived- to avenge her loss on the inhabitants of Herot.

Once again the poet tells the battle between Grendel and Beowulf.

NOTE: Are all these repetitions of the same event necessary? Let's assume that the poet in the oral telling of the story backtracked every few verses to remind his audience of what had happened. Also, when you tell someone a story it's often natural to repeat some things in a different way for emphasis. Some critics feel the repetitions detract from the poem while others think they add to the tension. This is something you'll have to decide for yourself.

The visit from Grendel's mother, the poet tell us, ended the good fortune of the Geats. It seems only a few hours have passed since Grendel's death, enough time for another banquet.

NOTE: Is the poet being overly moralistic here? Every time you truly enjoy yourself, he's saying, something horrible happens to you. It's a mistake to feel too self-confident, too sure of yourself. Evil- whether it takes the form of a monster or a treacherous warrior- is always in the air.

Grendel's mother enters the hall where the warriors are sleeping. (Why do you think the Danes neglected to post any soldiers at the door of Herot?) They wake in time to ward off the attack with their swords but the monster manages to escape with one victim in her claws. The poet, again, leaves it up to your imagination to visualize Grendel's mother.

After she escapes, the warriors realize that she managed to steal back Grendel's claw from where it was hanging on the rafters. The victim turns out to be one of Hrothgar's closest advisers, “the man he loved most of all men on earth.” The king summons Beowulf and his men. There's a feeling of desperation in the air, but as Beowulf walks through the halls of Herot on his way to the king's throne, he “Rehearsed the words he would want with Hrothgar;/He'd ask the Danes' great lord if all/Were at peace, if the night had passed quietly” (1318-20). We know Beowulf realizes that something is dreadfully wrong- no doubt he can hear the uproar from the main hall- but he also knows that it's his job to convey confidence and self-control. At this moment the young warrior seems wiser and more mature than the aging king.

VERSE 20

Hrothgar is beside himself. “Anguish,” he tells Beowulf, “has descended on the Danes.” It's surprising, in a way, that the king is so shocked. In the course of his speech we learn that, in fact, Grendel had been seen in the company of another monster. Why didn't the Danes expect this other creature to appear one day?

Hrothgar's speech to Beowulf contains a description of the swamp, or “mere,” where Grendel's mother lives. The description is realistic and dream-like at the same time. The trees growing over the lake “are covered with frozen spray.” A deer pursued by hunters would prefer to die on the shore of the lake rather than seek shelter and safety in the water. During storms, “waves splash toward the sky,/As dark as the air, as black as the rain/That the heavens weep” (1374-76). It's the poet's ability to evoke a landscape or scene, as much as his insight into human nature, that has established Beowulf's place in the tradition of great literature.

The king begs Beowulf to help him once again. He's visibly shaken by the death of his friend Esher. His speech displays the capacity and depth of his feelings. Of everyone in the poem, Hrothgar is the person most capable of relating to the events in the world in a way that is truly human.

VERSES 21-23

Beowulf's heroic stature is never more in evidence than when he consoles Hrothgar on the death of his friend, and offers to kill Grendel's mother. Both men follow the monster's tracks until they reach the lake where the monsters live and where now, floating on the water, they see “Esher's bloody head.”

NOTE: Some readers interpret the poet's use of the image of dismemberment- Grendel's claw, Esher's head- as a metaphor for the disunity in the world. A person's body, they say, is like a world in itself. Protecting the body with armor and helmets is a way of protecting one's world.

The surface of the lake is swarming with serpents and sea monsters. Beowulf, for no apparent reason, shoots an arrow at one of the monsters. What does he have to prove? Remember the earlier story of his swimming match with Brecca and how he boasted of his ability to fight against sea monsters. Possibly in this instance he is merely testing himself, as a way of preparing for his underwater battle with Grendel's mother.

He has certainly proved his courage to Unferth. No longer doubting Beowulf's superhuman abilities, he gives the hero a special sword to take into battle. Is Unferth reconciled to the fact that Beowulf is a braver warrior than he? He does seem genuinely embarrassed by the speech he made when Beowulf first arrived in Denmark. Beowulf, by killing Grendel, has revealed to the Danish warriors the limits of their own bravery; all they can do is stand back, awestruck, as he prepares to enter the lake.

Beowulf tells Hrothgar that if he dies in the lake to look after his comrades and to send his treasures to Higlac, king of the Geats. Beowulf again reveals the aspects of his personality that make him a true hero: consideration of others, humility, generosity, and awareness of his own mortality.

Without waiting for a response from Hrothgar, Beowulf leaps into the snakeinfested waters. “For hours he sank through the waves,” the poet says, indicating that Beowulf possesses the amazing power to hold his breath underwater for an unlimited period of time. Some readers feel that this ability detracts from the realistic nature of the story, and gives the impression that Beowulf is more like a good monster than a man. (It has been suggested that in keeping with the Christian themes that pervade the poem, Beowulf's descent into the lake represents a true descent into the underworld or hell.)

Grendel's mother captures Beowulf in her claws and drags him down to her cave at the bottom of the lake. As they wrestle together, the other sea monsters look on- in much the same way the Geat and Danish warriors watched as Beowulf battled Grendel. Beowulf attempts to sever the monster's head with Unferth's sword before realizing that Grendel's mother, like her son, is immune to ordinary weapons, and that no sword could slice her evil skin."

Beowulf, the poet tells us, is motivated by his desire for fame, as if he didn't have enough already. “So fame/Comes to the men who mean to win it/And care about nothing else!” (1534-36). The desire for revenge that motivates Grendel's mother makes her seem even fiercer than her son. Remember that Grendel didn't put up much of a fight against Beowulf, while Grendel's mother, “squatting with her weight on his stomach,” almost manages to stab Beowulf with her dagger.

Until the very end of Verse 22 there's no mention of God's help. Beowulf in this battle is relying on courage alone. But when all is hopeless, and Grendel's mother appears to have the upper hand, God intervenes. It's as if God has been looking on all along, waiting for the right moment to show whose side He's on.

The battle ends swiftly. Beowulf sees the magic sword hanging on the wall of the cave, and in a moment of desperation and pure strength, cuts off the monster's head. A brilliant light shines through the roof of the monsters' hall, a supernatural light “as bright as heaven's own candle.” Recall that in the simplest sense evil is associated with darkness (Grendel and his mother appear only at night) and goodness with light.

The poet then retells the story of Grendel's attacks, creating a bridge between the two battles. Beowulf explores the monsters' hall, finds Grendel's body, and cuts off his head.

NOTE: Revenge, which motivates the people in this society, is not to be taken lightly. Recall the Finnsburg Episode, and how a feud between tribes could be resolved only by taking revenge for what the other tribe had done. Is revenge (“an eye for an eye”) the great equalizer? Is the poet telling us that no true resolution can take place without it?

We return to the audience of warriors standing at the edge of the lake. As the blood (it's Grendel's mother's blood, but they don't know that yet) rises to the surface, they begin to lose all hope that the Geat hero will ever return. “Almost all agreed that Grendel's/Mighty mother, the she-wolf, had killed him” (1598-99). Hrothgar and his men give up and go home, while Beowulf's comrades linger. Does it surprise you, after all Beowulf has accomplished, that they give up hope so easily?

The poet takes us from the real world- the warriors awaiting the news of Beowulf's fate- to the supernatural underwater world where Beowulf is battling the monsters. The sword, without which Beowulf would certainly have died, begins melting away like an icicle: it dissolves “in Grendel's steaming blood.” The sword is the sign of God's presence. Beowulf takes Grendel's head and the hilt of the magical sword, and swims up to the surface to rejoin his comrades.

VERSES 24-25

In his triumphant speech to Hrothgar on his return to Herot, Beowulf attributes his success against Grendel's mother to “God's guidance.” He realizes that without the magic sword he might have lost his life. Again the poet backtracks and, in Beowulf's voice, retells the story of finding the sword and killing the monster.

NOTE: The relationship between Grendel and his mother is one of kinship and parallels the many blood relationships that the poet describes throughout his story.

In the ancient letters, “runes,” written on the hilt of the magic sword, the old king reads the battle between good and evil and the history of the evil giants. Then Hrothgar, realizing that Beowulf's work in Denmark is over, warns the Geat hero against letting his successes and fame go to his head. He advises Beowulf not to become like Hermod, the Danish leader whose story the poet has already told us (900). Hermod abused his power, brought destruction to his people, and ended his life alone and friendless.

It's up to God, Hrothgar tells Beowulf, to grant men wisdom, greatness, and wealth. Yet once a person has power and fame he must learn how to use it correctly. A prosperous person forgets that he's been blessed with God's favor. He allows pride, devilish pride, to grow in his heart and soul. Before he knows it his body fails him; it's too late to make amends for the evil things he's done. The greatest evil, we learn, is not taking advantage of God's favor. If he gives you wealth or power, use it well. If you don't you'll die alone, bitter, and filled with regret.

Death is inevitable, Hrothgar tells Beowulf, even for the greatest of warriors.

How closely is Beowulf listening to Hrothgar's sermon? The great hero doesn't respond and for the moment we have no way of knowing what he's thinking. Hrothgar's speech ends with the promise of more treasures- possibly that's what Beowulf is really interested in.

The warriors sit down to yet another feast, a farewell dinner because the next morning the Geat warriors plan to begin their voyage home. There's a feeling of peace and serenity in the hall. The warriors can finally all go to bed without the fear that some new danger lurks in the shadows.

Eating, sleeping, gift-giving- these scenes seem to follow a set pattern. First joy occurs, then sorrow. Possibly a new feud will begin the next day or an act of treachery will occur. These people (with the possible exception of Hrothgar) live very much in the present moment; they accept instability and sudden change as a fact of life. From day to day, from night to night, no one knows what to expect.

No monster comes to haunt the great hall in the middle of the night. Instead, “a black-feathered raven” is singing outside the windows.

Except for the raven, the night passes uneventfully. The Geat warriors, anxious to return home, rise early and begin preparing for their voyage. Unferth, still trying to make up with Beowulf after his initial blunder, offers him his sword, Hrunting, as a farewell gift. Beowulf, with Hrothgar's sermon on pride still fresh in his ears, accepts Unferth's gift forgivingly. His words of thanks, the poet tells us, “were spoken like the hero he was!”

VERSE 26

Before leaving, Beowulf returns to Herot to visit the king one last time. His speech shows us clearly that he's taken Hrothgar's sermon to heart. His modesty and generosity are as impressive as his self-confidence was earlier. He offers to return with “a thousand armed Geats” if Denmark is ever again threatened by enemies or if the king ever needs his help.

Hrothgar's farewell speech is the most emotional passage in the poem. His ability to express what he's really feeling gives the poem as a whole an added dimension. Through Hrothgar's character the poet is informing us that the people in Anglo-Saxon society are not merely barbarians- going to war, feasting, plotting against one another- but also possess the capacity to care about what their comrades are feeling.

Hrothgar predicts that when Higlac dies Beowulf will surely become the king of the Geats. He kisses Beowulf good-bye and bursts into tears, realizing (he's an old man, after all) that it's possible he'll never see the young warrior again. “His love,” the poet tells us, “was too warm to be hidden.”

NOTE: Then, as now, people had a hard time expressing their feelings, and some readers think that the poet himself believes that Hrothgar's tears are a sign of weakness. “Winter had followed winter,” the poet tells us, “and age had stolen his strength.” Do you think the ability to express feelings is a sign of strength or of weakness?

VERSE 27

Loaded down with treasures, the Geats march proudly down to the shore. The same soldier who met them when they arrived in Denmark (Verse 3) comments to them that their countrymen will be glad to see them when they return.

Notice the energy and spirit of the language the poet uses to describe the voyage. It's almost as if the words themselves were propelling the boat over the waves. “Driven/By the wind,” he writes, “the ship rammed high on the shore” (1912-13). The Geats are characterized as an aggressive and forceful tribe, and it's no accident that the poet uses words like driven and rammed to describe their homecoming.

As the Geats carry their treasures to Higlac's hall, the poet interrupts the narrative with another digression. This one concerns Higd, Higlac's wife and the daughter of Hareth. Higd is “young but wise and knowing beyond her years,” a generous queen who happily distributed her husband's wealth among his followers. In contrast, her daughter Thrith is arrogant and destructive, so vicious “that her father's followers/Averted their eyes as she passed” (1932-33). More than once a man was executed for staring at her. After Thrith marries Offa, a member of the Hemming tribe, her personality changes radically. Her husband's followers praise her for “her generous heart” and for the “adoring love” she displays for her husband. (Some readers compare Thrith to Katherine in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. Others describe her as a female version of Hermod.) The digression ends with words of praise for Offa.

NOTE: The poet makes us wonder about the relevance of all this to the main narrative. Of course, since Beowulf and his men are about to meet with Higlac, it's only natural that the poet should want to fill us in about the king's family. Perhaps he wants us to compare Offa and Higlac, whom we'll meet for the first time in the next verse. Remember this digression as you read further, and try to see how it connects to the main story.

VERSES 28-30

Does Beowulf's retelling of his exploits in Denmark add anything to our knowledge? Or is it just the poet's way of bringing the story up to date for his audience?

For the first time we see Beowulf at home among friends. We see the hero and his men at the foot of Higlac's throne. And once again we see the queen pouring drinks for the king and his warriors. (Does it seem that pouring drinks for the men and bestowing gifts on the brave warriors are the main functions of women in this society?)

Beowulf makes it clear right from the start that news of his success against Grendel wasn't something that could ever be questioned. Possibly he's thinking of Unferth's remarks about his swimming match with Brecca (Verse 8). “Not even the oldest of his evil kind,” he reassures Higlac, “will ever boast, lying in sin/And deceit, that the monster beat me” (2007-2009).

He interrupts the chronological story of his adventures to tell Higlac a historical digression of his own. This one concerns Freaw, Hrothgar's daughter, whom the king is planning to marry to Ingeld, a prince of the Hathobard tribe, in the hope that this arrangement will settle the quarrel between the Danes and the Hathobards. Beowulf, however, is skeptical about this method of ending the feud. He predicts that on the very day of the wedding, when the Danes and the Hathobards get together, one of Ingeld's soldiers will drunkenly provoke one of the Danes, and the feud between the two tribes will erupt again.

NOTE: All the historical digressions involve feuds between men, but the main narrative concerns feuds between men and monsters. Some critics think that the digressions are the most important sections of the poem and tell us more about the society of these people than Beowulf's heroic battles. It's fun to go back over the poem and read the digressions separately from the main narrative to see how they connect to one another.

From Beowulf's story of his battle with Grendel we learn that the monster had a pouch at his side, “a huge bag sewn/From a dragon's skin” (2086-87). Beowulf tells Higlac that “the monster intended to take me, put me inside, save me for another meal.” The image of the pouch is the only detail the poet omitted from his own version of the story. This comment that Beowulf could fit inside the monster's pouch gives us our only concrete idea of the monster's actual size. Or do you think that Beowulf is exaggerating Grendel's physical stature to impress Higlac?

Hrothgar, in Beowulf's words, is a melancholy old man, filled with the memories of the battles he won when he was younger. We see him stroking the strings of a harp, “reciting unhappy truths about good/And evil” (2110-11). We see him weeping at the death of Esher, his closest friend. We see him begging Beowulf to kill Grendel's mother. Do these images of Hrothgar coincide with what we already know about him? Or is Beowulf again altering the picture slightly for Higlac's benefit?

Notice that Beowulf's descriptions of his adventures contain almost no mention of God's help. His remarks at the end of his description of the battle with Grendel's mother that “I had barely escaped/With my life, my death was not written” (2140-41) indicate the concerns with fate, and the power of God to alter man's fate, that existed in Anglo-Saxon society.

VERSE 31

Beowulf ends his speech to Higlac with an avowal of loyalty to his king. “I have almost no family,/Higlac,” he says, “almost no one, now, but you” (215051). Describing his adventures in Denmark, he was careful not to praise Hrothgar too highly for fear, perhaps, of offending Higlac. Now he's saying, as a way of reassuring the Geat king, that despite his feelings for Hrothgar he has remained faithful to the Geats. Everything he did in Denmark was to bring honor and glory to his homeland.

Beowulf presents Higlac with his treasures. The poet's brief commentary on Beowulf's character gives us an indication of the feelings of paranoia that pervaded the minds of people in the Anglo-Saxon world:

Beowulf had brought his king

Horses and treasure- as a man must,

Not weaving nets of malice for his comrades,

Preparing their death in the dark, with secret,

Cunning tricks. (2165-69)

Treachery, malice, hatred- all these are the expected ways of behaving. To act selflessly, and to perform heroically for the sake of one's country, was obviously rare. No wonder Hrothgar loved Beowulf so much.

The poet gives us a brief summary of Beowulf's childhood: how he'd been scorned by his fellow Geats who “were sure he was lazy, noble but slow.” It's possible that Beowulf's motivation to become a great warrior was to prove himself to the people who'd scorned him when he was younger. The need for respect from our friends and peers is a universal feeling, and certainly one we can all identify with.

This verse marks the transition between Beowulf's youth and his old age. After Higlac dies and his son Herdred is killed in battle with the Swedes, Beowulf takes the throne and rules over the Geat kingdom for fifty years.

NOTE: The poet tells us little about what occurred during Beowulf's reign except to say that he held the throne “long and well.” Why do you think the poet spends only a few lines describing Beowulf's fifty-year reign, and almost three verses recounting his exploits in Denmark? Remember that an epic poem usually concentrates on a few important events in a person's life, rather than attempting to portray an entire life from beginning to end.

At the end of his life we learn that a new challenge has presented itself to Beowulf. Geatland is being terrorized by a fire-breathing dragon who was awakened when a thief entered his castle and stole a jeweled cup from his treasure-hoard. The dragon wreaks havoc on the Geats in much the same way Grendel terrorized the Danes. It's up to Beowulf as king to protect his people, and the second part of the poem will be dominated by this final conflict.

VERSE 32

The thief is the first character in the poem who is neither a member of the aristocracy nor a warrior. “He was someone's slave,” the poet tells us, reminding us that a society of ordinary people existed outside the great halls and battlefields.

The dragon is guarding a treasure-hoard left by “the last survivor of a noble race,” who, before he died, locked his gold and jewels in a stone fortress. “The Lay of the Last Survivor,” as it's called (beginning 2247), is one of the most moving speeches in the poem, and recalls Hrothgar's sermon to Beowulf about pride and the transience of fame and wealth. The speech also foreshadows the end of the Geat dynasty, and of all dynasties, and mocks the endless giving of gifts that occurs throughout the first part of the poem.

NOTE: Notice as you read the second part whether the poet's style is different from the first part. Remember that some readers think that the two parts were composed by two different poets.

After the last survivor of this “noble race” finally dies, his treasure-hoard is discovered by a dragon. In the last survivor's speech, the futility of acquiring material objects is emphasized, so it's no surprise that the treasure-hoard is now guarded by a dragon for whom the treasures have absolutely no use. The stealing of a single cup from the hoard only highlights the pettiness and greed of a society that places such a high premium on material wealth.

VERSES 33-35

As Grendel tormented the Danish people in part one, so the dragon vents its anger on the Geats in part two. Like Grendel, the dragon strikes only at night, burning houses so that “the signs of its anger flickered and glowed in the darkness.” Nothing is spared, not even Beowulf's hall and throne.

When Beowulf learns that his own house has been destroyed, his first thought is that he did something to anger God, and he feels guilty. (The poet never makes it clear whether an offense against God actually did occur.)

NOTE: Does Beowulf's reaction seem in keeping with what we know about his character? As king his main function is to protect his people. This is different from the role of warrior that he played in part one. Consequently, he himself must accept the blame for all acts of evil that are performed by or against his country. The stealing of the dragon's cup becomes Beowulf's responsibility, whether he likes it or not.

Beowulf prepares to fight the dragon. At this point the poet again foreshadows the outcome of the poem. Beowulf will die soon, the poet tells us, “but would take the dragon/With him, tear it from the heaped-up treasure/It had guarded so long” (2343-45). Beowulf's youth is evoked by a brief retelling of his battles against Grendel and Grendel's mother, and of his exploits fighting side by side with Higlac during the war with the Frisians.

In part two the poet effortlessly blends past and present events. In retelling Beowulf's exploits against the Frisians during which Higlac was killed, the poet describes Beowulf as “the only survivor,” relating him to “the last survivor” whose treasures fell into the hands of the evil dragon. The connections between present events and the historical digressions are much more evident in part two than in part one.

After the Frisian War Beowulf is offered the leadership of the Geats. He turns it down, however, preferring to support Herdred, Higlac's son, and the rightful heir to the throne. In the course of his kingship, Herdred offers to harbor a group of Swedish exiles- rebels, we are told, against Onela, the Swedish king. Onela invades Geatland in search of the rebels, and Herdred is slain, forcing Beowulf to assume the position he didn't originally want, king of the Geats. Beowulf leads the Geat army in a battle against Sweden, during which Onela is killed.

NOTE: Again, notice the way the poet moves from the past to the present. You learn that two major events occurred during Beowulf's reign as king- the Frisian War and the Geats' feud with Sweden. It's natural, now that Beowulf is an old man, for his memories of the past to play such a large role in the story, that the memories, in fact, are the story. We know that Beowulf will defeat the dragon and die in the process. It's how Beowulf views his entire life that's most important in part two.

The thief who stole the dragon's cup leads Beowulf and his men to the dragon's castle. As Beowulf rests on the shore outside the castle, he has a premonition of his own death. He realizes that he's not as strong as he was when he fought Grendel; the risk of dying is more than a vague possibility. The poet takes this opportunity to allow Beowulf to review his life. We learn how Hrethel took him from his father when Beowulf was seven and treated him like a son, reviving the theme of kinship, and the search for the lost father that recurs throughout the poem.

Hrethel, we are told, has three sons of his own- Herbald, Hathcyn, and Higlac. Beowulf recounts the story of how Hathcyn killed Herbald in a hunting accident, and of Hrethel's sadness at the loss of his son. Old age, as depicted in the poem, seems to be a time of great unhappiness, when all the success and pleasures of a long life are undermined by the loss of strength and power. Hrethel is powerless to avenge his son's death: a problem within one's own family is different from a feud between countries. Consequently, he can do nothing to relieve his grief.

Beowulf's meditation on his life is one of the most moving sections of the poem. Though old age has robbed him of his physical strength, his courage is truly heroic- he still thinks like a hero. His recitation is a study in contrasts between the sad and the joyous, as well as being a chronological history of what he considers his immediate family.

After Herbald dies, Hathcyn inherits the throne, only to die in yet another battle between the Geats and the Swedes. The tone of Beowulf's meditation changes once Higlac becomes king. As long as Beowulf was there to fight at his side, it was unnecessary for the Geat king to enlist help from other tribes. Beowulf's presence alone, so he tells us, was enough to ensure the success of the Geat nation. He sees himself as being “alone, and so it shall be forever.” It's the hero's fate, as one whose courage is so much greater than anyone else's, to move through the world alone, to fight alone against the monsters, to stand alone at the front of every battle. His memories of his previous accomplishments give him the courage now, as an old warrior, to proceed with his endeavor against the dragon.

NOTE: Compare this speech with Beowulf's speeches preceding his battles against Grendel and Grendel's mother. Now that he's an old man has Beowulf's confidence in himself decreased?

Beowulf turns from his meditation on the past to address his fellow warriors. His accomplishments fill him with pride- but of a different sort than the negative pride Hrothgar warned him against earlier in the poem. He will fight against the dragon in the same way he fought against Grendel. As a hero it's his job to accomplish the impossible; as an old man he still wants one last moment of glory.

It's Beowulf who initiates the battle, waking the dragon with “a call so loud and clear that it reached through/The hoary rock, hung in the dragon's ear” (255254). During the first confrontation the dragon's flames melt Beowulf's shield. The aged warrior realizes now that fate is against him, but it doesn't prevent him from striking out against the dragon with his sword.

Beowulf manages to wound the dragon, but not fatally. The dragon responds by engulfing Beowulf with his fiery breath. Now that Beowulf appears to be losing the battle doesn't it seem to you that his comrades would come to his assistance? But the bonds of loyalty and kinship have broken down, a foreshadowing of the chaos that will befall the Geats after Beowulf dies. His fellow warriors flee, thinking only of saving their own lives. Individual survival has become more important than the code of honor and bravery- the bond of comitatus- that held society together. The response of the warriors to Beowulf's plight indicates that the values of this world are changing rapidly. Without the bond of comitatus, without a great leader to guide them, the state will surely fall apart.

VERSES 36-37

One of Beowulf's followers remains true to the bonds of kinship and loyalty. Wiglaf may not be cut from the same heroic mold as Beowulf, but he possesses the same energy and vigor that characterized Beowulf as a young warrior. (Parallel relations abound throughout the poem. Notice, for example, how the aging Beowulf resembles Hrothgar at the start of the poem.)

Read Wiglaf's speech to his comrades in light of what you've already learned about the warriors' code of ethics. As early as the Prologue, the poet informed us that it was a king's generosity toward his warriors that established the bonds of loyalty. In return for their loyalty he provided them with swords and armor, and shared with them the spoils of war.

Wiglaf realizes that for Beowulf it's a point of honor to fight the dragon alone. But he also realizes that for Beowulf “those days are over and gone/And now our lord must lean on younger/Arms” (2646-48). He tries to encourage his frightened comrades to come to Beowulf's assistance; he berates them, and mocks their manhood. But to no avail. The poet gives us a brief history of Wiglaf's sword.

NOTE: How do you interpret this? Some readers feel that the image of the sword as it's used throughout the poem is a symbol of the never-ending feuds between countries. People die in battle, but their swords survive and are used, in future battles, by their next of kin. Objects, the poet is telling us here, often have a longer history than people. Recall how after Beowulf killed Grendel's mother he gave Hrothgar the handle of the magic sword, and how Hrothgar read “the story of ancient wars between good and evil” in the runes on its shiny handle.)

Wiglaf rushes fearlessly into the thick of the battle, crying words of encouragement to Beowulf. The dragon hears him, and engulfs both the warriors with his flames. Beowulf attempts to crush the dragon's head with his old sword, Nagling, but the sword fails him and breaks into pieces. The monster charges again and thrusts its tusks into Beowulf's neck.

NOTE: Beowulf doesn't reject Wiglaf's assistance at this moment. It's more important to slay the dragon and protect his people than to preserve his legend as a warrior who fights alone. It's only as an old man that he realizes the advantage of working in collaboration with other people, and that the pride of the solitary hero only adds to the chaos of the world.

Wiglaf cleverly manages to wound the dragon with his sword, and Beowulf finishes the job by cutting the beast in half. “What they did,” the poet tells us, “all men must do/When the time comes!” (2708-2709). Beowulf realizes that the wound in his neck is serious, and he prepares to die. In his speech to Wiglaf he bemoans the fact that he has no son to whom he can leave his armor. (Remember that the poem is filled with substitute sons and fathers. Wiglaf, then, as he bathes Beowulf's wounds, can be seen as the son Beowulf never had.)

Beowulf reviews his life. He sees his past in terms of all the things he never did: he swore no unholy oaths, began no wars without good reason, didn't shed the blood of any members of his family. His sin, if any, was his desire for wealth and fame. He wasn't content, the poet implies, with his God-given gifts, but craved the rewards that he felt were due him for his accomplishments.

VERSE 38

So gold can easily

Triumph, defeat the strongest of men,

No matter how deep it is hidden! (2764-66)

How insignificant the dragon's treasure-hoard seems in comparison to the acts of bravery and honor that Beowulf accomplished during his life! Yet, as he dies, his main concern is to see the treasure that the dragon was guarding. The conflict between spiritual and material values is never more evident than in his last speech, where he thanks God for “this gold, these jewels.” It's as if as an old man he's reverted to the pagan belief in objects, forgetting that it was with God's strength that he was able to be successful against his many adversaries.

“I sold my life/For this treasure,” Beowulf tells Wiglaf, “and I sold it well” (2798-99). The treasure-hoard, as described by the poet, is in a state of chaos“piles of gleaming gold, precious gems, scattered on the floor”- much like the world itself. After all the feuds and all the endless battles, the dragon's treasure seems like a small reward.

Beowulf's last request is to have a tomb built in his honor. Like Hrothgar, he wants to create some kind of permanent monument to his successes- though permanence, as we've seen, is only an illusion. He gives his necklace, helmet, rings, and mailshirt to Wiglaf. It's the end of an era of prosperity and stability and the beginning of an age of chaos and disintegration. What hope does the world have without the bond between king and warrior?

VERSE 39

The cowardly Geat warriors emerge from the woods where they've been hiding and discover Wiglaf trying to revive the body of his king. Wiglaf's anger when he addresses them is undercut by the grief he feels over Beowulf's death. His speech is an elegy for the entire Geat tribe.

Once again the poet emphasizes the bond between warrior and king as essential to the stability of medieval society. Beowulf gave his followers the best weapons he could find, but when the time came to use them they “ran like cowards.”

Wiglaf, with the true modesty of a devoted warrior, minimizes his role in killing the dragon. Do you think he does this to make his comrades feel guilty? Or is he trying to perpetuate Beowulf's status as a great hero?

He ends his speech by predicting that the Geats will forever be known as cowards, and that death would be preferable to a life “branded with disgrace.”

VERSES 40-41

Wiglaf sends a messenger to the troop of Geat soldiers who are awaiting word on the outcome of the battle. In his address the nameless messenger continues Wiglaf's prediction that the Geats will now become targets of all their old enemies, most especially the Franks and the Swedes.

The messenger reviews the history of the feuds between the tribes. We hear, briefly, about the “bitter quarrel” that Higlac began with the Franks, during which the Geat king was killed. And in the poem's final- and possibly most violent- historical digression, the messenger recounts the long history of the feud between the Geats and the Swedes.

NOTE: These stories, which concern the death of kings (Higlac on one hand, and the Swedish king Ongentho on the other), should be seen in contrast with the story of Beowulf's own death. The story of the battle between the Geats and the Swedes includes many of the major themes that the poet has presented up to this point.

The old Swedish king Ongentho is depicted in combat with the young Geat warriors, Efor and Wulf. (Efor and Wulf collaborate on killing the king, in much the same way Beowulf and Wiglaf joined forces to destroy the dragon.) In keeping with the code between king and warrior, Efor and Wulf are rewarded by Higlac with great treasures. Killing, the poet is saying, is an acceptable act: it is the only way for the warrior's to accumulate wealth and fame. Neither Efor nor Wulf is a particularly impressive warrior and neither of them seems to have any moral feelings about killing. They are motivated solely by the promise of rewards.

The messenger predicts that all the old feuds will begin again once the Geats' enemies learn that Beowulf is dead. It's time to bury the great hero- and with him, all the treasures that the dragon guarded for so long. Some readers feel that the messenger is really speaking in the voice of the poet himself, and that the poem's ultimate message is a condemnation of all the material objects that were so important to the kings, the warriors, and to medieval society in general. The messenger advises Beowulf's followers to melt the dragon's treasure-hoard in the same fire that consumes the hero's ashes: “Give it all of this golden pile,/This terrible, uncounted heap of cups/And rings, bought with his blood” (3012-14). The age of laughter and prosperity is over. If the treasures aren't buried alongside Beowulf's ashes, they will surely fall into the hands of the Geats' enemies.

The messenger ends his speech by evoking the beasts of war: the raven, the eagle, and the wolf. You can almost feel the shadows darkening and the air growing still, an ominous silence broken only by the cries of these animals. As men plunder the treasures of their enemies, so these beasts, the poet reminds us, feed on the bodies of the dead warriors.

The Geats go to the scene of the battle and view the two dead bodies: Beowulf and the dragon. Yet the poet's main interest is the treasure-hoard, and once again he depicts the meaninglessness of all these objects for which people died and whole tribes were destroyed. The dragon guarded the treasure, killed men, and was killed in return. Is it all worth it?

VERSE 42

Hiding the treasure, the poet tells us, was a sign of man's greed. It went against the law of God. Eventually it led to Beowulf's death. The men who hid the treasure had cast a spell on it that was meant to last until the day of judgment. It was Beowulf's ill-fortune- and his fate- to fight the dragon and inherit his jewels.

NOTE: No one knows when one is going to die. A thief steals a cup from a dragon, and this seemingly trivial act leads to Beowulf's downfall. His death makes us wonder whether all his acts of courage were motivated by greed, as much as by a desire for fame and glory. In his dying moments the dragon's treasure seems to be his main concern. To give Beowulf the benefit of the doubt, we should view him as an essentially honorable person- a man who wanted to perform good deeds- who was unable to resolve the conflict between pagan and Christian values that dominated his lifetime.

In Wiglaf's final speech, the poet attempts to sum up the events that led to Beowulf's death. We learn that Beowulf's followers tried to prevent him from fighting the dragon, but that “fate, and his will, were too strong.” Beowulf's life was worth more than all the treasures he earned by his acts of courage. Unlike Efor and Wulf and most of the other warriors, Beowulf's life had a moral value that set him apart from other men.

Wiglaf orders the lumber for Beowulf's funeral pyre. With seven other Geat warriors he enters the dragon's cave and gathers the treasure-hoard. Then, after rolling the dragon's body into the ocean, they load the treasures onto a wagon and bring them to the pyre.

VERSE 43

The Geats carry out Beowulf's final wishes. They build a huge funeral pyre, surrounding it with helmets, shields, and mailshirts. It's a time of great sadness and mourning. An old woman leads the mourners in “a song of misery,” predicting the decline of the Geat nation. The smoke from the funeral pyre rises toward heaven with the words of her song- a final link, some readers feel, between the spiritual and earthly forces that dominate the world.

The Geats are aware that with Beowulf's death their lives have changed for the worse; there's no one to replace him. They build a tower on the sand, a monument containing the hero's ashes and all the dragon's treasures. Though Beowulf had hoped that his people would profit from the dragon's hoard, all the gold and jewels are useless, buried in the earth forever. It's the poem's great irony that all the material rewards that one earns during one's life can never be enough to stem the tide of fate. Everything in life is uncertain, even for a hero.

A STEP BEYOND: TESTS AND ANSWERS

TEST 1

_____ 1. Beowulf may have been first told by a scop who was a(n)

traveling entertainer
monk
epic hero

_____ 2. Two conflicting codes in this poem are

Christian and pagan
materialist and idealist
political and spiritual

_____ 3. Beowulf sails to Denmark because

he wants to fight Grendel
Hrothgar invited him
a big reward was offered

_____ 4. Grendel is a descendant of

Satan
Chaos
Cain

_____ 5. Hrothgar once fought with

King Higlac
Beowulf's father Edgetho
The king of the Wulfings

_____ 6. The Finnsburg Episodes is told to bring up the theme of

treachery
kinship
revenge

I and III only

I and II only

I, II, and III

_____ 7. Beowulf kills Grendel's mother with

a shaft of holy light
her own son's claw
a magical sword

_____ 8. Unlike Hrothgar, in his old age Beowulf seeks

a son figure
one last moment of glory
wisdom

_____ 9. The dragon begins to attack the Geats because

a cup was stolen from its hoard
its son was killed
God makes him punish the faithless Geats

_____ 10. After Beowulf dies, we sense that the Geats will

use the treasure wisely
become prey to their enemies
live in peace at last

11. One of the major themes of Beowulf is the contrast between youth and age. Discuss.

12. Analyze the various aspects of Beowulf's personality. In what ways do you think he's a hero?

13. Analyze the structure of the poem. Focus on how the historical digressions fit into the main narrative.

14. Define the following terms: kenning, alliteration, litotes.

15. Why is the code of ethics between warrior and king so important to Anglo-Saxon society?

TEST 2

_____ 1. This poem relates the adventures of the

Anglos and the Saxons
Celts and the Norsemen
Danes and the Geats

_____ 2. Herot is the home built by

Grendel
Hrothgar
Beowulf

_____ 3. Hrothgar is to young Beowulf as old Beowulf is to

Unferth
Wiglaf
Brecca

_____ 4. Comitatus is

the bond between king and warrior
Christian charity
courage in battle

_____ 5. When we first meet Beowulf, he appears

calm and self-confident
shy and uncertain
boastful and rude

_____ 6. When Beowulf grabs Grendel's hand, the monster

immediately wants to escape
breathes fire on the roof
calls for his mother

_____ 7. The Beowulf poet repeats scenes for the following reasons

for variety
for emphasis
as part of a courtly tradition

I only
III only
I and II only

_____ 8. Grendel's mother kills

Hrothgar's friend Esher
Beowulf's son
Unferth

_____ 9. Hrothgar warns Beowulf against

greed
pride
too much trust in God

_____ 10. Beowulf becomes king of the Geats

when Higlac dies
after Herdred, Higlac's son
because he has killed the dragon

11. What do you learn about Anglo-Saxon society from reading the poem?

12. Define an epic. Discuss the reasons why you would describe Beowulf as an epic poem.

13. In what way was the poet influenced by Christian tradition? Explain.

14. Some critics feel that the major theme of the poem is the struggle between good and evil. Tell why you agree or disagree.

15. How does the society of the Danes and the Geats change in the course of the poem?

ANSWERS:

TEST 1

1. A 2. A 3. A 4. C 5. B 6. A 7. C 8. B 9. A 10. B

11. Compare the relationship between Beowulf as a young man and Hrothgar as an older king. See how this parallels the later relationship between Beowulf and Wiglaf. Note the characteristics of Beowulf's youthfulness by citing examples from his first speeches when he arrives in Denmark. Compare the tone and content of these speeches with Beowulf's speeches as an old man.

12. Note Beowulf's superhuman qualities (for instance, his ability to stay underwater for long periods of time, as he does during the battle with Grendel's mother) that set him apart from other men. Discuss how he treats other people, citing examples from the poem: his conversation with the Danish soldier when the Geats first arrive in Denmark, his dialogues with King Hrothgar and King Higlac. Discuss his personality in terms of his capacity for loyalty, forgiveness, and generosity. Does his desire for fame and glory make him less a hero? Talk about why you think he insists on fighting the dragon alone, and relate this idea to the idea of the hero as a solitary and tragic figure.

13. The poem is divided into two parts. In part one we see Beowulf as a young man, in part two as an aging king. The main narrative involves three battles: Beowulf and Grendel, Beowulf and Grendel's mother, Beowulf and the dragon. The poem can be described structurally by comparing parts one and two or by comparing the three battles. The poem can also be viewed as being structured around the character of Beowulf. In the course of telling the main story the poet frequently digresses with a related story from the past. The relation of the historical digressions to the main narrative is another possible interpretation of how the poem was put together. Take any of the digressions- the Finnsburg Episode, for instance- and see how it relates to what's going on in the main narrative. Discuss how the stories from the past are meant to parallel and illuminate what's happening in the present.

14. A kenning is a phrase signifying a characteristic of a person or thing that the poet uses instead of naming that person or thing directly. For example: a warrior might be described as “the helmet-bearing one” or a king as a “ring-giver.” Alliteration is the repetition of the same sounds or syllables in two or more words in a line. Litotes are a form of understatement, often intended to create a sense of irony. An example of litotes can be found in the poet's description of Beowulf after he returns to Geatland from Denmark (2165-69).

15. Throughout the poem (beginning with the description of Shild in the Prologue) we see how the code of comitatus forms the backbone of Anglo-Saxon society. The king known for his generosity will attract the most warriors. In return, the warrior will pledge his loyalty to the king and his country. Cite the Geat warriors' refusal (with the exception of Wiglaf) to help Beowulf when he fights the dragon. Refer to Wiglaf's speech to his cowardly comrades, and discuss the idea that, as Wiglaf puts it, death is better than the violation of the code.

TEST 2

1. C 2. B 3. B 4. A 5. A 6. A 7. C 8. A 9. B 10. B

11. The poem deals with only one aspect of Anglo-Saxon society: the kings and the warriors. The thief who steals the cup from the dragon is perhaps the only character in the poem who isn't a member of the aristocracy. The life of the kings and the warriors is very formal and ritualistic. Their main forms of relaxation tend to be simple ones, like eating and drinking. Discuss women's role in the society and mention the women characters whom you think are most important.

12. Beowulf fits into the epic tradition that began with Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey and Virgil's The Aeneid. Like these earlier poems, Beowulf deals with a few heroic events in the life of a single individual. Through an examination of this person's life the epic poet attempts to reflect the history of his time. (It would be a good idea to read the earlier epic poems and compare them to Beowulf.) Note the dignity of the style and tone, and the way past events are woven into the main narrative. Analyze Beowulf's relation to Hrothgar and Higlac, his feelings about the feud between the Danes and the Hathobards, and how his personality embodies the most important characteristic and conflicts of Anglo-Saxon society.

13. The poet was indebted to the Christian tradition as it existed in England at the end of the seventh century. His point of view, his references to the Bible, his ethical standards are all Christian; he's attempting to blend the pagan concept of fate with the Christian idea of grace. Beowulf defeats Unferth not by force, but by example, and Unferth hands over his sword, symbol of his strength. The audience for whom the poet was writing was obviously familiar with the Christian references. At the approximate time that the poem was composed, most of the AngloSaxon world had converted to Christianity. It might be said that Beowulf was a pagan epic adapted to the feelings of a Christian world.

14. The monsters are necessary to the poem so that Beowulf can prove his heroic qualities. Beowulf is described as “the strongest man in the world” and in order to prove himself as a hero he has to fight against something super-human. Although the monsters possess evil qualities that doesn't mean that Beowulf and the warriors are necessarily good. Analyze the characteristics of pagan society: the feuds, the conspiracies, the emphasis on material goods, the endless wars between countries. It's a society where killing is accepted and rewarded. In the poet's mind, society was as much a threat to itself as the monsters were.

15. The poem begins on a positive note: it's the beginning of a new reign of prosperity for the Danish people. The bond between king and warrior- comitatus has never been stronger. A heroic figure like Beowulf is an accepted figure in this world. The way to win glory and fame is by risking your life and performing acts of extreme bravery and courage. By the end of the poem we see how the value of the bond between warrior and king has diminished in importance. Beowulf strives to perform one last heroic act- killing the dragon- and loses his life. The Geat dynasty is on the brink of disaster. The Danes are about to enter a feud with the Hathobards. Christianity is replacing paganism as the basis for ethical conduct.

TERM PAPER IDEAS

1. Discuss the idea of comitatus and why it was so important to Anglo-Saxon society.

2. What are the qualities that make a hero? Cite the qualities in Beowulf's personality that you think are truly heroic.

3. Some readers describe Beowulf as being more like a god than a man. What are the qualities that make him human?

4. Compare Beowulf to Odysseus in Homer's Odyssey and Aeneas in Virgil's Aeneid.

5. How are the historical digressions important to the structure of the poem?

6. What is the relevance of the character Unferth to the poem?

7. Are Hrothgar's tears on Beowulf's departure from Denmark a sign of strength or weakness?

8. Compare Beowulf as a young warrior to Wiglaf.

9. Show how the influence of Christianity affected the lives of Beowulf, Hrothgar, and Anglo-Saxon society in general.

10. What is the role of women in Anglo-Saxon society? Are there any major women characters in the poem?

11. Why do you think the poet repeats the story of the battle between Beowulf and Grendel so frequently? Do these repetitions add to or subtract from the overall drama of the poem?

12. Analyze Hrothgar's sermon to Beowulf on the evils of pride. Discuss the ideas contained within this speech.

13. Why does Wiglaf predict that the Geat dynasty will collapse after Beowulf's death?

14. Compare “The Lay of the Last Survivor” to Hrothgar's sermon on pride.

15. Is Hrothgar himself guilty of excessive pride by building Herot? Discuss this in relation to the feeling of instability and transience that pervaded AngloSaxon life.

16. Discuss the father-son relationship between Hrothgar and Beowulf.

17. Define paganism. Discuss how paganism affected Beowulf's character, and what conflicts it created for the hero.

18. What makes Beowulf a great poem? Discuss the way the poet uses language- the precision with which he describes things, his narrative techniques.

19. Discuss the concept of revenge as it occurs throughout the poem. Do you think that revenge is part of the pagan or the Christian tradition?

20. Why does Beowulf insist on fighting the monster alone? Discuss this point in terms of what we know about the nature of the hero.

21. What is the poet's point of view? Does it remain the same throughout the poem or does it change from character to character?

22. Choose one of the historical digressions and show how it connects to the main narrative.

23. Discuss the image of “feasting” as it appears throughout the poem.

24. What does the violence of the battle scenes tell us about Anglo-Saxon society? Relate the notion of violence to the conflict between paganism and Christianity.

25. Who are the major characters in the poem other than Beowulf? Explain.

GLOSSARY

The spelling of names in this study guide are based on the Burton Raffel translation. Alternative spellings are given below in parentheses.

BEO A Danish king. Son of Shild, father of Healfdane.

BEOWULF Son of Edgetho, nephew of Higlac. King of the Geats. Born in A.D. 495, went to Denmark to battle Grendel in 515, became king of the Geats in 533.

BONSTAN (Beanstan) Father of Brecca.

BRECCA Chief of the Brondings. A young companion of Beowulf.

BRONDINGS A Scandinavian tribe.

BROSING A possible reference to the Brisings, who made a necklace for the goddess Freyja.

DAGREF (Daeghrefn) A Frank warrior, killed by Beowulf.

ECLAF (Ecglaf) Unferth's father.

EDGETHO (Ecgtheow) Father of Beowulf, married to Hrethel's daughter.

EFOR (Eofor) A Geat warrior. Kills Ongentho, and is given Higlac's daughter as a reward.

EMER (Eomer) Son of Offa.

ERMLAF (Yrmenlaf) A Danish nobleman, brother of Esher.

ERMRIC (Eormenric) King of the East Goths.

ESHER (Aeschere) A Danish nobleman, one of Hrothgar's trusted friends. Killed by Grendel's mother.

FINN A Frisian king; husband of Hnaf's sister, Hildeburh.

FITLA (Fitela) Son of Siegmund.

FRANKS A West German tribe, located near the Rhine and Meuse rivers.

FREAW (Freawaru) Hrothgar's daughter. She's given in marriage to Ingeld, in the hope of settling the quarrel between the Danes and the Hathobards.

FRISIANS A West German people.

FRODA King of the Hathobards, father of Ingeld.

GARMUND Offa's father.

GEATS A tribe from southern Sweden. The exact identification and origin of this people is unknown.

GOTHS A tribe originating in Poland. Settled near the Danube River in the third century A.D. Were wiped out by the Lombards at the end of the sixth century.

GRENDEL A monster (descended from Cain) who lives at the bottom of a lake with his mother. Terrorizes the Danes until he's killed by Beowulf.

HALGA Son of Healfdane, brother of Hrothgar, father of Hrothulf.

HAMA A character in the series of tales about Ermric.

HARETH (Haereth) Father of Higd.

HATHCYN (Haethcyn) Son of Hrethel. He becomes king of the Geats after accidentally killing his brother, Herbald. Killed by Ongentho.

HATHLAF (Heatholaf) A member of the Wulfing tribe, killed by Edgetho.

HATHOBARDS A German tribe, who may have lived on the south Baltic coast.

HEALFDANE (Healfdene) A Danish king. Son of Beo, father of Hergar, Hrothgar, Halga, and Urs.

HEMMING A friend of Offa.

HENGEST A Danish warrior. Avenges the death of his leader, Hnaf, against the Finns.

HERBALD (Herebald) A prince of the Geats, Hrethel's son. Killed accidentally by his brother, Hathcyn.

HERDRED (Heardred) A king of the Geats, son of Higlac. He is killed by Onela, the Swedish king.

HERGAR (Heorogar) A Danish king, son of Healfdane.

HERMOD (Heremod) A Danish king whose bad character undermined his great military prowess.

HEROT (Heorot) Battle hall built by Hrothgar to celebrate his successes.

HERWARD (Heoroweard) Hergar's son.

HIGD (Hygd) Wife of Higlac, daughter of Hareth.

HIGLAC (Hygelac) A king of the Geats. Uncle of Beowulf, son of Hrethel, brother of Herbald and Hathcyn.

HNAF (Hnaef) A Danish king, killed by Finn.

HONDSHEW (Hondscio) A Geat warrior. Accompanies Beowulf to Denmark and is killed by Grendel.

HRETHEL A king of the Geats. Higlac's father.

HRETHRIC Son of Hrothgar.

HROTHGAR A Danish king. Son of Healfdane. While king his country is afflicted by the attacks of Grendel and Grendel's mother.

HROTHMUND Son of Hrothgar.

HROTHULF Son of Halga. Though it's not mentioned in the poem, Hrothulf was to seize the Danish throne after Hrothgar's death, killing Hrethric, the legal heir.

HRUNTING Unferth's sword.

INGELD A prince of the Hathobards. Married to Freaw.

JUTES A Frisian tribe.

NAGLING Beowulf's sword.

OFFA King of the Angles, husband of Thrith.

ONELA A Swedish king, son of Ongentho. Killed the Geat king Herdred and is later killed by his nephew.

ONGENTHO (Ongentheow) A Swedish king. Killer of Hathcyn. Eventually killed by a group of Geats, led by Higlac.

RENNSBURG Location of the battle between the Swedes and Geats.

SHILD (Scyld) A Danish king.

SIEGMUND (Sigemund) Legendary Germanic hero, whose story is recounted in the poem. Son of Vels, father of Fitia.

SWERTING Grandfather of Higlac.

THRITH (Thryth) Offa's wife. A haughty and violent woman who is later tamed by her husband.

UNFERTH A Danish warrior. Attempts to slander Beowulf's reputation when the hero arrives in Denmark.

VELS Siegmund's father.

WAYLAND A master smith celebrated in many Germanic poems.

WELTHOW (Wealtheow) Wife of Hrothgar.

WEXSTAN (Weoxstan) Wiglaf's father. Killed Onela's nephew, when the Swedish king invaded Geatland.

WIGLAF A Geat warrior, who joined Beowulf in the fight against the dragon.

WULF A Geat warrior, brother of Efor.

WULFGAR A Danish warrior. He informs Hrothgar of Beowulf's arrival in Denmark.

WULFINGS (Wylfings) A Germanic tribe who resided on the Baltic Sea.

YRS Daughter of Healfdane.

CRITICS

Beowulf is essentially a balance, an opposition of ends and beginnings. In its simplest terms it is a contrasted description of two moments in a great life, rising and setting; an elaboration of the ancient and intensely moving contrast between youth and age, first achievement and final death.

J. R. R. Tolkien, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," 1936

We have in Beowulf a story of giant-killing and dragon-slaying. Why should we construct a legend of the gods or a nature-myth to account for these tales? Why must Grendel or his mother represent the tempest, or the malaria, or the drear long winter nights? We know that tales of giant-killers and dragon-slayers have been current among the people of Europe for thousands of years. Is it not far more easy to regard the story of the fight between Beowulf and Grendel merely as a fairy tale, glorified into an epic?

R. W. Chambers, Beowulf: An Introduction to the Study of the Poem, 1959

The poet's consistency of tone reveals his mastery of texture and structure, mostly in the handling of digressions of various length. A long one, such as the Finnsburg episode, can set the grim past of the Danes into an atmosphere of treachery in Hrothgar's court. The over-whelming tension of that long Frisian winter with its resolution by slaughter is emblematic and prophetic of the impending horrors of Hrothulf's revolt and the Hathobard feud.

Donald K. Fry, “The Artistry of Beowulf,” 1968

The Christian influence in the Beowulf is a matter of transforming spirit rather than of reference to dogma or doctrine. And it is, in the main, an influence reflecting the Old Testament rather than the New. The poem contains specific references to Cain's murder of Abel, and to the stories of the Creation, the giants and the Flood. But we find no such allusions to New Testament themes.... Indeed, considering the nature of the material with which the poet is working, we should hardly expect such references.

Charles W. Kennedy, Beowulf, The Oldest English Epic, 1964

...in this work the poet was not much concerned with Christianity and paganism. Beowulf was a hero mainly because of his deeds. All his adventures come from pagan stories, and the pagan motives and actions persist. Hrothgar is made eminent by his speeches, which were not governed by pagan tradition. The Christian poet was free to mold them as he wished, and so to make belief in God a leading figure of the character. He was likely to make the most of it, since Hrothgar is not just the pathetic figure of a king incapable through old age of protecting his people: he is a famous hero, still great because of his wisdom and goodness.

Kenneth Sisam, The Structure of Beowulf, 1965

The most unexpected quality in Beowulf is its abiding communication of joy. In contrast with the Mediterranean glitter of the Odyssey... Beowulf takes place in an atmosphere of semi-darkness, the gloom of fire-lit halls, stormy wastelands, and underwater caverns. It is full of blood and fierceness.... Men exult in their conflict with each other and the elements. Even Grendel and his mother are serious in the way Greek demons never are. They may be horrors survived from the pagan Norse world of frost giants, wolf men, and dragons of the waters, but nobody would ever dream of calling them frivolous. They share Beowulf's dogged earnestness; what they lack is his joy....

Kenneth Rexroth, “Classics Revisited- IV: Beowulf,” 1965

Certain peculiarities in the structure of Beowulf can hardly fail to strike the reader. (1) The poem is not a biography of Beowulf, nor yet an episode in his lifeit is 2 distinct episodes: The Grendel business and the dragon business, joined by a narrow bridge. (2) Both these stories are broken in upon by digressions: some of these concern Beowulf himself, so that we get a fairly complete idea of the life of our hero... (3) Even apart from these digressions, the narrative is often hampered: the poet begins his story, diverges and returns. (4) The traces of Christian thought and knowledge which meet us from time to time seem to belong to a different world from that of the Germanic life in which our poem has its roots.

R. W. Chambers: Beowulf: An Introduction to the Study of the Poem, 1959

BIBLIOGRAPHY: FURTHER READING

CRITICAL WORKS

Bloomfield, Joan. “The Style and Structure of Beowulf.” Review of English Studies, XIV (1938): 396-403.

Brodeur, Arthur G. The Art of Beowulf. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959.

Chambers, R. W. Beowulf. An Introduction to the Study of the Poem. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959.

Fry, Donald K. “The Artistry of Beowulf,” from The Beowulf Poet: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Donald K. Fry. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968.

Girvan, Ritchie. Beowulf and the Seventh Century. London: Methuen, 1935.

Irving, Edward B., Jr. Introduction to Beowulf. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969.

Kennedy, Charles W. Beowulf, The Oldest English Epic. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964.

Lawrence, W. W. Beowulf and Epic Tradition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1928.

Nicholson, Lewis E., ed. An Anthology of Beowulf Criticism. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963. Includes the Tolkien article.

Rexroth, Kenneth. “Classics Revisited- IV: Beowulf,” Saturday Review, April

10, 1965, p. 27.

Sisam, Kenneth. The Structure of Beowulf. London: Oxford University Press, 1965.

Tolkien, J. R. R. “Beowulf. The Monsters and the Critics,” Proceedings of the British Academy, XXII (1936): 245-95.

ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF BEOWULF Alexander, Michael. Beowulf. London: Penguin Books, 1973 Kennedy, Charles W. Beowulf. New York: Oxford University Press, 1940 Morgan, Edwin. Beowulf. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964.

Raffel, Burton. Beowulf. New York: New American Library, 1963.

THE END OF BARRON'S BOOK NOTES

David Daiches A Critical History of English Literature

VOLUME I

C H A P T E R O N E

Anglo-Saxon Literature

The Anglo-Saxon invaders, who came to Britain in the latter part of the fifth century A.D. and eventually established their kingdoms there, were the founders of what we can properly call English culture and English literature. They gave England its name, its language, and its links with "Germania," that great body of Teutonic peoples whose migrations disrupted the Roman Empire and utterly changed the face of Europe. Some four hundred years before they arrived in Britain, the Roman historian Tacitus had given his account of the Germanic peoples and how they looked to his civilized Roman eyes; and though we can see that Tacitus' Germania idealizes the barbarians in order to hold up the noble savage as an example to decadent Rome, we can nevertheless trace in his account something of the qualities of these people as they emerge out of the mists of history and legend at a later period. To the Romans, whose world they threatened and finally overcame, they were "barbarians," appearing out of nowhere to endanger, with their primitive vigor and alien ways of thought, both the political structure of the Empire and the ideological structure of Greco-Roman thought. After the Roman Empire had become Christianized, the contrast between barbarian and Roman was even more striking, for the former were heathen and their life and their society reflected heroic ideals far removed from Roman Christian theory or practice. Yet the history of much of Europe in the so-called "Dark Ages" is the story of the gradual fusion of these two ways of life and thought, the growing together of barbarian and Christian and the grounding of both in an appropriately modified phase of the Greco-Roman tradition.

Precisely who the invaders were whom we have for so long called "Anglo-Saxon" is not of primary importance to the student of literature. That they belonged to the group of Teutonic peoples to which we can appropriately give Tacitus' name of Germania is clear. According to Bede, writing his ecclesiastical history of England two hundred years and more after their arrival, they came "from three very powerful nations of the Germans: that is, from the Saxons, Angles, and the Jutes." We know something about the Saxons, who appear to have come from the low country south of Denmark and east of Holland, the modern Holstein. The Angles appear to have lived in modern Jutland and the neighboring islands before they appeared in Britain, while the Jutes, whose origin is the most obscure of the three, perhaps came from the country east of the lower Rhine and perhaps, though less probably (the apparent similarity of names not being the cogent argument it might appear to the modern ear), from Jutland. In Anglo-Saxon England there were Saxon kingdoms (in the south and southwest), Anglian kingdoms (in the east, north, and midlands), and the Jutish kingdom of Kent in the southeast. The cultural differences between the three groups are of comparatively little moment: their language was essentially the same, though with important dialectical differences; and they all considered themselves part of "Germania," that loosely associated group of peoples who included Goths, Burgundians, Lombards, and others, and who had a common set of heroes who might belong to any one of these.

Of the Romanized Britons whom the invading Anglo-Saxons pushed into western corners of England the historian of English literature has little to say. A Celtic people who had been taken into the Roman Empire, they were left to fend for themselves when the Romans, desperately trying to hold their empire together against barbarian invaders, withdrew from England in A.D. 410. A prey to the ruder Picts and Scots in the north, they soon found themselves more seriously threatened by the invaders from across the North Sea, to whom they were an alien people known as "Welsh," which was simply the Germanic peoples' name for foreigners who were not part of Germania. Only in Wales have these Cambro-Britons continuously preserved their language and their traditions; their contribution to specifically English literature is sporadic and oblique, and does not appear until long after the Anglo-Saxon period. If Arthur, who plays such an important part in Middle English romance, was really a historical Cambro-British character from this period-and we have no mention of him before the ninth century except for a passing remark by an early seventh-century Welsh poet that a certain warrior, while brave, "was not Arthur" - there is still no reason for considering his metamorphosis into a hero of medieval romance and a focus for a host of "Arthurian" stories as any part of a direct and continuous heritage from Celtic Britain into later times. It was not until the twelfth century, when English literature sought its inspiration from the French, that the Arthurian romances began to appear, and while it is true that it was an Englishman, Geoffrey of Monmouth, who first elaborated the Arthurian story (in his Historia Regum Britanniae) to provide rich material for these romances, the Anglo-French development of the material is very far removed from any Celtic origins. Whatever the origins of the Arthurian story, therefore, we are justified in beginning the history of English literature with the Anglo-Saxons.

Of surviving Anglo-Saxon literature, that which brings us most closely into contact with the Germanic origins of the invaders is the heroic poetry, which still bears traces not only of the pre-Christian heroic society of the continental Saxons and others, but also of that community of subject which linked these early English with the wider civilization of Germania. This is written in the language we know as Old English or Anglo-Saxon, which is essentially the English language in an earlier stage of its development, with inflections which have since disappeared, a relatively small vocabulary from which many words have since been lost (though some which are lost to standard English remain in altered form in Scots and in regional English dialects), and significant differences between, for example, the West Saxon dialect of the south and the Anglian dialect of Northumbria. The verse is alliterative and stressed, without rhyme, each line containing four stressed syllables and a varying number unstressed. There is a definite pause (caesura) between the two halves of each line, with two stresses in each half.

We geascodon Eormenrices

wylfenne gepoht; ahte wide folc

Gotena rices; pxt wxs grim cyning.

Sxt secg monig sorgum gebunden,

wean on wenan, wyscte geneahhe

~~t ~aes cynerices ofercumen waere.

To the superficial eye this looks very far removed from modern English; and in a sense it is. (The letter p= “thorn"-has the sound of "th.") But a literal translation helps to bring out its relation to modern English:

We have learned of Eormanric's

wolfish disposition; he held wide dominion

in the realm of the Goths. That was a cruel king.

Many a man sat bound in sorrows,

anticipating woe, often wishing

that his kingdom were overcome.

Some thirty thousand lines of Anglo-Saxon poetry have survived, nearly all of it contained in four manuscripts,¹ and we have no reason to believe that the older, nonreligious poetry that survives is more than a casually preserved fragment of what was written. Specifically religious poetry might be expected to have earned ecclesiastical care and preservation, but the heroic poetry which connects more directly with the Germanic origins of the Anglo-Saxons could not be expected to arouse any special ecclesiastical interest even when it had been superficially purged of its pagan feeling and in some degree Christianized in thought. The conversion of the English peoples began with the arrival of Augustine in Kent in 597; he had been sent by Gregory the Great with a band of monks in order to achieve this missionary task. But, though Ethelberht, king of Kent, was duly converted to Christianity and Augustine was soon able to establish the seat of his bishopric at Canterbury, the permanent establishment of Christianity throughout England proved a much lengthier task and one which required the active intervention of Celtic missionaries from Ireland and Scotland. Differences between the customs and practices of the Irish Church-which had remained somewhat isolated from Rome-and the Roman Church, which had sponsored Augustine's mission, made for certain difficulties between those English ecclesiastics who looked to Rome and those who looked to Iona and to Ireland, and these were not resolved until the Synod of Whitby in 663;² but it is sufficient for the historian of literature to note that the development of English Christianity was not continuous but sporadic for the first century and more, with certain notable setbacks such as the defeat and death of the Christian Edwin, king of Northumbria, at the hands of the pagan Penda, king of Mercia, in 632, which meant the disappearance of the Christian Church in Northumbria until its re-establishment by Aidan and his followers from Iona. If even the external ecclesiastical organization was thus unstable in the early centuries, it is not difficult to see how traces of pagan thought in varying kinds of relation to Christianity persisted for some time after the nominal conversion of the English.

¹ These are: (1) MS Cotton Vitellius A XV in the British Museum, which contains Beowulf, Judith, and three prose works. (2) The Junius Manuscript in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (MS Bodleian Junius 11), which contains Genesis Exodus, Daniel, and Christ and Satan. (3) The Exeter Book, given by Bishop Leofric to Exeter Cathedral containing Christ, Juliana, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, Widsith, Deor, and many other short pieces. (4) The Vercelli Book, preserved in the cathedral library at Vercelli, in northern Italy, which contains Andreas, The Fates of the

Apo,stles, Address of the Soul to the Body, The Dream of the Rood, and Elene.

²Not 664, as is traditionally held. Bede dates it 664, but he begins his year in September and as the Synod can be shown to have been held in late September or early October, this would mean 663 in our dating.

Unfortunately, though much is known in general about the mythology of the Germanic and the Norse peoples, we have very little definite information about the heathen background of Old English culture. Though we can draw analogies between what we know of Scandinavian heathendom and what we surmise of its Old English equivalent, the fact remains that the common origin of the two was already far in the past by the time we find the Anglo-Saxons in England. Old English place names give some indication of pre-Christian activity associated with certain localities in Anglo-Saxon England, but tell us nothing of the larger patterns of attitude and belief which are of the most relevance for a study of the literature. That Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry, even as we have it, is the product of a pagan heroic society and in social tone and general mood bears evidence of its origins, can hardly be disputed. But debate on the degree to which Beowulf, for example, has been modified by a relatively sophisticated Latin culture-not only by Christian sentiment but, as has been claimed, by a Virgilian tradition-cannot be resolved without knowledge of more details than it seems likely we shall ever possess about primitive Anglo-Saxon beliefs. On the whole, it would seem likely that Beowulf and such other remains of early English heroic poetry as survive are closer to their pagan origins in mood and purpose than is sometimes believed.

Though there are difficulties in placing the earliest extant Anglo-Saxon poetry in its cultural context, we can take some comfort from the knowledge that what has survived of Anglo-Saxon poetry, fragmentary though it is and an arbitrary sample though it may be, is of earlier date than any extant poetry of the other Germanic literatures - of Old High German or Old Norse, for example. Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry is the nearest we can get to the oral pagan literature of the Heroic Age of Germania. The stressed alliterative verse of Anglo-Saxon poetry is clearly the product of an oral court minstrelsy; it was intended to be recited by the scop, the itinerant minstrel who frequented the halls of kings and chiefs and sometimes found continuous service with one master. One of the earliest surviving Anglo-Saxon poems, Widsith, is the autobiographical record of such a scop. The poem as we have it is probably not homogeneous-some of the lines seem to be later interpolations-but the core of the work finely reflects the heroic attitude to the bard's function and gives us a fascinating glimpse of the Germanic world as it appeared to the imagination of the Anglo-Saxons. The text we have of the poem is in the Exeter Book, and is thus tenth-century and in the West Saxon dialect; the poem-which must have been originally composed in Northumbria-dates from the late seventh or early eighth century, though parts of it must be older even than that. Widsith, the "far wanderer," tells of his travels throughout the Germanic world and mentions the many rulers he has visited. Many of the characters he mentions figure in other poems-in Beo2vaclf, for example, and in the fragmentary stories of Finn and Waldhere. The princes he claims to have visited cover virtually the whole Germanic world and their lifetimes extend over two hundred years. He was, he tells us, with Eormanric (the Gothic king who died about 370); "likewise I was in Italy with AElfwine," he tells us elsewhere in the poem, and AElfwine is Alboin, king of the Lombards, who died about 572 (and who is, incidentally, the latest character to be mentioned in any Germanic heroic poem). The poem thus cannot be true autobiography. It is, however, something much more interesting than that: it is a view of Germanic history and geography as it appeared to a Northumbrian bard of the seventh century drawing on the traditions of his people. What strikes us most forcibly is its catholicity: praise is meted out impartially to Huns, Goths, Burgundians, Franks, Danes, Swedes, Angles, Wends, Saxons, Langobards, and many others. "AEtla [Attila] ruled the Huns, Eormanric the Goths, Becca the Bannings, Gifica the Burgundians, . . . Theodric ruled the Franks, Thyle the Rondings, Breoca the Brondings, Billing the Waernas. Oswine ruled the Eowan, and Gefwulf the Jutes, Fin Folcwalding the race of the Frisians. . . . Offa ruled Angel, Alewih the Danes; he was the most courageous of all these men, but he did not excel Offa in his mighty deeds." We are given here a bird's eye view of the subject matter of Germanic heroic poetry; and we are reminded that the heroes of that poetry were not regional or national but common to all Germania.

Widsith may be primitive stuff as poetry-indeed, the first catalogue of rulers in the poem is cast in the form of a very early type of genealogical verse and may well date from the beginning of the sixth century or even from before the coming of the Anglo-Saxons to Britain-but it is this very primitive quality which is of most interest. In its combination of historical memories and heroic traditions it shows us something of the historical foundations of heroic poetry and reminds us of the nature and extent of that wide world of Germania which the author of Beowulf was equally to take for granted as familiar to his audience and thus as suitable material for allusion and analogy. The whole world of barbarian wanderings and conquests-the world which collided with, in a sense destroyed, and in a sense was absorbed by, the Roman Empire-is here sketched out. And that world provides the orchestration, as it were, for Beowulf.

Beowulf holds a special position in Anglo-Saxon literature-indeed, in older Germanic literature as a whole-because it is the only complete extant epic of its kind in an ancient Germanic language. Nowhere else is a traditional theme handled in a long narrative poem against a background which reveals to us the culture and society of the Heroic Age of the Germanic peoples. Whether there were in fact other Anglo-Saxon epics, which have not survived, is a question which may well be debated forever; but the fact remains that Beowulf survives in a single manuscript, which was damaged by fire before it was ever studied or transcribed. If it is impossible to determine conclusively whether it was the Anglo-Saxon epic or simply an Anglo-Saxon epic (though it should be mentioned that modern opinion inclines to the belief that it was the only poem of its kind composed in Anglo-Saxon times), it can at least be said that it is a poem technically impressive in its handling of narrative verse, remarkably successful in rendering that combination of heroic idealism and somber fatalism which seems to have been part of the Germanic temper, yet structurally weak and providing insufficient unity of tone or organization to hold together effectively the two central episodes and the many digressions which make up the whole. Though the ultimate origin of the story is folklore (working, as folklore does, on history), and behind the poem probably lies a variety of popular lays, the poem as we have it is generally agreed to be the work of a single author writing in the first half of the eighth century, though a powerful case has been made out for its having been composed orally by a heathen considerably earlier, with the Christian references (of which there are about seventy) representing later revision or interpolations. Future scholars may well return to this latter view.

Beowulf falls into two main parts. The first deals with the visit of Beowulf, nephew of King Hygelac of the Geats (the Geats probably occupied what is now southern Sweden), to the court of King Hrothgar of Denmark. The aging Hrothgar had long been plagued by a man-eating monster, Grendel, who came regularly to the king's great hall of Heorot to prey on his warriors, and it was to slay the monster that Beowulf came to Denmark. He fights with and mortally wounds Grendel in Heorot, and when Grendel's mother comes to take revenge for the death of her son he follows her to her underwater home and after a desperate struggle slays her too. Beowulf and his companions then leave for home, laden with honors and presents from the Danish king. The second part takes place fifty years later, when Beowulf has long been king of the Geats. A dragon, guarding a hoard of treasure, has been disturbed, and has been going out to wreak slaughter throughout the land. Beowulf, to save his country from the dragon's ravages, undertakes to fight it, and though he succeeds in slaying it he is himself mortally wounded in the struggle. The poem ends with an account of Beowulf's funeral: his body is burned on an elaborate funeral pyre, amid the lamentations of his warriors.

There are historical elements in Beowulf, though they are seen through the folk memory and the folk imagination, in combination with a variety of marvelous legends. There are also numerous digressions and allusions which make it clear that the author is taking for granted among his readers (or auditors) knowledge of a whole body of stories concerning Germanic heroes. In the feast at Heorot celebrating Beowulf's victory over Grendel we are told how the minstrel recited the story of Hnaef's death at the hands of the sons of Finn and the subsequent vengeance taken on Finn by the Danes, whose leader Hnaef had been. Part of the minstrel's recital is given at considerable length in Beowulf, but it can have had little meaning to anyone without a knowledge of the whole story. We can in some degree reconstruct the sequence of events with the help of a fragmentary Anglo-Saxon lay, The Fight at Finnsburh, which appears to deal with other events in the same story, told on a different scale. Other stories are referred to in Beowulf more casually, and part of its interest lies in the thread of Germanic story that runs, through allusions, analogies, and references, through the poem. Though it is an Anglo-Saxon poem, composed in England, it harks back to the period of Germanic history before the Anglo-Saxon invasion and shows no bias toward English heroes. Geats, Danes, and Swedes occupy the foreground of the narrative, and emerging briefly from the background are a number of figures whom we also meet in Scandinavian tradition and in the poetry and legends of a variety of Teutonic peoples.

On the surface, Beowulf is a heroic poem, celebrating the exploits of a great warrior whose character and actions are held up as a model of aristocratic virtue. It reflects the ideals of that state of society we call the Heroic Age, and its resemblance to the Odyssey in this respect has often been noted. The grave courtesy with which men of rank are received and dismissed, the generosity of rulers and the loyalty of retainers, the thirst for fame through the achievement of deeds of courage and endurance, the solemn boasting of warriors before and after performance, the interest in genealogies and pride in a noble heredity-all these things are to be found in both poems. But Beowulf is also a record of marvels rather different in kind from those encountered by Ulysses in his adventures, and, further, its Anglo-Saxon gravity is reinforced by the introduction of Christian elements which do not, however, seriously weaken the pagan atmosphere of the poem, for they are concerned with large elemental facts such as God s creation and governance of the world and such Old Testament stories as that of Cain's murder of Abel. If the general atmosphere of Beowulf can be called seriously pagan, with the seriousness deepened and the pagan heroic ideal enlarged by Christian elements, it is certainly not uncivilized, though the civilization it reflects is primitive enough. There is a genuine ideal of nobility underlying its adventure stories.

It is the splendid gravity of the poem that falls most impressively on modern ears. Sometimes in a single line the poem conveys atmosphere and mood to perfection. We are given an account of Beowulf's reception at Heorot, and his confident words before his warriors lay themselves down to sleep. Then:

Com on wanre niht

scri~3an sceadu-3en3a. Sceotend swxfon,

pa pxt horn-reced healdan scoldon,

ealle buton anum. . . .

Ł~a com of more under mist-hleo~um

3rendel 3on3an, 3odes yrre bxr. . . .

Came on the dark

night gliding, the shadowy prowler. The warriors slept

who were to hold the antlered hall,

all but one. . . .

Then from the moor under the misty cliffs

came Grendel marching; he bore God's anger. . .

The tone is not uniform, but the poem is at its most effective in its moments of slow terror or suspense, and in its more elegiac moods. It has neither the larger epic conception of the Odyssey nor the fine polish of a "secondary" epic such as the Aeneid. But it is an impressive, if uneven, performance, carrying us successfully into the Anglo-Saxon heroic imagination, with its emphasis on solemn courtesy, generosity, fidelity, and sheer endurance. And underlying all is the sense of the shortness of life and the passing away of all things except the fame a man leaves behind.

[Andrew SANDERS: The Short Oxford History of English Literature, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1994]

Old English Literature

The term `Old English' was invented as a patriotic and philological convenience. The more familiar term `Anglo-Saxon' has a far older pedigree. `Old English' implied that there was a cultural continuity between the England of the sixth century and the England of the nineteenth century (when German, and later British, philologists determined that there had been phases in the development of the English language which they described as `Old', `Middle', and `Modern'). `Anglo-Saxon' had, on the other hand, come to suggest a culture distinct from that of modern England, one which might be pejoratively linked to the overtones of `Sassenach' (Saxon), a word long thrown back by angry Celts at English invaders and English cultural imperialists. In 1871 Henry Sweet, the pioneer Oxford phonetician and Anglicist, insisted in his edition of one of King Alfred's translations that he was going to use `Old English' to denote `the unmixed, inflectional state of the English language, commonly known by the barbarous and unmeaning title of “Anglo-Saxon”'. A thousand years earlier, King Alfred himself had referred to the tongue which he spoke and in which he wrote as `englisc'. It was the language of the people he ruled, the inhabitants of Wessex who formed part of a larger English nation. That nation, which occupied most of the ferale arable land in the southern part of the island of Britain, was united by its Christian religion, by its traditions, and by a form of speech which, despite wide regional varieties of dialect, was already distinct from the `Saxon' of the continental Germans. From the thirteenth century onwards, however, Alfred's `English' gradually became incomprehensible to the vast majority of the English-speaking descendants of those same Anglo-Saxons. Scholars and divines of the Renaissance period may have revived interest in the study of Old English texts in the hope of proving that England had traditions in Church and State which distinguished it from the rest of Europe. Nineteenth-century philologists, like Sweet, may have helped to lay the foundations of all modern textual and linguistic research, and most British students of English literature may have been obliged, until relatively recently, to acquire some kind of mastery of the earliest written form of their language, but there remains a general and almost ineradicable prejudice that the culture of early England was severed from all that came after it by the Norman Conquest of 1066. 1066 is still the most familiar date in the history of the island of Britain, and, despite Henry Sweet's Victorian protest, many latter-day `barbarians' have persisted in seeing pre-Conquest England, and its wide and complex civilization, as somehow that of a lost tribe of `Anglo-Saxons'.

The Germanic peoples known as the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes, who had successfully invaded the former Roman colony of Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries, brought with them their language, their paganism, and their distinctive warrior traditions. They had also driven the Christianized Celtic inhabitants of Britain westwards to the confines of Wales and Cornwall and northwards into the Highlands of Scotland. The radical success of their colonization is evident in the new place-names that they imposed on their areas of settlement, emphatically English place-names which proclaim their ownership of homesteads and cultivated land (the main exceptions to this nomenclature generally pertain to the residually Celtic names of rivers, hills, and forests or to the remains of fortified Roman towns which were delineated by the Latin-derived suffixes -chester and -cester). The fate of the old Celtic inhabitants who were not able to remove themselves is announced in the English word Wealh (from which the term `Welsh' is derived), a word once applied both to a native Briton and to a slave. The old Roman order had utterly disintegrated under pressure from the new invaders, though stories of determined Celtic resistance to the Saxons in the sixth century, a resistance directed by a prince claiming imperial authority, were later associated with the largely mythological exploits of the fabled King Arthur.

The process of re-Christianization began in the late sixth century. The missionary work was undertaken in the north and in Scotland by Celtic monks, but in the south the mission was entrusted to a group of Benedictines sent from Rome in AD 596 by Pope Gregory the Great. This mission, led by Augustine, the first Archbishop of Canterbury, was of incalculable importance to the future development of English culture. The organizational zeal of the Benedictines and the chain of monasteries eventually established by them served to link Britain both to the Latin civilization of the Roman Church and to the newly germinating Christian national cultures of Western Europe. By the end of the seventh century all the kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England had accepted the discipline and order of Roman Christianity. A century after Augustine's arrival from Rome, the English Church had confidently begun to send out its own missionaries in order to convert its pagan kinsmen on the Continent. The most spectacularly successful of these missionaries were the Northumbrian priest, Willibrord (658-739), the founder of the Dutch see of Utrecht and of the great abbey at Echternach, and Boniface (680-754), the so-called `Apostle of Germany', who famously felled the oak tree sacred to the god Thor at Geismar, who was consecrated as the first Archbishop of Mainz in 747 and who, having enthusiastically returned to the mission field, met a martyr's death in Frisia.

According to Bede (673-735), the first great English historian, Augustine's mission to England was reinforced, four years after his arrival, by new clergy from Rome bringing with them `everything necessary for the worship and service of the Church'. Bede stresses that these pastoral requisites included `many books'. The written word was of crucial importance to the Church, for its services depended upon the reading of the Holy Scriptures and its spirituality steadily drew on glosses on those Scriptures, on sermons, and on meditations. This emphasis on the written and read word must, however, have been a considerable novelty to the generally unlettered new converts. The old runic alphabet of the Germanic tribes, which seems to have been used largely for inscriptions, was gradually replaced by Roman letters (though, as certain distinctly Christian artefacts show, both alphabets coexisted until well into the eighth century, and in some parts of the country runes were used for inscriptions until the twelfth century). All this newly imposed written literature was in Latin, the language that the Roman Church had directly inherited from the defunct Roman imperium. England was thus brought into the mainstream of Western European culture, a Christian culture which tenaciously clung to its roots in the fragmented ancient civilizations of Greece, Rome, and Israel, while proclaiming the advent of its own new age. It was through the medium of Latin that a highly distinguished pattern of teaching and scholarship was steadily developed at English monastic and cathedral schools, an intellectual discipline which fostered the achievements of such men as Aldhelm, Bishop of Sherborne (c. 639-709) (the master of an ornate, and once much admired, Latin style in both verse and prose) and Alcuin (c. 735-8o4), the most respected and widely accomplished scholar at the influential court of Charlemagne. It was in Latin, and for an international audience, that Bede wrote his great Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in 731). Bede's History, of which more than 150 medieval manuscripts survive, remains an indispensable record of the advance of Christianity in England. It is also a work which bears the imprint of the distinctive intellectual energy, the scholarly coherence, and the wide-ranging sympathies of its author.

Literacy in early England may well have been limited to those in holy orders, but literature in a broader, oral form appears to have remained a more general possession. In this, the first of the Germanic lands to have been brought into the sphere of the Western Church, Latin never seems to have precluded the survival and development of a vigorous, vernacular literary tradition. Certain aspects of religious instruction, notably those based on the sermon and the homily, naturally used English. The most important of the surviving sermons date from late in the Anglo-Saxon era. The great monastery of Winchester in the royal capital of Wessex (and later of all England) is credited with a series of educational reforms in the late tenth century which may have influenced the lucid, alliterative prose written for the benefit of the faithful by clerics such as Wulfstan (d. 1023), Bishop of Worcester and Archbishop of York (the author of the Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, `Wolf's Sermon to the English'), and Ćlfric (c. 955 - c. 1010), formerly a monk at Winchester and later Abbot of Eynsham (whose two series Catholic Homilies and Lives of the Saints suggest a familiarity with the idioms of Old English poetry). The Scriptures, generally available only in St Jerome's fourth-century Latin translation (the so-called Vulgate version), were also subject to determined attempts to render them into English for the benefit of those who were deficient in Latin. Bede was engaged on an English translation of the Gospel of St John at the time of his death and a vernacular gloss in Northumbrian English was added in the tenth century to the superbly illuminated seventh-century manuscript known as the Lindisfarne Gospels. A West Saxon version of the four Gospels has survived in six manuscripts, the formal, expressive, liturgical rhythms of which found a muted echo in every subsequent translation until superseded by the flat, functional English of the mid-twentieth century.

The religious and cultural life of the great, and increasingly well-endowed, Anglo-Saxon abbeys did not remain settled. In 793 - some sixty-two years after Bede had concluded his History at the monastery at Jarrow with the optimistic sentiment that `peace and prosperity' blessed the English Church and people - the neighbouring abbey at Lindisfarne was sacked and devastated by Viking sea-raiders. A similar fate befell Jarrow in the following year. For a century the ordered and influential culture fostered by the English monasteries was severely disrupted, even extinguished. Libraries were scattered or destroyed and monastic schools deserted. It was not until the reign of the determined and cultured Alfred, King of Wessex (848-99), that English learning was again purposefully encouraged. A thorough revival of the monasteries took place in the tenth century under the aegis of Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury (c. 910-88), Ćthelwold, Bishop of Winchester (?908-84), and Oswald, Bishop of Worcester (d. 992). From this period date the four most significant surviving volumes of Old English verse, the so-called Junius manuscript, the Beowulf manuscript, the Vercelli Book, and the Exeter Book. These collections were almost certainly the products of monastic scriptoria (writing-rooms) although the anonymous authors of the poems may not necessarily have been monks themselves. Many of the poems are presumed to date from a much earlier period, but their presence in these tenth-century anthologies indicates not just the survival, acceptability, and consistency of an older tradition; it also amply suggests how wide-ranging, complex, and sophisticated the poetry of the Anglo-Saxon period was. While allowing that the surviving poems are representative of the tradition, many modern scholars none the less allow that what has survived was probably subject to two distinct processes of selection: one an arbitrary selection imposed by time, by casual destruction, or by the natural decay of written records; the other a process of editing, exclusion, excision, or suppression by monastic scribes. This latter process of anonymous censorship has left us with a generally elevated, elevating, and male-centred literature, one which lays a stress on the virtues of a tribal community, on the ties of loyalty between lord and liegeman, on the significance of individual heroism, and on the powerful sway of wyrd, or fate. The earliest dated poem that we have is ascribed by Bede to a writer named Cćdmon, an unskilled servant employed at the monastery at Whitby in the late seventh century. Cćdmon, who had once been afraid to take the harp and sing to its accompaniment at secular feasts, as divinely granted the gift of poetry in a dream and, on waking, composed a short hymn to God the Creator. Such was the quality of his divine inspiration that the new poet was admitted to the monastic community and is said to have written a series of now lost poems on Scriptural subjects, including accounts of Christ's Incarnation, Passion, and Resurrection. Bede's mention of Cćdmon's early fear of being a guest `invited to sing and entertain the company' at a feast suggests something of the extent to which poetry was a public and communal art. It also suggests that a specifically religious poetry both derived from, and could be distinct from, established secular modes of composition. Bede's story clearly indicates that the poetry of his day followed rules of diction and versification which were readily recognized by its audience. That audience, it is also implied, accepted that poetry was designed for public repetition, recitation and, indeed, artful improvisation. The elaborate, conventional language of Old English poetry probably derived from a Germanic bardic tradition which also accepted the vital initiatory role of a professional poet, or scop, the original improviser ofa song on heroic themes. This scop, drawing from a `word-hoard' of elevated language and terminology, would be expected to perform his verses at celebratory gatherings in the royal, lordly, and even monastic halls which figure so prominently in the literature of the period. The writer of Beowulf speaks, for example, of `the clear song of the scop' ('swutol sang scopes') (l. 90) and of a poet, `a thane of the king's ... who remembered many traditional stories and improvised new verses' (ll. 867-71). The vitality of the relationship of a scop to his lord, and the dire social misfortune attendant on the loss of such patronage, also feature in the elegiac poem known as Deor, a poem which dwells purposefully, and somewhat mournfully, on the importance of the poet's memorializing. The scop's inherited pattern of poetry-making derived from an art which was essentially oral in its origins and development. Old English verse uses a complex pattern of alliteration as the basis of its form. Elaborately constructed sentences, and interweaving words and phrases are shaped into two-stressed half lines of a varying number of syllables; the half lines are then linked into full-lines by means of alliteration borne on the first stress of the second half line. The dying speech of Beowulf, commanding the construction ofa barrow to his memory, suggests something of the steady majesty this verse can carry:

HataD heaDomćre hlćw gewyrcean

beorhtne ćfter bćle ćt brimes nosan;

se scel to gemyndum minum leodum

heah hlifian on Hronesnćsse,

ţćt hit sćliDend syDDan hatan

Biowulfes biorh, Da De brentingas

ofer floda genipu feorran drifaD.

(Command the warriors famed in battle build a bright mound after my burning at the sea headland. It shall tower high on Whale Ness, a reminder to my people, so that seafarers may afterwards call it Beowulf's barrow when they drive their ships from afar over the dark waves.)

Beowulf

It was long held that the most substantial surviving Old English poem, Beowulf, was a pre-Christian composition which had somehow been tampered with by monastic scribes in order to give it an acceptably Christian frame of reference. This argument is no longer tenable, though some scholars hold that the tenth-century manuscript of the poem may postdate its composition by as much as three or even four hundred years. The anonymous poet-narrator recognizes that his story is a pagan one and that his characters hold to pagan virtues and to a pre-Christian world-view, but he is also aware that older concepts of heroism and heroic action can be viewed as compatible with his own religious and moral values. Beowulf refers back to an age of monster slayings in Scandinavia, but it interprets them as struggles between good and evil, between humanity and the destructive forces which undo human order. Grendel, the first monster of the poem, is seen as `Godes andsaca', the enemy of God (l. 1682) and as a descendant of the biblical Cain, the first murderer (l. 107). The poem's original audience must have shared this mixed culture, one which readily responded to references to an ancestral world and one which also recognized the relevance of primitive heroism to a Christian society. As other surviving Old English poems suggest, Christ's acts in redeeming the world, and the missions and martyrdoms of his saints, could be interpreted according to supra-biblical concepts of the hero. In a sense, a poem like Beowulf mediates between a settled and an unsettled culture, between one which enjoys the benefits of a stable, ordered, agricultural society and one which relished the restlessness of the wandering warrior hero. Despite the fact that the bards of the royal hall at Heorot sing of God's Creation much as Cćdmon sang of it, Beowulf springs from a religious culture which saw infinite mystery in the natural world, and the world itself as if hidden by a veil. It saw in nature a mass of confused signs, portents, and meanings. Marvels and horrors, such as Grendel, his kin, and the dragon, suggested that there was a multiplicity in divine purposes. By properly understanding God's marvels, his will could also be understood; by battling against manifestations of evil, his purposes could be realized.

Beowulf can properly be called an `epic' poem in the sense that it celebrates the achievements of a hero in narrative verse. Although it may strike some readers as casually episodic when compared to the ostensibly tighter narrative structures of Homer or Virgil, the poem is in fact constructed around three encounters with the other-worldly, with monsters who seem to interrupt the narrative by literally intruding themselves into accounts of human celebration and community. Around these stories others are woven, stories which serve to broaden the context to a larger civilization and tradition. While the humans gather in the warmth and comradeship of the mead-hall, the monsters come from a bleak and unfriendly outside, contrasts which suggest starkly alternating phases of the social and the alien. Human society is seen as being bound together by ties of loyalty-the lord providing protection, nourishment, and a place in an accepted hierarchy for which his warriors return service. The lord is the bountiful `ring-giver', the `gold-friend', the rewarder of Beowulf's bravery, and the founder of feasts. Beyond this predominantly masculine hierarchy of acknowledged ties and obligations, centred at the beginning of the poem on King Hrothgar's court at Heorot, there lies another order, or rather disorder, of creatures intent on destroying both king and court. Grendel the predator stalks at night, dwelling apart from men and from faith. It is Beowulf who challenges the intruder, who drives the wounded monster back to his lair in the wilderness and kills him. When Grendel's enraged mother mounts a new attack on Heorot, and Beowulf and his companions pursue her to her watery retreat, there follows a further evocation of uninhabitable deserts, of empty fens and bleak sea-cliffs. It is in such passages that the poet suggests the gulf still fixed between the social world of humankind and the insecure, cold, untamed world of the beasts, the inheritance of the outcast, the exile, and the outsider.

Beowulf's victory over Grendel in the wastes of Denmark is compared by King Hrothgar's scop to those of the great dragon-slayer of Teutonic legend, Sigemund. To the poem's original audience such a comparison would probably have suggested that Beowulf's heroic progress would lead, just as inexorably as Sigemund's, to new encounters with monsters and, ultimately, to his undoing by death. The parallel carried with it a grand and tragic irony appropriate to epic. When Beowulf enters what will prove to be his final struggle with a dragon, he seems to be a more troubled man, one haunted by an awareness of fate, the looming sense of destiny that the Anglo-Saxons referred to as wyrd. He who has lived by his determining ancestral inheritance, the sword, must now die by it. Beowulf, betrayed by those of his liegemen who have feared the fight, leaves a realm threatened by neighbouring princes anxious to exploit the political vacuum left by the death of so effective a hero. The poem ends in mourning and with the hero's ashes paganly interred in a barrow surrounded by splendidly wrought treasures of the kind that were discovered at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk in 1939. The last lines of Beowulf evoke a pre-Christian spectacle, but the poem's insistent stress on mortality and on the determining nature of wyrd might equally have conveyed to a Christian audience a message of heroic submission to the just commands of a benevolent but almighty God.

The Battle of Maldon and the Elegies

The system of social and military loyalties evoked throughout Beowulf is reflected elsewhere in Old English literature. In the fragmentary poem known as The Battle of Maldon (written c. 1000) a fatal skirmish between the Essex nobleman, Byrhtnoth, and a raiding party of Vikings is celebrated. The `battle' which took place in 991, seems to have stirred its latter-day poet, possibly a monastic one, into echoing an older heroic style and into exploring the tensions inherent in the heroic code of action. Byrhtnoth is seen as something more than a brave, if rash, warrior. In some senses he is a martyr, generously throwing away his life, and those of his loyal vassals, for the sake of his liege-lord (King Ethelred) and for his nation (`folc and foldan'). Yet his `martyrdom' is ambiguous. His rashness in allowing the Danes to cross the river which should have formed his best line of defence, and his consequent defeat at their hands, may be viewed by the poet as a sacrifice for Christian culture against a pagan enemy, but there are also suggestions that the spirit of loyalty and fraternity amongst Byrhtnoth's men particularly matters because God is potentially indifferent to their fate. Deor offers a complete contrast, albeit one which illuminates a similarly pervasive stress on loyalty and on the mutual relationship of a lordly patron and his vassal. The poem, spoken in the first person, purports to be the lament of a scop who has been supplanted by a rival. Deor's self-consolation takes the form of a meditation on five instances of misfortune, all of them drawn from Germanic legend and history; in each case, he assures himself, the sorrow passed away, so likewise may the pain of his rejection pass. Each meditation ends with an echoed refrain, with its concluding section moving beyond a broadly pagan endurance of the rule of fate into a Christian assertion of faith in divine providence.

Widsith also takes the form of a soliloquy spoken by an imaginary scop, here a `far-wanderer' who `unlocks his word-hoard' in order to describe the peoples and princes amongst whom he has journeyed. His catalogue of nations is predominantly Teutonic, but the peripatetic poet, proudly manifesting his knowledge of the Bible, also includes the Jews, the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Medes, and the Persians. He also carefully emphasizes the rewards given to him by discerning patrons, both a reference to past generosity and to the traditional interdependence of poet and patron, and a public reminder of present obligations. The scop `Widsith' has prospered in his journeyings; the narrator of the poem known as The Wanderer, who is not necessarily a minstrel, claims to have lost his lord and patron and is now confronted with a bitterly alienating vision of frozen waves, sea-birds, and winter cold. His is a wasteland of exile evoked through the use of precise metaphors and carefully placed adjectives. Here the sea, so significant to the ancestral history of settlers on an island, has become the disconnecter; its emptiness and its winter violence are rendered as the embodiment of the failure of human relationships, of loneliness, of severance and exile. The `wanderer', like other Old English narrators, comforts himself with a wisdom which has been shaped by patience in the face of a divine fate. In The Seafarer the contrast between the comforts of a settled life on land and the hardships and dangers of the sea is at once more poignant and more ambiguous. The narrator tells us that he has endured `bitre breostceare' (`bitter breast-sorrow'), that he has laboured and has heard nothing but `the pounding of the sea and the ice-cold wave' (`hlimman sć, | iscaldne wćg'), but his experiences seem to thrill him. His exile is self imposed, not forced upon him by rejection, by loss of patronage, or by fate. Somewhat disconcertingly, the poem gradually establishes that though the Seafarer delights in the security of life on shore, he also distrusts it. For him, the cuckoo, the harbinger of summer on land, merely reminds him of the passage of the seasons, while the cry of a sea-bird urges a return to the exhilaration of the waves. At the end of the poem the narrator establishes a new opposition towards which his whole argument has been moving: the shore comes to represent the transitory and uncertain nature of the world against which heaven, the truly secure home of the peregrinatory soul, can properly be defined.

The insecure nature of earth's joys and achievements, and an implied longing for heavenly resolution, also figure in the short fragmentary poem known as The Ruin. The poem muses over the crumbling stones of a ruined city (probably the wreck of the Roman city of Aquae Sulis, the modern Bath), ruins which cause its narrator to wonder that there could ever have been a race of such mighty builders (most ambitious Anglo-Saxon structures were of wood, not stone, and the earliest English colonizers seem, perhaps superstitiously, to have avoided old Roman settlements). The narrator of TheRuin does not, however, seek to evoke a sense of alienation; rather, he speaks of an exile from vanished wonders, an awareness reinforced by the ravages of time and wyrd. The Wife's Lament, which, along with The Wanderer, The Seafarer, Deor, Widsith, and The Ruin, has survived in the great anthology known as the Exeter Book, offers a further, but quite distinct, variation on the common themes of banishment, displacement, and social disgrace. In The Wife's Lament a rare woman's voice is heard mourning the absence of her banished husband, though the precise situation is left unclear and many of the allusions are cryptic. The poem has sometimes been linked to the verses known as The Husband's Message. They may also be associated with the short poetic Riddles (also preserved in the Exeter Book), dense little poems which suggest the degree to which Anglo-Saxon audiences indulged a fascination with the operations of metaphor. Given the clear ecclesiastical pedigree of the Exeter anthology, The Wife's Complaint has sometimes been explained as a paraphrase of the Song of Songs, a book traditionally interpreted by the Christian Church as the soul's yearning for its heavenly lover. All these elegiac poems, with their stress on loss, estrangement, and exile, also recall the potency of the famous image of the transience of earthly pleasure employed by Bede in his History. When, according to Bede's narrative, King Edwin of Northumbria summoned a council in 627 to discuss whether or not to accept Christianity, one of the King's chief courtiers compares human life to the flight of a sparrow through a warm, thronged, royal hall, a short period of security compared to the winter storms raging outside the hall. The sparrow's origins and his destination are as mysterious as are the destinies of humankind. Only a religious perspective, the counsellor insists, allows the Christian to understand the surrounding darkness and to cope with the emptiness of a world where companionship, loyalty, and order falter and decay.

The Biblical Poems and The Dream of the Rood

A substantial body of Old English religious poetry is based directly on Scriptural sources and on Latin saints' lives. We know from Bede's History that Cćdmon is supposed to have written verses with subjects drawn from Genesis, Exodus, and the Gospels, but none of the surviving poems on these subjects can now be safely ascribed to a named poet. The verses known as Genesis, Exodus, Daniel, and Judith are much more than straightforward paraphrases of Scripture. Genesis, for example, opens with a grand justification of the propriety of praising the Lord of Hosts and moves to a lengthy, and non-Scriptural, account of the fall of the angels. Much of the poem is framed around the idea of a vast struggle between the principles of good and evil. The most effective sections of the interpolation (known awkwardly as Genesis B) treat the fall of Adam as a betrayal of the trust of his Almighty liege-lord, a betrayal punished by exile from the benevolent protection of his Creator. Military metaphors also run through Exodus which treats the struggle of the Jews and the Egyptians as an armed conflict in which the departing Jews triumph. Its apparent poetic sequel, Daniel, emphasizes the force of divine intervention in human affairs and perhaps reflects the prominent use of Old Testament stories of deliverance in the ceremonies and liturgies of Holy Week and Easter. Christ himself is portrayed as a warrior battling against the forces of darkness in Christ and Satan, a poem which ranges from a further rehearsal of the story of the fall of the angels, through a description of the Harrowing of Hell, to the Saviour's Resurrection and Ascension (though the story of the gradual victory over Satan reaches its climax in an account of the temptation in the wilderness). Judith, a fragmentary poem which survives in the Beowulf manuscript, has a valiant female warrior as its protagonist. Judith, the chaste defender of Israel, struggles as much against a monster of depravity (in the form of the invader, Holofernes) as does Beowulf against Grendel and his kin. The poems based on apocryphal saints' lives also suggest the degree to which the modes, metaphors, and language of secular heroic verse could be adapted to the purposes of Christian epic. In Andreas, a decidedly militant St Andrew journeys across the sea to rescue his fellow apostle St Matthew from imprisonment and, somewhat more extraordinarily, from the threat of being eaten by the anthropophagi of Mermedonia. The Fates of the Apostles, which is signed at the end in runic fashion by a poet known as Cynewulf, recounts the missionary journeys and martyrdoms of the `twelve men of noble heart', Christ's disciples being cast in the roles of hardy Nordic heroes. This same Cynewulf is also credited with the authorship of Elene, the story of St Helena's discovery of the True Cross, and of Juliana, the history of a Roman virgin martyr.

Much Old English religious poetry commands more respect (albeit, sometimes grudging) than it does affection and admiration. To many modern readers, unaccustomed to the stately piety of the saints' life tradition, by far the most profound, moving, and intellectually sophisticated of the specifically Christian poems is The Dream of the Rood. The shape of the poem, which describes a vision of Christ's cross (the Rood), has a fluid daring which is, at times, almost surreal in its play with paradox and its fascination with metamorphosis. What appears to be a quotation from it in a runic inscription on the margins of the eighth-century Ruthwell cross (a stone monument sited just over the present Scottish border) suggests a relatively early date for the poem. Its subject, for which several earlier analogues exist (most notable amongst them being the familiar Passiontide Office hymns Pange Lingua and Vexilla Regis by the sixth-century French bishop Venantius Fortunatus), concerns the shift in the narrator's perceptions of Christ's cross. The Dream of the Rood opens with a dreamer's vision of a gilded and bejewelled cross of victory (`sige beam'), worshipped by the angels. Its supernatural effulgence seems, none the less, to inspire a deep sense of unworthiness and sin in the earthbound beholder, and the troubled narrator begins to understand that the outward appearance of the cross is paradoxical. The Rood is both glorious and moist with blood:

HwćDre ic ţurh ţćt gold ongytan meahte

earmra ćrgewin, ţćt hit ćrest ongan

swćtan on ţa swiDran healfe. Eall ic wćs mid sorgum gedrefed.

(Yet through that gold I could perceive the former strife of wretched men, that it had once bled on the right side. I was greatly troubled with sorrows.)

The cross itself then begins to speak, describing how a tree was felled and fashioned into a gallows which a `young hero' embraced. Both cross and hero have been pierced by the same nails, both have been scorned and both bloodied. Having thus been obliged to be a partaker in the Passion of Christ, the cross is discarded, buried, and later discovered by the `Lord's thanes' who recognize it as the instrument of salvation. At one with its Lord, the Rood has been miraculously transformed by his Resurrection and Ascension, and it is now glorified in Heaven as `the best of signs' (`beacna selest'). When the rood ceases to speak and the dreamer resumes, his words are transfused with a sense of joy, worship, and wonder. Like the narrators of The Wanderer and The Seafarer he is torn between the contemplation of heavenly serenity and his attachment to the uncertainties and limitations of life on earth. The dreamer longs for the heaven which he glimpses as a glorified royal mead-hall, the focus of Lordly bounty and the fitting setting for the eternal communion of saints. The Dream of the Rood plays with the great paradoxes of the Christian religion, but its play is more profound and more concrete than that of the elusive quizzicality of a riddle. It presents its readers with an icon, a paradoxical sign which requires interpretation and which is finally merged with the meaning that it signifies. There are few more impressive religious poems in English.

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