Orientations: Beowulf

From Michael Alexander's 

History of English Literature 

(2nd ed., Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)

Beowulf

Like Greek literature, English literature begins with an epic, a poem of historic scope telling of heroes and of the world, human and non-human. Compared with the epics of Homer, Beowulf is short, with 3182 verses, yet it is the longest as well as the richest of Old English poems. Like other epics, it has a style made for oral composition, rich in formulas. The poem is found in a manuscript of the early eleventh century, but was composed perhaps two centuries earlier still, on the coasts of the Baltic. This was the northwest Germanic world from which the English had come to Britain. The coming of the Saxons is recalled in a poem in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 937.


... from the east came
Angles and Saxons up to these shores,
Seeking Britain across the broad seas,
Smart for glory, those smiths of war
That overcame the Welsh, and won a homeland

The first great work of English literature is not set in Britain. Beowulf opens with the mysterious figure of Scyld, founder of the Scylding dynasty of Denmark, who would have lived c. 400, before England existed. A Hengest mentioned in a sub-story of the poem may be the Hengest invited into Kent in 449 (see page 12). The Offa who is mentioned may be an ancestor of Offa, King of Mercia in the 8th century.


Beowulf showed the English the world of their ancestors, the heroic world of the north, a world both glorious and heathen. Dynasties take their identity from their ancestors, and the rulers of the English kingdoms ruled by right of ancestral conquest. The date and provenance of Beowulf are uncertain, and its authorship unknown, but the poem would have had ancestral interest to such a ruler. West-Saxon genealogies go back to Noah via Woden; they include three names mentioned in Beowulf—Scyld, Scef and Beow. When in the 7th century the English became Christian they sent missionaries to their Germanic cousins. The audience for poetry was the lord of the hall and the men of his retinue. Such an audience was proud of its ancestors—even if, as the poem says of the Danes, 'they did not know God'.

The text of Beowulf is found in a manuscript in the West-Saxon dialect of Wessex which had become the literary standard. All the texts in the manuscript are about monsters, but the prime concern of Beowulf is not with monsters or even heroes but with human wisdom and destiny. It recounts the doings over two or three generations about the year 500 of the rulers of the Danes and the Swedes, and of a people who lived between them in southern Sweden, the Geats. The name Beowulf is not recorded in history, but the political and dynastic events of the poem are consistent with history. Beowulf is the nephew of Hygelac, King of the Geats, who died in a raid on the northern fringe of the Frankish empire. This key event of the poem is recorded in two Latin histories as having happened in about 521.

Hygelac fell in a raid in search of booty. In attacking the Frisians on the Frankish border, Beowulf's uncle was asking for trouble, says the poem. The Franks took from Hygelac's body a necklace of precious stones, a treasure previously bestowed on Beowulf by the Queen of the Danes as a reward for having killed the monster, Grendel (see below). On his return from Denmark, Beowulf had presented this prize to his lord, Hygelac, but the necklace was lost in this needless attack. Beowulf stopped the enemy champion, Dayraven, from taking Hygelac's armour by crushing him to death with his bare hands. Beowulf returned with the armour of thirty soldiers, and declined the throne, preferring to serve Hygelac's young son. But when this son is killed for harbouring an exiled Swedish prince, Beowulf became king and ruled the Geats for 'fifty years'.

The poem has a mysterious overture in the arrival of Scyld as a foundling child, sent by God to protect the lordless Danes, his victorious life and his burial in a ship. His great-grandson Hrothgar inherits the Danish empire and builds the great hall of Heorot, where he rewards his followers with gifts. At a banquet, Hrothgar's poet sings the story of the creation of the world. The sound of music, laughter and feasting is resented by the monster Grendel, who comes from the fens to attack Heorot when the men are asleep. He devours thirty of Hrothgar's thanes. Beowulf hears of the persecution of the Danes and comes to kill Grendel, in a tremendous fight at night in the hall. The next night, Grendel's mother comes to the hall and takes her revenge. Beowulf follows her to her lair in an underwater cave, where with God's help he kills her. Finally, in old age, he has to fight a dragon, who has attacked the Geats in revenge for the taking of a cup from his treasure-hoard. Beowulf faces the dragon alone, but can kill it only with the help of a young supporter; he dies of his wounds. The poem ends with a prophecy of the subjection of the Geats by the Franks or the Swedes. The Geats build a funeral pyre for their leader.

Then the warriors rode about the barrow
Twelve of them in all, athelings' sons.
They recited a dirge to declare their grief,
Spoke of the man, mourned their King.
They praised his manhood, and the prowess of his hands,
They raised his name; it is right a man
Should be lavish in honouring his lord and friend,
Should love him in his heart when the leading-forth
From the house of flesh befalls him at last.

This was the manner of the mourning of the men of the Geats,
Sharers in the feast, at the fall of their lord:
They said that he was of all the world's kings
The gentlest of men, and the most gracious,
The kindest to his people, the keenest for fame.

The foundation of Germanic heroic society is the bond between a lord and his people, especially his retinue of warriors. Each will die for the other. Beowulf's epitaph suggests an ethical recipe for heroism: three parts responsibility to one part honour. The origin of Beowulf's life-story in the folk-tale of the Bear's son and his marvellous feats, is transformed by the poem into a distinctly social ideal of the good young hero and the wise old king.

The heroic world is violent, but neither Beowulf nor Beowulf is bloodthirsty. The poem shows not just the glory but also the human cost of a code built upon family honour and the duty of vengeance. This cost is borne by men, and differently, by women. In this aristocratic world, women have honoured roles: peacemaker in marriage-alliances between dynasties, bride, consort, hostess, counsellor, mother, and widow. In Beowulf the cost of martial honour is signified in the figure of the mourning woman. Here is the Danish princess Hildeburh at the funeral pyre of her brother Hnaef, treacherously killed by her husband Finn, and her son, also killed in the attack on Hnaef. Shortly after this, Finn is killed by Hengest.

Hildeburh then ordered her own son
To be given to the funeral fire of Hnaef
For the burning of his bones; bade him be laid
At his uncle's side. She sang the dirges,
Bewailed her grief. The warrior went up;
The greatest of corpse-fires coiled to the sky, 
Roared before the mounds. There were melting heads
And bursting wounds, as the blood sprang out
From weapon-bitten bodies. Blazing fire,
Most insatiable of spirits, swallowed the remains
of the victims of both nations. Their valour was no more.

The heroic way of life—magnificent, hospitable and courageous—depends upon military success. It can descend into the world of the feud, violent and merciless. The heroic code involves obligations to lord, to family and to guest, and heroic literature brings these obligations into tension, with tragic potential.

A comparison can be made between Beowulf and the Achilles of the Iliad. When Achilles' pride is piqued, he will not fight, rejoining the Greeks only after his friend and substitute is killed. Achilles takes out his anger on the Trojan Hector, killing him, dishonoring his corpse and refusing to yield it for burial, until at last Hector's father humiliates himself before Achilles to beg his son's body. Achilles is reminded that even he must die. Homer's characterization is more dramatic, brilliant and detailed; the characters of Beowulf are types rather than individuals. The ethos is also different. Beowulf devotedly serves his lord Hygelac, and his people the Geats. His youthful exploits in Denmark repay a debt of honour he owes to Hrothgar, who had saved Beowulf's father Edgetheow, paying compensation for the life of a man Edgetheow had killed. Like Achilles, Beowulf is eloquent, courageous, quick to act, unusually strong. But Beowulf is considerate, magnanimous and responsible. As Hrothgar points out, he has an old head on young shoulders; he makes a good king. Yet as the poem makes clear in a series of stories marginal to Beowulf's own life, most warriors from ruling families fall far short of Beowulf's responsibility and judgement. Beowulf is both a celebration of and an elegy for heroism. The ideal example set by Beowulf himself implies a Christian critique of an ethic in which honour can be satisfied by 'the world's remedy', vengeance.

Grendel envies the harmony of the feast in Heorot and destroys it. He is a fiend: feond means both enemy and malign spirit. He is also in man's shape, though of monstrous size. He is identified as a descendant of Cain, the first murderer, who in Genesis is marked and driven out by God from human society. Fratricide was an occupational hazard in ruling Germanic families, since succession was not by primogeniture but by choice of the fittest. In the heroic age of the north, sons were often fostered out, partly to reduce conflict and risk, but fraternal rivalry remained endemic. In Beowulf the greatest crimes are treachery to a lord and murder of kindred. The folklore figure of Grendel embodies the savage spirit of fratricidal envy. The dragon is a brute without Grendel's human and demonic aspects. He destroys Beowulf's hall by fire in revenge for the theft of a golden cup from his treasure. The dragon jealously guards his hoard underground, whereas the king shares out rings in the hall.

Beowulf commands respect by the depth and maturity of its understanding. Although its archaic world of warriors and rulers is simple, the poem is often moving in its sober concern with wisdom and right action, the destiny of dynasties, the limits of human understanding and power, and with the creative and the destructive in human life. Its style has reserve and authority.

Beowulf

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