This book is a story, a poem, and a song. It is narrative, its form has an importance of its own, and whether sung or read aloud, it was designed not only to communicate but also to sound. The book has no title in its surviving manuscript, so the name of the protagonist has become the title.
The text has attracted a steady stream of readers and researchers for over a thousand years, and this for multiple reasons.
Linguists consider it a valuable example of Old English, which was spoken and written from approximately 450 to 1050. Much of the Old English language is nearly indistinguishable from Old High German and Old Low German, which were spoken around the same time. These three languages are siblings, descending from a parent language, West Germanic.
Literary scholars consider it perhaps the only surviving example of a genre of which we otherwise have no remaining texts. Its poetic style and structure are landmarks.
Historians and cultural anthropologists mine the book for clues about the society in which it was composed, and the slightly different society which was its subject matter. The plot is fictional — or rather, contains fictional elements — but also refers accurately to historical events which took place in the late 400s or early 500s, more than a century before the story was written.
The book is also a book of contradictions. As indicated, reliable historical data pinpoints certain events, places, and people. But other elements in the book are not only fictional; they are fantasy. Fact and fiction are interwoven throughout. The characters are warriors, dragons, and monsters. The names will sound ancient to the twenty-first century American ear: Hrothgar, Grendel, Beowulf. The mother of the monster Grendel, herself a monster, plays a major role in the narrative.
A second tension lives in the text: the poetry, the plot, and presumably the author manifest traces of both sincere Christianity and Germanic paganism. The heathen belief systems native both to Europe north of the Alps and to Britain didn’t disappear in an instant when the Christian faith arrived. The two worldviews were interwoven in cultures for many years, and the characters in Beowulf demonstrate certain inconsistencies reflecting their society’s embrace of two incompatible conceptions of the world.
The poet knit Christian and pre-Christian motifs into a single fabric, as scholar Rosemary Jean Cramp writes:
Christianity has so deeply penetrated the language, metaphor, and thought of the poem that we must assume an audience with some tradition of Christianity and most probably Christian poetry behind it. The poet naturally presupposes also a wide knowledge of traditional heroic stories but he penetrates below the surface of such stories and their conventional situations, sympathetically considering the sufferings of innocent participants, the impermanence of success and happiness, and the courage of the heroes who had to live without the consolation of Christianity.
The pre-Christian pagan narratives remain on the surface of the characters. Christianity will introduce an exploration of the inner life. The text of Beowulf gives more occasional glimpses of the protagonist’s inner life than one generally finds in the purely pagan Germanic sagas.
In 1939, the archeological discovery of a burial site from the 700s provided confirmation that the “poet’s descriptions of the equipment and lavish burials of kings was neither exaggerated nor dependent on pre-English traditions.” The discovery, in Suffolk, revealed “a curious mix of heathen and Christian elements in the burial.” Rosemary Cramp adds that “there was no trace” in the burial area “of the human or animal sacrifices which were a feature of fully pagan burial rites.”
While traces of paganism are certainly present and clearly visible in the text, it is no longer the full-throated paganism of pre-Christian Scandinavia, because it lacks human sacrifice.
The dual nature of the text shows, on the one hand, a pagan warrior-code with ruthless familial feuds, a powerful concept of fate, immortal fame being earned by heroic deeds, and an honor culture which drives characters to self-aggrandizement and glory-seeking. On the other hand, with a touch of dissonance, the narrative contains Christian concepts like forgiveness, a framework of good versus evil, biblical allusions, prayer to a benevolent Savior, and a merry afterlife.
The times and places of the plot, and later of the writing, were “rather newly Christian,” writes Burton Raffel: “Layers of morality and tenderness and piety are intermixed,” with the pagan “glorification of war, death, and fame.” In the lingering paganism, on its way out and yet making itself felt in culture, “such humdrum occupations as farming, fishing,” and “the care and feeding of both adults and children are all denigrated, casually, when they are mentioned at all. Slavery is taken for granted.”
The introduction of Christianity into the culture brings about a more sympathetic eye, seeing the humanity of the slaves, servants, and craftsmen.
The harsh heathenism, in which “battle is a way of life, a necessary function of the worthiest members of society,” Raffel continues, “death being the supreme product of their occupation.” Christianity refuses to glorify killing.
“This morality, born of its time and its circumstances,” does not “sound particularly Christian. And yet the poem is full of Christian sentiments, joined with or superimposed onto this more or less pagan code of battle-heroism-kingship.” The reader might be tempted to think that the story is the result of a collaboration between two or more authors, so great is the tension between the pagan elements and the Christian elements. Yet Raffel states: “It seems fairly clear, however — and I myself have no doubt — that Beowulf is the work of one man and that its author was a Christian.”
Early in the text, the description of the natural world is such that “whoever wrote it was plainly a Christian.” The reader might think that such a passage was inserted into the narrative by a later hand, but Raffel argues that
Most of the Christianity in Beowulf is not so easily dismissed as interpolation. “Let God be thanked!” (Alwealdan Þanc), cries Hrothgar, for example, when the Danes assemble to celebrate Beowulf’s victory over Grendel. These are his first words; he goes on, almost at once, to assert with great feeling that
... the Almighty makes miracles
When He pleases, wonder after wonder, and this world
Rests in His hands …It is God, as I have already noted, who leads Beowulf to victory over Grendel’s vicious mother, once Beowulf has proved that he is willing and able to help himself. The examples could be multiplied many times over: the essential nature of this Christianity may not be quite the same as that practiced in twentieth-century London or in California, but it is an integral part of the poet’s thought and view of life.
Trying to imagine how a poet would compose a text in which the heathen worldview and the Christian worldview coexist, sometimes harmoniously, and sometimes dissonantly, Robert P. Creed notes that “Beowulf is the work of a Christian poet.” But this Christian poet set his narrative in times and places in which the Christian faith had not yet arrived. Britain and northern Europe were still solidly pagan in the 400s and 500s. The poet would have heard and read about names, places, and events; he integrated those into his own narrative.
What was this poet’s creative process? Robert Creed offers two options. In the first option, the poet sees latent Christian virtues in the stories of the heroes in a pre-Christian society:
At some point after the arrival in England of the Christianizing mission of St. Augustine in 597 a traditional singer who was also a Christian told again the story of the noble hero. To this Christian singer the notion that this magnanimous warrior was not a Christian was unthinkable. Beowulf’s conduct showed that he had been the willing servant of the true God.
Alternatively, the poet might have heard a song about a warrior, and detecting that both the song and the warrior lacked spirituality, added this dimension to the narrative, and created from scratch a new poem:
Or it might have happened in this fashion. The Anglo-Saxon singer heard a crude song of monster-wrestling and tribal warfare and decided to make a better man out of the hero of these savage doings. God, the singer had learned, was the fountain of all virtue, and the noblest adventure of all was the imitation of Christ. His noble hero would in his fashion have to imitate Christ.That is, after all, what Beowulf does in this poem. Hearing that the Danes are at the mercy of that devilish son of Cain, Grendel, one of “a brood forever opposing the Lord’s Will,” the hero leaves his home in southwest Sweden and sails to the rescue. He wrestles with and defeats Grendel in the hall that becomes for that moment symbolic of the whole world.
The text names specifically Cain and Abel, and does so once at the beginning of the narrative and once toward the end. The monsters are in a “lake” that “burns like a torch.” These are clear biblical references. In the end, Hrothgar tells Beowulf, “our only help lies with you,” making Beowulf into a Christ figure. In Raffel’s words, Beowulf obliges by being “the man who died to save his people.”
Beowulf’s funeral retains the faintest hint of paganism, as his body is laid atop a funeral pyre. The Christian element is present in the funeral narrative, too: Bewulf’s soul drawn into eternal paradise, as “Heaven swallowed up the billowing smoke.”
The deceased goes up, not down.
Burton Raffel offers two slightly different hypotheses about how the pagan and Christian elements were mingled into the text. There may also be other possible scenarios. In any case, however, the two influences are braided intricately with each other, and organically, reflecting the two influences in the larger society: both present and detectable, but paganism on its way out, and Christianity on its way in.
These two belief systems moved past each other, one on the descent and the other on the ascent, in fits and starts, but generally at glacial speed. It took centuries to root out pagan practices like human sacrifice, animal sacrifice, and the payment of wergeld — a practice in which a human life was given a monetary value, and a killer need merely to pay this sum to the victim’s family in order for justice to be declared satisfied. Other pagan practices — the buying and selling of women, infanticide, and the kidnapping and enslaving of outsiders — extend and continue this general tone of devaluing human life.
So it is, then, that Allen Kent Hieatt writes: “The Christianity of the poet’s England was still strongly influenced by pagan habits of thought.” The narrative belongs to a “great body of partly heathen, partly Christian Germanic poetry and prose.”
The pagan and Christian strands have perhaps one common point: the clear sense of loyalty — to one’s family, friends, tribe, or king — as an ethical principle. Yet this shared ideal is soon split: in the pagan instance, the response is to kill without exception anyone who is disloyal; in the Christian instance, the response is to endure the disloyalty with patience and forgive the traitor.
“The transmutation of Germanic mores from personal vengeance to the fight against evil depends partly on the Christianity of the author,” writes Hieatt. This author’s “Christian milieu influenced his choice of supernaturally evil figures rather than men as Beowulf’s enemies (although of course these figures belonged originally to the realm of folklore).”
Hieatt continues:
There are a number of plainly Christian references in the body of the poem: to an Almighty who is just, to a shepherd who cares for souls and a malicious being who attacks them when they are not vigilant.
Additionally,
There are also definite biblical reminiscences. Grendel is said to be descended from Cain; the sword hilt which Beowulf brings back to Hrothgar from the underwater battle with Grendel’s mother has an inscription referring to an ancient race of giants, alien to God and flood-whelmed, reminiscent of the Nephilim of Genesis.
After offering a few examples of Christian influence, Hieatt points to the competing heathen ideology:
On the other hand, frequent references to an inscrutable, all-controlling fate; to being fated, i.e., doomed to die; and to a man’s fame as the only thing that will live after him are all in accord with what we know of Germanic pagan habits of thought, although there are no references to the ancient Germanic divinities.
Agreeing with Burton Raffel, Kent Hieatt argues that the two disparate worldviews in the text are not “later interpolations.” Instead, “what might seem to be discrete Christian elements and remnants of pagan thinking appear together” organically “and plainly come from the mind of a single author.”
Such elements are capable of residing in a text side-by-side, even if they are capable of generating a small amount of cognitive dissonance:
They are perhaps better described as elements of the Anglo-Saxon viewpoint, which assimilated older views rather than completely discarding them.
In contrast, scholar Frederick Rebsamen allows for an outside chance that the author of Beowulf was not a Christian:
The Beowulf poet was either a Christian or very familiar with and influenced by Christianity. The very tone of the poem in places, especially in the final third, reflects the Christian patristic influence that pervades much of Old English poetry. But some of the principal characters are historically North Germanic pagans, and much of this tradition is retained by the poet, notably in some of the characteristics of Beowulf.The author, argues Frederick Rebsamen, whether he was a Christian or not, addressed implicitly if not explicitly the fact that his audience lived in a culture and a society which was Christian, but only recently so, and which was well aware of its pagan past:
The way in which the poet solves the problem of religion in this heroic-elegiac poem composed for a Christian audience is one thing that leads me to believe that the poem was composed not long after 700. At that time, although the Anglo-Saxons were generally converted to Christianity, they were also strongly aware of their pagan past. Thus the poet, while introducing the idea of only one god, a kind of Old Testament god whose name is spelled exactly as today, does not push things further, makes no mention of Christ or anything else in the New Testament.The author mentions “not one pagan god,” and the English/Germanic word wyrd is used in the text to refer to a concept of fate. The word had been used, prior to the writing of Beowulf, to refer to a Germanic god. The author thus reduces wyrd from a personal god to an impersonal concept. The demotion of wyrd goes even farther, when Beowulf’s “courage withstood wyrd.”
Frederick Rebsamen points out that God “is mentioned thirty-two times as God and at least sixty times” in the text “under several other names.” He concludes:
Though the pagan Germanic tradition is reflected in many ways, one god, named God and introduced through Christianity, is in charge.Beowulf was, Rebsamen surmises, “a curious blend of pagan and Christian.
Writing about the many scholars who’ve analyzed Beowulf over the years, Seamus Heaney suggests:
They devoted themselves to a consideration of the world-view behind the poem, asking to what extent (if at all) the newly Christian understanding of the world which operates in the poet’s designing mind displaces him from his imaginative at-homeness in the world of his poem — a pagan Germanic society governed by a heroic code of honour, one where the attainment of a name for warrior-prowess among the living overwhelms any concern about the soul’s destiny in the afterlife.Heaney proposes that such investigations are reasonable, but that they perhaps miss a greater investigation: the literary merit of the work. Beowulf is, after all, a poem, and as such, the structure, form, and sound are as important as — or more important than — its meaning and its analysis. He hopes that the reader can enter into a fantasy of monsters and dragons and the heroes who slay them, without having to be bogged down in critical apparatuses or interpretations.
What is the structure that houses the two worldviews which are at work in Beowulf? Heaney posits that the narrative contains an inner and an “outer” perspective, which allow to comment on the plot from two different viewpoints. The inner, internal, viewpoint is that of the pagan Germanic world.
But there is another, outer, rim of value, a circumference of understanding within which the heroic world is occasionally viewed as from a distance and recognized for what it is, an earlier state of consciousness and culture, one which has not been altogether shed but which has now been comprehended as part of another pattern. And this circumference and pattern arise, of course, from the poet’s Christianity and from his perspective as an Englishman looking back at places and legends which his ancestors knew before they made their migration from continental Europe to their new home on the island of the Britons. As a consequence of his doctrinal certitude, which is as composed as it is ardent, the poet can view the story-time of his poem with a certain historical detachment and even censure the ways of those who lived in illo tempore:As evidence, Heaney cites lines 175 to 180, in which the poet reports that the ancestors “vowed offerings to idols” and “swore oaths that the killer of souls might come to their aid and save the people.” These things happened at “pagan shrines.” The poet distances himself from his ancestors: “that was their way.”
The poet’s own worldview appears in line 188, where he explains that the souls of the dead come to rest “in the Father’s embrace.”
Of course, Heaney offers this data from his own translation of the text; other translations confirm his presentation.
The poet offers a glimpse of the transition from the world of his ancient ancestors to his own world. He does this by showing how materialism receded. In the world of Beowulf, gold is a greatly valuable, perhaps the most valuable, possession. Over the course of the narrative, the status of gold changes:
By the end of the poem, gold has suffered a radiation from the Christian vision. It is not that it yet equals riches in the medieval sense of worldly corruption, just that its status as the ore of all value has been put in doubt.The dragon, in Heaney’s estimation, is part and parcel of Beowulf’s world, and it is a sort of litmus test for the warrior: Can Beowulf slay the dragon? But the dragon has meaning beyond the mere physical test of skill:
Dragon equals shadow-line, the psalmist’s valley of the shadow of death, the embodiment of a knowledge deeply ingrained in the species which is the very knowledge of the price to be paid for physical and spiritual survival.It has often been observed that all the scriptural references in Beowulf are to the Old Testament. The poet is more in sympathy with the tragic, waiting, unredeemed phase of things than with any transcendental promise.
The text of Beowulf offers many onramps for exploration: it can be read aloud for a purely auditory and musical experience; it poses fascinating questions about society’s metamorphosis from blood-thirsty Germanic paganism to a humane Christianity which values every human life; it highlights the tension between outer-directed and inner-directed psychologies, between the narrative of warriors who attend only to being shamed or praised and the narrative of characters who have an internalized sense of honor or guilt; the book blends solidly documented historical realities with fantasy creatures, like blending oil and water.
The many different aspects of this text, and the many different types of questions which it poses, explain the large amount of intellectual energy which scholars from different disciplines have expended in their investigations of it.
