John D. Niles - Beowulf - The Poem and Its Tradition-Harvard University Press (1983) PDF
John D. Niles - Beowulf - The Poem and Its Tradition-Harvard University Press (1983) PDF
John D. Niles - Beowulf - The Poem and Its Tradition-Harvard University Press (1983) PDF
Beowulf
The Poem
and Its Tradition
JOHN D. NILES
(I) C O N T E X T
1. T h e Marvelous 3
2. The Art of the Germanic Scop 31
3. Latin Christian Letters 66
4. T h e Danes and the Date 96
(III) I N T E R P R E T A T I O N
9. T h e Dimension of Time 179
10. T h e Narrator's Voice 197
11. T h e Listening Audience 205
12. Reciprocity 213
13. T h e Controlling Theme 224
14. T h e Fatal Contradiction 235
Afterword
T h e Excellence of Beowulf 248
Abbreviations 257
Notes 261
Index 307
ILLUSTRATIONS
(From the British Library MS. Cotton Tiberius B.v)
3
4 CONTEXT
and potency. Without these creatures—without the monsters—we
would have a setting but no story. Our poem would still be a treasure
house of antiquarian interest but no longer the compelling tale of won-
der that it is.
Wise readers have never rebelled against the marvelous in Beowulf,
although in earlier years an undertone of grumbling could be heard
about the prominence that the poet chose to give it. Forty-five years
ago, when J. R. R. Tolkien admitted Beowulf fully into the ranks of
English literature with his eloquent address to the British Academy,1
he took the monsters as his main point of reference. By respecting the
marvelous in Beowulf rather than excusing it or wishing it away, he
succeeded better than anyone before him in discovering the source of
the excellence of this excellent work. He liked the monsters. He re-
sponded to their sheer physical presence, much as generations of read-
ers have responded with a fascinated shudder to Mary Shelley's Frank-
enstein or Robert Louis Stevenson's fable of Mr. Hyde. Tolkien was a
poet. The monsters fit into his concept of what constitutes a legitimate
subject of inquiry by the human brain. He was aware that there are
things about which the human brain will speculate, regardless of
whether or not mature adults approve of the activity.
Since Tolkien's address, the monsters of Beowulf have come into
their own. As one scholar has written in a review of recent criticism,
"there has been something like a core of general agreement that the
monsters are at the center of the action precisely because their univer-
sality of meaning transcends what could be expressed through specific
human antagonists." 2 Unlike such human antagonists as Ingeld, Finn,
Dseghrefn, and OngenJjeow, the monstrous antagonists of Beowulf are
bound to no particular time or place. They are as real or as unreal
today as they were a thousand years ago. Their names may change,
but their forms do not disappear from our consciousness, however
much we may wish them away. We may even admire them a little, as
if their terrifying potency were something with which we needed to
keep in touch as we go about the affairs of daily life.
Not all readers share this core of agreement about the place of the
marvelous in Beowulf, of course. A note of discontent with the easy
acceptance of wonders has been sounded in several recent studies that
attempt to account in realistic terms for certain apparently marvelous
features of the action. We are told that after the death of Hygelac, for
example, Beowulf did not swim back home from the Rhineland carry-
THE MARVELOUS 5
3
ing thirty suits of armor. He rowed back in a boat. His contest with
Breca was likewise not a swimming match but a rowing match.4 In the
hero's most astonishing adventure, similarly, he did not descend
through the waters of Grendel's mere for "a good part of the day"
(hwil dceges), as has been thought. He simply descended "at day-
break." 5
Any of these interpretations may be right. I rather suspect that they
are not right, and that the first two are based on an overly literal read-
ing of the poet's flamboyant metaphors for the act of swimming, while
the third hinges on the faith that because the Old English word
dœghwil means "daybreak," which it does, the expression hwil dœges
also means "daybreak," which it may or may not do. But apart from
any such philological niceties, something is dubious about the attitude
that seems to motivate these studies; and even if the specific studies are
right, I would like to speak against the general attitude.
The marvelous in Beowulf is not something to be embarrassed
about. We do not need to explain it away whenever the parameters of
the language will permit us to do so. In any event, it cannot be ex-
plained away. Take away the hero's long descent through the waters
of Grendel's mere and we are still faced with the problem of account-
ing for his later ascent through the same waters, an ascent that he ac-
complishes swimming, clothed in full armor, carrying Unferth's
sword, the hilt of a second gigantic sword, and Grendel's head. Later
we are told that only with difficulty could Beowulf's companions lift up
the head alone, and four of them were needed to carry it to Hrothgar's
court (iÓ34b-39). This is scarcely the mode of realism. The question
"Did Beowulf's descent take a long or a short time?" fades into insig-
nificance beside the question "What are we to make of the presence of
such marvelous events in the narrative?"
The marvelous events, the historical setting—these are the two
chief elements that combine to make up Beowulf, and the poem de-
rives its special power from their adroit blending. Each of these ele-
ments is handled superbly on its own, yet on its own, neither would
raise the poem to a level of excellence attained by the Gilgamesh epic,
the Odyssey, or other great monuments of the world's early literature.
Like the stories of Gilgamesh and Odysseus, Beowulf is a serious and
dignified work that contains enough fabulous adventures to make its
dignity appealing. If not for these adventures, the dignified setting
might soon appear pompous and would likely lose our interest. If not for
6 CONTEXT
the dignified setting, the adventures would only entertain and would not
lift us to a knowledge of how the hero's actions express a code of conduct
that helps to hold human society together.
than one Old Norse saga or páttr, the mother of the draugr appears in
the form of a ketta, or she-cat with long claws.12 In the páttr of Ormr
Stórólfsson, the hero Stórólf kills a cave-dwelling troll named Brusi,
who is "strongest of all men," shortly after he has dispatched Brúsi's
mother, a coal-black she-cat who has long claws and sharp teeth and
who breathes fire.13 Perhaps the closest Norse parallel to the pair of
male and female monsters in Beowulf occurs in Qrvar-Odd's Saga, in
which the hero goes east of the Baltic and, among other exploits,
fights a man named Qgmundr who is "the worst troll and monster
ever born in the Northern Hemisphere" and who tears out a man's
throat with his teeth. Although Qgmundr's mother has a human face,
farther down she looks like an animal with enormous talons and tail.
Once a human being, she turned into an ogress who lives in the woods
with the wild beasts and who kills anything living that comes her
14
way.
These and other Norse analogues to the Grendel creatures suggest
that the Germanic North is the most proximate source for the poet's
conception of the monsters. Still, the adversaries of Beowulf far tran-
scend the character of their Norse cousins. Grendel and his mother are
not only fearsome troll-like creatures. They also partake of spiritual
evil. By linking them repeatedly to biblical history and Christian cos-
mology, the poet makes them participants in a struggle whose origins
must be sought in the earliest annals of human events and whose end is
not yet in sight. This is no simple combat of a hero against fearsome
antagonists, as in the Old Norse stories of Grettir, BçÔvar Bjarki, and
Qrvar-Odd, but one of absolute spiritual good against unmitigated
spiritual evil. In this struggle the Christian deity has sometimes taken a
personal part.
Just as Grendel is both human and bestial, he modulates between
the monstrous and the literally demonic. One cannot tell if he is imag-
ined to be a devil or merely devilish, but from the start, the poet asso-
ciates him with hell and with the hellish progeny of Cain. 15 Such epi-
thets asfeondon helle, "fiend in hell" (ioib); feondmancynnes, "enemy
of mankind" (164b); helle hafta, "prisoner of hell" (788a); and helle
gast, "demon of hell" (1274a), identify him as either a devil or a devil's
minion, while later the poet speaks of the killing of the two Grendel
creatures as a deofia hryre, a "destruction of devils" (1680a). Three
epithets the Beowulf poet uses of Grendel—atol aglœca, "terrible,
fearsome one" (592a, 732a, 816a); Godes andsaca, "God's adversary"
12 CONTEXT
(786b, 1682b); andfyrena hyrde, "shepherd of crimes" (750b)—are
used in the poem Christ and Satan of Satan himself (verses 160a, 190a,
and 159b, respectively), while in the same poem Satan's minions are
called hellehœftas, "prisoners of hell" (629a). The draugr of Old Norse
tradition has changed character in Beowulf by being assimilated to a
tradition of Christian devotional poetry with its own special concept of
the creatures of hell. In large part this concept and its associated termi-
nology derive from patristic demonology. 16
According to early medieval belief, there are many devils, or,
rather, the devil has innumerable subordinate demons whom he sends
as agents throughout the world. Devils have suborned the altars at
which the heathens worship, as jElfric relates in his homilies on the
creation and on idolatry and as is made clear in the Anglo-Saxon
psalms, where is it said that "all the heathen gods are warring
devils." 17 By worshiping their idols, the heathen prove themselves
only to be devil-worshipers, as happens in the early part of Beowulf,
when the faithless Danes offer heathen sacrifice and thereby, ironi-
cally, invoke the aid of the devil (gastbona, 177a) against the devilish.
In the hands of a different poet the Christian terms in which Gren-
del is described could easily have been exploited for devotional pur-
poses. The action of the first part of the poem could have become an
allegory in which a hero who represents Christ meets and defeats two
creatures symbolic of the devil and his minions. The Beowulf poet
steadfastly resists this temptation. His otherworldly creatures never
cross the line into symbolism. If anything, the Christian framework
within which they are introduced reinforces our sense of their actual
existence. T h e descent from Cain that the poet ascribes to them
( i 0 4 b - l 14, 1260-68) strengthens their ties to the real world of sacred
and secular history, from the earliest times to the present.
Rather than locate his monsters in the "once-upon-a-time" of fairy
tales or even in the romanticized pseudohistorical setting of the Norse
sagas and páttir, the poet thus takes pains to account realistically for
their origins in the world in which we ourselves live. Grendel and his
mother may be laid to rest, the poet tells us, but there is no reason to
disbelieve that similar devilish creatures are lurking in the darkness
somewhere out there, whether in faraway lands, at the gate of hell, or,
perhaps, in the mists and fenland pools of Anglo-Saxon England. God
may have destroyed the giants of Genesis 2 in the Flood, but a variety
of other hellish creatures sprung from the seed of the Cain survived
T H E MARVELOUS 13
this destruction to remain as potential enemies of humankind, among
them the "etyns and elves and Orkneys" of the genealogical excursus
of lines 104b-114; the malignant sea-creatures of the Breca episode
(549-579a); the etyns and niceras ("sea snakes") that Beowulf claims
to have laid low in his youth (419-4243); and the nicers and sœdracan
("sea serpents") that are seen basking on the banks and swimming in
the waters of Grendel's mere, one of which is shot with an arrow and
pulled ashore just as one would harpoon an eel or fish (1425-413).
There is nothing make-believe about these creatures. They are pre-
sented as part of the natural world, part of the damned progeny of
Cain, and, perhaps, specifically those that could not be destroyed in the
Flood because of their aquatic or amphibious nature.
Testimony to a belief in the reality of such creatures is found in
other Anglo-Saxon writings, both Christian and secular. Attention has
long been drawn to the way that the Beowulf manuscript includes
other texts that display a lively interest in strange or marvelous crea-
tures. 18 These texts include a West Saxon translation of the work
known in Latin as De rebus in oriente mirabilibus and in English as the
Marvels of the East. Other versions of the Maruels are preserved in the
British Library's manuscript Cotton Tiberius B.v, written in about
1025 (in Latin and Old English), and in the somewhat later Bodleian
Library manuscript Bodley 614 (in Latin). An editor of the Marvels
has called it "a collection of absurdities" that he is "rescuing from a
perhaps merited oblivion," 19 but what is an absurdity to modern sci-
ence may still have been taken as a fact of life by men and women of a
thousand years ago. There is no evidence to suggest that Anglo-
Saxons did not believe in the serpents, dragons, giants, cannibalistic
monsters, and other strange beasts of the Marvels with the same faith
that people today believe in the reality of the orangutan, grizzly bear,
or crocodile from seeing these creatures in picture books, even if we
could not consult the evidence of our eyes by visiting the zoo. For the
most part, the strange creatures of the Marvels are described with
what seems like an attempt at literal-minded accuracy. At only one
point does the writer's credulity falter, when he describes a race of
people who are fifteen feet tall and ten feet broad and have large,
light-weight ears in which they wrap themselves at night, using one as
a mattress and one as a blanket. After declaring that these creatures
are so shy that if they see a human being "they take their ears in their
hands and fly away very quickly," he adds, Swa is wen pat hy fleogen:
14 CONTEXT
"So people believe that they fly."20 He withholds judgment himself.
Of the many strange creatures of the Marvels, quite a few have
something in common with the monsters of Beowulf. We can see the
latter more clearly if we keep in mind their affinities with their early
medieval kindred. The motif of light shining from human eyes, for
example, is not restricted to the poet's description of Grendel at the
door of Heorot but occurs in chapter 23 of the Marvels: "Then there
is an island on which are born people whose eyes shine as bright as if a
great lantern were lit on a dark night." 21 Also featured are serpents
whose eyes "shine by night as bright as lanterns,"22 as well as a pair of
dragons "who are 150 feet long and as great as stone columns in
girth" (see illustration, p. 177). In comparison with these dragons the
50-foot-long firedrake fought by Beowulf seems somewhat less ex-
traordinary.
The illustrations of the Cotton Tiberius B.v manuscript have not
been examined with regard to Beowulf, as far as I know, perhaps be-
cause of the widespread assumption that the poem long predates these
eleventh-century illustrations. The attribution of Beowulf to an early
date can be questioned on many grounds, however, as I argue later.
The illustrations may thus represent a near contemporary's visualiza-
tion of the sorts of creatures that are introduced in the poem. Apart
from their date relative to Beowulf these pictures are of interest in
their own right as "magnificent specimens of the best late Anglo-
Saxon school"23 showing how one Anglo-Saxon artist conceived of a
variety of strange creatures of his world.
Three illustrations are of special interest for readers of Beowulf.
The first, from folio 81b, shows one of a race of men who have
"thighs and shanks twelve feet long and breasts seven feet across" and
who "rightly are called hostes, for they devour any human being they
catch" (see illustration, p. 1). In his upright stature and human ap-
pearance, as well as in his cannibalistic habits, the giant calls to mind
Grendel, who looks like a man except for his extraordinary size. An-
other illumination depicts one of a race of monstrous women who are
said to be thirteen feet tall, with boar's tusks and hair as long as their
heels (see illustration, p. 119). From their written description these
women would seem to have nothing to do with Beowulf, but the artist
has rendered his theme so expressively that one is tempted to see in
this ferocious, long-haired she-monster a family resemblance to Gren-
del's mother and the ketta of Old Norse tradition. The resemblance
T H E MARVELOUS 15
does not extend to the details of the cloven feet and ox's tail, of course.
It is a spiritual rather than a physical kinship that one senses between
these creatures. While both have the likeness of a woman, they are
wilder and more fearsome than any mortal woman, and the terror they
inspire derives as much from their being like human beings as unlike
them.
The most striking of the Tiberius illustrations and one of the mas-
terworks of Anglo-Saxon art is the full-page illumination that is repro-
duced as the frontispiece of this book. It illustrates an apocryphal
story, now chiefly lost, of the wizard Iannis and his brother Mambres.
The human figure who calmly surveys the scene from his station on
the rock is Mambres, who is using a book of necromancy to call up the
idolon ("shade") of his dead brother from hell. In the smoking pit
below, devils, beasts, and serpents torment the pustulous bodies of the
damned. In the Latin text accompanying the picture, the shade of
Iannis gives Mambres a short sermon on the importance of living a
virtuous life on earth, "for in hell there is nothing good, only sorrow
and darkness." Iannis is not shown, unless perhaps he is the bearded
figure directly beneath the right shoulder of the monster. Instead, the
scene is dominated by the huge, hairy monster who guards hell's
mouth and is devouring the bodies of several sinners.
This vigorous depiction of the hell-monster is perhaps the best indi-
cation we have as to how Grendel was imagined by an audience of
Anglo-Saxons. The monster of the Tiberius manuscript has only a
tenuous relation to the story he is supposed to illustrate. He seems to
have materialized out of the artist's own imagination, and the form he
takes corresponds to what the Beowulf poet tells us of Grendel. The
monster's gigantic size, roughly three to five times the size of the
human figures; his steel-like claws; his cannibalism; his association with
the mouth of hell—all these features could almost be taken straight
from the text of Beowulf. Even the great rock overhanging hell's
mouth calls to mind the rock that overshadows Grendel's mere. Per-
haps as important, there are no extraneous details in the portrait that
would not be appropriate to Grendel. The monster has no long tail or
other animalistic features; he is like a man, only larger and more terri-
ble.
By making this comparison between the hell-monster and Grendel,
I do not mean to suggest that the artist was familiar with the Beowulf
story and took his inspiration from the poet's words. We will never
ι6 CONTEXT
know the sources of his inspiration. We can be sure that they did not
include the version of the Marvels that is included on folios 98b-io6b
of the Beowulf codex, for this version breaks off before the story of
Iannis and Mambres and includes no picture of a monster at the mouth
of hell. What is important is that the two works reflect a similar con-
ception of a certain kind of monstrous creature. To be more exact,
they reflect not only a similar conception but a similar belief. Anglo-
Saxon readers may or may not have accepted Mambres and Iannis as
historical personages, but they knew hell and its guardians to be part
of the real world.
Κ The locus for all the monstrous creatures of the first part of
Beowulf is Grendel's mere. There they make their home, this loose-
knit alliance of nicers, sea serpents, and manlike monsters, and from
there, as from an apparently impregnable fastness, they venture out to
attack human beings. In its realistic appearance and uncanny nature,
the pool reinforces the ambiguousness of Grendel and his mother as
creatures both of and not of the natural world.
The mere looks like a natural pool, and it is described with a wealth
of detail that confirms its existence as part of a real landscape. It is lo-
cated a short distance from Heorot in a place where a body of water
descends beneath an outcrop of rock and disappears below. Mist rises
from its surface, and over it hang frosty trees. It is approached by an
untraveled path whose narrowness permits only single-file traffic as it
winds over the surrounding cliffs and bluffs.
Coexisting with these naturalistic details are other features that
seem included chiefly for their emotive force and that make us wonder
whether we are dealing with a natural pool or with something un-
worldly. The pool is said to be bottomless (i366b-Ó7)—a feature that
calls to mind the abyss of hell24 as well as that familiar, chilling terror
of anyone who as a child swam in a "bottomless" quarry or lake. Ani-
mals avoid the mere instinctively: even a hart pursued by hounds will
give up his life on the banks rather than enter the water for protection.
And every night, Hrothgar reports, a "terrible wonder" can be seen
on the mere in the form of fire that burns on its surface. No other de-
tail expresses the ambiguity of the place so clearly. Readers who are
familiar with marsh gas and other sources of weird illumination may at
first try to rationalize this fire as a natural phenomenon, for indeed
such a wonder as light shining from water is known to science. But
T H E MARVELOUS 17
Grendel's mere is no stagnant marshland pool. It is part of a turbulent
landscape of rising mists, a falling stream, and towering bluffs and
trees. T h e fire that burns on the water is ascribed no natural cause; it
reminds us more of the burning waters of hell than of anything terres-
trial.
T h e topographical uncertainty in the description of the location of
Grendel's mere confirms our uneasy sense that it is no ordinary pool.
Is the mere located in the fens? In high and rocky ground? In or near
the sea? Different details of the poet's description permit us to answer
"yes" to each of these questions. 25 T h e resultant contradictory picture
reflects the uncertainty in popular belief concerning the "true" loca-
tion of the otherworld—a terrifying but ill-defined region that British
folklore associates now with the forest, now with high mountains, now
with an island, now with an underwater or subterranean realm. 26 One
should not hesitate to identify the waters through which the hero de-
scends as cognate with the waters that separate the ordinary human
world from the magical and threatening "other" realm in so many
tales of an otherworldly journey. 27 Steep hills, the ocean, frosty trees,
rising mist, and fire on water all figure commonly in medieval and
nonmedieval accounts of such a journey. Wherever Beowulf stands
geographically, mythically he is approaching an entry to the other-
world. Just as the Grendel creatures are literally demonic, the entry is
described in terms specifically appropriate to the Christian hell. Still,
the poet never makes this identification explicit. T h e pool is always a
pool; it is never made into an abstraction or a symbol of something
else. As with the monsters themselves, we are left in doubt as to the
exact nature of what is being described, and the resultant ambiguity
adds to the listener's uneasiness.
T h e character of the mere stands out clearly when one compares it
with an analogous description found in the tenth-century collection of
anonymous sermons known as the Blickling homilies. A passage in the
seventeenth homily elaborates a concept of the mouth of hell much
like that expressed in pictorial form by the artist of manuscript Cotton
Tiberius B.v. T h e homilist takes as his main subject St. Michael and
the angels. At the end he digresses briefly to speak of hell and the fate
of the damned:
Angels are as ministering spirits sent by God here into the world to
those who with might and main will merit from God the eternal king-
ι8 CONTEXT
dom, so that they [the angels] might help those whose lot it is to contend
ceaselessly against accursed spirits. But let us now entreat the Archangel
St. Michael and the nine orders of the holy angels to be our aid against
hell-fiends. These angels are the holy ones who have received [and still
receive] the souls of men. Thus St. Paul was looking toward the north-
ern region of the earth where all waters go down under, and there over
the water he saw a gray rock, and to the north were some frost-covered
trees that had grown from the rock, and there were dark mists, and
under the rock was the dwelling-place of nicers and accursed creatures.
And he saw that many black souls were hanging on the icy trees on the
cliff with their hands fettered, and devils [literally, "the hellish enemies
of them," that is, the black souls] in the likeness of nicers were reaching
for them like hungry wolves, and the water beneath the cliff was black.
And between the cliff and the water was a distance of about twelve
miles, and when the branches broke, then down went the souls who had
been hanging on them, and the nicers got them. These were the souls of
men who had sinned wickedly here in the world and would not cease
from it before the end of their lives. But let us earnestly pray to St. Mi-
chael that he bring our souls into bliss, where they may rejoice without
end in eternity.28
Hordwynne fond
eald uhtsceaSa opene standan,
se Se byrnende biorgas seceS,
nacod niödraca, nihtes fleogeS
fyre befangen; hyne foldbuend
swiÖe ondraedaÖ. He gesecean sceall
hord on hrusan, Jjaer he hasSen gold
waraS wintrum frod; ne byS him wihte S y sel.
A n old dawn-raider
found the joy of the hoard standing o p e n —
he who burning seeks out barrows,
the naked dragon who flies by night
enveloped in flames; dwellers on earth
fear him greatly. It is his lot to seek
a hoard in the earth where he will guard
heathen gold, grown old and wise;
he gains nothing by that.
Earth-dwellers fear him greatly. The present tense implies a living be-
lief. The Beowulf dragon himself is not being described; we are told
that he is one of the kind of creatures who seek out barrows and fly by
night, enveloped in flame.39 The poet is summarizing the general
characteristics of dragons, somewhat as if a naturalist were describing
a rare and remarkable species. All dragons, not this one alone, have
the habit of seeking out a hoard in the earth and, as inarticulate, reclu-
sive creatures, have no profit from their wealth. Somewhat later the
poet again stands back from the action for a moment to characterize
the race of dragons, and his words again imply belief in the reality of
26 CONTEXT
such creatures. Just after the fight the poet tells how Beowulf s death
fulfills an ancient pattern (2836-423):
The first line can be taken as litotes for "scarcely any man at all." Var-
ious stories are told of men who met with dragons, the poet implies,
but few such tales have a happy ending.
The moral neutrality of the Beowulf dragon stands out clearly when
one considers how easily the poet could have associated him with the
Christian devil. In the poem "The Panther," part of a late Old
English bestiary, the panther is said to be friendly to all earthly crea-
tures except the poisonous draca, for whom he harbors a deadly ha-
tred. The poet then likens the continuing feud between the terrestrial
panther and the terrestrial dragon to the cosmic feud between God
and Satan that came to a climax at the time of the harrowing of hell,
when Christ "bound the ancient enemy in the abyss of torments and
fettered him in fiery bands" (lines 59-60). Such an allegorization of
the dragon is based on good precedent and goes back at least to the
authority of Revelation 12:9: Et apprehendit draconem, serpentent anti-
quum, qui est diabolus, et Satanas, "And he took hold of the dragon, the
ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan." But the Beowulf poet
does not exploit the potential allegorical significance of the dragon
fight. Only Grendel and Grendel's mother are persistently associated
with hell and the creatures of damnation. Never is the dragon called a
devil, referred to as "God's enemy," or associated with hell.40 The
T H E MARVELOUS 27
barrow where he makes his home is always an earthly hill. The boiling
stream that emerges from it seethes from the natural cause of the
dragon's heat, unlike the mysterious flame that rises for no apparent
reason from the surface of Grendel's mere.
T o make this distinction between the spiritual evil of the Grendel
creatures and the physical threat of the dragon is by no means to di-
minish the dragon's stature. It is simply to clarify his character. As
Irving notes (p. 214), "Though he may be evil, he is not Evil. There
is an amoral aspect to him, alien and remote." As long as the dragon is
undisturbed, he sleeps peacefully as the guardian of treasures put into
the earth for good. His enormous destructive potential is aroused only
when a man dares to disturb the hoard. He is evil in the sense that an
earthquake or tornado is evil when people are in its path. O f course
the dragon is frightful, but he is not therefore Satanic. It would not do
for the hero to die in an epic combat against a Guernsey cow.
If we fail to make this distinction—if we do precisely what the poet
does not and identify the dragon with Satan—we risk distorting the
meaning of the end of the poem by polarizing it along the lines of a
false spiritual dichotomy. However essential the contrast of good ver-
sus evil or God versus Satan may have been in the first part of the
poem, by the time of the hero's final combat such terms of moral op-
position have ceased to apply. Instead we are shown the heroic end of a
heroic life. If the dragon were Satan, the king's falling victim to him
would leave evil victorious. Yet the tone of grandeur and sorrow in
which we are told of the hero's last words, death, and funeral reaffirms
Beowulf as a story of how a great man met his death in a noble though
desperate cause. T o turn the story into an allegory of the triumph of
evil is not only to malign the character of the morally neutral dragon
but is also to turn Beowulf from a hero into a victim, and any such
conversion destroys the tone of muted celebration in which the poem
closes.
By the time of his final fight, Beowulf himself has become like a
dragon. He has ruled his kingdom in peace for fifty years, as untrou-
bled by foreign wars or internal dissensions as the neighboring dragon
who sleeps in his barrow. He has become a frodfolces weard, an "old
and wise guardian of the tribe," just as the dragon is frod, "old and
wise," and is the guardian of his hoard. Like the dragon, he is able to
live in peace not simply because circumstances let him, but because his
potential power is so fearsome that others prefer not to arouse him.
28 CONTEXT
When he finally has no choice but to use his power, he does so, like the
dragon, to the utmost. When the two veteran warriors meet, their
combat is ferocious, but nothing is supernatural about it. The poet
tells of no entry to an uncanny realm, no divine aid, no miracle of a
melting sword-blade or of light shining like the sun in the midst of
darkness, no miraculous cleansing of the waters—in short, none of the
wondrous details that make the combat with Grendel's mother one of
the most astonishing adventures in English fiction. One fearsome
combatant meets another, and that is all. The combat is described at
great length, with all the epic elaboration that the poet chooses to
muster, but in its essentials it is a simple meeting of force against force.
Given the nearly equal terms of the fight, it could have no other out-
come. The hero must die, the story must come to its close; and what
better way to have the hero meet his end than in a combat of awesome
proportions in which, for one last time, he proves the quality of his
fortitude by measuring it against that of the most fearsome of God's
creatures? There is something fitting about the twin deaths of the two
aged antagonists, as if two enormous sources of energy were to meet
and cancel each other, leaving only timid survivors to dispose of the
dead.
31
32 CONTEXT
identifying the ways that Anglo-Saxon poetry imitates and reflects the
dominant intellectual tradition of its age, the tradition of Latin Chris-
tian letters. Perhaps no other aspect of our knowledge of Old English
literature has advanced so significantly in recent years as has our
knowledge of its relation to the attitudes and practices of English mo-
nasticism. Certainly it is also true that "Anglo-Saxon poetry, in its ex-
isting written form, is the product of monastic culture." 1 T o say that
Old English poetry was written down by monks is not necessarily to
have shown, however, that monks schooled in Latin Christian letters
were responsible for shaping all features of its art.
In the Anglo-Saxon period there were both poets and scribes.
To mistake the office of one for that of the other may not do justice
to the complex set of literary interrelationships that existed in a
society in which most people were illiterate and in which singers were
honored and skilled performers for aristocratic patrons. In the absence
of evidence to the contrary, one cannot rule out the possibility that a
given Old English poetic text came into being in any of several ways:
as the written composition of a learned author; as the oral composition
of a lettered or unlettered singer whose work was written down; or as
an oral composition that was written down and then revised, perhaps
repeatedly, in the course of its written transmission.2 A priori
judgments will not help us sort through these different possibili-
ties.
Beowulf has provided a battleground for those concerned with iden-
tifying the original context of the Old English poetry that has sur-
vived. Does the poem derive its form and strength from being
grounded in the traditional art of the Germanic scop? Or is it a product
of generations of monastic experience in fashioning poetry on themes
derived from Latin letters?
The answer, of course, is both. The poem grows from a complex
milieu in which elements from Germanic and Mediterranean cultures
met and fused in a combination not quite like anything else we know of
from the Middle Ages. Like the highly refined book illumination of
the period, it presupposes skills that are both Germanic and monastic
in origin. In order to understand Beowulf, one should try to recon-
struct as exactly as possible both the traditional verse-making tech-
nique of the Anglo-Saxon scop and the nature of the monastic culture
that preserved this and all other Old English literature. If either of
these elements is ignored, one risks oversimplifying a poem whose ori-
T H E A R T OF T H E GERMANIC SCOP 33
gins, despite all efforts of historical reconstruction, are complex and
obscure.
the poet means what he says may consider the last lines of the poem,
which consist of a rather skillful eleven-line macaronic in Latin and
English.
When we turn to Beowulf we find none of these signs of clerical au-
thorship. The poem is on a secular theme, follows no known Latin
source, is set in the mists of "days of yore," and never alludes to
book-learning. While we need not conclude that in its original and pri-
mary mode of existence the poem was the property of scops, there is
no reason to rule out this possibility.
The case for an oral, traditional Beowulf underlying the extant text
becomes more persuasive when one considers how the poem includes a
remarkable portrait of an orally improvising scop.14 On the second day
in Heorot, after a band of men have followed Grendel's trail as far as
the bloody mere, the poet pauses for a moment to tell how the men
celebrated Beowulf's victory by racing their horses, while from time to
time the king's scop sang words of praise that included a lay of
Beowulf's own deed (864-8743):
At least as common is the type of line in which only the first stressed
syllables of both verses alliterate:
Less favored, though still common, is the type of line in which the sec-
ond stress of the a verse alliterates with the first stress of the b verse:
Beowulf donned
his noble arms with no thought for his life;
his broad mail-shirt woven by hand,
expertly wrought was to explore the waves;
1445 it knew how to cover his cage of bones
so that no hostile grip could injure him,
no enemy's grasp could touch his vitals.
T h e bright helmet that guarded his head
was soon to seek out the eddying waves
1450 and stir up the sea depths, adorned with treasure,
clasped with lordly bands just as the weapon-smith
had fashioned it wondrously in former days,
surmounted it with boar-images so that ever afterwards
no sword or battle-blade could bite through it.
1455 Not the least aid to his strength was what
Hrothgar's thyle lent him in his need;
the hilted sword was named Hrunting;
peerless it was among ancient treasures;
the blade was of iron gleaming with poisonous designs
1460 hardened in war-blood; never at battle
had it failed any man who wielded it in his hands
as he dared to try dangerous exploits
on the field of combat; that was not the first time
it was called to perform a deed of valor.
patterns. Among the fourteen words of the passage that do not occur
outside Beowulf, for example, is the compound eorlgewœde, "noble
clothing," which may be compared with the other Old English poetic
compounds eorlgestreon, "noble treasure"; eorlgebyrd, "noble birth";
eorlmcegen, "noble might"; and eorlweorod, "noble troop." Another
unique compound, herebyrne, "war byrnie," survives in Layamon's
Brut in the form hereburne and may be compared with heregeatu, "war
gear"; herereaf, "spoils of war"; herewœpen, "weapon of war"; here-
cyrm, "noise of war"; and several dozen other here- compounds at-
tested in the poetic corpus. A third unique compound is beadumece,
"battle-sword," which may be compared with beadowcepen, "weapon
of battle"; beadosearo, "battle gear"; beadupreat, "band of warriors";
and a score other beadu- compounds found elsewhere in Old English
poetry. These examples are typical, as anyone may ascertain by glanc-
ing through the Bessinger-Smith Concordance.
The unique diction of the Beowulf poet takes on a still less idiosyn-
cratic appearance when one considers how it tends to fall into lexical
systems. If the compound eorlgewœde is not found outside of Beowulf,
neither are the compounds breostegewœde, "breast clothing" ( i 2 l i a ,
2162a), or gwSgewœde, "battle clothing" (six occurrences in the
poem). Herebyrne is unique, and so are the compounds gwSbyrne,
"battle byrnie" (321b); irenbyrne, "iron byrnie" (2986b); and isern-
byrne, "iron byrnie" (671b); while hea&obyrne, "battle byrnie"
(1552a) occurs elsewhere only in verse 64b of " T h e Gifts of Men."
The word beadumece is part of a formulaic system whose other mem-
bers are hildemece, "battle-sword" (2202b), and hœftmece, "long-hilted
sword" (1457a). If one supposes that the Beowulf poet coined all or
most of his unique diction, one must conclude not only that he in-
vented individual words but that he devised flexible formulaic systems
among which he could substitute at will. Far more likely is that the
tradition did this inventing for him.
Also counting against the conclusion that the Beowulf poet coined
all or most of his otherwise unattested diction is that the poet of
"Waldere" seems to have been almost equally inventive in his word-
hoard. O f the nineteen compound nouns or adjectives that occur in the
sixty-one lines of the "Waldere" fragments, ten occur nowhere else in
the Anglo-Saxon poetic corpus.56 O f the nine compounds found else-
where, three occur only in Beowulf: these are swatfag, 'blood-stained";
guhbill, "war-sword"; andfe<Sewig, "battle on foot." One, byrnhoma, or
T H E ART O F T H E GERMANIC SCOP 63
"coat of mail," is found elsewhere only in "Judith" and another,
œtsteall, "camp station," only in Guthlac A. It is hard to imagine that of
the two authors of secular epic poems that have come down to us in
Old English, both were idiosyncratic poets who exercised their imagi-
nations coining a large number of new words or using words practi-
cally unknown elsewhere. One suspects that if the whole of "Wal-
dere" and one or two other Anglo-Saxon epic poems on secular
themes had happened to survive, many such words could be identified
as members of well-defined traditional lexical systems.
Because there are no Latin sources for the subjects of early Ger-
manic heroic poetry, no Latin prototype for the Germanic meter, and
no Latin models for the elaborate sorts of apposition and compound
diction that are characteristic of the Germanic epic style, one can con-
clude that the lay and the epic were two forms of oral narrative poetry
that arose in the Germanic North largely independent of Mediterran-
ean cultural influences. T h e first goes back to proto-Germanic roots
and appears to have come to England during the tribal migrations of
the fifth and sixth centuries. T h e second seems to have been a native
Anglo-Saxon development that flourished chiefly on English soil. As
these forms continued developing, they absorbed a number of influ-
ences from monastic culture, and yet each retained much of its native
character. The lay was relatively short, simple, and direct. The epic
was ample, involuted, and richly allusive and digressive. Transmitting
the lay may have depended largely on memorization—more so among
weaker singers, progressively less so among the capable and experi-
enced ones. T h e epic can scarcely have been memorized but was prob-
ably transmitted by professional or semiprofessional singers who could
recreate any number of songs on demand. Such singers would have
based their performances both on their memory of previous perform-
ances and on their mastery of traditional rhetorical techniques that in-
cluded frequent digressions for the sake of thematic depth, 57 frequent
speeches of direct address, liberal use of gnomic sententiae,58 use of
elaborate sorts of apposition and other amplificatory devices, and em-
ployment of a body of traditional diction that allowed for much meta-
phorical periphrasis, particularly involving compound words.
In practice, especially during the later Old English period, the he-
roic lay and the heroic epic may not have been two separate genres but
rather two modes of performance that differed from one another in
64 CONTEXT
degree rather than kind. One can easily imagine that a single s o n g —
the story of Waldere's escape from the Huns, for example—could
have been either compressed to the length of a lay or drawn out to epic
proportions, depending on the singer's skill, the circumstances of the
performance, and the patience of the audience. The Beowulf poet
knew how to compose either in the epic style or in the style of the lay
(as with the song of Finn and Hengest). O f the extant early Germanic
poetry, "The Battle of Finnsburh" and the "Hildebrandslied" (frag-
mentary though they are) provide the best evidence as to the nature of
the heroic lay, and Beowulf and "Waldere" the best evidence as to the
nature of the heroic epic, but between these two extremes probably
existed a number of poems of intermediate complexity and length.
One example of such a poem is "The Battle of Maldon," a narrative
that runs to 325 lines in its present fragmentary state and may once
have been a hundred or so lines longer. Its importance for historians of
English poetry can scarcely be exaggerated, for it shows that even as
late as 991, the year of the battle the poem commemorates—four
centuries after Latin letters had been introduced by the missionaries
and several decades after the monastic revival—the tradition of
Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry was still capable of finding most vigorous
expression. In this poem one sees the heroic ideal embodied in quintes-
sential form in a narrative as forceful and polished as any that survives
from the Old English period. The "Maldon" poet does not strive for
the richly sententious mode of Beowulf. His use of poetic diction is re-
strained, and he avoids the digressive technique of the fully-formed
epic. Instead, he tells a straightforward tale of a lord's tragic overcon-
fidence and the heroic deaths of the man and his best companions. Pre-
cisely because of the author's restrained yet full narrative technique,
many readers have found the poem as admirable as anything surviving
from the period. That this poem dates from near the end of the Old
English period rather than from its beginning speaks forcefully against
any tendency to undervalue the contribution of the native Germanic
tradition toward shaping Anglo-Saxon attitudes and poetic forms.
T o say this is not to have determined the exact relation of any Old
English text to the kinds of verse that were current in oral tradition.
Until a tape-recording of a scop singing an oral prototype of " T h e
Battle of Finnsburh" or "Waldere" is discovered, we have no way of
knowing to what extent the text of any such poem reproduces the way
the song was actually sung. Still, we distort these texts when we read
THE ART OF THE GERMANIC SCOP 65
them as if they had been penned by a learned ecclesiastic on the order
of the author of the Latin Waltharii poesis. The character of Beowulf,
in particular, is difficult to account for unless one postulates a long
prior tradition of epic verse-making in the vernacular, just as the
recording of the text with pen and ink was impossible without a long
prior development of the technology of book making.
Whether Beowulf derives from the recitation of a scop, from the
writing of an ecclesiastic who remembered the singing of a scop and
imitated it more or less accurately, or from the writing of an ecclesias-
tic who was himself a scop, we shall never know, but I do not see how
we can read the poem as if it had no relation to the art of Germanic
singers of tales. Nowhere else in Old English poetry and rarely else-
where in the literature of the British Isles do we see such richness of
poetic diction. Nowhere else do we see such a deep and sustained inter-
est in defining the nature of ethical behavior in a world dominated by
broken faith and self-destructive violence. Rather than ignore the na-
tive traditions that made such a poem possible, we would do well to
respect them as the primary source of the excellence of this noble
work of human imagination.
3. LATIN CHRISTIAN LETTERS
to convert his life into hagiography. 15 Also from this period, most
likely, are the "Leiden Riddle" (a translation of Aldhelm's "Lorica"
riddle) and the runic fragments of " T h e Dream of the Rood." O f ver-
nacular prose there remains next to nothing.
4. A period of decline (about 800-880) during which knowledge of
Latin lapsed while the production of new manuscripts slowed or in
some areas stopped altogether. This is the stage lamented by Alfred in
the preface to Gregory's Pastoral Care. It is not clear when the decline
set in or why. The Danish wars were not its cause, but they did much
to intensify it. In 866 York was captured, and the great library there
was probably dispersed or destroyed. In 870 Ely and Peterborough
were sacked. Other devastation followed until a general peace was es-
tablished by the Treaty of Wedmore in 878.
5. A minor renaissance (about 880-940) during which Alfred em-
barked upon his educational program and the kings of Wessex estab-
lished hegemony over all England. T o this period may be traced the
beginnings of a native prose tradition in the Alfredian translations and
in the entries of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Asser's biography of
Alfred is the only important Latin work to have been composed by
Alfred's circle of scholars. Only a little poetry can be firmly dated to
this period, notably the Meters of Boethius and "The Battle of Brunan-
burh," but a good deal more may have been produced in both English
and Norse, for the court of Athelstan was a magnet for men of talent.
T h e discipline of most monasteries was still lax.
6. A golden age of vernacular learning (about 940-1066) centered
largely in the south and reaching its richest expression in the works of
TElfric. During this time, the production of manuscripts increased as
never before, thanks to the reorganization of the monasteries under
Dunstan and the still-increasing prosperity of the realm. By the end of
the tenth century nearly forty monasteries existed in the south of
England alone, each a potential center of book production. Secular in-
fluence or control in the monasteries was now largely broken. Al-
though Latin remained the chief language of ecclesiastical affairs, most
original literature was written in English, and some of it was brilliant
poetry. Despite the renewal of Viking attacks during the reign of Eth-
elred, the conquests by Swein and Cnut, and increasing Norman influ-
ence during the reign of Edward the Confessor, the continuity of
English culture was not broken until the Battle of Hastings. England
on the eve of the Conquest was one of the wealthiest and more stable
LATIN CHRISTIAN LETTERS 73
states of Europe, with a highly developed tradition of vernacular
learning, an unparalleled heritage of vernacular poetry, and a knowl-
edge of Latin letters that seemed to the Normans somewhat back-
ward. After William the Conquerer virtually eliminated the native
aristocracy, Latin became for a time the sole written language of
church and state. Written English fell into disuse, to the point that
within a few centuries manuscripts recorded in the old insular script
were literally a closed book except to a few antiquarians.
The lines from the Aeneid describe a glen in high ground to which
Turnus retires in hopes of ambushing Aeneas:22
While the stige nearwe could recall the tenuis semita of Virgil, and while
the scenery is threatening in both instances, the parallel is not borne
out in detail. The fauces of Virgil could not be mistaken for the nœssas
of the Beowulf poet, and the Virgilian landscape lacks serpents. Fur-
thermore, the imagined echoes do not lock into a wider context. The
aged Hrothgar, leading a band of Danes and Geats, scarcely calls to
mind the athletic Turnus, who approaches the glen alone and whom
we have just seen "exultant in his high spirit and in his hope of finding
his foe at hand," like "some stallion which has broken his tether and,
free at last, gallops from his stall with all the open plains before him,
hastening towards the pastures where herds of mares are feeding."23
Grendel's mere becomes the scene of the climactic fight of part I of
the Old English epic, while the glen occupied by Turnus turns out to
be of no significance. Klaeber's enthusiasm for the parallel seems ex-
cessive.
Nor does the creation hymn sung by Hrothgar's scop soon after the
building of Heorot clearly recall the song performed by Dido's min-
strel Iopas before the gathered Trojans and Phoenicians in Carthage,
as many have thought:
LATIN CHRISTIAN LETTERS 77
Cithara crinitus Iopas
personat aurata, docuit quem maximus Atlas.
Hie canit errantem lunam solisque labores,
unde hominum genus et pecudes, unde imber et ignes,
Arcturum pluviasque Hyadas geminosque Triones;
quid tantum Oceano properent se tinguere soles
hiberni, vel quae tardis mora noctibus obstet. (1.740-746)
Long-haired Iopas, once taught by mighty Atlas, makes the hall ring with
his golden lyre. He sings of the wandering moon and the sun's toils;
whence sprang human kind and the brutes, whence rain and fire; of Arc-
turus, the rainy Hyades and the twin Bears; why wintry suns make such
haste to dip themselves in Ocean, or what delay stays the slowly passing
nights.
Each minstrel sings of the sun and the moon and the origin of living
creatures. Each song appears early in the epic and is sung before a
large group of listeners at a happy time before disaster. There is thus a
tighter "locking into context" than with other supposed parallels, and
yet the correspondence remains inexact. Iopas' song is not a hymn,
nor is its main subject creation, let alone the creation of the universe
by a single all-powerful deity. In its concern with the motions of the
sun and moon and with the differing lengths of day and night, the song
of Iopas breathes a spirit of scientific rationalism that reflects Virgil's
interest in the natural philosophy of Lucretius and that is foreign to
the Anglo-Saxon poet's simpler piety. 24 T h e proximate source for the
song of Hrothgar's scop is of course not the first book of the Aeneid
but the first book of the Bible, together with "Caedmon's H y m n " —
two works that were probably as well known as any others in the
England of the Beowulf poet's day. W e do not have to turn to a loose
Virgilian parallel to account for the scop's performance. T h e song
grows naturally out of its own surrounding context as the poet devel-
ops an implicit threefold analogy between the human beings who cre-
ate Heorot, God who created the universe, and the singer who creates
songs. Perhaps the idea of a song on the subject of the natural universe
was suggested by the example of Virgil. More likely, we need look for
no other source than the poet's imagination, colored by his knowledge
of Caedmon and his memory of performances by other Anglo-Saxon
scops. In either event a close comparison of the two scenes serves
more to clarify what is unique about the Old English poem than to
prove that its art is derivative.
78 CONTEXT
The closest "fit" between Beowulf and the Aeneid\ in my view,
consists of a pair of synonymous phrases that do seem to mesh at least
partially with their surrounding context: swigodon ealle (1699b) and
conticuere omnes (Aeneid 2.1). That a phrase meaning "they all fell si-
lent" should occur within the ample confines of each epic is not sur-
prising. What is interesting is that each phrase precedes a speech that
is addressed to a great assembly of men and women and that is one of
the significant "set pieces" of the poem. The Old English phrase
directly precedes Hrothgar's impressive discourse on the subject of
pride and mutability (1700-84). Particularly when one thinks of
Beowulf as sung or recited before a listening audience, the words pre-
pare for the gravity of the speech that is to follow. T h e phrase from
Virgil precedes the long apologue by Aeneas that occupies the whole
of books 2 and 3 of the Aeneid. It too signals the importance of the
speech to come. Still, the fit between the two passages is imprecise.
T h e phrase from Beowulf occurs midway through the epic rather than
early along, while the moralistic cast of Hrothgar's speech has nothing
in common with Aeneas' heroic narrative. T h e parallel could be the
result of coincidence, a great neglected factor in discussions of literary
influence. More precisely, it could stem from similar artistic intentions
on the part of each author. Only a poor poet would have an imagined
audience all fall silent before a trivial speech.
A reading of Beowulf side by side with the Aeneid thus yields a few
similar phrases, a number of loosely analogous motifs and sentiments,
perhaps a similarity of mood, 25 and perhaps a comparable approach to
the depiction of landscape, 26 but no firm evidence that the later poet
used the earlier work as a model. I would not go so far as Girvan in
holding that "few epics seem less like Beowulf than the Aeneid" (p.
470), for Dante's Commedia, the Gerusalemme liberata, the Faerie
Queene, Paradise Lost, Wordsworth's Prelude, Tolstoy's War and
Peace, and Pound's Cantos, for example, all seem even more remote
from the art of the Old English poet. Still the differences between the
two works stand out far more than their similarities.
In Beowulf there are no invocations of the Muse, no epic catalogues
or great deliberative assemblies, no epic similes, no dreams or por-
tents, no references to the heroes of ancient mythology. In short,
there is none of the epic paraphernalia that Virgil got from Homer and
that Milton got from both his ancient masters, and that identifies all
three as authors working in a common tradition. Just as important,
L A T I N CHRISTIAN L E T T E R S 79
perhaps, the Old English poem differs in its broad outlines and emo-
tional contours and in the kind of struggle it depicts. There is no victo-
rious conquering and civilizing power in Beowulf, as there is in the
Aeneid or The Song of Roland}1 There is no sense of a chosen race,
and both Danes and Geats are destined to suffer misfortune according
to the decrees of an indifferent fate. The hero wins individual fame but
founds no empire. Combat between human tribes is not glorified in the
Old English epic as it is in Virgil. Nor do battles seem to be of much
interest: there is nothing like the gravis luctus of Aeneid 7 - 1 2 , with
troops massed against troops. When weighted against these significant
points of divergence, the possible echo of a phrase like conticuere omnes
does not suggest the Anglo-Saxon poet learned from Virgil "the new
conception of a true epic poem" (Klaeber, p. cxviii). In Beowulf one
sees a quality of intelligence and a kind of poetic form and style that
are not to be explained by reference to the epic poets of Rome. 28
If there is no strong evidence that the author of Beowulf knew
pagan Latin poets, one may still ask whether he made use of the fig-
ures of rhetoric that medieval theorists codified on the basis of their
study of these poets. Clearly a knowledge of rhetoric was common-
place in learned circles during much of the Old English period.29 T h e
seven liberal arts, including grammatica and rhetorica as their founda-
tion, were an established part of the school curriculum. Aldhelm
clearly set out to imitate the most aureate and rhetorical of Latin
poets. Bede wrote his important treatise De schematibus et tropibus
largely on the model of Donatus' Ars maior. Alcuin modeled his trea-
tise De rhetorica et de virtutibus on the five divisions of Ciceronian
rhetoric. yElfric wrote his bilingual grammar largely on the basis of the
adaptation of the Ars maior in Isidore's Etymologiae. Vernacular poets
learned the figures of Latin rhetoric not only through the standard
treatises but through the art of translation and adaptation, as in the
Alfredian translation of the metrical portions of Boethius' De consola-
tone philosophiae or as in the poetic paraphrase known as " T h e Phoe-
nix." During the Middle Ages, as in more recent times, a good part of
education has consisted of learning how to imitate well.
At the same time, there existed a set of native Germanic poetic
strategies that deserve the name rhetoric just as much as do the strate-
gies of Latin authors, even though the Germanic tropes were never
codified in written treatises. The most basic stylistic features of Old
English poetry—parallelism of phrases, variation of words or phrases
8o CONTEXT
set in apposition to one another, the use of special poetic diction in-
cluding kennings and compound nouns and adjectives, and the use of
formulas and formulaic systems—were not learned from Latin
sources. They were part of the native poetic idiom.30 When one deals
with an Old English text in isolation, there is often no way to tell the
extent to which its style expresses Latin rhetorical conventions. A
person with no special knowledge who read Riddle 35 of the Exeter
Book, for example, would have no way of telling that it is a West
Saxon translation of a Latin original, Aldhelm's "Lorica" riddle, per-
haps by way of a Northumbrian intermediary (the "Leiden Riddle").
Nor would one know that Aldhelm's riddle is derived from the model
of Symphosius and was ostensibly penned to illustrate a particular kind
of Latin meter. The recalcitrant fact is that most Old English poems
are of unknown authorship and antecedents. Latin influence was often
indirect, for as soon as many Latin poems had been turned into
English, their rhetorical patterns must have begun to be reflected in
the style even of authors who knew no Latin but had absorbed much
native poetry.
The influence of classical rhetoric on Beowulf is hard to judge. Evi-
dently the poet had assimilated the habits of style bequeathed him by
his tradition, whether those were of Germanic or Latin origin. Beyond
this there is no evidence that he was manipulating rhetorical figures.31
One scholar has argued that the expansiveness of the epic style of
Beowulf was not learned from the Germanic Heldenlied but resulted
from studied use of various types of amplificatio by a poet schooled in
Latin rhetorical techniques.32 I have already suggested that the ex-
pansive epic style was a native development that arose in part because
of the opportunities for patronage that existed in Anglo-Saxon
England. Certainly one need not look to Latin poetry for examples of
the expansive style. Avdo Medjedovic read neither Latin nor Serbo-
Croatian, yet he knew enough of the arts of amplificatio to be able to
hear a song once, then repeat it at nearly three times the length.33
Homer never attempted Priscian's Progymnasmata or pored over
Boethius' treatise De differentibus topicis,34 yet he managed the expan-
sive style as well as authors who have had such works at their finger-
tips.
Conspicuously absent from Beowulf is the kind of neat use of rhe-
torical figures that is evident in certain Old English poems on homi-
letic or devotional themes. One critic has nevertheless advanced the
L A T I N CHRISTIAN L E T T E R S 8ι
claim that the absence of clear rhetorical figures in the poem can per-
haps be taken as evidence for the rhetorical sophistication of its author.
According to this view, the poet "had so thoroughly absorbed his edu-
cation and mingled it so unobtrusively with his innate talent that his
poem achieves a state where art subsumes artfulness" (Campbell, "Ad-
aptation," p. 197). The poet had so thoroughly absorbed his educa-
tion, we are asked to believe, that none of it shows. Such an argument
is as difficult to disprove as it is to prove, but common sense should tell
us to assume a knowledge of rhetorical figures on the part of an
Anglo-Saxon poet only when such figures are recognizable within his
work. Even then, we must admit the possibility that they were the
product of a native rhetoric or were learned from the poet's imitating
other vernacular authors rather than his studying Latin masters. The
Beowulf poet seems to have assimilated Latin rhetoric to the extent
that the Old English poetic language itself had done so by the time he
composed the poem. Perhaps this general debt was significant. T o
postulate any greater individual debt is to go beyond what the text can
tell us.
Turning back from style to substance, let me pose the large and
difficult question of whether or not the Beowulf poet used the writ-
ings of early Christian authors, in particular Lactantius, Prudentius,
Boethius, Gregory, and Augustine.
Although Alcuin lists Lactantius among the authors known in the
library of York Minster, his works were not much copied, and his Di-
vinae institutiones appear to have been virtually unmined by Anglo-
Saxon authors. Donald W . Lee's claim that the Beowulf poet used
Lactantius as a source for certain early parts of his epic thus requires
strong support.35 Conceivably the Beowulf poet drew the inspiration
for the creation hymn of Hrothgar's scop (lines 9ob-98) from Institu-
tiones II.5, where Lactantius writes rhapsodically of God the creator of
the physical universe, but a closer inspiration was at hand in the form
of Caedmon's well-known hymn. In any event, praise of God as creator
of the universe is not an idea for which we need search out a specific
source. The same is true of Heorot's standing idei ond unnyt, "empty
and useless" (413a). Although this idea might be thought to recall
Lactantius' words, "It is possible for the world to be without man, just
as it is for a city and a house to be without a man," the correspondence
is imprecise. If anything, the phrase idei ond unnyt recalls not Lactan-
tius but verse 106a of the Old English poem Genesis A. The sugges-
82 CONTEXT
tion that Grendel is meant to call to mind Gaius Verres, quaestor of
Sicily, whom Cicero accused of pillaging Sicily by despoiling the tem-
ples, carries no more weight. It is a long step from the man whom Ci-
cero describes as frequenting the shore of Sicily clothed in effeminate
Greek garb, with a cheap tart on his arm, 36 to the creature who swal-
lows Hondscioh whole. Taken together, such supposed parallels add
up to nothing more substantial than what would result if one were to
have practically any work of literature fresh in mind, then turn to
Beowulf and jot down a few points of similarity.
Although the chief works of Prudentius were available in England
from an early date, and the Psychomachia was especially popular from
the time of Aldhelm and Bede onward, the obvious differences be-
tween Beowulf and the Psychomachia have not encouraged compari-
sons between the two. In a well-known essay, Morton W. Bloomfield
has suggested that Beowulf was colored by Prudentian allegory and
that the character of Unferth is modeled on that of Discordia in the
Psychomachia,37 "Unferth," by a slight permutation, yields the signifi-
cant name Unfrith, "Mar-peace," or "Strife," hence Discordia. Al-
though this suggestion has been widely accepted, it is based on a vul-
nerable chain of linguistic hypotheses. Because the manuscript
consistently gives Hunferth as the spelling of the thyle's name, one
must imagine the following set of transformations:
U Altogether one thus finds little or no evidence that the poet knew
Latin letters directly. The few possible instances of direct influence are
counterbalanced by many examples of critics' strained efforts to pur-
sue comparisons that prove weightless. While direct Latin influence
on Beowulf cannot be ruled out, attempts to discover it have failed to
establish a valid literary context for the poem.
On the other hand, evidence abounds that the poet shared the vo-
cabulary and psychology of his age. In part these derived from the
92 CONTEXT
great body of patristic writings that had found their way to England by
his time. T h e countless Christian themes and phrases in the poem bear
witness to the extent to which its author was steeped in the tradition of
English devotional literature that began with Caedmon, in whose hymn
one may already see patristic thought expressed in Germanic verse. 54
There is every reason to believe that the poet and his audience had as-
similated the tradition of Christian poetry in the vernacular, for the
Germanic story-matter of Beowulf \s presented in terms that are some-
times identical with those of poems on religious themes. The poet was
a pious author, not a zealot, who was able to articulate some of the
basic concepts of Christianity in a work whose primary appeal was sec-
ular rather than religious.
For most of the poem's Christian allusions there is no need to search
for a Latin source. The Creation, Cain and Abel, the Flood, heaven,
hell, and Doomsday were familiar subjects to all Englishmen. For
many other allusions, parallels are at hand in the vernacular. Grendel is
described in terms used elsewhere of the devil. T o "choose God's
light," a phrase used regarding Hrethel's blessed death (2469b), is also
used in the fourth Chronicle poem to describe the blessed death of
Edgar, as well as in Guthlac in regard to Guthlac's death. T o go on
feonda geweald, "into the keeping of fiends," means to be damned,
whether the words apply to Heremod (903a) or any other sinner
(compare Christ 1415a, Andreas 1619a). The conception of sin in
Hrothgar's "sermon" parallels what one finds in Juliana 400-4093, in
which the devil takes up the Pauline and Gregorian concept of the
human soul as a fortress, defending itself against the shafts of sin. T h e
same concept is found in the Bückling and Vercelli homilies and in
other Anglo-Saxon sermons. That the whole central part of Hroth-
gar's speech is a tissue of homiletic topoi is evident from Klaeber's ar-
ticle "Die christlichen Elemente im Beowulf, " from which hundreds of
other examples of vernacular parallels to the poet's religious diction
could be cited.55
Although the poet's Christian vocabulary does not provide any sure
means of dating his work, certain words, phrases, and whole para-
graphs are more consistent with a late date than an earlier one. Most
of the terms for the devil are not paralleled in Genesis A and Exodus
(two poems that have been held to be early) but are duplicated in the
saints' lives Juliana, Guthlac, and Elene. Examples are feond man-
cynnes, bana, helle gcest, helle hœfta, deorc dea<5scua, atol aglœca, Godes
LATIN CHRISTIAN LETTERS 93
andsaca, and fyrene hyrde. The "heathen" curse that is set on the trea-
sure is couched in wholly Christian terms having a late ring. A person
who violates the curse is condemned to be held "guilty for his sins, . . .
bound in infernal clamps, stricken with defilements" (307ib-73a).
Besides the parallels to Anglo-Saxon laws and to the formula of ex-
communication,56 the lines call to mind that part of the late poem "Ju-
dith" that describes the fate of Holofernes' soul, which departs to be
"condemned to torment ever afterward in the grip of worms, in forced
punishments, bitterly confined in hellfire" ( 1 1 4 - 1 1 6 ) .
Of particular interest in regard to dating is the passage that tells of
the Danes' idolatry (175-1833), together with the "Christian ex-
cursus" that immediately follows (183b-188). The first passage is
paralleled in the Old English Daniel in lines that tell of the idolatry of
Nebuchadnezzar's followers, heathens who "bowed to that idol [and]
offered sacrifice; they knew no better way, they acted wrongfully . . . "
(181 b - 1 8 3 a). The Beowulf passage has been thought to be the later of
the two,57 but the point is unimportant. What is significant is the way
in which the two passages voice a similar attitude toward idolators. T o
some readers the tone of the Beowulf passage has seemed compassion-
ate, as if the poet felt sympathy for the plight of the heathen Danes,58
but surely his words condemn them. In history, the continental Danes
were not baptized until the eleventh century. There was no love lost
between the Anglo-Saxons and the heathen Vikings. An unambiguous
reference to the Danes' spiritual error ("they had hellish things in
their hearts," 1 7 9 b - ! 80a) is followed by an equally emphatic state-
ment of what lies in store for idolators, as well as for others, both
damned and saved (183b-!88):
The "Christian excursus" of Beowulf not only reflects the spirit of the
homilists in their occasional outbursts on the subject of damnation and
salvation; it also manifests the same lively concerns that encouraged
the enactment of late laws against idolatry and witchcraft because of
the persistence of pagan customs among Englishmen of Norse de-
scent. The passage from Beowulf would scarcely have suited the pre-
Viking period. Since nothing else forbids dating the poem to a period
after the Scandinavian settlement had begun, there is reason to believe
that Whitelock's interpolator is none other than the poet himself.
96
THE DANES AND THE DATE 97
I doubt whether he would have spoken in such terms during the Viking
Age, or whether his audience would have given him a patient hearing if
he had. It is not how men like to hear the people described who are
burning their homes, pillaging their churches, ravaging their cattle and
crops, killing their countrymen or carrying them off into slavery. (Au-
dience, pp. 24-25)
A pre-Viking date for Beowulf could be taken for granted if the his-
tory of the Scandinavians in England were in fact a story of unremit-
ting burning, pillaging, ravaging, killing, and enslavement, but the
story is not so simple. Certainly the Vikings first came to England as
raiders. Sporadic raiding by Norsemen continued in parts of the island
up to the end of the Old English period, while even in the best of
times relations between the Danes and the English may have been
strained, to judge from the violence that erupted between the two
peoples during the reign of Ethelred and that came to a head in the St.
Brice's Day massacre of 1002. Still, large numbers of Scandinavians
THE DANES AND THE DATE 103
came to England not to fight but to farm. Once they had established
their presence by force of arms, many Danes seem to have settled
down as husbandmen who tilled their fields and raised their livestock in
peaceful coexistence with their English neighbors.
This history of peaceful husbandry is not the history written in the
militaristic annals of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,17 but it is no less sig-
nificant for having occurred without the clash of arms. The Danish in-
vasions were no repetition of the Germanic invasions of the fifth and
sixth centuries, in the course of which the native British population was
largely displaced. The Danes settled side by side with the native popu-
lation to make use of agricultural land that was already well tended by
a kindred race with kindred language and customs. As Kenneth Sisam
has noted, the eastern counties that were settled by the Danes were
the richest and most populous of England. While not much is known
about the inhabitants of the Danelaw until the late tenth century, still
they cannot be neglected "as intermediaries between English and
Scandinavians, as an audience for the oral literature of both peoples,
and as possible preservers of heathen legends that had lost their hold in
the long-christianized South." 18
Many towns seem to have come to terms with their conquerors
quickly. At York, according to F. M. Stenton, there is "no evidence of
any breach in the continuity of life during the Danish wars," 19 while in
other northern towns like Lincoln and Nottingham the native English
population was never displaced. In Lancastershire, according to F. T .
Wainwright, "theories of military conquest, mass slaughter, displace-
ment, and dispossession may be safely forgotten." 20 Archeological
evidence confirms that the churchyards of northern England were in
continuous use by Scandinavians as well as Anglo-Saxons.21 The evi-
dence of place-names shows conclusively that there was no extermina-
tion of the English peasantry in the Danelaw. 22 At the same time, the
Danes came in sufficient numbers to impress their own names and
customs on the land. Stenton speaks of the transplantation to England
of a Norse vocabulary "which covered the whole framework of agri-
cultural life" ("Historical Bearing," p. 312). The question is still being
debated as to whether or not the Scandinavian population in England
was ever great enough to justify our speaking of a Norse "migration"
from the Continent, 23 but there can be no doubt that the number of
immigrants was sufficient to leave a lasting impression on the pattern
of settled life in the eastern and northern parts of the land.
T o a large extent, the history of the Danish settlers in England is
104 CONTEXT
one of their gradual acculturation to the habits and traditions of the
native population. The most important of these acts of acculturation
was their acceptance of Christianity. 24 Little in the history of the later
Old English period is more astonishing than the rapidity with which
the Vikings who had warred against Alfred agreed to take on the reli-
gion of their adversaries. Within a generation or two after the Danish
leader Guthrum had been baptized by Alfred as part of the terms of
the Treaty of Wedmore (878), Christian Danes and Englishmen were
worshiping side by side, with little, as far as we know, to distinguish
the religious practices of one group from those of the other. T o be
sure, Norse heathenism did not die out overnight. From the late ninth
to the early eleventh century new groups of unbaptized immigrants
entered England from different parts of Scandinavia, and each new
family or group was subject to a similar process of conversion and ac-
culturation. Heathen practices must have been reintroduced to
England periodically during this period, to judge from the stern laws
that were promulgated against them in the Canons of Edgar, the Law
of the Northumbrian Priests, and the Laws of Cnut. 25 Such indications
of the survival of paganism should not obscure the important fact that
as a group the Danes quickly and even enthusiastically embraced the
new faith. Danish influence within the Church extended to the highest
levels, to judge from the career of Oda "the Good," Archbishop of
Canterbury during the years 9 4 1 - 9 5 8 and a Dane by birth.
T h e ready conversion of the Danes goes far to explain the relative
peacefulness of tenth-century political history. Once the Danes had
accepted Christianity, nothing stood in the way of their intermarrying
with the native population and living with them in an atmosphere
of mutual toleration, if not respect. Rather than harry and burn, the
second- and third-generation Anglo-Danes seem to have been willing
to work with the English to solve the basic problems of making a liv-
ing from the land and defending it from its spiritual and human ene-
mies.
Contributing to the easy acculturation of the Danes was their rela-
tive lack of political unity and hence their early submission to the kings
of Wessex. Just as they had been unaccustomed to a state-supported
monotheistic religion with all the persuasive power of organized
Christianity, they had been unaccustomed to the authority of a single
state government. Their loyalties tended to shift among a number of
lesser chieftains who, by English standards, were kings only in name.
T H E DANES AND T H E D A T E 105
After the security of the Danelaw was threatened by new raiders,
chiefly Norwegian raiders based in Ireland, the Danes began to look to
the kings of Wessex for protection, particularly to Edward the Elder
(899-924), whose energetic military campaigns were proving him to
be the most powerful ruler in England. By the year 919 Edward had
won back the Danelaw, and all England south of the Humber was
united under his rule.
In this united kingdom the Danes had both rights and responsibil-
ities. Some of their responsibilities are suggested by the entry in The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the year 918, which states that Edward gar-
risoned Nottingham with both Englishmen and Danes.26 Some of
their rights are evident in several charters of the year 926 that show
the English buying land from the Danes rather than seeking to win it
by military conquest. As Stenton points out, these charters "correct
the impression of unqualified hostility between Danes and Englishmen
which is produced by the monotonous record of their wars." 27 By 934,
when Edward's successor Athelstan (924-939) had extended English
power over the Welsh and over the Norse kingdom of York, the
English king well deserved the title that he chose for himself: Angel-
saxonum Denorumque gloriosissimus rex, "most glorious king of the
Anglo-Saxons and Danes." 28
Athelstan's court was truly international, and Egil's Saga is not the
only document that testifies to the high repute that the king enjoyed
among Norsemen.29 At the great court held at Winchester on 28 May
934, five of the twelve earls in attendance bore Scandinavian names,
and these and other Norse names appear regularly in royal charters of
the period.30 The great triumph at Brunanburh in 937 was no simple
victory of Englishmen over Scandinavians; it was won in defense of a
united Anglo-Danish kingdom in opposition to Norwegian and Irish
invaders whose security was threatened by the expansion of Athel-
stan's power. This alliance between Englishmen and Danes is evident
in the Chronicle poem of the year 942 on the capture of the Five Bor-
oughs of the Danelaw from the Norsemen of York. The author makes
a clear distinction between the Danes and their heathen enemies,
under whom they had previously been forced to live "in the fetters of
slavery" (line 10). The term "heathen" could at this time be applied
only to the Norsemen of York, who were still plundering monasteries,
not to the converted Danes of the Danelaw.31
Anglo-Danish relations were at their most friendly during the reign
ιο6 CONTEXT
confirms the contrast that has been developing between the active
hero and his ineffective hosts. By criticizing Beowulf for risking his life
in the contest with Breca "for a foolish boast" (509a), Unferth shows
himself to be blind to the glory that Beowulf won as a result.
As the story progresses and night falls after the hero's reception in
Heorot, the Danes prove their mettle by falling asleep. Once the
struggle begins, they can do no more than stand at the walls, groping
for their weapons and listening to the monster howl, while Beowulf
carries through with the fight on his own. Although the hero later
states that the victory was won by common effort—"We fought that
fight with great good will" (958-9593)—his words display more gen-
erosity than truth. The audience is well aware that the fight was
fought singlehanded, as Beowulf had hoped it would be.
The contrast between the active hero and his passive hosts is made
yet more clear during the ensuing fight with Grendel's mother.
Hrothgar acknowledges that the Danes have no hope of offering resis-
tance to her threat if Beowulf does not take on the task: "Now once
again our cure is in your hands alone" (i370b-77a). The hero replies
with a speech that expresses in quintessential form the heroic code on
which he bases his conduct (lines 1384-91):
The last two lines read as a classic example of praise that damns.
Through line 861 the poet has accomplished his purpose of praising
Beowulf by telling how he is praised by the Danes. The passage could
fittingly have ended here. By adding the next two lines the poet com-
plicates the picture: the warriors' praise of Beowulf, we are to under-
stand, is not to be taken as disparagement of Hrothgar. There would
have been no comparison with Hrothgar if the poet had not forced the
issue. The king is an old man, after all, and we have learned not to ex-
pect from him the deeds of a youth. By forcing the audience to think
of Beowulf and Hrothgar side by side, the poet only reminds us of the
king's weakness. Even the summary judgment "but he was a good
king," recalling the poet's earlier praise of Scyld (i lb), sounds hollow
beside the praise of Beowulf as a hero unequaled "south nor north,
between the two seas, over the wide earth . . . beneath the skies."
In the poet's depiction of the Danes one thus finds support for the
idea that Beowulf reflects interests and attitudes that would have been
prevalent among aristocratic Englishmen of the early or middle years
of the tenth century, but not earlier. If one postulates an earlier date
for the poem, its extraordinary interest in Danish affairs and in the
Scandinavian world at large is a fact "still calling for an adequate ex-
planation" (Klaeber, p. exxiii). The poet's ambivalent attitude toward
the Danes seems accurately to reflect the political and social realities of
the post-Viking age. The Danes are not depicted as villains or sense-
112 CONTEXT
less marauders, as one would expect if the poem had been composed
during the Viking wars. On the other hand, they are not made into
the heroes of the tale, and the poet's praise for them is undercut
by reminders of their unwillingness or inability to act with heroic
stature.
I therefore both follow and depart from L. L. Schücking's conclu-
sions in his important study "Wann entstand der Beowulf? Glossen,
Zweifel, und Fragen." 39 Almost alone among Anglicists of his day,
Schiicking resisted the impulse to push the poem back into the mists of
history and marshaled a number of arguments for dating it to a time
after the first Viking raids. His views were attacked by scholars who
mistakenly imputed to him the belief that the poem derives from late
Scandinavian traditions, which it clearly does not.40 In a response,
Schücking corrected this distortion of his position and clarified his
view of Beowulf as an English poem based on English traditions and
composed by an English poet.41 For the reasons stated, I find much
that is attractive in the view that a poem showing such a striking inter-
est in the Danes was probably composed for an audience including
Danes, or at least composed sometime after the Danelaw was estab-
lished by the treaty of 878. Where I part company with Schücking is
in his supposition that the poem came into being when a Scandinavian
prince from the Danelaw hired a famous English singer to create an
epic of moral instruction for his son, who was to be educated in
English. Such a scenario is no more than interesting speculation. Par-
ticularly detrimental to the idea of Danish patronage for Beowulf is the
poet's less-than-flattering depiction of the Danes. Given the failure of
Hrothgar and his retinue to act with anything approaching heroic for-
titude, however energetically they conduct themselves when it is time
to eat and drink, I doubt that the poem was commissioned by a Dane
or, if it was, that such a patron would have been pleased with the re-
sults.
A safer conclusion is that the poem was composed for an English
patron and, in all probability, for a mixed Anglo-Scandinavian audi-
ence. Such a mixed audience would have been the norm in practically
any great court held during the reign of Athelstan or his successors. If
an oral version of Beowulf was performed at any such state occasion,
perhaps as part of a number of festivities, recording it would have pre-
sented little difficulty. While the English possessed as yet no chancery,
in the later sense, already in Athelstan's reign a staff of clerks attended
the king on his progresses.42 A poem like Beowulf, once performed
THE DANES AND THE DATE "3
and admired, could have been recorded by one such clerk or several
such clerks at the bidding of the king or anyone high in his service.
O n c e written down, the poem would have been available to a small
reading public o f clergy or educated laymen. It could have been read
aloud to a wider listening public. T h e text could have found its way to
a scriptorium for copying, or it could have been heard by singers who
would have used their memory of it as the basis for new oral perform-
ances. A n y such new performance could have been taken down in
writing, in turn, in the continuing interplay between oral and written
transmission that has been characteristic of oral literature in more re-
cent times.
Still less would have stood in the way o f the poem's being per-
formed and recorded at any of a number o f ecclesiastical centers. Un-
fortunately, evidence bearing on the state o f the monasteries in the
ninth and early tenth centuries is almost nonexistent. W h e r e monasti-
cism survived in the face o f the Viking invasions, it went through a
process o f secularization that left many houses under lay influence or
control. D o m David Knowles's view that by the reign of Athelstan,
England was "wholly without any organized monastic life" 4 3 is per-
haps based on a rigorous concept of what constitutes organization.
Certainly monasticism o f a sort continued in a variety of ways.
Knowles estimates that although many or all o f the smaller houses had
disappeared, many of the larger ones had fallen into secular hands,
"while in others the level of regular life had fallen so low as to be
scarcely recognizable any longer as monastic" (p. 32). In some houses
a period of desolation may have been followed by a period of irregular
monastic life, as at Ely, where the monastery is said to have been de-
serted for eight years until a group of monks returned in 878 and were
joined by others " w h o lived not canonically but most irreligiously." 4 4
T h e discipline o f some monasteries may have been irregular from the
start, as is not surprising in view of their close ties to the lay aristoc-
racy. Certainly all were not like Bede's Jarrow; as I have shown, Bede
speaks bitterly of the way that the companions o f some clergy give
themselves over to tales and feasting. In a speech addressed to his bish-
ops and heads of monasteries in about the year 9 7 1 , King Edgar de-
nounces in no uncertain terms the failure of the clergy to live up to the
ideals of their calling:
Let me speak, let me speak of things that make good men grieve and
evil men laugh. Let me speak in lamentation, if indeed such things can
114 CONTEXT
be uttered, of how they are abandoning themselves in gluttonous feasts
and drunkenness, in bedrooms and in acts of shame, so that the houses
of clergymen are reputed to be brothels for prostitutes and meeting-
places for entertainers. There dicing, there dancing and singing take
place; there wakeful hours stretching until the middle t>f the night are
spent in riotous noise and horror . . . Was it for this that our ancestors
drained their coffers? Was it for this that the royal treasury was shrunk
by the withdrawal of many revenues? Was it for this that royal generos-
ity granted fields and holdings to the churches of Christ, so that whores
might adorn themselves with the idle gifts of clerics? So that luxurious
banquets might be prepared? So that dogs and birds and similar frivoli-
ties might be acquired? These things the soldiers are shouting about; the
people are muttering under their breath; the actors are singing and
dancing about—and do you ignore them, do you turn a blind eye, do
you pretend not to see?45
through this period, to judge from such datable poems as " T h e Battle
of Brunanburh" (937) and " T h e Battle of Maldon" (post-991).
Corroborating the notion of the composition of Beowulf during a
time not distant from the reign of Athelstan is the evidence of the fa-
mous Wiltshire charter of 931. 5 5 T h e place-names Grendeles mere
("Grendel's mere") and Beowan hamm ("Beowa's enclosure") that
appear in this charter suggest that something like the extant poem was
known in the southwest of England at that time. In themselves, the
place-names prove little, however, for oral versions of the Beowulf
story may have been in circulation long before and long after our
unique text was written down. Until additional facts are discovered,
one is wiser to admit one's ignorance of when, where, and how the
poem was written down than to pretend to have knowledge that is be-
yond our grasp.
5- FORMULA AND FORMULAIC
SYSTEM
the thirty thousand or so lines of the Homeric corpus with only one
variation, the substitution of the imperfect προσηύδων for the aorist
ιτροσηνδα. Each time the phrase occurs, it occupies the same metrical
position, from the masculine caesura to the end of the line, as the dia-
gram shows.
φωρήσας
f/ur Ι
φωνήσασ'
[ a<j>eas J
κa i • λισσόμενος
'έπεα irrepoevra προ
β όλοφνρόμβυος
άγχον 8' ιστάμενος
Tovs δ γ' 673οτρννων
addressing (mase.)
and •
{him
them
addressing (fem.)
entreating
winged words he spoke
then lamenting
them urging on
Although a case had been made that Homer uses the phrase "winged
words" only at chosen moments, when he wishes to give a speech spe-
cial emphasis, 3 Milman Parry was able to show that it is used chiefly
for its metrical convenience. T h e various "winged words" lines are
used to bring in speech when "the character who is to speak has been
the subject of the last verses, so that the use of his name in the line
would be clumsy." 4 Given the poet's desire to say "he said" in the sec-
ond half of a line that does not begin with the speaker's name, he will
use the phrase "winged words." N o alternative expression occurs. T h e
phrase is thus a good example of a formula, under Parry's definition:
"a group of words which is regularly employed under the same metri-
cal conditions to express a given essential idea."
T o compare an example of formulaic language from Beowulf, the
word gedryht, "band of retainers," occurs six times within the 3,182
lines of the poem. 5 Each time, it occurs without inflection as the sec-
ond measure of the off-verse, or ¿-verse:
FORMULA AND FORMULAIC SYSTEM 123
ι. mid minra secga gedriht 633b
2. mid Jjinra secga gedryht 1672b
3. mid his eorla gedriht 357b
4. [ond] minra eorla gedryht 431b
5. mid his haelejja gedryht 662b
6. aej)elinga gedriht 118b
While no two of these verses are exactly alike, all share a certain re-
semblance. In each, the word gedryht is preceded by a noun denoting
"man" or "nobleman" in the genitive plural case {secga, eorla, hœlépa,
œpe/inga). In the first five, the noun denoting "man" is preceded by
two unstressed words, a preposition (mid, "with") or a conjunction
(ond, "and"), 6 followed by a possessive form of the personal pronoun
(minra, pinra, his). These first five verses could reasonably be said to
constitute a single formulaic system: that is, a group of verses that fol-
low the same basic patterns of rhythm and syntax and have at least one
main semantic element in common. The members of this formulaic
system differ from one another in the number (but not the distribu-
tion) of unstressed syllables, which do not enter into the alliteration. In
addition, and more significantly, they differ in the choice of a variable
word that carries the alliteration. The poet speaks of secgas rather than
eorlas or hœ/epas not because of a desire to fit the precise connotation
of a word to a particular context, one may plausibly imagine, but to
satisfy the alliteration of the line.
When one considers these five verses, one can speak of no "group
of words regularly employed," an essential criterion for the formula
under Parry's definition. One can speak of no "identical metrical con-
ditions," except in regard to those verses that share the same allitera-
tion (for example, verses 1 and 2, or 3 and 4). Instead, the five verses
are similar in rhythm and syntax and identical in the relative placement
of the word gedryht. Very likely the poet knew them not only as iso-
lated phrases but as verses of a type, so that he was able to substitute
them for one other almost without thinking. The abstract system is as
follows:
Like the members of the gedryht system, these verses are of the same
metrical type and syntactic pattern. They are related semantically by
one constant element, the word celling, "nobleman," in the genitive
singular or genitive plural case and occupying the first measure of the
verse. This constant element is fairly meaningless. In the heroic con-
text of Beowulf, to say that a man is a "son of noblemen" is simply to
say that he is a man; to say that treasure is "treasure of noblemen" is
simply to say that it is treasure. In this system the constant element
supplies the alliteration while the variable element carries the semantic
burden. The primary function of the formulaic system remains the
same: to allow the poet to express his meaning unerringly in the given
metrical form.
Aware of the importance of the stylistic feature of variation in Old
English poetry, Donald K. Fry has proposed definitions of the formula
and formulaic system that suit the special conditions of the Anglo-
Saxon poetic line. T o Fry, a formulaic system is "a group of half-lines,
usually loosely related metrically and semantically, which are related in
form by the identical relative placement of two elements, one a vari-
able word or element of a compound usually supplying the alliteration,
and the other a constant word or element of a compound, with approx-
imately the same distribution of non-stressed elements."7 The formula
can then simply be defined as a member (or product) or a formulaic
FORMULA A N D FORMULAIC SYSTEM 125
system. Fry's definitions cut across fruitless debate over how much re-
semblance between phrases is sufficient to identify them as "the
same." They direct attention away from the recurrent phrase to the
pattern that underlies both recurrent phrases and similar phrases that
do not happen to recur. According to these definitions, for example,
verse 633b (mid minra secga gedriht) deserves to be considered a for-
mula not only because a nearly identical verse happens to occur else-
where in the poem (1672b, mid pt'nra secga gedryht) but because it is a
member of a well-defined formulaic system. The verse would still be a
formula even if nothing quite like it were to recur, as happens with
verse 662b, mid his hœlepa gedryht}
In view of the utility of this concept of the Old English formula, I
regret that Fry's application of it has not been more rigorous. As a re-
sult, his concept has not received the attention it deserves. The main
problem lies in the identification of what constitutes metrical and se-
mantic resemblance between different verses. T o judge from Fry's
own examples, the metrical and semantic resemblance between mem-
bers of the same formulaic system may be loose indeed, while the syn-
tactic resemblance may be nonexistent. Fry cites the following as
among thirty-one members of what he calls the "X mup" system in
Old English poetry, for example ("Aesthetic Implications," p. 520):
If one adds the number of reiterated verses that play no part in a for-
mulaic system (36) to the number of reiterated verses that are mem-
bers of a formulaic system (133), one arrives at a total of 169 reiter-
ated verses, or 16.9 percent of the whole. This figure is very close to
the one Creed obtained, 16.7 percent, for verses repeated in "identical
or nearly identical" form in the entire poem.
Study of a larger sample thus verifies my earlier conclusions. Close
to two out of three verses in the poem are members of an identifiable
formulaic system. In creating these phrases, the poet not only was
working within the linguistic patterns afforded him by the natural lan-
guage, he was using more highly specialized patterns that enabled him
to compose fluently in the alliterative form. On the other hand, only
about one verse in six recurs elsewhere in substantially the same form.
T o call these reiterated verses "fixed formulas" would be misleading,
for most of them (almost 80 percent) belong to a flexible formulaic
system. In other words, the diction of Beowulf is indeed highly formu-
laic, but far more important than the repetition of fixed phrases is the
substitution of one verbal element for another within flexible formulaic
systems filling the half-line.17
In sum, one may conclude that the Beowulf poet did not have to
search his mind for new and ingenious ways of saying what he wished
to say. His tradition not only provided him with a large body of known
FORMULA AND FORMULAIC SYSTEM 129
APPENDIX
Formulas and Formulaic Systems, Beowulf 1 - 2 5
APPENDIX
(continued)
2a. peodcytiinga
Jjeodcyninges 2694b Γ -a
woroldcyninga 1684b Χ (χ) -cyning J -es
wyruldcyninga 3180b -e
2
wuldurcyninge 795 a
síecyninga 2382b
heahcyninges 1039b
eorScyninges 1155 b
Frescyninge 2503 b
Cf. verses based on the com-
pounds gwScyning 199b, 1969a,
2335b, 2563a, 2677b, 3036b;
peodcyning 2144a, 2579a, 2963a,
2970a, 3008a, 3086a; folccytiing
2733b, 2873a; beomcyning 2148a;
soìScyning 3055a.
FORMULA AND FORMULAIC SYSTEM
APPENDIX
(continued)
APPENDIX
(continued)
7 a. feasceaft funden
godne funde 1486b X (x) (on-)fúnde(-n)
hleonian funde 1415b
weard onfunde 2841b
sona onfunde 2226b
APPENDIX
(continued)
SYSTEM A B S T R A C T FORM
ioa. ofer hronrade
ofer swanrade 200a Ofer 1 χ _ràde
on seglrade 1429b on J
1 1 a. gomban gyldan
golde forgyldan 1054a Xx (for-)gyldan (-e)
gode forgylde 956a
Grendle forgyldan 1577a
lige forgyldan 2305b
134 STYLE AND STRUCTURE
APPENDIX
(continued)
APPENDIX
(continued)
SYSTEM A B S T R A C T FORM
15b. aldorlease
aldorleasne 1587a -e
ealdorleasne 3003a Χ χ (x) -lèas -ne
sawolleasne 1406b -um
sawulleasne 3033b
Seodenlease 1103a
winigea leasum 1664a
feormendlease 2761b
hlafordlease 2935b
APPENDIX
(continued)
19b. Scedelandum in
Freslondum on 2357b X -làndum in
APPENDIX
(continued)
23 a. wi/gestpas
swaese gesijjas 29a Χ (χ) gesí<Sas(-a)
swaese gesiÖas 2040a
swaese gesiÖas 2518a
swaesra gesiSa 1934A
ealdgesiSas 853B
O f the first four verses, three are built upon a different compound
noun. Each of these compounds forms part of a formulaic substitution
system used by the poet. With Gardena may be compared Beorht-,
Hring-, East-, Nor(5, SutS, and fVestdene; with geardagum may be com-
pared œr-, dedÇ>, ealdor-, ende-, fyrn-, hearm-, lœn-, lif-, swylt-, and
windceg; and with peodcyninga may be compared beorn-, eor<5-, fole-,
gut)-, heah-, leod-, sœ-, soft-, worold-, and wuldureyning. All these com-
pounds occur at least once within the poem's 3,182 lines, in one in-
flection or another. In the work as a whole, compounds occur more
than fifteen hundred times, or at the rate of almost one every other
line, a higher percentage than in any other Old English narrative
poem except Exodus.1
These compounds have long attracted attention. They have been
counted and catalogued, and their aesthetic effect has been described.
All I need to stress is that they are not merely ornamental; they are
not used merely for poetic effect. They are functional, and this is their
prime reason for being. The unusually rich and varied compound dic-
tion in Beowulf is the product of a centuries-old tradition of alliterative
verse-making, and the poet used it not only because he loved it but
because it helped him compose.
Up to now, few inquiries into the relationship of Beowulf to oral
138
COMPOUND DICTION 139
tradition have taken as their starting point this question of utility. How
useful to a scop composing in the native verse form of the Anglo-
Saxons were certain, specific ways of making phrases? As the early
Germanic scops composed in their alliterative form, they developed a
vocabulary uniquely suited to it, for the demands of the form tended to
encourage the development of a special poetic diction. As the poet var-
ied his alliteration from line to line, he could continue to express his
meaning exactly, without being at a loss for words, by varying his
words in ways that corresponded to the alliteration. If the Beowulf
poet had wished, for example, he might have begun his poem as fol-
lows:
Although feebler than the poet's actual words, such an opening would
probably have been tolerable to Anglo-Saxon ears. The poet had
available to him such varied possibilities of expression not only because
Anglo-Saxon poetic word order was relatively free, but because of the
number of synonymous or nearly synonymous expressions to which
the alliterative verse form had given rise. Rarely does the Beowulf poet
repeat the same idea in exactly the same terms. Most often he varies
his expression by substituting one similar word, syllable, or phrase for
another. He is able to do so because his tradition had armed him with
an inherited system of flexible poetic diction that permitted him to
compose fluently in a form in which the controlling element, the allit-
eration, was constantly changing.
Milman Parry's key discovery, the root of his theory of the oral-
formulaic composition of the Homeric epics, was the principle of thrift:
the observation that in the poems of Homer, in a given metrical posi-
tion in the line there normally exists only one formula by which the
poet expresses a specific idea.3 T o a poet composing in the Greek epic
hexameter, such thrift has an obvious function. Given a specific idea
and a specific metrical slot in which to express it, the singer need not
hesitate among alternative phrases. Normally only one appropriate
phrase exists.
In the Old Germanic alliterative form, the situation is quite differ-
ent. Thrift would have been precisely what was to be avoided. Instead,
140 STYLE AND STRUCTURE
the scop would have desired many different ways of expressing the
same idea. In Beowulf, in place of thrift one finds the stylistic feature
of variation, a feature so basic to the art of the scop that it has been
called "all-important" and "the very soul of the Old English poetical
style." 4 Filling or nearly filling each metrical position—the a-verse
and the ¿-verse—the Beowulf poet tends to have available any number
of alternative words and phrases by which he can express a given es-
sential idea. Usually he chooses among these expressions at will, de-
pending on the alliteration that he needs or wants to use at the mo-
ment. Often within one sentence the poet repeats the same essential
idea two or three times, always in words that fit a changing alliteration.
T h e resulting stop-and-go narrative movement is one of the most
prominent aspects of the Old English poetic style.
T o clarify this contrast between a formulaic language based on
variation and one based on thrift, consider the different ways in which
Homer and the Beowulf poet refer to a specific lord or king. In the
Homeric epics, in the metrical position that extends from the bucolic
dieresis to the end of the line, Achilles is referred to thirty-four times
by the noun-epithet formula δ ¿os Ά χ ί λ λ ε ύ β , "godly Achilles." Five
times he is called ώ/cvs Ά χ ι λ λ ε ώ , "swift Achilles." In the metrical
position that extends from the masculine caesura to the end of the line,
he is referred to thirty-one times as ΠΌΔΑΣ ¿MVS Ά χ ι λ λ ε ώ , "swift-
footed Achilles." Only once is he referred to by a different formula,
μεγάθυμοι Ά χ ι λ λ ε ύ β , "great-hearted Achilles." In the metrical posi-
tion that extends from the feminine caesura to the end of the line,
twenty-one times he is called ποδάρκηβ δ ios Ά χ ί λ λ ε ύ β , "swift-footed
godly Achilles." N o other expression for "Achilles" occurs in this po-
sition. In other words, the formulaic language by which Homer refers
to Achilles within the space of the half-line is marked by considerable
thrift. 5
In vivid contrast to this thrift is the variety of ways in which the
Beowulf poet refers to Hrothgar, King of the Danes, within the space
of the half-line. By my count, within part I of the poem (lines 1-2199)
sixty-three different nominal expressions for "Hrothgar" occur within
the half-line. 6 Most of these fill the verse. Twenty-four are compounds
or are built on compounds. A m o n g them are the nouns sincgyfa and
leodgebyrgea and eight verses that show double alliteration: <z)>eling
œrgod\ eald epelweard, freowinefolca, gomelguïSwiga, goldmine gúmena,
hordweard hœle)>a, har hilderinc, and wœlreow wiga. Fifty-three other
COMPOUND DICTION 141
expressions for "Hrothgar" fall into a limited number of formulaic
substitution systems. The poet refers to the Danish king as a gw&cyn-
ing, heahcyning, or peodcyning; as a hildfruma, leodfruma, or wigfruma;
or as a freodryhten, sigedryhten, or winedrihten. Seen in relation to his
father, the king is bearn Healfdenes, maga Healfdenes, sunu Healfdenes,
or Healfdenes sunu. In his character as a wise, aged ruler, Hrothgar is
se goda, se gómela, se mœra, se rica, se snotera, or se wisa. As the dis-
penser of treasure he is beaga brytta or sinces brytta; as defender of the
realm he is folces hyrde or rices hyrde, beahhorda weard or rices weard.
The remaining expressions are members of the following doubly vari-
able substitution systems:
wine
3. Adjective + noun
cempa
frod
cyning
gamela
fengel
msere haelej)
rumheort rinc
sigerof Scylding
snottor jDeoden
wisa
142 STYLE AND STRUCTURE
Not all the combinations that are possible on the basis of the foregoing
list occur in fact, of course. Some are excluded on metrical grounds;
others may simply not have been part of the poet's formulaic vocabu-
lary. Conversely, the poet easily might have referred to Hrothgar by a
number of other terms that he happened to avoid. Examples of terms
for "king" or "lord" that occur elsewhere in the poem are beorncyn-
ingjolccyning, and leodcyning; freodryhten, gumdryhten, and mondryfi-
ten; beaggyfa and goldgyfa; leofe peoden and rice peoden; hringa fengel,
hringa pengel, and wigena strengel; and such other terms as cepele ord-
fruma, leof landfruma, winia bealdor, weoroda rœswa, ealdor pegna,
freca Scyldinga, cumbles hyrde, and se herewisa.1 Addition of these
terms would swell the foregoing list. Still, the various alternative ex-
pressions for "Hrothgar" that do occur are enough to suggest the ex-
traordinary flexibility of the Beowulf poet's diction. Depending on his
desire of the moment, the poet could express the idea of "Hrothgar"
in any of ten different consonantal alliterations—[b], [f], [g], [h], [1],
[m], [r], [s], [J)], or [w]—as well as in the vowel alliteration. Several of
these expressions are functionally redundant. The verses eodur Scyl-
dinga and aldor Eastdena share the same alliteration and are very simi-
lar in meaning and rhythm, for example, while with little change of
effect, the poet could have substituted gamela Scylding for gomel
guhwiga, or goldwine gúmena for gúmena dryhten. In Beowulf, instead
of Homeric thrift one finds an extraordinary variety of diction by
which the same basic idea may be expressed within the same metrical
limits. The Beowulf poet was familiar with a store of traditional diction
that enabled him to compose fluently when dealing with themes that
were customary in the poetry. More important, he knew abstract pat-
terns of verse making by which he could generate new words and
phrases on the model of old ones.
Not all these compounds and compound systems can be dated to the
common Germanic period. Some may have developed independently
in different areas, while others may have been imported from one re-
gion to another. All the same, the number of compounds and com-
pound systems that appear in common among the different dialect
areas is enough to suggest that by an early date, perhaps before the
Age of Migrations, scops were developing a core of formulaic vocabu-
lary, much of it in the form of compound diction.
The Old English compound noun or adjective could thus be consid-
ered the child of the alliterative form. It is at the heart of the scop's
COMPOUND DICTION 145
verse-making technique. An aesthetics of Old English poetry that
overlooks the importance of compounding is bound to be superficial,
and one that overlooks the utility of compounding is likely to go astray
in searching out nuances of meaning in the poet's use of one alterna-
tive expression in place of another, when very likely his chief concern
was not to develop subtle shades of meaning but simply to compose in
the alliterative form.
The point can be argued, of course. It is sometimes tempting to be-
lieve that the Beowulf poet chooses every word with an eye toward its
aesthetic implications: that in a particular situation, for example, the
poet speaks of Spear-Danes rather than Ring-Danes or West-Danes
because he wishes to call up an image of the Danes' martial prowess.
After reviewing the various -Dene, -Scyldinge{-as), -Geatas, and -Seti-
fingas compounds in Beowulf, one scholar concludes: "We have dis-
cussed fifteen compounds, occuring in all twenty-nine times, and in
each case we have seen that their use is justified, not only as far as
sense and metre is concerned, but also as to poetic connotation and ar-
tistic significance."9
Such a conclusion cannot be refuted. If the poet uses the word
Spear-Danes at a time when the Danes are successful in war, the noun
is clearly apt. If on the other hand he uses it at a time when the Danes
are conspicuously unsuccessful in their exercise of the martial arts, the
noun must be ironic, hence also apt.
Without ruling out attempts to find justification for the poet's use
of a particular compound in a particular place, I would suggest that the
Danes are Spear-Danes and are brave in war by definition, regardless of
their conduct at any moment. Normally, it seems, the poet chooses his
compound diction to fulfill the needs of alliteration with minimal con-
tortion of rhythm and syntax. He will choose a word or phrase without
regard for its thematic overtones, even occasionally at cross-purposes
to its thematic overtones, for the sake of one thing: its utility. All the
same, one need not conclude that the initial alliterating element of a
compound is colorless. It may provide a good deal of color to the nar-
rative, but this color tends to be constant. Once invoked it is omni-
present; it does not flare up or die away depending on the context.
The ocean is always a whale-road, it is always a seal-road. The Danes
are always brave. The sun is always the world-candle, God's bright
beacon, a jewel clothed in light.
By stressing this point I do not mean to encourage the fallacy that
the poet's verse-form did his creating for him. In no way did the poet's
146 STYLE AND STRUCTURE
choice of a particular alliteration determine what he would say next.
On the contrary, verbal freedom is perhaps the most striking feature
of the Old English formulaic style. Especially in the work of a master
like the Beowulf poet, no one word choice could dictate another any
more than it does in everyday speech. Present-day readers therefore
have free license to search out the possible nuances of a word or phrase
in its specific context. I suggest only that as one does so, one should
try not to mistake the sensibility of our own century for that of the
eighth or tenth. Overtones of meaning that occur to us today, espe-
cially ironic or ambiguous ones, may have played no part in the appre-
ciation of the poem by its original audience, who could not stop the
narrative and ponder each word choice.10
if Was the Beowulf poet then a singer of tales after all? Or was he a
learned author who set out to imitate the old style for antiquarian ef-
fect? Doubtless the question will never be resolved to everyone's satis-
faction, and the healthiest stance for one to take might be one of
open-minded agnosticism. All the same, it seems to me that the high
incidence of compounding in the poem—even more, the frequent or-
ganization of these compound words into useful formulaic systems—
might indicate not only that the author of the work was familiar with
the old oral tradition, but that he was a living part of it. Unlike the Ex-
odus poet, who draws on a great number of compounds of unusual
construction, the Beowulf poet rarely uses exotic compounds. 11 He
relies on the combination of simple words whose meanings are usually
transparent. The apparent ease with which he varies formulaically-
related compounds suggests a poet at home in a traditional verse-
medium. This is no touchstone for the oral style; it is only one of many
subtle indices which, if carefully observed, might indicate to which end
of the oral-literary spectrum a given text lies.
A comparison of two passages of Old English poetry will illustrate
this point. The first, which describes Grendel's midnight approach to
Heorot, has consistently been praised as an example of the art of the
Beowulf poet at its finest.12 I have selected the second passage, from
the Old English poetic paraphrase of the metrical portions of
Boethius' De consolatione philosophiae, because it has formerly been
used to support the thesis that formula counting is no test of oral style.
The compound nouns and adjectives that occur in each passage are
printed in italics, and at the end of each passage I note the formulaic
COMPOUND DICTION 147
substitution system to which each compound word pertains, if any
exists. Supporting evidence for these systems is restricted to the 3,182
lines of Beowulf and the 1,750 lines of the Meters of Boethius, respec-
tively, so that the words and phrases of many different poets compos-
ing in different times, places, and genres are not used as evidence for
one poet's linguistic practice. 13
Beowulf 710-727:
Meters of Boethius 6:
152
RING C O M P O S I T I O N 153
To him in time a son was born,
young in the land, whom the Lord sent
to comfort the folk; He knew the dire need
they had suffered earlier, lacking a king
for a long time. The Lord of life,
Ruler of glory, granted them grace for this.
Beowjulf] was famous, his name rang widely,
Scyld's son, in the lands of the North.
In the main, one may conclude, the poem consists of three major
episodes of different length and complexity, each one of which shows
ring patterning. The question remains: How are these episodes articu-
lated into a single coherent story of epic length?
If the reader does not become lost in the many byways of the narra-
tive, the large-scale symmetry of its design will be evident: (A) intro-
158 STYLE AND STRUCTURE
duction, (Β) fight with Grendel, (C) celebrations, (D) fight with
Grendel's mother, (C) celebrations, (Β) fight with dragon, (A) close.
T h e three great fights that constitute the main body of the poem are
separated by two substantial interludes in which the hero's triumphs
are celebrated with gifts, feasting, and songs and speeches alluding to
legendary heroes. Surrounding the whole—enveloping it in the wraps
of eternity, as it were—are passages of opening and closing that look
deep into the past, in the story of Scyld, and far into the future, in the
dark forebodings of the "Messenger's Prophecy" and in the building
of a barrow for the dead king that is to stand ever after "as a remem-
brance to my people" (2804).
In the grand design as well as in its parts, events answer to one an-
other. The poem ends where it begins, with a eulogy for a dead king.
And before and after these eulogies? Stories of the kings' funerals. In a
way too consistent to be the result of chance, events in the poem's
gradual unfolding find a reply in events from the poem's gradual close.
Although these events are like one another in some ways, they are an-
tithetical in others. Scyld is an ideal king, for example, but is preemi-
nently a king of war and conquest. Beowulf, an equally ideal king, is
renowned for his keeping of the peace: of all worldly kings he is
"mildest and most gracious to his people" (3181-82). The fight with
Grendel is the young Beowulf's first great test, and he meets it with
extraordinary vigor. The moment he puts his hands on Grendel, the
joyful outcome of the fight is no longer in doubt. The fight with the
dragon is the aged Beowulf's last test of all, and he meets it with al-
most superhuman fortitude. In this fight, the narrator's frequent and
all too clear asides ( 2 3 4 ^ - 4 4 , 2 4 1 ^ - 2 4 , 2511a, 2589-913, and
2725b-28) impress on the audience the dark end that is drawing near.
Most of the chief correspondences that knit the poem together are
obvious. Others, less obvious, appear with equal force when one re-
flects on them. Hrothgar's command to build Heorot, for example
(Ó7b-7Óa), has a parallel in Beowulf's request to have his barrow built
(2802-08). Each edifice, adorned with gold in magnificent quantities,
is to stand high (hlifade, 81b; hlifiart, 2805 a) over the surrounding
countryside, a monument to future generations of the glory of the
past. Each is given a special name—Heorot, Biowulfes beorh—and
each shines bright (311, 2803a). Heorot echoes with the song of the
Creation (9ob-98), and over the barrow is heard the lamentation of
the Geats (3i48b-55a).
RING COMPOSITION 159
T o a remarkable extent, the structure of Beowulf can be described
in terms of a series of major and minor pairs. The two great parts of
the poem—the parts that together make up Tolkien's "balance" and
"opposition of ends and beginnings"9—are the largest pair. Another
contrasting pair consists of the Grendel fight and the dragon fight.
Somewhat smaller are the sea voyages to and from Denmark. Smallest
of all are minute echoes of diction that ring too clear to be fortuitous,
such as "unknown path" (1410b) and "known ways" (1634a).
Many of these correspondences, great and small, converge on a sin-
gle narrative event of great intensity: the hero's struggle against
Grendel's mother in the depths of the monsters' pool. The choice of
this event as the structural center of the epic is not casual. At this
point in the narrative the young hero has his closest brush with death;
he is in fact given up for dead by the Danes, who think that the blood
welling to the surface of the pool is his. Insofar as Beowulf is marked
out as "a mythic figure of death and resurrection," as Albert Lord has
maintained,10 it is here that he can be said to suffer symbolic death.
Thereafter, the hero returns to his native land to take his rightful
place in society as a mature and respected adult.
Readers of the Odyssey will note a curious and appropriate parallel
between the ring structures of these two poems. As others have ob-
served,11 the adventure that forms the kernel of the story of Odysseus'
wanderings (books 9 - 1 2 ) is the Nekyia, the tale of his journey to the
land of the dead. The corresponding event of the Aeneid will leap to
mind: book 6, Aeneas' descent to the underworld to consult the shades
of the dead. Like Homer and Virgil, the Beowulf poet had the narra-
tive genius to develop his story around its point of greatest mystery. In
doing so, he called to mind the greatest story of Christendom as well.
By repeatedly associating Grendel and his mother with the creatures of
hell, he presents Beowulf's descent in terms that call to mind Christ's
legendary harrowing of hell, as recounted in the apocryphal Gospel of
Nicodemus.12 Such echoes may have been unintentional, of course.
There is no way of knowing if the narrator was consciously alluding to
Christ's descent, although he evidently drew on established concep-
tions of the mouth of hell. Virgilian influence in the poem is uncertain,
and direct Homeric influence can be ruled out. In developing a narra-
tive that has points in common with certain critical parts of the Odys-
sey, the Aeneid, and the story of Christ, the author may unconsciously
have been drawing on the same age-old popular traditions (or the same
ι6ο STYLE AND STRUCTURE
psychic depths) that inspired Homer, Virgil, and the early dissemina-
tors of the Christian myth. All one can say with confidence is that to
an audience familiar with these mythically cognate materials, such as-
sociations between Beowulf and other legendary heroes are an appro-
priate means of enriching the poem. Thanks largely to the way in
which it centers on a complex of events that resonates deeply with fa-
mous stories of the past, Beowulf is transformed from what it might
have been—a fairly straightforward tale of the deeds of a good man—
into a work of superb psychological and mythic suggestiveness.
Far from having been an unskilled compiler of separate tales, the
poet was endowed with a keen (although always flexible) sense of nar-
rative form. His epic develops in a leisurely manner, as events in the
poem's gradual beginning eventually find their equivalents in the
poem's gradual close, so that the work as a whole has the solidity and
grace of a well-planned piece of architecture. Beowulf is no mere col-
lection of "fabulous exploits redolent of folk-tale fancy" (Klaeber, p.
xii). It is no sightless narration, nor is it a clumsy joining of two tales.13
It is a well-wrought epic poem. Its chief materials may be highly dis-
parate, but in ordering them the poet shows his competence in relating
a long, cohesive verse narrative.
While it is tempting to believe that the structural patterning of
Beowulf has some relation to the poem's special conditions of oral per-
formance or to the conditions of oral composition among hypothetical
prototypes of the text, this relation is too problematical to be assessed
here. Patterning of any sort is mnemonically useful to an oral poet or
to a performer of oral poems, just as it is useful to any stage performer
(whether singer, storyteller, actor, musician, toastmaster, or nightclub
entertainer) who does not rely on a fixed text as the basis of his or her
performance. Ring composition could serve as one elementary type of
mnemonic patterning: as Cedric Whitman observes, "The oral poet,
having mentioned A, B, and C, picks them up later on in the order C,
B, and A, since it is natural to reconstruct a chain of thought back-
wards." 14 All the same, oral texts taken from the field have not been
shown to exhibit complex ring structures comparable to those evident
in the Iliad and Beowulf. Perhaps these structures exist, but the neces-
sary field work and analysis have not been done. Moreover, even some
polished literary works (such as Tom Jones and Paradise Lost) show
complex ring patterning. 15 The various sorts of ring composition in
Beowulf may plausibly be taken as traits that would be useful to an oral
poet or performer, but further conclusions are premature.
RING COMPOSITION i6i
163
164 STYLE AND STRUCTURE
(1601 a). Taking the term hwate at its face value as a nonironic epi-
thet, one critic has tried to account for it in realistic terms. "Convinced
that Beowulf is dead," the Danes "courteously withdraw to allow the
Geats to mourn their supposedly lost leader in private." Their ap-
parent faithlessness is in fact a praiseworthy act of respect.2
For several reasons this reading is hard to accept. No mention is
made that the Geats intend to mourn their leader. They simply con-
tinue to stare at the waters "sick at heart" ( 1603a), hopelessly wishing
(to use the poet's own paradoxical terms) that they will see their lord
again. More important, the apparently anomalous formula hwate Scyl-
dingas is no more than an expression of the poem's abstract style,
which rarely if ever strives for realistic effects. In Beowulf, the essen-
tial qualities of persons and things do not change from moment to mo-
ment. Human beings may change, but if so, they change emphatically,
once and for all, like Heremod or Offa's queen. People are either
"good" or "bad," "valiant" or "cowardly," and the poem's formulaic
vocabulary reflects this point of view. The use of a fixed phrase in an
apparently anomalous context need not be explained on naturalistic
grounds, for the author's language is a tissue of conventions about
which there is nothing naturalistic in the first place.
A similar stylization is evident on the narrative level. During the
dragon fight, we are told, the hero can barely stand firm against the
dragon's second onslaught and is enveloped in flame. His hand-picked
companions break from the hill where he has stationed them. Wiglaf
alone recalls his duties as Beowulf's kinsman and thane, berates the
men at length for abandoning their king, and advances to stand by him
(259^-2668).
Here again it is possible for a reader who is looking for realism to
rebel against the apparent meaning of the text. How could Wiglaf de-
liver a twenty-seven line speech to the thanes who have fled to the
woods, presumably some distance away? The same critic has argued
that in the interests of verisimilitude, one must imagine that Wiglaf
first fled with the group, then realized his mistake and acted accord-
ingly.3
Such an explanation is based on narrative expectations that do not
fit this poem. The essential point is that Wiglaf says what must be said,
given this opportunity to define the heroic ethos. What is important is
the thematic content of his speech, not such external factors as the
distance from the hill to the woods or the relative ease or difficulty
BARBARIC STYLE 165
with which the man's words, in the real world, could have been heard.
After all, Beowulf does not depict the world of everyday reality. It
presents a landscape as conventional as any stage. T h e "real" audience
of W i g l a f s speech is we, the listeners or readers, not a group of name-
less and fictive Geats. In any event, why salvage one realistic spatial
detail of this scene when the whole fabric of the narrative is abstract
and nonrepresentational in its disregard for the naturalistic passing
of time? During the whole passage in which Wiglaf is introduced
and delivers his speech, time is suspended; the flames that envelop
the hero cannot harm him in the least. In a naturalistic story or in
real life, W i g l a f s behavior would be at fault. If a man were truly
in need of help, his young kinsman would not pause to deliver a
twenty-seven line oration to absent companions but would go im-
mediately to his side. 4 Not only is the narrative nonrepresentational
at this stage, it is deliberately and characteristically so. T h e poet's em-
phasis is all on the inner significance of the action and not at all on its
spatial and temporal relations, which he ignores to display his theme
with perfect clarity.
W h a t I have just discussed are examples of a general stylistic ten-
dency in Beowulf. T h e elements of the real world, as they normally
offer themselves to perception, are rearranged by the poet's vision into
abstract intellectual patterns that express not a world, but an ethical
concept of a world. Just as this concept is foreign to most present-day
readers, the style in which it is expressed is alien and can be misunder-
stood or dismissed on this account. From a classical perspective, "ar-
tistically Beowulf is a rude and comparatively unskilled poem." 5 From
the perspective of its author and original audience, I suspect, the poem
expressed its themes efficiently in a cultivated, aristocratic style. Be-
cause this nonclassical style has no accepted name, I refer to it as "bar-
baric," using the term in the nonpejorative sense that it has in the fine
arts.
Among art historians, the term barbaric (not "barbarous") has oc-
casionally been used to denote the various types of abstract design that
were cultivated, to some extent in common, by the Germanic and
Celtic tribes who bordered on the Roman Empire. 6 In contrast to
Mediterranean naturalistic art, which came to provide a model for
most Western European art from the Renaissance until the early
twentieth century, the art of the Northern tribes shunned the realistic
depiction of persons and things, knew nothing of three-dimensional
STYLE AND STRUCTURE
perspective, and tended to break surfaces into intricate, swirling, zoo-
morphic designs rather than depict them in naturalistic "modeled"
contours.
Anyone familiar with the Sutton Hoo metalwork in the British Mu-
seum or the full-page illuminations from the Book of Kells qr the Lin-
disfarne Gospels will know the dynamic style of this art at its finest.
Even in these latter examples, classical influence can be detected, and
an increase in classical influence can easily be traced in the art of the
later Anglo-Saxon period. Here too, however, an abstract, nonrealistic
streak sometimes sets this art off decidedly from classical norms. A
similar gradation between barbaric and classical norms can be observed
in Anglo-Saxon poetry, some of which is obviously patterned on Latin
models while some (like "Widsith") displays a rhetorical structure that
cannot well be accounted for except in terms of a native Germanic po-
etics. Beowulf falls somewhere between these two extremes. Like the
stonecarving, metalwork, and manuscript illumination of the period,
the poem bears witness to the existence of a well-defined set of non-
classical aesthetic conventions that predated the arrival of Mediterran-
ean culture in Anglo-Saxon England and that remained strong, though
progressively changed, at least until the Norman Conquest.
Some scholars have spoken of the need to read Beowulf in a manner
in keeping with the aesthetics of its age. John Leyerle has called atten-
tion to apparent similarities of style between Anglo-Saxon visual and
poetic arts and has shown how the concept of "interlace," borrowed
from the sphere of decorative design, can be used with some suc-
cess to account for certain patterns of recurrence within the design of
the poetry.7 In a more far-ranging attempt to correlate the arts and
poetry of the period, Peter R. Schroeder has stressed the abstract qual-
ities of each and has suggested that the stylized representation of space
in the visual arts is analogous to the stylized representation of time in
the narrative poetry. In both the art and the poetry, he finds "not a
representation of reality as we perceive it, but a breaking up and rear-
rangement of that reality to create a composition in which the 'reality'
can often be discerned only with difficulty."8 Schroeder is thus led to a
point of view that accords closely with Joan Blomfield's understanding
of the style of Beowulf as expressed in an article whose judgments im-
prove with time: "The poetry of this time (like the visual art) reaches a
high degree of abstraction and formalism. As far as his medium, a se-
quence of words, will allow, the poet has detached his theme from the
BARBARIC STYLE
processes of time and space and disregarded the appearance which for
practical purposes constitute reality. . . . The writer of Beowulf \s in
fact a true poet; he has created a tragic unity, he sees with the poet's
eye which splits and recombines the elements of everyday percep-
tion." 9 Rather than speak of the "lack of realism" of the poetry of this
period, one might better speak of its possession of a set of conventions
that permit it to express unerringly what it considers most important.
In general, these matters do not have to do with the outward appear-
ance of people or things, or with their external relations, but with their
ethical or spiritual significance.
A number of features of the poem cease to appear anomalous when
one reads it not as a realistic narrative that has failed, but as an expres-
sion of a stylistic impulse that finds similar expression in the abstract
visual arts of the period. An example is Grendel's entry into Heorot.
For a moment, recall the scene. For twelve years the Danes have
been vacating Heorot as soon as night falls because of their fear of
Grendel. Beowulf and his companions—"the bravest that he could
find" (206b-207a)—have come from across the sea with the express
purpose of challenging the monster and, after chivalrous negotiations,
have arranged to spend the night in the hall. "Not one of them be-
lieved he would ever again partake of the joys" of his native land, the
poet informs us ( 6 9 1 - 6 9 3 ) . At this critical moment the men take to
their beds and . . . pray? Adjust their armor and weapons? Take leave
of one another, or speak nervous boasts in which they only half be-
lieve? No. They fall asleep. Concerning the fear, anxiety, tiredness, or
other feelings that the author of a naturalistic novel might wish to as-
cribe to them, we are told not a word. The men have no such feelings
but fall asleep as obediently as puppets in a child's play. 10
Still, this is not the chief anomaly of the passage. A few lines later
the monster breaks down the door with one blow of his fists. He then
treads on the floor of the hall, an "unpretty light" flashing from his
eyes. Here, with this sudden violent outbreak of noise, at the culmi-
nating moment of the Geats' journey and, one would think, of their
entire lives up to this moment, the warriors continue sleeping just as
soundly as before. They wake only later, after one of their number has
been devoured "hands and feet" ( 745a) and after Beowulf, who alone
has been watching these events in alert silence, has met Grendel's grip
with one more powerful.
If one reads the poem expecting it to fulfill the conventions of natu-
ι68 STYLE AND STRUCTURE
ralistic mimesis, the behavior of the Geats at this point violates all nar-
rative propriety. Only if one reads the narrative as a diagram of an ac-
tion rather than an imitation of one, as it were, do its inner relationships
become clear. T h e men fall asleep and stay asleep not out of tiredness,
nor because their sleep is magically induced, but because of the narra-
tive principle of contrast. Their behavior is explicable on stylistic
grounds, not mimetic ones. Rather than react as real persons would in
the same situation, they are obedient participants in the conventions of
an abstract type of narrative composition. According to these conven-
tions, the hero is strong and his companions weak. T h e hero manifests
whatever qualities are necessary for success in a certain situation—vig-
ilance and self-discipline, here—and his companions show the opposite
traits. T h e hero and his great antagonist meet each other alone, and if
others do happen to be present, the narrator manages to nullify their
presence as effectively as if they were no more than the furniture of
the scene. They provide contrast to the hero and magnify terror by
furnishing a victim, or rather by furnishing a roomful of potential vic-
tims who serve as the dramatic audience for the fight. Apart from
these ethical and dramatic functions, the men have no real interest. As
the scene progresses, the poet forgets them except to call attention to
their fear and ineffectiveness—qualities that again set them sharply
apart from the hero.
T h e loss of Hondscioh, then (the man who is devoured by Grendel)
inspires neither tears nor regret. Beowulf cannot be blamed for allow-
ing him to die. Ethically speaking, the sleeping Hondscioh represents
all the Geats. His fate shows what the fate of all of them would have
been in the absence of a hero, or what the fate of Beowulf himself
would have been in the absence of those qualities that distinguish him
from his companions. The principle of contrast, together with a desire
to magnify terror, calls Hondscioh into being and insists that he be
handed over to the monster without the least outcry of protest.
The apparent anomalies of such a scene seem less awkward when
one treats them as a result not of the author's violation of the demands
of realism, but of his willing observance of the conventions of the bar-
baric style, among them the principle of contrast. A second convention
also leads to occasional anomalies. This is the principle that each scene,
passage, or episode has its own integrity, regardless of what is said or
not said elsewhere in the narrative. The story is time-bound, as only a
narrative spoken or sung aloud can be, and thus it includes narrative
inconsistencies.
BARBARIC STYLE 169
cated motifs have caused more serious problems because of critics' de-
sire to integrate them in a narrative master-plan that either does not
exist or is never expressed. Examples are the curse on the treasure and
the supposed existence of treachery in the Danish court.
T h e curse on the dragon's treasure ( 3 0 5 1 - 7 5 ) is a crux that cannot
be disposed of here. Rather than influencing the entire last part of the
narrative, I believe, it is a classic example of a motif that leads no-
where. Taken by itself, it is of exceptional interest; it is generically ap-
propriate to this kind of story, which deals with the winning of a
dragon's hoard; and it has no narrative consequences whatsoever.
What could be more natural than that buried treasure should carry
a curse? And yet introducing the motif of the curse is perhaps the
poet's most serious blunder. Even if only for a moment, the curse
takes the attention of the audience away from what is most impor-
tant—the value of the hero's self-sacrifice—and directs it to something
peripheral, for the poet never speaks of the curse as having caused
Beowulf's death. On the contrary, he calls attention to the efficacy of
the poison with which the hero has been infected from the dragon's
teeth (271 i b - 1 5 a ) . T h e notion of a curse is not introduced until well
after the hero's death, and Beowulf is a time-bound narrative in which
later events do not explain earlier ones. Neither need one take the
curse as causing the prospective ill-fortune of the Geats during the pe-
riod that is to follow the hero's death and burial. T h e Geats are the
cause of their own ill-fortune. Their cowardice during the dragon
fight, when known, will act as a magnet for Swedes, Franks, Frisians,
and any other tribes looking for easy plunder. Moreover, the Christian
terms in which the punishments to be effected by the curse are ex-
pressed (3069-733) have no relation to the misfortunes that are fore-
seen in the "Messenger's Prophecy" ( 3 0 i 5 b - 2 7 ) . These are of a mil-
itary character and have to do with the feared subjection of the Geats
to hostile tribes, not with their suffering plagues and hellish confine-
ment for their sins. Altogether, the curse is a minor flaw when taken
as a truncated motif and a major headache when taken as a motif that
silently guides or controls any events in the poem's close. T h e curse
has its own integrity in the scene in which it occurs, but thereafter, one
had best forget it as quickly and effortlessly as a folktale audience for-
gets a magic mountain or an audience listening to a Serbian singer
forgets a suit of borrowed armor.
Hrothulf's supposed treachery against members of the Danish court
BARBARIC S T Y L E 175
is another motif whose importance has been exaggerated by those who
see it as a central concern of the poet, when it probably amounts to no
more than a truncated motif, if it is not an outright invention of mod-
ern readers.19 The supposed treachery of Hrothulf is entirely a prod-
uct of critical extrapolation from the words "their peace was yet un-
broken" (1164b) and "the Danes were committing no wrongful acts
at that time" ( ioi8b-i9)—words that may point to some kind of fu-
ture quarrel or, in the second passage, some kind of past quarrel but
that do not say how this quarrel will or did come about. While a veiled
allusion to future treachery may be present in one or both of these
passages, I am not sure that one should make an issue of what the poet
chooses not to say. The poet never gives us enough information to
judge Hrothulf's character one way or another. T o assume that the
audience was so familiar with Hrothulf's bad character that the poet
needed to say nothing about it is guesswork that does not have the
support of Norse tradition, in which the character of Hrothulf's equiv-
alent, Hrólfr, is exemplary. In any event, several enigmatic hints do
not make a dominant theme, any more than several doubtful stars
make a constellation. Either the poet did not know of any future
treachery on Hrothulf's part or he chose to suppress this theme. The
motif of Hrothulf's treachery, if present, should be considered trun-
cated and is best left aside from evaluations of the main action, in
which the Danes generally appear in a favorable light, with the excep-
tion of Unferth and Heremod, whose former crimes may be the sort to
which allusion is made.
Throughout the Grendel episode, the same lesson is driven home: the
creative and destructive powers that God manifested with awesome
effect in the time of Genesis can manifest themselves at any moment in
history, given sufficient need.
During the last third of the poem, conspicuously little reference is
made to the mythic past. The Creation, the banishment of Cain, and
the Flood form a background for the Grendel episode but not for the
hero's last combat. Neither the narrator nor Beowulf makes an issue of
the importance of keeping faith in God's favor, and one is not sure that
the aged king has God's blessing when he fights the dragon.
Some critics have made much of these facts and have thought that
the hero's actions are spiritually flawed. Such a conclusion is unneces-
sary, because a different set of narrative needs governs the dragon
fight. T o be blunt, the third great fight is introduced first and fore-
most to provide the hero with a suitable death. This the poet does by
supplying him with an opponent who is both formidable and spiritually
neutral. The dragon is bad, but as we have seen, it is not demonic in
the sense that the Grendel creatures are. It is not given a genealogy
going back to the beginnings of time, and when the poet lists the vari-
ous unpleasant creatures who were part of the brood of Cain
(111-114) dragons are not among them. The mythic dimension of
time is not evoked during the dragon fight, I believe, because the poet
does not want this episode to be considered a new chapter in the con-
tinuing feud of God against His enemies. Instead of a story of a savior
who rescues a people from a demon, one is told of a battle between
two great adversaries. If this battle results in death for the hero as well
as his inhuman opponent, one may grieve at this unhappy outcome
but not shudder as one might have done if God's enemies had
T H E DIMENSION OF T I M E
triumphed. Such an ending would truly have been catastrophic, but
this is not what the poet gives us.
Beowulf s relative silence concerning his faith in the Lord's protec-
tion is therefore understandable, for the king is to be killed. If the poet
had made an issue of the old man's keeping his faith in God, this faith
would have been belied by the ensuing course of events. The poet
finds a happier solution by simply avoiding the topic of God's interest
in protecting heroes, just as he avoids alluding to the mythic past and
refrains from introducing miracles.
The last third of the poem includes only three allusions to God's
powers, and none of them builds up false hopes concerning Beowulf s
chances to avoid the fate that lies in store for all of us. The first is to
the effect that "undoomed men" (unfœge) can easily escape trouble if
the Lord protects them (2291-933). That Beowulf is not "un-
doomed" is frequently remarked upon. The second occurs when Wig-
laf tries in vain to revive his dead king (2858-59). Emphasis here is on
God's power to take away heroes, not to preserve them. The third al-
lusion comes when Wiglaf notes that even though the king's compan-
ions forsook him shortly before his death, God as dispenser of victories
granted Beowulf the ability and opportunity to avenge himself with his
own blade (2873-76). Here, if I am not mistaken, Wiglafs words boil
down to not much more than a statement to the effect that "even
though you ran, thank God that the king did not die unavenged." A
curious reader might ask why, if the Lord was concerned with saving
Beowulf s reputation, He did not care more about saving his life, but
such a question misses the point. The hero's death is not only a fore-
gone conclusion but a narrative necessity if the poet is to express the
guiding theme of this part of the story, the theme of the possibility of
heroic action in the face of a fate that will not be turned aside.
2. The legendary past plays a simpler role. In brief, this is the age of
exemplary heroes who lived, fought, ruled, and died before the time of
the actors who figure in this poem and their immediate ancestors. It is
the age of Sigemund, "most famous of exiles far and wide" (898),
whose career represents the fulfillment of the heroic ideal and whose
dragon fight presages Beowulf's own. It is the age of Weland, the
master smith, who in the Eddie "VçlundarkviSa," as in "Deor," rep-
resents the type of hero who lived to carry out full vengeance for prior
sufferings. O f the great kings named in the poem, at least two, possi-
bly four, could be said to have lived their lives in this legendary past.
ι86 INTERPRETATION
Scyld Scefing clearly is introduced as a representative of the ideal of
kingship, while Heremod represents the counter-ideal. The allusion to
Eormenric (i200b-0i) is too brief to reveal what the poet thought of
him, but since reference is made to his "crafty enmity," probably one
is to call to mind the wolfish disposition that is attributed to him in
"Deor," "HamSismál," and Vqlsungasaga. Like Heremod, he may
have exemplified how the power of a great king can lead to disaster for
his people when unrestrained by self-control. On the other hand, the
great Anglian king Offa I is praised for his generosity, wisdom, and
valor. Like Scyld, he represents the ideal of heroic kingship, and he
fulfills this ideal so well that he wins praise as "the best of humankind
between both seas" ( 1955-57 a)·
The chief function of the legendary past is thus to provide "time-
less" models of conduct to be imitated or avoided. When Beowulf is
praised, it is by comparison with Sigemund. When he is warned, it is
by allusion to Heremod. When a necklace is to be praised, likewise,
the poet can think of no better way to do so than by comparing it to
the great Brosinga mene, a treasure that is probably to be identified
with the necklace of the goddess Freya that figures in "PrymskviÖa."
The legendary past is an age of unqualified superlatives whose heroes
embody the absolutes of good and evil against which other people can
be measured or can measure themselves.
3. The historicalpast during which the main action of the poem takes
place can be regarded as a second heroic age intermediate between the
legendary past and our own day. While linked to the legendary past by
dynastic history, inherited weapons, or moral comparisons, the people
of this period stand apart from it as complex figures subject to human
weakness. Although their character or conduct is often described in
superlative terms, it is rarely exemplary, for whatever the stature of
such people may be, they rarely embody pure good or evil. Their
strength is tempered by weakness, their wisdom flawed by foolishness,
in a complex amalgam that comes closer to what one expects of real
people in the natural world.
The two kings of part I of the poem complement each other's im-
perfections, for example. Each represents an imbalance of the two de-
sired qualities of wisdom and fortitude.3 Whereas the old Hrothgar is
as wise as could be wished, his fortitude (in the martial sense) is all in
the past; and whereas the young Hygelac is strong and brave, his ca-
pacity for heroic action is untempered by wisdom. Each therefore suf-
T H E DIMENSION OF T I M E 187
fers: Hrothgar lives in misery for the twleve years of Grendel's at-
tacks, and Hygelac leaves his bones bleaching at the mouth of the
Rhine.
Other subsidiary characters share such a mixed role. Unferth is a
rascal and a fratricide. Nonetheless, Beowulf praises him as a good
warrior ( 1 8 1 0 - i i a ) , and the surly Dane neither offers a physical fight
nor is made into an exemplar of evil on the order of Heremod. Wiglaf
impeccably fulfills the duties of kinship and loyalty, and the effective-
ness of his sword-play in the dragon fight leads one to expect nothing
but good of him in the future. Still, no hope is offered that he will be-
come such a commanding king as to deter neighboring tribes from at-
tacking the Geats. W e know too little about the other male characters
to judge them as good or evil. Chiefly they are important as the agents
or victims of violence, not as heroes. Collectively, the Danes, like the
Geats, win praise but not respect, äschere and Hondscioh are passive
victims. Among the women, Wealhtheow, Freawaru, and Hygd all
seem admirable for their grace and generosity at the feast, but their
roles are incidental and do not leave room for a display of heroism like
that of GuSrun in the Eddie lays or self-will like Hallgerd's in Nja/'s
Saga. The one woman in the poem who has an exemplary function is
Offa's queen Thryth (or Modthryth), who is damned for her violent
self-will and praised for later having reformed ( 1 9 3 ^ - 5 4 ) . Like Offa,
she is a peripheral character who does not take part in the action.
Beowulf towers above these flawed or incomplete people. He ob-
scures his lesser companions, and in his combination of strength and
magnanimity, he seems to unite in one person the characteristics of a
mythic savior and a legendary warrior-king. His tragedy, if one can
call it that, is that even as an archetypal figure he is subject to a histori-
cal world, our world, whose iron laws are change and death. If any
leitmotif runs through Hrothgar's long homiletic address to the hero
(1700-84), it is this theme of inexorable reversals to which all human
life is subject. The reversal of fortune evident in Heremod's or Hroth-
gar's career warns what could happen to any man. In historical time,
change is the rule: pride grows great, the body decays, one man's
throne is given over to another, life itself is lœne, "on loan" (1754b).
The legendary strength in which the young Beowulf exults is his only
ane hwile, "for a while" (1762a). Hrothgar speaks true, and in the last
part of the poem one sees the hero tragically forced by his own inner
convictions to fight as he had in his youth, but without a young man's
188 INTERPRETATION
strength. The bleak ending of the poem reminds one of the fate that
awaits all men and women, even the most exemplary hero, in a transi-
tory world bound by time.
4. The present tense of the poem stands clearly apart from the past
action that it describes, all of which takes place "in former days," "in
that day," or "in that day of this life.'' 4 Aside from knowing that this
present is not past, however, one can identify it only in the most gen-
eral terms. The poem yields very little information about the date of
its composition or performance in pre-Conquest England. Probably
this vagueness is deliberate, for it permits the poem a sort of contem-
poraneity that would not have been possible if the narrator had dated
his own age precisely.
The present is identifiable chiefly through narrative asides, as when
the poet refers to one year's giving way to the next "as it still does"
(1134b). The same formula is used to describe the ever-present reality
of the power of God, who ruled over the men of that day "as He still
does" (1058b). God has power over times and seasons ( i 6 i o b - i i a ) ;
the sky's candle shines from heaven now as it always has (1571-723);
the Father loosens the lock of ice on the waters each spring in a never-
ending cycle (1608-11); dragons seek out barrows in which to live.
These are the eternals of the natural world, and they are matched by
corresponding eternal relationships in human affairs as well. While
God's power is unchanging, human fortune is subject to cyclical
change like that of nature. " A person who lives long in this world of
strife will meet much that is welcome, much unwelcome," the narrator
takes care to point out (io6ob-62). Beowulf shows every indication of
being aware of the constants that govern human existence. He makes
them the cornerstone of his philosophy of life, which is a philosophy of
action. "Everyone's life is bound to end," as he says just before risking
his; "the best thing is to win a good name before you die" (1386-89).
The essence of such gnomic statements is that they blunt the teeth
of time by expressing what once was, is now, and ever shall be.5 God
rules unmoved; all else moves, seasons and men, for good and for ill, in
a perpetual cycle of change. In these essential features, the historical
age in which the main action of the poem takes place is our own. W e
all grow old and die, as Hrothgar reminds us. Good fortune gives way
to ill, and one king's bad rule is replaced by another's better one.
These things have happened before and will happen again. Toward
the end of the poem the Geatish messenger grimly prophesies that the
fifty years of peace during Beowulf s reign will give way to unparal-
T H E DIMENSION OF TIME 189
leled disasters from foreign invasion. One need not conclude that the
cyclical course of human affairs will therefore cease, for in turn, these
disasters will eventually become a thing of the past. Those enemies
who had prospered at the Geats' expense will be made to suffer in
turn, much as Hrothgar had lived to find solace for his afflictions and
much as the Danes had suffered before the Lord sent them the strong
kings Scyld and Beow. Human misfortune is nothing new in the world,
and like good fortune it will not last forever.
T h e historical age is repeatedly linked to the present, then, by the
narrator's assurances that fundamental constants in human existence
exist as they do in the natural world. Without such constants Beowulf
could not be the exemplary tale that it is. It would have to remain a
sort of historical romance of interest for its adventures and for its nos-
talgic picture of the past, not for its ethical teachings. Comments such
as "thus should a person do" and "thus should a kinsman do" would
express the heroic code of a past age but would not reverberate with
the currentness of meaning that they carry. A t the end of the poem,
that currentness of its values is strongly reaffirmed. T h e king dies
"just as anyone must relinquish his borrowed life" (259ob-ç)ia). T h e
treasure that is buried with him is still there, lying in the ground, an
imaginary tangible link between past and present (3167). T h e king's
chief thanes mourn him just as it is, not was, fitting that a man praise
his lord when he dies (3174). Through the narrator's asides, the values
of heroic society are identified as ones by which people can live today.
What the poem offers is thus not only a set of exemplars drawn
from the "timeless" realm of legendry, but a set of assurances that he-
roic ideals have had validity in our own time. It affirms that such ideals
have been previously put into practice without meaning disaster to
those who have followed them. It shows that those who live by high
ideals, like Beowulf, are rewarded. When disaster does fall in the
poem, it falls on those whose behavior abnegates the heroic ideal, peo-
ple like Heremod, the Danes who flee before Grendel, or the Geats
who desert their king, and not on Beowulf, whose only misfortune is
to die like a man and whose unyielding integrity wins him both fame
on earth and salvation in heaven.
This discussion of present time, however, refers only to the present
of the poem's performance. What of the other present tense that
enters into the texture of the work, the present tense of our reading it
now?6
Few if any current readers can approach archaic literature unin-
INTERPRETATION
fluenced by knowledge of the developments that have changed the
face of the globe since the time this literature was produced. Between
the prefeudal tribal society depicted in Beowulf and the enormously
more complex commercial nation-state of today, there extends a gulf
so great that historical criticism can only begin to bridge it. Heroism is
out of fashion today. Money is dirty. God, if not dead, averts His face.
Leaders, particularly, do not personally risk their lives for their people.
The concept of tribal community, central to the poem, has crumbled
away to insignificance between the opposed ideals of rugged individu-
alism and devotion to the giant state. Even in trying to read the poem
in the spirit of its age, inevitably one imports to it one's knowledge and
cultural preconceptions. At best, such knowledge and preconceptions
can change the coloring of certain passages. At worst, they can affect
one's entire reading of the work.
The supposed destruction of the Geats is an instance of the lesser
evil. Toward the end of the poem, an unnamed messenger assures the
Geats (and the narrator confirms in an aside) that their cowardly be-
havior presages a period of national disaster. Swedes, Franks, and Fri-
sians will invade the realm; women will walk the paths of exile stripped
of their treasures (2099-3027). Modern historians are aware that at
some point during the earlier Middle Ages, the historical tribe of the
Geats lost its separate identity and was absorbed by neighbors. The
"Messenger's Prophecy" is thus sometimes read as an allusion to some
kind of genocide that the Beowulf narrator and his audience knew to
have taken place.7
Although commonly accepted, such a reading goes beyond what the
poet suggests. In history, as Kenneth Sisam has pointed out,8 the
Geats may have been absorbed peacefully. We do not know the cir-
cumstances in which they dropped out of history, but their disappear-
ance as an independent tribe may have long postdated the text of the
poem. In the poem, the Geats are said to be about to suffer the ravages
of war, but given the unsettled conditions of life in that age, little is
unusual about this prospect. What is unusual is that for the past fifty
years they have not had to wage war, thanks to their king's success in
keeping the peace against habitual enemies. Overdue violence is about
to fall on them, but of supposed genocide the poet says nothing, and
extratextual half-knowledge should not color one's understanding of
this passage by painting its tragedies in darker tones.
The historical knowledge that present-day readers commonly pos-
T H E DIMENSION OF T I M E 191
197
198 INTERPRETATION
enee shared within the group. His tone is rarely ironic or confessional,
for he utters his words as a spokesman for all rather than as a person
sharing private perceptions.
An active narrator of this kind is sure to have provided the poem's
link to a live audience. This narrator presumably had a name and char-
acter of his own and impressed his character on the work at least to the
extent that a skilled musician or conductor impresses his character on a
piece of music today. Although this dimension of the performance is
lost, the role of the narrator in Beowulf is still not completely impossi-
ble to reconstruct, because the poet includes a part for him. From
early on, one is aware of the presence of an I, a speaker who is not
the poet himself but is the voice of the poet's alter ego in oral perform-
ance.1
It is this voice that recalls the action, orchestrates it in its imposing
detail, and mediates it by setting it within a value system that the lis-
tening audience would have recognized as its own. This voice is not
exactly a persona, in the sense that critics use the term to speak of
Chaucer's self-portrait in the Canterbury Tales or as Ezra Pound used
the term to refer to the different masks or personalities he adopted in
his shorter poems. Such a persona is always individualized and is often
playful or ironic: there is an important difference between Ezra Pound
and Pound's Propertius. In Beowulf one can make no such clear dis-
tinctions, for the poet's mask is nearly featureless. The chief function
of the narrator's voice is to validate the story and comment on it—to
"authenticate" it for the listeners.2 The habitual stance of the narrator
has been aptly described as one of "authority based on exceptional
knowledge about a common tradition."3
From the poem's first lines, the narrator suppresses his individuality
to present himself as one of the group, the other members of which
constitute the listening audience. "Lo, we have heard," he begins,
shunning the personal voice of the Anglo-Saxon elegies. The narrator
claims to speak only what is common knowledge.
Eventually this first-person plural voice merges almost unnoticeably
into the first-person singular. After the first line, as the story becomes
more specific, the narrator never again uses the pronoun we in relation
to his knowledge of his sources. A bare dozen times (in lines 38, 62,
74, i o n , 1027, 1196, 1197, 1842, 2163, 2172, 2694, and 2773) he
uses the pronoun / in phrases of the sort hyrde ic pœt, "I have heard
that"; or pa ic . . . gefrœgn, "I have heard, then . . ."; or, in compara-
T H E N A R R A T O R ' S VOICE 199
tive constructions, ne hyrde ic, "I have not heard o f " (a more comely
ship, or more generous king, and so forth). Another five times (in lines
776, 837, 1955, 2685, and 2837) he uses the fixed formula mine
gefrœge "by my account" or, perhaps, "according to my version of the
story." None of these phrases is meant to call up the idea of a human
being with an individual sensibility or with an original story to relate.
At the most, they suggest that the narrator speaks from his deep famil-
iarity with the stories of Germanic antiquity, a familiarity that he has
gained from oral tradition. Many stories of old times are told, the nar-
rator suggests. O f these he has chosen one for retelling.
Apart from these few instances of first-person asides, Beowulf may
seem to be a story that tells itself. Its immediate impression on a reader
is likely to be that of direct, unmediated narrative, much like that of
Genesis A or Exodus. The falsity of this impression becomes evident as
soon as one considers how frequently the narrator uses gnomic state-
ments, superlatives, and explicit ethical judgments to build up a grid of
belief against which the action he recounts can be plotted. The narra-
tor is not with us only intermittently, at moments when he speaks of
his having heard the story; he is a constant presence throughout. His
one great function is to put his listeners into the position of his ideal
audience, an audience that nods assent to all his judgments. Because
these judgments are not the property of any one person but have been
handed down as collective wisdom, the narrator does not really manip-
ulate his audience, as an author of propaganda might. One could think
of the poem as a process whereby a society's traditional system of
values or beliefs is articulated so that it can be appreciated more deeply
by all those present.
The narrator in Beowulf is not omniscient, though he has been
called that.4 He speaks what he knows of the actors in the story, much
as Hrothgar's thane recounts "just about all that he had heard said
concerning Sigemund's courageous deeds" (874.b-876a). Usually he
observes a respectful silence concerning things that no mortal could be
expected to know. "People know not how to say truly" who received
Scyld's funeral boat (5ob-5ia), just as "no one knows" the move-
ments of the secret creatures of hell (i62b-iÓ3). These matters he
accepts as mysteries. On the other hand, his knowledge of Beowulf's
adventures seems to have no limits, for he is able to describe, for ex-
ample, the hero's fortunes even at the bottom of Grendel's mere. At
one point he moves back in time to recount the words of a speaker
200 INTERPRETATION
their character (or help establish their character) in a way that the
narrator's asides do not. The credo of action is set into the active
Beowulf's mouth (1384-89), while the credo of caution is set into
W i g l a f s (3077-78). The aged, gracious, somewhat humbled Hroth-
gar is made to speak the great fatherly warning against pride and
greed (1700-84). The guardian of the Danish coast, appropriately, is
given a sententious remark on the need to distinguish fair words from
fair deeds (287b-8ç)). These persons are individualized in the poem,
briefly or at length, but the narrator never assumes a separate identity.
If he did so he would lose his mediating role as one who speaks for all
his audience, not only those with certain roles or views.
Perhaps the narrator's most disarming trait is his enthusiasm in
making simple judgments. "That was a good king!" ( n b ) , he says of
Scyld. "That was a brave man!" (1812b), he later remarks of Beowulf.
"That's what a man should be!" (2708b), he says of Wiglaf. There is
nothing ironic or naive about these designations, as there is when the
Chaucer-persona of the Canterbury Tales praises the Shipman with the
words "and certeinly he was a good felawe!" T o be a "good felawe,"
in the context of Chaucer's pilgrimage, is of course to be a rascal and
a rogue. T o be a god cyning in Beowulf is to rule well. Whereas
Chaucer's praise can rarely be taken innocently, the Beowulf narrator
seems incapable of speaking with the ironist's wink. The many super-
latives of Beowulf might likewise call to mind the frequent superlatives
that Chaucer applies to his gallery of pilgrims, each of whom seems to
be the best or the worthiest or the most notable of his kind, but the
strategies of the two poets are utterly opposed. Although Chaucer
often damns with praise, as when he calls the Friar "the beste beggere
in his hous," the words of the Old English poem can be taken at face
value, with only a normal allowance for narrative hyperbole.
In Beowulf, everything seems larger or better or more terrible than
life. Heorot is "the most illustrious building under the sky"
(309-310). If Beowulf's hall is likewise "the best of buildings"
(2326a), there is no contradiction here but only a plethora of praise.
The lord who rules from Heorot is appropriately "the best of worldly
kings between the two seas" (i684b-85), and again there is no con-
tradiction with either Beowulf or King Offa, "the best of all mankind
between the two seas" (1955-56), for these men ruled at different
times, between different seas. The Danes are said to flock about their
king in a bigger, more decorous retinue than any other of which the
202 INTERPRETATION
narrator has heard (1011-12). They enjoy "the choicest of feasts"
(1232b), and their merriment as they flock about their king and queen
is greater than any other the narrator has seen (20i4.b-i6a). Hroth-
gar's gifts to Beowulf are unparalleled for their generosity (1027-29).
The necklace that Wealhtheow gives the hero is the best treasure of
which the narrator has heard, barring only the Brosinga mene
(1197-99). Scyld's funeral ship is decked out more beautifully with
weapons, clothes, and other treasures than any other known to the
speaker (38-403). Unferth's sword is "the best of blades" (1144a).
The sword that Hygelac presents to Beowulf as a reward for his vic-
tories is better than any other among the Geats (2i92b-93). The
hero's corselet, another heirloom, is "the best of battle-shirts" (453a).
Even the minor characters are painted in the strongest colors,
äschere is the "best," the "most beloved" of all Hrothgar's retainers
(1406a, 1296b). Wiglaf is "an immeasurably good thane" (2721b).
The seven Geats who rifle the barrow are "the finest" of them all
(3122b).
The referent of many different superlatives in the poem is, of
course, Beowulf, model hero and king. His physical attributes are de-
scribed first. The narrator introduces him as "the strongest of all
mankind in that day of this life" (196-197). The guard of the Danish
coast notes his singular appearance and confesses that he has never
seen a bigger man on earth (247b-25i). After the hero's reception in
Heorot, Hrothgar remarks that he has never heard a young man speak
so wisely (18420-43). Beowulf's actions in Denmark evoke further
superlatives. The Danes call him the finest warrior on earth and the
one most worthy of kingship (857b-61), while Wealhtheow says that
people will praise him as far as the sea encircles the earth (1221-243).
At the end of his life, not his strength or ferocious deeds, but the ex-
cellence of his character is praised. T o Wiglaf, he is the "most be-
loved" of men (2823), the "most worthy warrior over the whole
earth" (3099). T o the Geats who circle the barrow he is the "mildest"
and "gentlest" of men and the "kindest to his people" (3181-82).
The barrow the tribe builds for him is constructed with such care that
knowledgeable people will find it "most worthy" (3i6ib-62), and the
flames that consume his corpse make up "the greatest of pyres"
(3143b).
If the narrator is not stingy in bestowing praise, neither does he
withhold blame. Many of his judgments concern patterns of conduct
that deviate from the ideal values represented by such people as Scyld,
T H E N A R R A T O R ' S VOICE 203
205
2o6 INTERPRETATION
ular text of this sort is not likely to have been memorized. Alterna-
tively, if the poem was recomposed in the act of oral performance,
then such a public performance could not have generated the text.
Only a singer's private, leisurely dictation before a scribe or a team of
scribes could have done so. The poem would thus already have been
divorced from its natural function and setting, like most oral poetry
collected in our own day.
Instead of advancing my own hypothesis about the probable audi-
ence of the poem, I prefer to direct attention to the more fruitful
question of the nature of the audience in the poem. In what ways is
audience response important in this work? By what rhetorical strate-
gies is the audience made to participate? Such an approach renders
Beowulf less of an artifact, like a piece of goldwork on display in a mu-
seum, and more of a semidramatic song.
Such a phenomenological approach is demanded by the evidence
pointing to the poem's relation to the oral verse-making tradition of
early Germanic scops. Apart from the thorny question how the poem
was composed, an approach focusing on the audience's response can be
fruitful if one simply starts from the assumption that the text was pri-
marily intended to be declaimed or sung aloud rather than read pri-
vately. When readers pick up Beowulf privately today and study it as it
was never studied in Anglo-Saxon times, they can perhaps gain some
additional insight into it by putting themselves in the place of original
listeners, who did not have the text before them but entered an arena
in which speaker and audience participated in a game of the imagina-
tion.2 T o experience the poem in this way is more complicated than
either listening to it or reading it. It is to read it as a means of listening
to it in the mind's ear, past a gap of many centuries and momentous
social changes. While such an approach to the work may seem arbi-
trary, it is really far less so than approaching it as if it were meant to be
perused in an armchair or read in a university classroom.
I have already discussed how the poem presupposes a narrator who
validates the story and establishes it within a framework of belief. The
audience is assumed to share certain values to which the narrator al-
ludes from time to time as a way to reinforce the exemplary aspect of
the tale. The term lof "praise" or "glory," for example, is clearly ex-
pected to reverberate with positive connotations rather than with the
negative ones that might be appropriate to more sternly devotional
literature. By saying that a person will always prosper through
T H E LISTENING A U D I E N C E 207
if The audience not only brings its own knowledge and beliefs to the
poem but sometimes is drawn into the action by the presence of an au-
dience within the poem. So regularly does the hero appear accompa-
nied by others that a listening audience could identify with almost all
his movements by reference to those people around him. Whereas the
hero approaches the superhuman, these anonymous Danes or Geats
are ordinary souls. T o a certain extent their role resembles that of the
chorus in a classical tragedy, for they both witness the action and, oc-
casionally, comment on it. Often they function as a sort of dramatic
audience, for one sees and hears the action as if through their eyes and
ears. Their emotional reactions can thus shape ours, and the poet fre-
quently exploits this possibility for aesthetic effect.
One critic has identified the dramatic audience in each of the hero's
three great fights as a means by which "the poet establishes suspense
in spite of anticipatory comment." Even though readers are made to
know in advance how the fight will turn out, they are encouraged to
identify with the situation of a group of Danes or Geats who serve as
T H E LISTENING AUDIENCE 209
"functional onlookers" of the narrative event and who are ignorant of
its outcome.7 Doubtless the use of such a dramatic audience does en-
hance suspense for readers, as has been claimed. In addition, it can
serve other, equally important purposes, especially when one regards
the poem not as a text to be read at home but as a public event shared
by a performer and his audience.
The scene in Heorot shortly after Beowulf has returned in triumph
from Grendel's mere provides examples of the importance of such
functional onlookers. Hrothgar and the Danes have been drinking as
usual. The doors open and their eyes grow large when Beowulf—
whom they had not expected to see again—walks in with his band of
Geats, several of whom carry Grendel's severed head by the hair.
There is an obvious use of the device of the audience within the poem
here, but more interesting is what happens when Beowulf tells Hroth-
gar of his success and presents him with a second token of victory, the
hilt of the giant sword that he found in the monster's hall. For a long
moment the Danish king examines the hilt and the ancient runes with
which it is inscribed. No one speaks. Although by this stage in the
narrative the Danes' propensity for noisy merriment has been well es-
tablished, here the narrator pointedly says that "they all fell silent"
(1699b). Hrothgar then begins his address before what seems to be a
spellbound audience.
The narrator's aside (swigedon ealle) is not exactly a means of creat-
ing suspense in this situation. Nothing in the immediate plot hinges on
Hrothgar's words, and the very real suspense of the underwater fight
is now resolved. Rather, the aside is a means by which listeners are
prepared for a speech of great thematic importance. It is a signifier, a
signpost, that tells us to prick up our ears. By making an issue of the
Danes' falling silent at this moment, the narrator does what he can to
encourage the members of his own audience to follow suit. By this
means the narrator's audience is put into a situation very much like
that of the dramatic audience within the poem, and the two groups
begin to merge. Even more, the narrator himself then begins to merge
with Hrothgar, for it is through his voice that the fictive Danish king
speaks. Hrothgar's wisdom thus leaps past normal distinctions of time
and space: it is addressed as much to the listening Anglo-Saxons as to
the listening Danes.
Somewhat later in the same speech, as the king turns to address
Beowulf directly, the relation of speaker to listener is made yet more
210 INTERPRETATION
intimate. It is as if each member of the listening audience were being
encouraged to take the king's wisdom personally to heart. "You take
heed by this," Hrothgar says. "In the wisdom of my old age, I have
spoken these words concerning you!" (i722b-24a). T o any young
man in the audience, particularly if he identified himself at all with the
hero (as who would not?), the speaker's paternal admonition would
seem to be directed precisely at himself. In oral performance, Hroth-
gar's homiletic address would have an immediacy that goes beyond its
possible effect on most people encountering the written text.
A dramatic audience of a similar kind functions in many different
parts of the narrative, not merely in the three scenes of combat. T h e
funeral of Scyld is seen as if through the eyes of his followers, his "own
dear companions" (29a). As the king's ship departs over the waves, lis-
teners know no more of its destination than do the retainers left griev-
ing on the shore. At the end of the poem, the listening audience can
again imagine itself standing by the shore of the sea as mute witnesses
to the funeral of a glorious king. The last words of the poem represent
a collective eulogy in his behalf. The Geats who circle the barrow
speak with a single voice in praise of their king, and any listener who
so wishes is encouraged to join his voice with theirs in imagination "as
is fitting" (3174b).
T h e collective voice of the dramatic audience is also heard just after
the Grendel fight, when people come from all over to look on the
monster's trail and trace it to the mere. Again one sees the scene
through the eyes of participants in the poem: the bloody tracks, the
water mingled with gore, the fair paths leading back through the
wastes to Heorot. The men unite in high praise of Beowulf, thus tak-
ing the active role of a chorus (850b-86i). They then revert to their
usual passive role of dramatic audience as the king's thane strikes up a
song of Sigemund. Once again the narrator and the narrator's fictive
speaker merge for a while, just as the listening audience may find itself
modulating toward the group of listening Danes. After praising
Beowulf, the Danes now hear a singer celebrate his praises. In either
way, listeners are stirred from their impassivity and encouraged to
share the emotional response of actors in the poem.
During the three fights, the device of the dramatic audience not
only creates suspense but helps to condition the listeners' emotional
response. When the Danes feel "terrible fear" as they hear Grendel
howl in Heorot (784a), their reaction magnifies the sense of terror and
THE LISTENING AUDIENCE 211
wonder that any imaginative listener might feel at this point in the ac-
tion. A similar sense of horror is evoked when the men solemnly ven-
ture out along the narrow path that leads to Grendel's mere and come
to a halt where /Eschere's head is lying on a cliff. T h e pool wells with
gore. " T h e men looked on," the poet tersely adds (1422b). No fur-
ther description is necessary, for the listeners are encouraged to use
their own powers of imagination to visualize the scene just as it would
appear to the Danes and Geats on the shore. Later, after Beowulf has
descended into the waters and the Danes have given him up for dead,
any listener would be able to share in the reversal of emotion that the
Geats feel as they see him emerge unharmed. From being "sick at
heart" (1603a), they are suddenly rejoicing (1633a), and their reac-
tions would be capable of triggering corresponding ones on the part of
any listener who participated in the creation of the poem by permitting
his or her own feelings to be engaged.
It would be a mistake to conclude that these corresponding emo-
tions would necessarily be identical. T h e device of the dramatic audi-
ence can also lend itself toward irony, as happens in Greek tragedy
when the chorus is ignorant of the true situation facing the characters.
T o return to the previous example, when the Geats look on the wa-
ters of Grendel's mere "sick at heart," there is an important difference
between their reaction and what a listener's would be. T h e listener
knows that the blood welling to the surface of the mere is that of
Grendel and his mother. The dramatic audience thinks it is Beowulf's.
By establishing a distance between the two points of view, the poet is
able to put his listeners into a slightly superior and more detached po-
sition than that held by any of the actors in the narrative. The listen-
ers, but not Beowulf, the Danes, or the Geats, know more or less what
the outcome of each fight will be. T h e listeners, but not the Danes,
know that Heorot is vulnerable to destruction and that the marriage
between Ingeld and Freawaru is not destined to be blissful. On the sec-
ond night in Heorot, the listeners know that one of the Danes or Geats
will fall victim to Grendel's mother, but the men themselves sleep in
ignorance of her approach. More significant, the listeners know that
Grendel is part of the brood of Cain, but the actors in the narrative do
not. T h e listeners know that the Danes' religious devotions are no
other than devil-worship, but the Danes know no better. T h e listeners
are told that Beowulf's soul is saved, but his companions have no such
knowledge.
212 INTERPRETATION
Ultimately, despite all the ways in which it is drawn into active par-
ticipation, the listening audience remains somewhat aloof. Its percep-
tions are not necessarily the same as those of the dramatic audience,
though the two may sometimes coincide. In this way a complex inter-
play is established between the audience in the poem—the chorus, as it
were—and the audience of the poem, which sometimes sees what the
chorus sees and sometimes has superior knowledge. A similar interplay
exists between the narrator's voice and the various voices he imper-
sonates, several of which (Unferth's, for example) obviously speak in
foreign accents and others of which (Hrothgar's in the "sermon," for
example) sound very much like his, in that they express traditional
wisdom that is not conditioned by boundaries of time and space.
213
214 INTERPRETATION
does not deserve to be called a hero; a king who does not distribute
treasure scarcely deserves the title of king. Giving gifts is an act of the
highest social importance. It is an act governed by a threefold reci-
procity, for equal with the obligation to give and the obligation to re-
ceive is the obligation to pass on gifts to a third person.4 In Beowulf,
the archetypal bad ruler is Heremod, who "gave no treasures to the
Danes in pursuit of glory" (1719b-20) and lived out the end of his life
in misery after a period of national disaster. In the collection of Old
English maxims known as the "Cotton Gnomes," all that is requisite
of a king is reduced to a single essential: " A king is to distribute trea-
sure in the hall" (28b-29a). In the concluding verses of the collection
known as the "Exeter Gnomes," the idea is expressed that material
things stand in a one-to-one relationship to their possessors. " T h e
brave have helmets," we are told, "and the craven always have least
treasure" (203b-204). Also in the "Exeter Gnomes," the reciprocity
that is an accepted part of gift giving is expressed in brief: "One trea-
sure deserves a return; gold is to be given away" (i54b-i55a). A wry
maxim of the late Old English period, "Every gift looks over its shoul-
der," 5 expresses the nearly universal truth that gifts are given as one
part of a two-way exchange.
The institution of gift giving can thus be seen as a public ceremony
of rich symbolism. Precious gifts clearly reflect the glory of the givers,
for only people of worth could afford to present them.6 In addition,
they reflect the glory of the recipients, who would not be given some-
thing precious if they had not also proven themselves worthy. T h e
glory of the recipients shines at its brightest, however, when they in
turn present the gifts to others, for at this time both their personal
glory and their observance of the social code are manifest.
T h e concepts of treasure and reciprocity illustrated in Old English
literature were not the invention of poets but grew out of the realities
of Anglo-Saxon social life. The feud, for example, represents reciproc-
ity reduced to its most grim level. Injury demands injury; blood asks
for blood. Reciprocity at this level was the bane of Germanic society
from an early period, as is well documented in The Anglo-Saxon Chron-
icle and the Old Norse kings' sagas. Also from an early period, how-
ever, a more abstract system of reciprocity was sometimes able to put
an end to what otherwise would have been endless cycles of violence.
The institution of wergild was the great internal peacemaker of Ger-
manic society during a time when courts, judges, police, and jails, not
to mention the Sermon on the Mount, were virtually unknown.
RECIPROCITY 215
T h e one understanding that made possible wergild—"in its purest
form the blood-price, the sum paid in just compensation for a slay-
ing" 7 —was the notion that living people could be valued in terms of
material things, so that for legal purposes the two could be equated.
Each man had his price. What is more, each woman or slave also had a
price, in a hierarchical arrangement that fit the stratification of society.
While such a blunt way of reckoning the value of human beings is ab-
horrent today to those who believe in the sacredness of life, it was
taken for granted in Anglo-Saxon England. A man could even take his
price as a matter of pride. A person who climbed to a higher social
rank, and hence graduated to a higher wergild, would not only con-
gratulate himself for his improved statute but could feel more secure.
T h e higher a person's wergild, the greater incentive others would
have not to harm him, for they could rest assured that his relatives
would pursue the case until they obtained his price.
Although the laws concerning wergild varied from time to time and
area to area in Anglo-Saxon England, the mentality that sustained
them remained fairly constant. T h e introduction of Christianity not
only failed to dislodge this mentality, it never seems to have tried to do
so. Clergymen were given their own handsome wergild. Rather than
opposing "man-price" as inegalitarian or materialistic, the new reli-
gion promoted it as a way of settling feuds with a minimum of vio-
lence.
T h e institution of the heriot (from heregeatu "war gear") also seems
to have remained intact until the late Anglo-Saxon period. 8 This was a
strictly reciprocal relationship whereby every thane received his weap-
ons when he entered his lord's service. T h e wills of Anglo-Saxon no-
blemen indicate that the heriot normally consisted of a helmet, a coat
of mail, a sword, a shield, and one spear. By the time of Cnut it also
consisted of one horse with its gear. Upon the thane's death, this
equipment reverted to the lord, normally in kind, although occasion-
ally in its cash equivalent. T h e lord's presentation of the heriot was not
a gift outright but was contingent on the thane's providing military
service under terms clearly spelled out in the laws. A man's weapons
were what identified his status most visibly: a thane would possess the
full heriot, while an ordinary freeman would normally have just the
spear and shield. T h e material weapons thus virtually stood for the ab-
stract quality of being a thane, even though legally a freeman could
not claim the wergild of a thane until he owned five hides of land.
Whereas the heriot reverted to the lord who ultimately owned it,
2i6 INTERPRETATION
the lord himself, originally, was buried with weapons and treasure.
The "treasure drain" or "arms drain" that was thus inherent in Ger-
manic society could be remedied only through the lord's acquisition of
new treasures while he lived.9 He could not do this by stripping the
tombs of the dead, the most easily available means, because wœlreaf
was prohibited by law. Grave-goods were useless to men by common
assent. Treasure acquired through raiding other tribes provided a le-
gitimate alternative. Even better was the receipt of tribute, if treasure
could be obtained through the threat of force rather than its use.
The "treasure drain" that tended to promote a strong degree of bel-
licosity among the Germanic tribes ceased to be important after
Christian rites became the norm and the custom of burying grave-
goods ceased. At the same time, the ethic of war and the deadly reci-
procity of revenge were discouraged for doctrinal reasons. Peace be-
came economically feasible as well as morally advisable. In a poem like
Beowulf, set in the pre-Christian past, one thus finds the apparent
anomaly of a eulogy for a king who is buried with grave-goods and yet
did not go raiding.
This anomaly arises from a simple conjunction of artistic purposes.
In brief, the grave-goods are an essential part of the historical coloring
of the tale, while the absence of raiding pertains to the Christian au-
thor's living values. The dragon's treasure serves as an attractive way
of bridging the gap between ancient heroic ideals and the more tem-
perate ones of the poet's day, for the hoard provides magnificent
grave-goods without the moral cost that raiding would entail.
One can now understand how, far from being despised, precious
material possessions such as swords, armor, horses, tapestries, gold
cups, and necklaces evoke the poet's superlative praise. In Beowulf,
the sun itself is "heaven's gem" (2072b). Treasure giving and joy in
one's native home are equated (2884-863), while to be deprived of
treasure means to suffer the utmost wretchedness (3 015b-19).
In part I, Scyld Scefing is seen as the type of king who gains trea-
sure through his warlike acts or through the threat of force once his
reputation is established. The magnificence of his funeral, with its
multitude of treasures gathered from distant lands, befits a life lived in
fulfillment of the old heroic ideal. In accord with the code of reciproc-
ity, the lord who won great tribute for his people is given great tribute
at his passing.
Scyld's son Beow illustrates the workings of reciprocity in a differ-
RECIPROCITY 217
ent way. Thanks to his generosity while young, he wins the allegiance
of retainers who flock about him as voluntary companions in later
times of war. He shows how a lord prospers and wins praise through
faithful gifts to those who serve him.
While Hrothgar's martial success is passed over in a bare three
verses (64-653), his generosity occasions comment after comment.
From his gift-throne in Heorot he lives up to his promise to distribute
treasure to young and old, just as he won it through God's grace
( 7 1 - 7 2 , 8o-8ia). Parts of his hall are literally gilded. 10 His queen,
Wealhtheow, is also conspicuously adorned with gold. His gifts to
Beowulf are such that no one will ever find fault with them (1046-49).
His earlier treatment of the hero's father, Ecgtheow, illustrates the
complexities of how wergild can settle a feud whose violence might
otherwise keep escalating.
After Ecgtheow killed an important member of the tribe of Wylf-
ings, for reasons not told, he and his kinsmen either could not or
would not pay the slain man's wergild. Rather than staying home and
rendering his whole family vulnerable to the feud, he chose exile and
came to the young Hrothgar for shelter (or perhaps his tribe chose this
path for him—we are not told). Hrothgar resolved the feud by send-
ing the Wylfings treasure that probably more than equaled the price of
the slain man. By settling the feud, Hrothgar thus established a new
reciprocal tie with Ecgtheow, who "swore oaths" (472b) to him. Very
likely these oaths included the promise of future support should the
Dane ever need it. Such oaths would have been most welcome in view
of Ecgtheow's position as son-in-law to the reigning Geatish king. If
so, then it is owing to this incident that, years later, Hrothgar even-
tually succeeds in putting an end to the threat of the Grendel creatures
through the services of Beowulf, whose offer of help is based in the
code of reciprocity. The ties that bound Ecgtheow to Hrothgar are
inherited by Ecgtheow's son. Beowulf comes to Denmark not just to
prove his manhood but to settle family debts.
The workings of wergild are also illustrated by Hrothgar's response
to the death of Hondscioh, the Geat who is devoured by Grendel in
Heorot a few moments before the monster reaches for Beowulf. On
the next day, when the Danish king rewards each of Beowulf's com-
panions with an ancient treasure, he orders Hondscioh's wergild to be
paid in gold (1050-553). We are not told of the fate of the money, but
presumably Beowulf brought it back to distribute to the dead man's
2Iδ INTERPRETATION
kin according to the usual custom, whereby the closest kindred would
receive most. Since Beowulf introduces himself and his men as the
personal companions of the Geatish king, Hondscioh's price would
have been that of a thane, or the equivalent of twelve hundred West
Saxon shillings.
T h e other Geats would have been pleased by a gift that added visi-
bly to their stature. They are first introduced as a band of warriors
who are "rendered worthy by their weapons" (331a). Their swords,
helmets, and byrnies immediately identify them as thanes rather than
ordinary freemen, and the poet makes much of the way that their
gilded boar's-head helmets shine over their cheek-guards and their
coats of mail glisten and rustle. As the king's thane Wulfgar reports to
Hrothgar, "Dressed in their war gear, they seem worthy to be es-
teemed noblemen" (368-3693).
T h e hero's own possessions play a complex role that is worth trac-
ing. When Beowulf arrives in Denmark, his mail coat seems to be his
most precious possession. It is Weland's work and is said to be "the
best of all battle shirts" (453-4553). Just before the hero delivers his
first speech to Hrothgar, the narrator suspends the action for a mo-
ment to call attention to its radiance (4050-406). On at least two oc-
casions it saves his life: once during his swimming match with Breca
(549-558) and, more directly, at a critical moment of his fight with
Grendel's mother (1545-49). In the catalogue of weapons that imme-
diately precedes Beowulf's descent into Grendel's mere, a description
of the byrnie takes first place (1443-47). Before fighting Grendel,
Beowulf makes no arrangements concerning his sword or other weap-
ons if he should die, but he takes care to ask that his mail coat be sent
back to Hygelac (452-4553).
He takes similar precautions for the precious gifts he receives from
Hrothgar, which are not introduced casually but at length, as if the
listening audience were expected to take a connoisseur's interest in
them. They include 3 gilded boar's-head standard, a helmet, a byrnie,
and 3 precious sword that once belonged to Hrothgar's brother
Heorogar, if it was not once Healfdane's own. 1 1 T o these gifts the
king adds eight horses, one of which wears his own war saddle, and,
somewhat later, twelve other unspecified treasures (1866-67).
Wealhtheow adds 3 robe, two gold arm-bsnds, an unspecified number
of rings, 3nd a magnificent necklace ( 1 1 9 3 0 - 9 6 ) . Before plunging into
the mere, Beowulf asks that if he dies, the treasures be sent to Hyge-
RECIPROCITY 219
lac. His desire to have his ornamented sword given to Unferth follows
from the demands of reciprocity. He is taking Unferth's sword
Hrunting into the depths of the mere, and if he should not return, the
Dane deserves exact recompense.
At the conclusion of the Danish episodes, Hrothgar and Beowulf
exchange offers of friendship and support for the future, and the Geat
sails home with his treasures. T o Hygelac he gives the standard, hel-
met, mail coat, and sword, together with four horses, and to Hygd he
presents the necklace and three other horses. In this way he fulfills the
demands of thaneship, by which the great part of what he wins reverts
to his lord. Hygelac reciprocates in proper royal fashion by rewarding
him with seven thousand hides of land (or, very roughly, eleven hun-
dred square miles), together with a hall and throne, to be held in com-
mon with the king himself. He also bestows upon Beowulf an extraor-
dinary honor by giving him the most precious sword among the Geats,
one that had belonged to King Hrethel. Presumably the gift of land
was not entirely unexpected, for as the son of Ecgtheow and grandson
of Hrethel, Beowulf would scarcely have grown up landless. Now,
thanks to his success abroad, he has come into an inheritance that
leaves him one of the great noblemen of the realm.
In richer detail than any other pre-Conquest text, the first part of
the poem thus affords a window on the economic foundation of early
Germanic society. Although the view the author permits one to see is
idealized, it is not falsified, as comparing it with the information pro-
vided by law codes, charters, and wills of the period shows. The poem
brings these terse historical documents to life by showing us men and
women who put their mutual social obligations into practice in accord
with the demands of reciprocity. Arms, precious ornaments, human
lives, and human services can be equated in this society, pragmatically
speaking. They are functionally equivalent, for they can be exchanged
in a variety of ways spelled out by law and custom. The poet's praise of
material things should not be taken as mere ornamentation. It is a way
of identifying the stature of the persons who figure in the poem, the
kings and queens who give gifts as well as the people who receive and
use them. More important, precious material things identify the value
of the services performed by those who offer one another aid in fulfill-
ment of past debts and who do so not under compulsion but cheerfully,
as if fully aware that gifts bring gifts.
The way that I have taken to reach the meaning of the dragon's
220 INTERPRETATION
treasure may seem roundabout, but perhaps it is less subject to pitfalls
than any direct approach.
The thief who steals the flagon, to begin with, is not guilty of
wœlreaf because the treasures were not part of a funeral offering; they
were buried as a hoard. Still, the gold is explicitly called "heathen"
(2216a), and the people who buried it put a curse on it that was in-
tended to keep it undisturbed forever (3051-75). More important—
whether or not misconduct was involved in seeking out heathen trea-
sure, and leaving the curse aside—the thief may be considered to have
committed a gross practical error for which he deserves no sympathy.
Acting out of pure self-will, he has aroused a creature who seeks dam-
ages for the theft through an immediate and deadly sort of reciprocity.
After the dragon is aroused, Beowulf inherits a feud that only vio-
lence can settle. Although he did not provoke the fight, as the de-
fender of his people he has the obligation to see it through to comple-
tion. His primary purpose is to kill the dragon, not to win the hoard,
though he knows that a magnificent prize will fall to his tribe if he
succeeds. Just as the legendary Sigemund won "no little honor"
(885b) for having killed a dragon and gained its hoard, Beowulf can
expect to win lasting praise for winning both the victory and its mate-
rial tokens.
The hero's supposed "greed" is a false issue, to my mind, unless one
starts from the premise that all treasure is evil, a point of view that was
not common in Anglo-Saxon England and that the poet did not share.
Unlike the selfish Heremod or the hypothetical covetous ruler imag-
ined by Hrothgar in his "sermon," Beowulf has ruled as a model king
for fifty years. He has avoided the example of Hygelac and has never
set out raiding for gold. Three times toward the end of the poem he is
seen as one who gave his people gifts (2Ó35b-40, 3009b, 3034^-353).
It is clear that he did not manipulate his way to the throne for the sake
of the riches it might confer, for he once turned down Hygd's offer of
the kingship and preferred to take the part of guardian for her son
Heardred. Just before his death, in what fittingly has been called "a
most moving expression of willing self-sacrifice,"12 he thanks the Lord
that he could win great treasure "for my people," not for himself
(2797b). He bestows his necklace, helmet, and byrnie on Wiglaf—he
cannot give his sword, for it is broken—and he asks his young kins-
man to care for the needs of the tribe (28oob-28oia). Taken to-
gether, these passages scarcely suggest a man driven by greed. They
RECIPROCITY 221
need of rulers to distribute treasure for communal good than with the
need of people to renounce it for their salvation. In his "sermon,"
Hrothgar could have made much of the vanity of earthly goods. In-
stead, he stresses the danger of a king's bottling up wealth. Rather
than exhort his audience to forego material goods, time and again the
poet dwells lovingly on the beauty or value of precious objects and
speaks of the honor they lend their possessors.
Some readers might reject the poet's wisdom on this account. That
is fair. What is less defensible is to ignore the open and manifest
meaning of the poet's words and to read the work as if it were penned
by someone with Boniface's mentality. A poem about Germanic
heroes that evaluated the materialistic ethic of reciprocity from a spir-
itual standpoint would indeed be interesting, but this is not the text we
have. The hero of Beowulf participates with good faith in a social sys-
tem whose materialistic basis is largely sanctioned by the poet, and he
does what he can to help his tribe. Though he dies in the attempt, he
meets a magnificent death. T o read the poem as if it were meant to
illustrate the delusions of gold is to read it in the spirit of Chaucer's
"Pardoner's Tale" rather than of, say, the noblemen and artisans
(whether laymen or clergy) whose collaboration resulted in the glori-
ous material artifacts of the Anglo-Saxon period. In the Pardoner's
moral tale, three comrades find a treasure hoard, betray one another in
their greed, and discover death. In Beowulf, a king wins a hoard at ut-
most personal cost because he sets his people's needs above his own.
The Pardoner's exemplum shows what results when normal human ties
of reciprocity are defiled, so that God's stern justice is the only justice
that remains. The Anglo-Saxon poem shows how a person who both
wins gifts and gives them earns a good name on earth and final recom-
pense in heaven.
ΐ3· THE CONTROLLING THEME
224
T H E CONTROLLING T H E M E 225
neither too flushed with joy nor too despairing in wretchedness."2
Such a description may match the long-suffering saints of hagiographie
literature. It may match the patient Hrothgar (who is said by Kaske,
on the contrary, to represent all sapientia and no fortitudo). It has little
to do with Beowulf, whose fortitude is of a different sort. Rather than
exhibiting patience in adversity, Beowulf lives by a credo of action and
seems to be happiest when engaged in a struggle against adverse
powers.3
Other attempts to account for the controlling theme of Beowulf
have been no more successful. The poem has been read as an allegory
of salvation,4 but most of the narrative reflects such a sustained inter-
est in kinship ties, loyalty, revenge, courtly behavior, and Germanic
tribal history that to speak of salvation as the "controlling" theme
would be to emphasize it more than the poet does. A view of the poem
as an exemplary tale exhibiting, through the hero, the dangers of pride
and avarice has little to recommend it. Even if it were attractive as an
account of the dragon fight, it does not speak to the poet's concerns
during the first two episodes, in which almost all critics see the hero as
unaffected by pride or avarice.
Perhaps we have gone wrong, however, by assuming that the poem
has a controlling theme. Is there a controlling theme for the Canter-
bury Tales, Wordsworth's Prelude, or Pound's Cantos? Can a major lit-
erary work have a controlling subject, or, lacking even this, a control-
ling author, but no controlling theme?
Let us return to the proposition that the poem is "essentially about
a hero and heroism." Certainly Beowulf is the figure who dominates
one's interest from the early stages of the narrative to the end, and the
poem is built around his three heroic fights. Still, to consider Beowulf
as a controlling subject fails to take account of the large amount of ma-
terial that concerns other characters and events. The hero is not intro-
duced until line 194, where he is not yet named. In the meantime one
has heard much of the dynastic history of the Danes, including the
story of Scyld's fate and of Hrothgar's prosperous youth and the
building of Heorot. As time goes on one is told of Sigemund, Finn,
and Hengest; one hears an elaborate description of Grendel's mere;
one hears Hrothgar (not Beowulf) deliver a long discourse on the sub-
ject of pride and reversal in human affairs; one hears of Offa and
Thryth, of Freawaru and Ingeld and the Heathobards; one is shown an
imaginative portrait of the last survivor of a vanished race, and one
22Ó INTERPRETATION
hears his lament; one learns more than some readers would wish con-
cerning Scandinavian tribal history; and one is told much of Wiglaf s
background and heroism and of the future troubles of the Geats. All
this concerns the hero only indirectly if at all.
In addition, great parts of Beowulf's life remain untold. His biogra-
phy never unfolds sequentially. His fifty-year rule is passed over with
the briefest of summaries. Was he ever married? Was he educated?
Did he like to ride, to hawk, to hunt, to read or tell stories? One is
never told. Concerning his inner thoughts, aspirations, or anxieties, if
he ever had any, one knows almost nothing.
If the statement that the poem is essentially about a hero cannot
command full assent, then, consider the more attractive idea that it is
essentially about heroism. Not only Beowulf but Scyld, Beow, Hroth-
gar, Sigemund, Hygelac, Hengest, Ingeld, and Wiglaf fall under the
general rubric of "hero," whatever their differences may be. Taken
together, they would seem to define by example the concept of hero-
ism as it was understood within the context of early Germanic life.
And yet even to say that the controlling subject of the poem is hero-
ism leaves too much unexplained. Why does one find such an emphasis
on tribal history? What do the Danes or Geats collectively have to do
with the concept of heroism? Why does the major speech of the poem,
Hrothgar's "sermon," take as its chief theme not the desirability of he-
roic action, but the propensity of heroes to get into trouble? Why does
the poem introduce the last survivor, who is no hero? Why the "Fa-
ther's Lament," a purely elegiac passage?
If At this point one might throw up one's hands and conclude that if
there ever was a controlling theme or subject to the poem, it cannot be
determined today. My own view is that the poem does possess the-
matic unity, but a somewhat different unity than has been proposed by
those who look on wisdom and fortitude, salvation, pride, the hero, or
even the concept of heroism as what the work is most about. T h e
poem's controlling theme is community: its nature, its occasional
breakdown, and the qualities that are necessary to maintain it. Since
such a view is not likely to strike a reader as obvious, perhaps it de-
serves brief justification.
Beowulf is a heroic poem, true; but to say that the work is essen-
tially about heroism implies that the poet wished to exhibit heroic en-
deavor for its own sake as embodying the highest human aspirations
THE CONTROLLING THEME 227
and capabilities. He could have done but so, but he did not. He could
have shown us a hero engaged in three successive life-and-death fights,
each one of which illustrated the man's exceptional qualities of
strength and courage, so that by the end of the poem the audience
could have marveled at what a person can achieve in the course of a
heroic life. Some readers approach the poem as if it were composed
this way. They see in it "[no] higher theme than the life and death of
its hero." 5 They thereby disregard many indications that the poet was
as interested in the social context and consequences of heroic deeds as
in the deeds themselves. Beowulf's adventures are not recounted in a
vacuum, as they might have been. They do not take place on a de-
serted mountain or on an island at the world's end. From the begin-
ning, they are embedded in a historical context that relates them to the
time of ancestral kings. They are located geographically in the two
neighboring courts of Denmark and Geatland, each of which provides
examples of gracious social behavior and serves as a nexus of kinship
ties and reciprocal obligations among a variety of people. The setting
of the poem contributes to its theme by showing the why and where-
fore of heroic action. It shows us heroic action as a method, a means to
an end, rather than as an end in itself. The end to which Beowulf's ac-
tions are directed is community—peaceful human community among
kin and neighbors—and much more of the poem deals with this col-
lective issue than with any individual heroics.
One scholar, Kathryn Hume, has argued against a hero-centered
approach to the poem and sees its controlling theme as threats to social
order—specifically, "troublemaking, revenge, and war—problems in-
escapably inherent in this kind of heroic society, yet profoundly inimi-
cal to its existence."6 While such an approach hits close to mine, one
might question if this theme is developed so systematically that it is
"controlling." Feasting, gift giving, and the exchange of ceremonious
speeches all have to do with social order, for example, but they do not
constitute threats. Such an approach would be attractive if one could
accept Hume's view that the firedrake represents war, but if the
dragon represents anything, it is also first and foremost a dragon. Nei-
ther is it clear that the poet depicts troublemaking, revenge, and war
as problems inescapably inherent in heroic society. Beowulf rules the
Geats in peace for fifty years. Blood-feuds were potentially subject to
settlement through payment of wergild, if they could not be resolved
by force (as the Grendel feud was). As for troublemaking, it unfortu-
228 INTERPRETATION
nately seems endemic not only to heroic society but to societies in gen-
eral, hence the universal existence of laws and systems of punishment
to deal with it. All in all, this approach shifts the poem's emphases by
making too much of war and feuding and too little of the author's in-
terest in dynastic history, genealogies, gift giving, courtly etiquette,
song, and other forms of nonviolent communal interaction. T o reduce
Beowulf to a series of threats is to forget that life, to this poet, is also
seen as seledream, "joy in the hall" (2252a). Death is not only a re-
lease from troubles; it is also the end of "laughter . . . play, and merri-
ment" in the company of others (3020b-2ia). When the community
is split apart by war and feuding, the possibility of such joy vanishes.
For this reason the poet puts much stress not only on threats to social
order, but on the nature of social order and the importance of people
directing their energies to communal ends.
If one views the poem as centrally concerned with collective issues
as well as with individual heroism, some of its structural anomalies
cease to appear very puzzling. Its digressive method can be seen to
have a certain rationale, for the digressions are always directed to an
elucidation of the social context of the action and away from a simple
narrative of "what happens next." The slow development of the first
episode, with all its attention to courtly etiquette in Heorot, can be
seen not only as a sort of retardando of the main business at hand but
as a necessary identification of what it is that Beowulf is fighting for.
This is not etiquette, exactly, but something much more: the possibil-
ity of peaceful human interaction in a world frequently subject to vio-
lence. The poet's failure to mention Beowulf or the monsters in the
prelude to his poem—a curious omission if one remembers the speci-
ficity with which classical epics identify their subject in the first few
lines—thus guides the audience at once to the poet's true interests.
The early Scylding kings enter the narrative only to leave it, but they
embody qualities of leadership and munificence to which the poet will
allude many times. These qualities and others akin to them, such as
unflinching courage and unwavering loyalty to one's oaths and kinship
ties, are what hold society together. With greater precision than the
virtues of wisdom and fortitude, they sum up what is asked of men and
women in Germanic tribal society. Everything that the poet has to say
that bears on these qualities and their opposites is equally relevant to
his main theme of community, whether or not any hero commands the
spotlight.
THE CONTROLLING THEME 229
235
236 INTERPRETATION
Not only modern readers have a right to disagree about the meaning
of a literary work from the past. From an early time, the work may
have meant different things to different listeners.
The existence of more than one judgment concerning the signifi-
cance of a work need not condemn it to oblivion, nor does such dis-
agreement necessarily turn it into a battleground wherein reader is set
off against reader or listener against listener. On the contrary, un-
ambiguous works sometimes divide an audience by their polemical
nature. One could argue that the Beowulf poet steers such an even-
handed and, ultimately, ambiguous course between tragedy and cele-
bration, between secular and religous ideals, that almost all members
of his audience would have been able to unite in admiration of the
poem and its articulation of certain general truths.
My remarks might seem to be leading to the conclusion that those
who praise the hero and those who damn him are equally justified,
given the possibility of medieval precedent for either view. This is not
my point. Critical relativism is not such an attractive refuge that one
must opt for it at the earliest opportunity, as if there were no way to
evaluate the likelihood that a particular judgment accords with an au-
thor's primary intentions. While ultimately an author's intentions may
be irrecoverable, the text is not lost, and one can tell what it says, al-
ways allowing for the possibility of honest disagreement about the
meaning of certain words and phrases.
In my own view, Beowulf expresses an essentially conservative im-
pulse. First and foremost, it praises a life lived in accord with ideals
that help perpetuate the best features of the kind of society it depicts.
The ideals deserve the name "heroic," but they are of Christian and
well-nigh universal significance as well. Most notably they include the
notions of unflinching courage in the face of adversity; unswerving
loyalty in fulfilling one's duty to one's king, one's kindred, and one's
word, and in carrying out one's earned or inherited social obligations
in general; and unsparing generosity, particularly on the part of kings
and queens. While these ideals motivate the conduct of many people in
the poem, they find most consistent expression in the life of Beowulf,
who is depicted at various stages of life and whose great adventures
successively exemplify praiseworthy conduct in a young warrior and
an aged king. The heroic code by which Beowulf lives is not presented
as something splendid and impractical, but as splendid and eminently
practical, in that societies are shown to stand or fall in accord with their
ability to sustain it.
T H E F A T A L CONTRADICTION 237
The hero follows a code that exalts indomitable will and valour in the
individual, but society requires a king who acts for the common good,
not for his own glory. The greater the hero, the more likely his ten-
dency to imprudent action as king. The three battles with the monsters,
the central episodes in the poem, reveal a pattern in which Beowulf's
preeminence as a hero leads to the destruction of the Geats when he be-
comes king . . . All turns on the figure of Beowulf, a man of magnifi-
cence, whose understandable, almost inevitable pride commits him to in-
dividual, heroic action and leads to a national calamity by leaving his race
without mature leadership at a time of extreme crisis, facing human en-
emies much more destructive than the dragon (pp. 89, 101-102).
Although the gist of Wiglafs speech is clear, its details are fraught
with uncertainties, and the translation I have offered must be taken as
tentative.
First, does anes willan mean "through one man's will," or "for the
sake of one [person]," as Klaeber glosses the words?' If the latter,
THE FATAL CONTRADICTION 239
Wiglaf means only that the Geats are lamenting Beowulf's death; if
the former, he means to say that Beowulf's stubborn decision to fight
the dragon led to their misery. Grammar will not determine the mat-
ter. Given the speaker's emphasis in the next lines on the hero's refusal
to accept any moderating advice, however, I discern a note of criticism
as well as regret in W i g l a f s words.
Then again, what is the wrœc, or "misery," to which the speaker
refers—the Geats' present grief, or the future troubles that the mes-
senger predicts they will suffer? Since Wiglaf refers to the Geats' mis-
ery as something that has already come about, one cannot conclude
that he is blaming Beowulf for bringing about hypothetical future di-
sasters. Wiglaf regrets that the king left himself vulnerable to being
killed, and that is the wrœc in question.
These questions of words and their meaning do not resolve a more
general question. Why are we told only at this point, after the fight,
that the hero went against the advice of his counselors? The poet's
practice here calls to mind an earlier passage when, long after the fact,
Hygelac mentions to Beowulf that he had opposed the hero's journey
to Denmark (1994^-98). In that prior instance the introduction of the
motif of "stubborn action against contrary advice" served to raise the
hero in the estimation of the audience by showing how he achieved his
victory in spite of timid counsel. Here much the same end is achieved,
for Beowulf has won even greater glory than before. Even while
dwelling on the cost of the king's achievement, Wiglaf pays tribute to
the man who alone "kept to his high destiny" when his countrymen
were urging him to evade it. A wholly different effect would have re-
sulted had the poet chronologically shown first the dragon's attack,
then the counselors' advice to the king, then Beowulf's defiance of this
advice. Such a sequence would have underscored the king's propensity
for headstrong action in much the same way as the author of The Song
of Roland highlights the arrogant confidence of Roland by showing
him defy prudent counsels in the course of a dramatic public debate.
This the poet refrains from doing, not merely out of a desire to break
up sequential chronology but to show the king as having kept to a
"high destiny" when with only slight loss of honor, as one discovers in
retrospect, he could have taken a more timid course.
W i g l a f s speech raises still another question. Can one assume, with
the counselors, that the dragon was going to lie quiet in its barrow "till
the world's end"? If so, then they were right, and Beowulf's contrary
240 INTERPRETATION
Wiglaf does not say that the joys of the tribe will cease once hostile
tribes hear the news of Beowulf's death. He singles out the Geats'
cowardice, not their hero's death, as the source of their approaching
misfortunes. Those who condemn the king for dying seem to assume
that he was going to live forever. T h e important question is: Will the
king leave behind him leaders capable of defending the realm with
courage and strength like his? T h e Geats have provided a visible an-
246 INTERPRETATION
swer to this question by running away. Not only will they decline to
fight a formidable enemy, they will violate their most compelling du-
ties and desert their king to save their skins. They prefer edwitlif, "a
life of shame," to the possibility of death in battle, for Wiglaf showed
that one could stand against the dragon and survive. Wiglaf emphati-
cally tells them what their conduct will mean in the eyes of others. The
Geats' cowardice serves as an open invitation to invade the realm.
Both for its inherent shamefulness and for its practical effects, the
Geats' behavior represents all that is to be avoided in the society de-
picted in the poem, and Wiglaf reduces matters to their essentials
when he says that "death is preferable" (2890b).
I cannot see, then, that Beowulf destroys the Geats or in any other
way acts out the role of an irresponsible leader who acts only for per-
sonal glory. Such behavior is indeed criticized in the poem, but not by
his example. On the contrary, Beowulf is so concerned for the safety
of his people that he forbids them to risk their lives even when one
might think that their help would be welcome. During his long reign,
he never sought out quarrels and thus was able to preserve his people
in a peace uncharacteristic of their age.
If the behavior of anyone in the poem is to be considered irrespon-
sible and impractical, it is that of the Geats, whose failure to live by the
heroic ideal proves to be impractical in the extreme, even to the point
of leading to their ruin as soon as they no longer have a hero to protect
them. Rather than suffering spiritual deterioration, Beowulf ends his
mature life as he had begun it years before in Hrothgar's court, with
acts of splendid and uncompromising devotion to a code of conduct
that places the good of others above oneself. O f all the persons in the
poem it is he who most commands admiration, for he wins not only
fame for his personal heroism and salvation for a life lived justly, but
the name of a good king for having directed his energies for the wel-
fare of society rather than for his own advantage.
There is thus no need to look for a tragic flaw in either the hero or
his society. In this poem, as has been wisely remarked, "the tragic ele-
ment is built into the very fabric of life itself and is as natural as the
coming of spring or of a dragon." 13 As for the hero's death, without
perhaps being a "triumph" 14 it can hardly be considered a defeat that
indicates that his actions were foolish or that he had somehow fallen
from grace. As one critic has put it, "That sinners live and saints die is
a fact of every-day experience which does not prove that God is with
THE F A T A L CONTRADICTION 247
15
the former and against the latter." Beowulf went into battle fully
cognizant that he might die, and the prospect did not make him
cringe. He shows a Christian readiness for death and an awareness that
all things are in divine dispensation. His last words express neither re-
gret nor self-incrimination, but only a quiet satisfaction that he has ac-
complished what he set out to do.
Does the poem then present "a criticism of the essential weakness
of the society it portrays"? In a certain way, yes: not by showing how a
decision to act by the heroic ideal can lead to disaster, but by showing
how a failure to act by the heroic ideal can do so. If the society por-
trayed in Beowulf is weak, its weakness can be ascribed to the too-
frequent failure of people to live by the ethics that, when put into
practice, hold society together. The fatal contradiction developed
through the narrative of Beowulf is nothing inherent in heroic society,
feudal society, capitalist or Marxist society, or any other social system.
It is lodged within the recalcitrant breasts of human beings who in
times of crisis find themselves unable to live up to the ideals to which
their lips give assent. The poem does not criticize the hero for being
unlike the Geats. It criticizes all of us for not being more like the hero.
AFTERWORD:
THE EXCELLENCE OF BEOWULF
248
T H E EXCELLENCE OF BEOWULF 249
nastic origins, under the theory that only a cleric would have had the
learning and cultivation to compose a poem of this kind. For reasons
already presented, I find it likely that much of this excellence derives
from native sources somewhat removed from monastic libraries and
the pens of clerics. The manifest superiority of Beowulf to Heliand,
Genesis A, Andreas, and the other Old Germanic religious epic poetry
is a plausible argument for its nonmonastic origin.1 There are no real
models in the Bible or in classical or patristic literature for Beowulf. As
for the tenth-century Walthariipoesis, its narrative technique is so infe-
rior as to suggest that however the Beowulf poet learned his craft, he
did not do so by imitating Latin hexameters.
My point is not simply that the poem is excellent. Any reader is free
to make this discovery without a critical guidebook. I wish to empha-
size that the poem's alien kind of excellence could not be predicted on
the basis of the other literature of the period. If the Beowulf manu-
script had been destroyed instead of only singed in the fire that swept
through Ashburnham House in 1731, no one could guess that a poem
of such quality once existed. There would be no compelling reason to
believe that any Germanic people had developed the art of secular he-
roic poetry to epic proportions, or if it had, that such an epic would
deviate so sharply from the classical tradition as well as from most cur-
rent aesthetic norms.
I have stressed the poem's debt to the oral traditions of the early
Germanic aristocracy in part because I suspect that modern readers
have erred not only in finding many attitudes nongermane to the poem
but in having concentrated on individual heroism in it when the poet
was also concerned with communal issues. The hero Beowulf was not a
real king calling for flattery, after all. He was an invention, a fictive
person set in motion through such acts as were believed to help hold
society together.
Some readers have seen Beowulf as a hero whose character deterio-
rates after his promising youth. Others regard him as an insolent
youth who grows more perfect with age. My own view is that the hero
progressively represents an ideal that corresponds to each stage of
human development from childhood to old age. Because children are
not expected to behave like old men, there seems to be some growth in
his character; but this is not psychological growth of the kind that one
sees in realistic novels. Rather than welling from within, it is imposed
from without, for as the hero grows older, he acts according to a dif-
250 AFTERWORD
ferent model. As his role matures, so do the man's actions, for his
identity consists of fulfilling one or another set of expectations con-
cerning the behavior appropriate to the different stages of life.
First is childhood, the period of dormancy, of slow growth that
occurs away from public eyes. The child's father has left him aban-
doned, in effect, so that he is raised by his maternal grandfather
Hrethel. T o the relatively stern and demanding eyes of others he ap-
pears lazy, like the "Ash-boy" hero of many folktales. He does noth-
ing; he watches and listens.
Next comes youth, the time of venturing and testing. He has grown
strong. For no other reason than an excess of high spirits he and Breca
challenge one another to a contest on the seas. The fame he wins pre-
cedes him to Denmark. Unferth claims that the two youths risked
their lives "out of pride" and "for a foolish boast." Beowulf does not
deny the accusation; he only stresses that they were then no more than
boys, and this, together with his success, is defense enough.
Third is early manhood. The time has come for him to put his
strength to use in the service of society. Hrothgar's officer Wulfgar
confesses his belief that Beowulf has undertaken the journey to Den-
mark "out of pride," but the words now have a positive connotation:
they are set into apposition with the phrase for higej^rymmum, "out of
greatness of spirit" (338-3393). Far from taking on the adventure as a
lark, Beowulf has chosen to risk his life in a matter of the highest con-
sequence. Although strong enough to wrestle Grendel into submis-
sion, he is no mere muscled champion. He has the wits to put Unferth
to shame in a verbal flyting, the cunning to take Grendel by surprise,
the endurance to withstand the worst that Grendel's mother can serve
him, and sufficient graciousness in all his dealings to earn Hrothgar's
praise as a young man whose strength is equaled by good judgment.
The next stage is that of the mature adult. Although the poet omits
any direct treatment of the hero's middle years, one learns enough
from retrospective comments to know how well they confirm his ear-
lier promise. During the battle in which Hygelac falls in the Rhine-
land, Beowulf distinguishes himself by killing Daeghrefn and winning
thirty sets of arms. At home he restrains the great gift of strength that
the Lord has given him. Instead of accepting the throne for himself,
he helps his nephew Heardred rule. After Heardred's death he rules in
peace for fifty years. No tribe dares attack him, and he seeks out no
fights. Nothing is said of his trying to prove his strength or manhood
further.
T H E E X C E L L E N C E OF BEOWULF 251
2
Last is old age. When called on to fight his most formidable adver-
sary of all, Beowulf shows the same indomitable will that enabled him
to defeat the Grendel creatures many years before. With calm resigna-
tion, in a gesture that has been seen as foolhardy but that is based on
an accurate assessment of the dependability of his thanes, he sets out to
fight the dragon alone and kills it at the cost of his life. He speaks his
last words with the quiet dignity of one who dies with no remorse.
These are the five stages of life that one sees illustrated by a man
whom the narrator calls Beowulf, but who represents a particular type
of heroism rather than any idiosyncratic human being. If one adds to
these stages the period of infancy and the state of death, one arrives at
a pattern that calls to mind the familiar theme of the seven ages of
man. Probably the resemblance is coincidental. The seven ages of
Beowulf are not presented in chronological sequence but must be re-
constructed from scattered references. In addition, while the usual
point of this topos is to exhibit the vanity of earthly ambitions, the
Anglo-Saxon poet stresses the hero's final glory rather than his decline
and fall.
Nevertheless, the analogy lets us see that the poet does not simply
present "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." 3 Besides this, he introduces enough
details from the hero's life to permit one to see it as a gradual matura-
tion. One sees Beowulf's strength and courage grow great from inaus-
picious beginnings. One sees his energy turn outward, away from triv-
ial displays, until it is directed against forces that threaten the social
order. Just as important, one also sees this energy held in check when
the crisis that provoked its use has passed. Beowulf not only acts, he
also knows that in any good warrior "thought should be restrained, the
hand controlled" ("Exeter Gnomes," 1 2 1 ) . Altogether, one witnesses
the type of life of one who consistently "strove for good repute"
(2179a). Unwilling to abide by the limits that most people allow to be
set on their search for personal excellence, Beowulf declines to com-
promise with his own potential weakness. " H e kept to his high des-
tiny" (3084a), as Wiglaf remarks in what can be taken as a capsule
summary of his lord's career.
Significantly, this destiny did not encompass warlike deeds of the
kind celebrated in many epics. In Beowulf the pagan heroic virtues are
tempered by the Christian virtues of selflessness and restraint. If the
poem was meant to facilitate the enculturation of a warrior class, as it
252 AFTERWORD
may in part have been, then this class did not live by the crusader's
creed.4 The poem would not have made patriots' hearts beat faster.
Winding persistently through the last thousand lines is a melancholy
music to which warriors' feet could not march. From beginning to
end, the hero shuns unnecessary violence. Unlike many in the poem,
he makes no raids and starts no feuds.5 Hrothgar takes Beowulf to be
an agent of God, and neither implicitly nor explicitly does the poet
contradict this judgment. It is not by chance that the hero wins final
praise as manna mildust ond mowSwcerust, "most mild and gentle of
men" (3181). 6 In the West Saxon translation of the Vulgate Gospel of
Matthew, monpwœre translates mansuetus and is used of Christ on His
entry to Jerusalem. In Psalms 77 and 146 the word is used of God in
His merciful aspect. jElfric attributes a similar quality to David, who is
said to be pleasing to God for his manpwœrnysse.7 It is safe to say that
the word had positive connotations. Consciously or unconsciously the
author may have used it as a way of letting the hero modulate closer to
the ranks of the saints and Old Testament prophets celebrated in the
devotional literature of the age. Such associations would not have hurt
the poem's chances for survival in the monastic setting where virtually
all Anglo-Saxon literature was preserved.
All the same, few readers confuse the hero with the speaker of the
Sermon on the Mount. Beowulf is also praised for his ellenweorc, "he-
roic deeds" (3173). He is a type of the active hero, not the contempla-
tive one. There is a toughness in him that is not the same as the forti-
tude of a saint or of the Christian Savior, although he has these
reserves of inner strength in ample measure too. One should not for-
get that the same man who is praised as a model of kindness crushes
Daeghrefn with his bare hands and takes pride in having fought in Hy-
gelac's vanguard.
Rather than being either a call to arms or a treatise on the subject of
nonviolence, the poem celebrates a man of the pre-Christian past who
also, without any awareness of the fact, leads a life with which few
Christian Englishmen could have found fault. There is a point in
human affairs at which Christian piety and enlightened secular wisdom
can begin to look alike. The poet was less interested in distinguishing
between the two sets of values than in allowing them to reinforce one
another. By celebrating the less brutal aspects of the heroic way of life
and by portraying his main characters as pious monotheists, the author
established a common ground between fifth- and sixth-century Scan-
T H E E X C E L L E N C E OF BEOWULF 253
dinavia and the England of his own day.8 He did so not only to pro-
mote the poem's survival in monastic scriptoria, I suspect, but to
express an attitude toward the world that he found noble and humane.
257
258 ABBREVIATIONS
1. T H E MARVELOUS
1. J. R. R. Tolkien, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," PBA, 22
(1936): 245-295.
2. Robert E. Kaske, "The Eotenas in Beowulf" in Creed, p. 300, and
"Beowulf," in Critical Approaches to Six Major English Works, ed. R. M. Lu-
miansky and Herschel Baker (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1968), pp. 4-5.
3. Karl P. Wentersdorf, "Beowulf's Withdrawal from Frisia: A Recon-
sideration," SPh, 68 (1971): 395-415. On this problem of interpretation,
note further Earl R. Anderson, "Beowulf s Retreat from Frisia: Analogues
from the Fifth and Eighth Centuries," ELN, 19 (1981): 89-93 (with addi-
tional bibliographical citations).
4. James W. Earl, "Beowulf's Rowing-Match," Neoph., 63 (1979):
285-290.
5. Fred C. Robinson, "Elements of the Marvellous in the Characteriza-
tion of Beowulf," in Pope Studies, pp. 119-137. For an earlier, less successful
attempt to do away with marvelous elements in the poem see Signe M. Carl-
son, "The Monsters of Beowulf: Creations of Literary Scholars," JAF, 80
(1967): 357-464.
6. See Friedrich Panzer, Studien zur germanischen Sagengeschichte, vol. I:
Beowulf (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1910). Panzer based his study on the Grimm
tale "Der starke Hans" and its numerous analogues, some of which are listed
under type 650A ("Strong John") and some under type 301 ("The Three
Stolen Princesses") in the standard index by Antti Aarne and Stith Thomp-
son, The Types of the Folktale, 2nd revision, FF Communications no. 184
(Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1961). For further discussion see
Gwyn Jones, Kings, Beasts, and Heroes (London: Oxford University Press,
1972), pp. 6-19. Robert A. Barakat, "John of the Bear and Beowulf, " West-
ern Folklore, 26 (1967): 1-11, discusses parallel elements in Beowulf and a
Mexican version of the "Bear's Son" folktale. For a wonderfully American-
ized analogue to the Grendel episode, see Vance Randolph, Sticks in the
Knapsack and Other Ozark Folktales (New York: Columbia University Press,
1958), pp. 17-18.
7. In making the following distinctions between Märchen and Sage I am
indebted particularly to two books by the Swiss folklorist Max Lüthi: Das
europäische Volksmärchen, translated by John D. Niles as The European
261
2Ó2 N O T E S T O PAGES 6 - 1 2
Folktale: Form and Nature (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human
Issues, 1982), esp. pp. 4-12 and 21-23, and Volksmärchen und Volkssage:
Zwei Grundformen erzählender Dichtung, 2nd ed. (Munich: Francke, 1966).
8. The subject of the attitude of legend tellers to the stories they re-
count is taken up in detail by Linda Dégh and Andrew Vázsonyi, "Legend
and Belief," Genre, 4 (1971): 281-304.
9. The bibliography for such creatures of popular belief is extensive and
ranges from studies that attempt to prove their existence, for example, John
Willison Green, On the Track of the Sasquatch (Agassiz, British Columbia:
Cheam Publishing, 1968); to others that accept the possibility of their exis-
tence, for example, John R. Napier, Bigfoot: The Yeti and Sasquatch in Myth
and Reality (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972); to others that take a skeptical
view, such as M. Carole Henderson, "Monsters of the West: The Sasquatch
and the Ogopogo," in Folklore of Canada, ed. Edith Fowke (Toronto:
McClelland and Steward, 1976), pp. 251-262. Articles representing many
different points of view are included in Manlike Monsters on Trial: Early
Records and Modern Evidence, ed. Marjorie M. Halpin and Michael M.
Ames (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1980).
10. Alain Renoir, "Point of View and Design for Terror in Beowulf,"
NM, 63 (1962), rpt. in Fry, p. 164.
11. See Nora K. Chadwick, "Norse Ghosts," Folk-Lore, 57 (1946):
50-65 and 106-127. On the draugr and other monstrous creatures of the
Norsemen, see also Kathryn Hume, "From Saga to Romance: The Use of
Monsters in Old Norse Literature," SPh, 77 (1980): 1-25.
12. Nora K. Chadwick, "The Monsters and Beowulf," in The Anglo-
Saxons: Studies . . . Bruce Dickins, ed. Peter Clemoes (London: Bowes and
Bowes, 1959), pp. 178-190, passim.
13. Extracts from the story are given in Old Norse and modern English
translation in Chambers, pp. 186-192.
14. R. C. Boer, ed., Qrvar-Odds Saga (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1888), pp.
125-137, version A; compare Paul Edwards and Hermann Pálsson, trans.,
"Arrow-Odd": A Medieval Novel (New York: New York University Press,
1970), chaps. 19-23; quotation from Edwards and Pálsson, p. 68.
15. See Lars Malmberg, "Grendel and the Devil," NM, 78 (1977):
241-243, and Tolkien, appendix A ("Grendel's Titles"), in Nicholson, pp.
88-91.
16. See Oliver F. Emerson, "Legends of Cain, Especially in Old and
Middle English," PMLA, 21 (1906): 831-929; note also S. J. Crawford,
"Grendel's Descent from Cain," MLR, 23 (1928): 207-208; and 24 (1929):
63; Marie P. Hamilton, "The Religious Principle in Beowulf," PMLA, 61
(1946): 309-330; Evelyn Lohr, "Patristic Demonology in Old English Lit-
erature" (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1947), a seventeen-page sum-
mary of which has been published under the same title as a pamphlet (New
York: New York University Press, 1949); Robert E. Kaske, "Beowulf and
the Book of Enoch," Speculum, 46 (1971): 427-428; Niilo Peltola, "Gren-
del's Descent from Cain Reconsidered," NM, 73 (1972): 284-291; Ruth
NOTES T O PAGES 1 2 - 1 7 263
Mellinkoff, "Cain's Monstrous Progeny in Beowulf: Part I, Noachic Tradi-
t i o n , " ^ ^ , 8 (1979): 143-162, and "Cain's Monstrous Progeny in Beowulf:
Part II, Post-Diluvian Survival," ASE, 9 (1981): 183-197; and M. Andrew,
"Grendel in Hell," ES, 62 (1981): 401-410.
17. See Benjamin Thorpe, ed., fiilfric's Catholic Homilies, I (London:
/Elfric Society, 1844), 22-25; John C. Pope, ed., Homilies of M/fric: A Sup-
plementary Collection, II, EETS no. 260 (London: Oxford University Press,
1968), pp. 687-688 (lines 197-201); and Paris Psalter 95:5, "syndon ealle
hae£)enu godu hildedeoful."
18. See Kenneth Sisam, "The Compilation of the Beowulf Manuscript"
in his Studies in the History of Old English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon,
1953), pp. 65-96.
19. Montague Rhodes James, Marvels of the East (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1929), p. 9. Medieval monster-lore is taken up in general terms
by Rudolph Wittkower, "Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of
Monsters," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute, 5 (1942):
159-197, and John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art
and Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981). The rela-
tionship between Beowulf and the compendium known as the Liber mon-
strorum is taken up by Dorothy Whitelock, The Audience of "Beowulf" (Ox-
ford: Clarendon, 1951), pp. 46-53, and, with more speculative conclusions,
by L. G. Whitbread, "The Liber monstrorum and Beowulf," MS, 36 (1974):
434-471. Ann Knock, "The Liber monstrorum: An Unpublished Manuscript
and Some Reconsiderations," Scriptorium, 32 (1978): 19-28, doubts the
Anglo-Saxon origin of the Liber, which has recently been reedited by Franco
Porsia (Bari: Dedalo Libri, 1976).
20. Stanley Rypins, ed., Three Old English Prose Texts in MS. Cotton
Vitellius A. XV, EETS no. 161 (London: Oxford University Press, 1924),
p. 62.
21. Ibid., pp. 62-63.
22. Ibid., p. 53.
23. James, Marvels, p. 51.
24. Hell is described as grundleas, "bottomless," in Christ 1544-45 and
"The Whale" 45-46.
25. See W. W. Lawrence, "The Haunted Mere in BeowulfPMLA,
27 (1912): 208-220 (esp. p. 219). Kemp Malone, "Grendel and His
Abode," in Studia philologica et litteraria in honorem L. Spitzer, ed. A. G.
Hatcher and K.-L. Selig (Bern: Francke, 1958), pp. 297-308, identifies the
pool strictly as part of the ocean. He succeeds in clarifying several obscurities
of the description, but in his search for consistency he perhaps minimizes the
fantastic nature of this imaginative landscape.
26. See Lowry Charles Wimberly, Folklore in the English and Scottish
Ballads (1928; rpt. New York: Dover, 1965), pp. 121-138 ("Locality of the
Otherworld").
27. For bibliographical citations relating to this commonplace of folk
belief see Stith Thompson, Motif Index of Folk Literature, 6 vols. (Blooming-
264 N O T E S T O PAGES 17-23
ton: Indiana University Press, 1955-1958), motifs F141, "Waterbarrier to
otherworld"; F133, "Submarine otherworld"; F134, "Otherworld on is-
land"; and related motifs in this part of the index. See further Howard Rollin
Patch, The Other World, According to Descriptions in Medieval Literature
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950).
28. R. Morris, ed., The Bückling Homilies, EETS nos. 58, 63, 73 (Lon-
don: Oxford University Press, 1874-1880; rpt. in one vol. 1967), pp.
209-211 (my translation).
29. For a variety of reasons I take the homilist to be the later author.
His description of hell's mouth is introduced with the most perfunctory of
transitions; in the words of Morris (p. vi), it "seems out of place" in a sermon
whose avowed subject is the angels and "is evidently borrowed from an older
source." The description of Grendel's mere, on the other hand, is integrated
organically into the surrounding narrative as one of the most effective pas-
sages in which the poet pauses for a moment to exploit the emotional over-
tones of the action. It has every appearance of being a carefully planned part
of the design for terror of the poem. I see no reason to doubt the conclusion
of Carleton Brown, "Beowulf and the Blickling Homilies, and Some Textual
Notes," PMLA, 53 (1938): 905-916, as confirmed by Antonette di Paolo
Healey, The Old English Vision of St. Paul, Speculum Anniversary Mono-
graphs, 2 (Cambridge, Mass.: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1978), p. 52,
that the Blickling homilist knew Beowulf and that in following the Visio Pauli,
he modified his description of hell under the influence of the Anglo-Saxon
poem. If so, we cannot conclude that the Visio was a source for the descrip-
tion of Grendel's mere, as sometimes has been claimed. About the Beowulf
poet's sources we know next to nothing.
30. Alan Cabaniss, "Beowulf and the Liturgy," JEGPh, 54 (1955):
195-201, and Maurice B. McNamee, "Beowulf—An Allegory of Salva-
tion?" JEGPh, 59 (I960): 190-207.
31. Edward B. Irving, Jr., A Reading of "Beowulf" (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1968), p. 15.
32. Joseph Fontenrose, Python: A Study of Delphic Myth and Its Origins
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), pp. 258-259.
33. See Lewis E. Nicholson, "Hunlafing and the Point of the Sword,"
in Anglo-Saxon Poetry: Essays in Appreciation for John C. McGalliard, ed.
Lewis E. Nicholson and Dolores Warwick Frese (Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1975), pp. 50-61, and M. F. Vaughan, "A Reconsidera-
tion of 'Unferö,' " NM, 77 (1976): 32-48. While several of Nicholson's
suggestions are too speculative to command assent, there is good reason to
follow both authors in holding that the consistent manuscript reading
HunfertS, which if it is a significant name means "the one of Hunnish spirit,"
is acceptable as it stands and deserves restoration in editions and critical com-
mentaries. In this book I keep to the time-honored form "Unferth" so as not
to force an issue that is beside my main concerns.
34. For example, T. M. Gang, "Approaches to Beowulf," RES, n.s. 3
(1952): 1-12; Kenneth Sisam, "Beowulf's Fight with the Dragon," RES,
NOTES T O PAGES 1 3 - 3 2 265
n.s. 9 (1958): 129-140; and Jones, Kings, Beasts, and Heroes, pp. 16-17.
35. Whitelock, Audience, pp. 73-74; see also Frank M. Stenton, "The
Historical Bearing of Place-Name Studies: Anglo-Saxon Heathenism," in
Preparatory to Anglo-Saxon England: Being the Collected Papers of Frank
Merry Stenton, ed. Doris Mary Stenton (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), pp.
284-285, and Kenneth Cameron, English Place-Names, 2nd ed. (London:
Batsford, 1963), p. 124. A dozen British dragon legends are assembled by
Katharine M. Briggs in A Dictionary of British Folk-Tales, pt. B, vol. 1
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971), pp. 159-172.
36. See Sir Edmund Chambers, The English Folk-Play (Oxford: Claren-
don, 1933), pp. 28-29, 87, 106, and 177-178.
37. Arthur E. Du Bois, "The Dragon in Beowulf'' PMLA, 72 (1957):
822. On the dragon and its background see W. W. Lawrence, "The Dragon
and His Lair in Beowulf " PMLA, 33 (1918): 547-583; Hilda R. Ellis Da-
vidson, "The Hill of the Dragon: Anglo-Saxon Burial Mounds in Literature
and Archaeology," Folk-Lore, 61 (1950): 169-185; Friedrich Wild, Drachen
im "Beowulf" und andere Drachen, Osterreichische Akademie der Wissen-
schaften, philosophisch-historische Klasse, vol. 238, pt. 5 (Vienna, 1962);
Claude Lecouteux, "Der Drache," ZfdA, 108 (1979): 13-31; and Alan K.
Brown, "The Firedrake in Beowulf " Neoph., 64 (1980): 439-460.
38. Lawrence, "Beowulf" and Epic Tradition, pp. 207-208, finds the
dragon "invulnerable to ordinary swords," but this view entails both consid-
ering Wiglafs sword to be of "supernatural" powers and ignoring the good
use that Beowulf makes of his short-sword (2703b-05).
39. See John C. McGalliard, "The Poet's Comment in Beowulf " SPh,
75 (1978): 252.
40. Emerson, "Legends of Cain," p. 882, notes, "No single phrase or
descriptive epithet applied to the firedrake can be tortured into any connec-
tion with devils, or creatures of evil in the Christian sense." The dragon is
called a feondin 2706a, but in the sense of "enemy" rather than "fiend" (just
as Beowulf and Wiglaf are called fionda\s] in 2671b, when considered from
the dragon's point of view).
41. Andreas Haarder, "Beowulf": The Appeal of a Poem (Vibourg:
Akademisk Forlag, 1975), p. 263.
2. T H E A R T OF T H E GERMANIC SCOP
1. Derek Pearsall, Old and Middle English Poetry (London: Routledge,
1977), p. 19.
2. Even such an outline of possibilities represents an oversimplification.
Joseph Harris, "Eddie Poetry as Oral Poetry: The Evidence of Parallel Pas-
sages in the Helgi Poems for Questions of Composition and Performance,"
forthcoming in "Edda": A Collection of Essays, ed. Haraldur Bessason and
Robert Glendinning (Winnipeg: Manitoba University Press), points out that
the term "oral composition" embraces both improvisation and deliberative
composition, while a poem composed by any method could have been subject
266 N O T E S T O PAGES 3 2 - 3 5
to a period of oral transmission during which it was reproduced either me-
moriter or by improvising.
3. The basic reference works here are MHV and Albert B. Lord, The
Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960). For a
general bibliography of works by Milman Parry, Lord, and many scholars
who have been influenced by their research see Edward R. Haymes, A Bibli-
ography of Studies Relating to Parry's and Lord's Oral Theory (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Printing Office, 1973). In lieu of reviewing the
many applications of Parry's and Lord's work to the study of Old English po-
etry since the publication of Francis P. Magoun, Jr., "Oral-Formulaic Char-
acter of Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry," Speculum, 28 (1953): 446-467, I
cite a single comprehensive survey: John Miles Foley, "The Oral Theory
and Old English Poetry," pp. 51-91 of his introduction to Lord Studies.
4. Pearsall, Old and Middle English Poetry, p. 17.
5. The assertive tone of some recent writing on the subject is struck by
W. F. Bolton, who states that "the theory does not merit a place in discus-
sions of Beowulf criticism, since by its very tenets it abdicates from criticism,"
and who adds, without further explanation, that "both the theory and the bib-
liography of oral-formulism are, in their different ways, unreal"; (see his Al-
cuin and "Beowulf": An Eighth-Century View (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Rutgers University Press, 1978), p. 4 and p. 62 n. 12, respectively.
6. Here and in the next sentence I am paraphrasing from David E.
Bynum, "The Generic Nature of Oral Epic Poetry," Genre, 2 (1969): 255.
7. On the career of Donnchadh Ban Macantsaoir (1724-1812), alias
Duncan Macintyre, see Douglas Young, "Never Blotted a Line? Formula
and Premeditation in Homer and Hesiod," in Essays on Classical Literature,
ed. Niall Rudd (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1972), pp. 38-39 and 51-52,
and John Maclnnes, "The Oral Tradition in Scottish Gaelic Poetry," Scottish
Studies, 12 (1968): 29-30.
8. See Albert B. Lord, "Avdo Mededovic, Guslar," JAF, 69 (1956):
318-330. Medjedovic's song The Wedding of Smailagic Meho has been pub-
lished, together with useful biographical information, as vols. 3-4 of Serbo-
Croatian Heroic Songs, collected by Milman Parry and edited and translated
by Lord (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1974); three others of his
songs are published in vol. 6 of the same series, ed. David E. Bynum (1980).
9. See, for example, Kemp Malone, untitled review in ES, 41 (1960):
204: "The Beowulf poet was no minstrel, strumming a harp and composing
verse as he strummed. He was a sophisticated literary artist, who gave careful
thought to what he was doing."
10. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, eds., Bede's "Ecclesiastical
History of the English People" (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), pp. 414-421. The
Old English translation of this part of Bede's history is given parallel to the
Latin in Bright's Old English Grammar and Reader, ed. Frederic G. Cassidy
and Richard N. Ringler, 3rd ed. (New York: Holt, 1971), pp. 126-134.
11. Donald K. Fry, "Caedmon as a Formulaic Poet," in Oral Literature:
Seven Essays, ed. Joseph J. Duggan (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press,
N O T E S T O PAGES 3 5 - 4 1
1975), pp. 45-46, takes the translator's words to mean that the monks first
wrote down Caedmon's words and then memorized them. Possibly this is
what is meant, but I think it more likely that the word leornodon has a general
sense and the translator wished simply to emphasize the paradox that edu-
cated men could learn from an illiterate cowherd.
12. Lord, The Singer of Tales, p. 132, notes that of nineteenth-century
Serbo-Croatian songs, "those which begin with the date are invariably from
the hand of a writer and not from the lips of a singer."
13. Ic . . . leotS somnige, / write woiScrœfte ("I gather the song, write it
with poetic art"). "The Phoenix," 547-548a.
14. See Robert P. Creed, "The Singer Looks at His Sources," in Bro-
deur Studies, pp. 44-52. Jeff Opland has discussed the passage in his articles
Beowulf on the Poet," MS, 38 (1976): 442-467, and "From Horseback to
Monastic Cell: The Impact on English Literature of the Introduction of
Writing," in OEL, pp. 30-43, as well as in his major study, Anglo-Saxon Oral
Poetry: A Study of the Traditions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980),
pp. 202-205. Opland sees the performance as primarily eulogistic. Although
Norman E. Eliason, "The 'Improvised Lay' in Beowulf," PQ, 31 (1952),
171-179, doubts that the scop is imagined to be singing an improvised lay, to
me there is little question that the performance includes at least some narra-
tive element, and it could not have been prepared long in advance. I am not
adopting the suggestion of Barbara Nolan and Morton W. Bloomfield,
"Beotword, Gilpcwidas, and the Gilphlœden Scop of Beowulf"' JEGPh, 79
(1980): 499-516, that gilphlœden in this passage means something as specific
as "endowed with speeches expressing formal boasts."
15. MHV, p. 377 (emphasis Parry's).
16. Parry's definition, MHV, p. 272.
17. To qualify this assessment somewhat, the fixity of the formula and
the stability of the theme are better established for the songs of Homer than
for Serbo-Croatian heroic song. Perhaps "relative fixity" and "relative stabil-
ity" would be more precise terms. Parry's statistics show the usefulness of the
concept of the fixed formula in early Greek epic poetry, yet this usefulness
has its limits as well, as is pointed out in different ways by Joseph A. Russo,
"A Closer Look at Homeric Formulas," TAPA, 94 (1963): 235-247, and
"The Structural Formula in Homeric Verse," Yale Classical Studies, 20
(1966): 219-240; J. B. Hainsworth, The Flexibility of the Homeric Formula
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1968); and Michael N. Nagler, "Towards a Generative
View of the Oral Formula," TAPA, 98 (1967): 269-311, and Spontaneity
and Tradition: A Study in the Oral Art of Homer (Berkeley: University of Cal-
ifornia Press, 1974), pp. 1-26.
18. See Joseph J. Duggan, "The Song of Roland": Formulaic Style and
Poetic Craft, Publications of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Stud-
ies, UCLA, 6 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), pp. 10-11.
19. Maclnnes, "The Oral Tradition," p. 40.
20. See Jeff Opland, "Imbongi Nezibongo: The Xhosa Tribal Poet and
the Contemporary Poetic Tradition," PMLA, 90 (1975): 195-196.
268 N O T E S T O PAGES 4 1 - 4 3
21. This essential point has been made by Ruth Finnegan, "What Is
Oral Literature Anyway? Comments in the Light of Some African and Other
Comparative Material," in Oral Literature and the Formula, ed. Benjamin A.
Stolz and Richard S. Shannon (Ann Arbor: Center for the Coordination of
Ancient and Modern Studies, The University of Michigan, 1976), pp.
127-166, with response and discussion on pp. 167-176; and by John Miles
Foley, "Beowulf and Traditional Narrative Song: The Potential and Limits
of Comparison," in OEL, pp. 117-136, and "Tradition-dependent and
-independent Features in Oral Literature: A Comparative View of the For-
mula," in Lord Studies, pp. 262-281.
22. David Buchan, "Oral Tradition and Literary Tradition: The Scot-
tish Ballads," in Oral Tradition, Literary Tradition: A Symposium, ed. Hans
Bekker-Nielsen et al. (Odense: Odense University Press, 1977), p. 57.
23. This account is simplified for obvious reasons. Readers who wish to
explore the complexities of the meter may compare the three different
theories set forth in Eduard Sievers, Altgermanische Metrik (Halle, 1893);
Andreas Heusler, Deutsche Versgeschichte mit Einschluss des altenglischen und
altnordischen Stabreimverses, I (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1925); and John Col-
lins Pope, The Rhythm of "Beowulf, " 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1966). See Pope, pp. 6-37, for a summary of the theories of his prede-
cessors. A summary of Sievers's system is presented in translation under the
title "Old Germanic Metrics and Old English Metrics" in Bessinger and
Kahrl, pp. 267-288. Marjorie Daunt argues intelligently against all three
systems in "Old English Verse and English Speech Rhythms," Transactions
of the Philological Society (1946), pp. 56-72. More recent studies include
Alan J. Bliss, The Metre of "Beowulf" 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), a
corroboration of Sievers's system; Robert P. Creed, "A New Approach to
the Rhythm of Beowulf ' PMLA, 81 (1966): 23-33, a development of
Pope's theory; Thomas Cable, The Meter and Melody of "Beowulf, " Illinois
Studies in Language and Literature, 64 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1974), a refinement of Sievers's system; and Jane-Marie Luecke, Measuring
Old English Rhythm: An Application of the Principles of Gregorian Chant
Rhythm to the Meter of "Beowulf" (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1978), a work whose title explains its approach. Any reader of Old English
poetry will be aware that within the half-line, certain arrangements of
stressed and unstressed syllables occur often, others seldom or not at all.
Sievers attempts to describe these favored arrangements; Heusler attempts to
fit them within a single isochronous scheme; and Pope offers a modification of
Heusler's theory based on an ingenious but speculative hypothesis concerning
the use of the lyre to mark time.
24. Calvin B. Kendall, "The Prefix Un- and the Metrical Grammar of
Beowulf" ASE, 10 (1982): 39.
25. Since I am not concerned with establishing scholarly texts, I quote
from editions on my shelf: "AtlakviSa" from Ursula Dronke, ed., The Poetic
Edda, I: Heroic Poems (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969); the "Hildebrandslied"
from Klaeber, pp. 290-292; Heliand from Otto Behagel, ed., Heliand und
NOTES T O PAGES 4 3 - 5 1 269
3. LATIN CHRISTIAN L E T T E R S
1. This history of misreading on the part of early scholars has been
written by E. G. Stanley, The Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism (Cambridge:
D. S. Brewer, 1975).
2. See James E. Cross, "On the Genre of 'The Wanderer,' " Neoph.,
45 (1961): 63-75.
3. See Dorothy Whitelock, "The Interpretation of'The Seafarer,' " in
The Early Cultures of North-West Europe, ed. Sir Cyril Fox and Bruce
Dickins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950), pp. 259-272.
4. See John V. Fleming, " 'The Dream of the Rood' and Anglo-Saxon
Monasticism," Traditio, 22 (1966): 43-72 (esp. p. 53).
5. See Thomas D. Hill, "Figurai Narrative in Andreas: The Conversion
of the Mermedonians," NM, 70 (1969): 261-273, and James W. Earl, "The
Typological Structure of Andreas," in OEL, pp. 66-89.
6. See Kenneth Sisam, "The Publication of Alfred's Pastoral Care," in
his Studies in the History of Old English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1953),
pp. 141-142, on the probable recipients of the preface and the book. The
274 N O T E S T O PAGES 68-69
key sentences bearing on the proposed educational reform are: "Therefore it
seems better to me, if it seems so to you, that we also should turn into the
language that we can all understand some books, which may be most neces-
sary for all men to know; and bring it to pass, as we can very easily with
God's help, if we have the peace, that all the youth now in England, born of
free men who have the means that they can apply to it, may be devoted to
learning as long as they cannot be of use in any other employment, until such
time as they can read well what is written in English. One may then teach
further in the Latin language those whom one wishes to teach further and to
bring to holy orders" ( E H D , p. 889).
7. Listhendig / to awritanne wordgeryno: "Gifts of Men," 95b-96. To
judge from a letter of Bede addressed to Egbert, archbishop of York, in 734,
not all the "good and wise men" who were thought by Alfred to have filled
the churches of England in former times were either good or wise, and some
of them were less than learned. Bede speaks of certain bishops said to
"have with them no men of any religion or continence, but rather those who
are given to laughter, jests, tales, feasting and drunkenness, and the other
attractions of a lax life." He goes on to describe the care that should be taken
for the ignorant people, by whom he means, he makes clear, not only laymen
but "those clerics or monks who are ignorant of the Latin language," and he
adds that in the interests of serving the needs of the faithful he has "often
given to many ignorant priests both . . . the Creed and the Lord's Prayer,
translated into the English language" (EHD, p. 801).
8. C. P. Wormald, "The Uses of Literacy in Anglo-Saxon England and
Its Neighbours," TRHS, 5th ser., 27 (1977): 95-114. Wormald doubts that
cultured literacy was ever widely established in Anglo-Saxon England; he also
suggests that even the literacy of the clergy could never be taken for granted.
9. Asset's "Life of King Alfred" ed. W. H. Stevenson (1904; rpt. Ox-
ford: Clarendon, 1959), chaps. 75-76 and 102, trans, in EHD, pp. 292-294
and 301.
10. See D. A. Bullough, "The Educational Tradition in England from
Alfred to /Elfric: Teaching Utriusque linguae, " in La scuola nell'occidente la-
tino dell'alto medioevo, 2 vols., Settimane di studio del Centro italiano di studi
sull'alto medioevo (hereafter: Settimane), 19 (Spoleto: Presso la Sede del
Centro, 1972), II, 453-494; and Connie C. Eble, "yElfric and Bilingualism
in Anglo-Saxon England," in The Fourth LACUS Forum, ed. Michel Paradis
(Columbia, S.C.: Hornbeam Press, 1978), pp. 423-431. The very different
educational system of the newly converted English is reconstructed by Put-
nam Fennell Jones, "The Gregorian Mission and English Education," Spec-
ulum, 3 (1928): 335-348.
11. See Peter Clemoes, "Late Old English Literature," in Tenth-Cen-
tury Studies, ed. David Parsons (London: Phillimore, 1975), pp. 103-114, on
the range and high quality of English prose between the reform and the
Conquest. Even as late as the twelfth century, in the view of T. J. Brown,
"An Historical Introduction to the Use of Classical Latin Authors in the Brit-
ish Isles from the Fifth to the Eleventh Century," in La cultura antica
nell'occidente latino dal VII all'XI secolo, 2 vols., Settimane, 22 (Spoleto:
N O T E S T O PAGES 69-74 275
Presso la Sede del Centro, 1975), I, 291, "the English monks were as back-
ward in their Latin reading as they were advanced in their adherence to
Alfred's radical plan for education based on the vernacular."
12. The reader who wishes to delve more deeply into the subject may
start with such standard works as John Godfrey, The Church in Anglo-Saxon
England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962); Margaret Dean-
esley, The Pre-Conquest Church in England, 2nd ed. (London: A. and C.
Black, 1964); and Henry Mayr-Harting, The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-
Saxon England (London: Batsford, 1972). A number of essays bearing on the
learning of Bede and his teachers and followers are included in Famulus
Christi: Essays in Commemoration of the Thirteenth Centenary of the Birth of
the Venerable Bede, ed. Gerald Bonner (London: Society for the Promulga-
tion of Christian Knowledge, 1976). Also of interest are the Jarrow Lectures
published by J . and P. Bealls, Newcastle, including Bertram Colgrave, The
Venerable Bede and His Times (1958); J. D. A. Ogilvy, The Place of Wear-
mouth and Jarrow in Western Cultural History (1970); and Henry Mayr-
Harting, The Venerable Bede, The Rule of St. Benedict, and Social Class
(1976). The subject of books and libraries, touched on by all these authors, is
the main concern of M. L. W. Laistner, " T h e Library of the Venerable
Bede," in Bede: His Life, Times, and Writings, ed. A. Hamilton Thompson
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1935), pp. 237-266, and of J . D. A. Ogilvy, Books
Known to the English, 597-1066 (Cambridge, Mass.: Mediaeval Academy of
America, 1967). T . J. Brown, "Historical Introduction," pp. 273-276, re-
views Ogilvy's findings with emphasis on the scantness of the evidence for
some titles. Richard J . Schräder, "Caedmon and the Monks, the Beowulf-
Poet, and Literary Continuity in the Early Middle Ages," American Benedic-
tine Review, 31 (1980): 39-69, offers a view of Anglo-Saxon learning that is
based on assumptions different from those adopted here.
13. For Alcuin's "Versus de sanctis Eboracensis ecclesiae" see MGH:
Poetae latini aevi Carolini, I, ed. Ernst Dümmler (Berlin: Weidmann, 1881),
201.
14. Although we know of this story only on the twelfth-century au-
thority of William of Malmesbury (Gesta pontificum Anglorum, 5.190), the
account has often been repeated as if it were of some historical value. It is
accepted as historical, for example, by L. F. Anderson, The Anglo-Saxon Scop
(Toronto: The University Library, 1903), p. 12, but then Anderson also
seems to believe in the historicity of Gunnar's performance in the snake pit
(p. 7).
15. As Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, eds., Bede's "Ecclesiasti-
cal History of the English People" (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), pp. 580-581 n.
4, remark, "Only a comparatively small group of the MSS. of the Letter [of
Cuthbert on the death of Bede] attribute the composition of the poem to
Bede himself, and those the later ones. So the evidence for Bede's authorship
is by no means strong."
16. Richard J . Schräder, "Beowulf s Obsequies and the Roman Epic,"
CL 24 (1972): 237-259.
17. Hector Munro Chadwick, The Heroic Age (Cambridge: Cambridge
276 N O T E S T O PAGES 74-79
University Press, 1912), pp. 73-76; Ritchie Girvan, untitled review in
MLR, 27 (1932): 466-470; John Nist, "Beowulf and the Classical Epics,"
College English, 24 (1963): 257-262.
18. The most important studies are Frederick Klaeber, "Aeneis und
Beowulf," Archiv, 126 (1911): 40-48 and 339-359; Rudolph Imelmann,
Forschungen zur altenglischen Poesie (Berlin: Weidmann, 1920); Tom Burns
Haber, A Comparative Study of the "Beowulf' and the "Aeneid" (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1931); and Alois Brandl, "Beowulf-Epos und
Aeneis in systematischer Vergleichung," Archiv, 171 (1937): 161-173.
19. Alain Renoir, "The Terror of the Dark Waters: A Note on Virgil-
ian and Beowulfian Techniques," Harvard English Studies, 5 (1974):
147-160. Renoir's caution recalls that of James Hulbert, "Beowulf and the
Classical Epic," MPh, 44 (1946): 65-75.
20. Klaeber, "Beowulfiana," Anglia, 50 (1926): 202.
21.1 follow most readers in taking Hrothgar to the œpelinga bearn who
leads the Danes and Geats to the mere, just as he is the wisa fengel ("wise
lord") who sets out in the lead at the beginning of the journey (1399-1402a)
and as he seems to be the unnamed "he" who scouts out the ground in
1412-16a. Klaeber's interpretation of bearn as plural has not been generally
accepted.
22. Here and elsewhere, unless otherwise noted, quotations and transla-
tions from Virgil are from the revised Loeb edition by H. Rushton Fair-
clough, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934).
23. Aeneid 11.491—494, trans. W. F. Jackson Knight (Baltimore: Pen-
guin, 1956).
24. See David M. Gaunt, "The Creation Theme in Epic Poetry," CL,
29 (1977): 213-220.
25. J. R. R. Tolkien, for example, speaks of the "stern and noble melan-
choly" of the two poets, together with their "sense of many-storied anti-
quity": "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," in Nicholson, p. 75 n. 21.
He wisely stresses that this likeness is "due to certain qualities in the authors
independent of the question whether the Anglo-Saxon had read Virgil or
not" (p. 74).
26. See Theodore M. Andersson, Early Epic Scenery: Homer, Virgil,
and the Medieval Legacy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), chap. 4,
"The Virgilian Heritage in Beowulf." While Andersson believes that the
likenesses point toward Virgilian influence, he does not claim that such influ-
ence is subject to proof.
27. See Jessie Crosland, "Virgil and the Old French Epic," MLR, 23
(1928): 164-173. Many of the parallels between the Aeneid and The Song of
Roland pointed out by Crosland, even if valid, cannot be extended to
Beowulf.
28. There remains a possibility that the Beowulf poet knew the Aeneid
not directly but as the Roman epic was interpreted and allegorized by medie-
val commentators, particularly by Fabius Fulgentius in his Mitologiarum and
his Expositio vergiliana continentia: see John Gardner, The Construction of
N O T E S T O PAGES 79-83 277
4. T H E D A N E S AND T H E D A T E
1. A shorter version of this chapter was presented at the joint meeting
of the Medieval Academy of America and the Medieval Association of the
28ο N O T E S T O PAGES 96-97
Pacific held in Los Angeles in March 1980. Some of its points have since
been anticipated in the welcome volume The Dating of "Beowulf, " ed. Colin
Chase (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), as well as by Kevin S.
Kiernan in his provocative study "Beowulf' and the "Beowulf Manuscript
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1981); Patricia Poussa in her
article " T h e Date of Beowulf Reconsidered: The Tenth Century?" NM, 82
(1981): 276-288; and, to some extent, by W. G. Busse and R. Holtei,
"Beowulf and the Tenth Century," Bulletin of the John Rylands University
Library, 63 (1981): 285-329. The notion of a post-Viking Beowulf clearly
an idea whose time has come. Since as yet no new consensus has evolved
concerning this point, however, I have thought it best to leave my remarks
essentially as written, with the addition of a few footnotes, as one contribution
to what has become a fruitful debate.
2. Dorothy Whitelock, The Audience of "Beowulf " (Oxford: Clarendon,
1951'), esp. pp. 22-29 and 99-105.
3. Kenneth Sisam, "Cynewulf and His Poetry," in his Studies in the His-
tory of Old English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1953), pp. 2-7. In view of
scholars' regular tendency to date Cynewulf no later than the mid-ninth cen-
tury, it should be emphasized that the grounds for assigning him a date no
earlier than the tenth century (apart from the linguistic tests, which I discuss
below) depend on largely unverifiable theories of the author's identity or of
the relative chronology of Old English poetry. The fact is, we do not know
who Cynewulf was or where or when he lived.
4. For example, " T h e Old English Advent," also known as "Christ,"
dated after 940 by Milton McC. Gatch, Loyalties and Traditions: Man and
His World in Old English Literature (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971), pp.
95-96.
5. T . P. Dunning and A. J. Bliss, eds., The Wanderer (London: Me-
thuen, 1969), p. 104, conclude that there is "no foundation" for the assump-
tion that this masterwork is of an early date and conclude that "the supposi-
tion that it was written in the first half of the tenth century would solve many
literary problems." Their view represents a break with the views of prior
editors.
6. T . A. Shippey, Old English Verse (London: Hutchinson, 1972), p.
210.
7. Derek Pearsall, Old English and Middle English Poetry (London:
Routledge, 1977), pp. 57-66. Pearsall's judgments appear to be based on the
view of later Old English poetic history expressed by Shippey, Old English
Verse, chap. 8 ("The Decline: King Alfred and After"), as well as by many
authors before him. R. W. Chambers, On the Continuity of English Prose from
Alfred to More and His School\ E E T S no. 191A (London: Oxford University
Press, 1932), pp. lx-lxxxi, speaks vigorously against the doctrine of the deca-
dence of Anglo-Saxon prose and civilization before the Conquest and sug-
gests that there may have been life left in the poetry too at this late date.
Compare the similar view of Peter Clemoes, "Late Old English Literature,"
in Tenth-Century Studies, ed. David Parsons (London: Phillimore, 1975), pp.
103-104.
N O T E S T O PAGES 97-100 281
8. Pearsall, Old English and Middle English Poetry, pp. 66, 60, 57, and
32, respectively.
9. Among scholars who have been unimpressed by facile arguments for
dating are Aldo Ricci, "The Chronology of Anglo-Saxon Poetry," RES, 5
(1929): 257-266 (although Ricci proposes some facile criteria of his own),
and Frederick Tupper, Jr., "The Philological Legend of Cynewulf," PMLA,
26 (1911): 270-278 (chiefly on the linguistic "tests"). Dorothy Whitelock
provides a good, brief survey of problems in the dating of Old English poetry
in "Anglo-Saxon Poetry and the Historian," TRHS, 4th ser., 31 (1949):
79-88. She concludes that "objections can be raised to all arguments that
claim to establish precise dates for Old English poetry" (p. 88). In his "Note
on Beowulf's Date and Economic-Social History," in Studi in onore di Ar-
mando Sapori (Milan: Instituto editoriale Cisalpino, 1957), pp. 175-178,
Robert L. Reynolds claims that "reconsideration of the evidence for the dates
to be assigned most Old English items is overdue" (p. 178) and suggests that
Beowulf may have been composed after the Viking invasions. Doubts as to
the assumption that most Old English poetry is pre-Alfredian are voiced by
Norman F. Blake, "The Dating of Old English Poetry," in An English Mis-
cellany Presented to W. S. Mackie, ed. Brian S. Lee (London: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1977), pp. 14-27. Many points raised by these authors are taken
up by Nicholas Jacobs in his excellent study "Anglo-Danish Relations, Poetic
Archaism, and the Date of Beowulf," Poetica (Tokyo), 8 (1977): 23-43.
Jacobs opens the door to our attributing the poem to almost any period from
the early eighth to the late tenth century, with some evidence favoring Mer-
da in the age of Athelstan or somewhat earlier. The publication of Chase's
volume The Dating of "Beowulf" has added fuel to the controversy. Of the
thirteen contributions to this volume, nine leave open the possibility of a
ninth- or tenth-century date. Among these, four argue positively for the
tenth century and one author (Kiernan) favors the early eleventh. While this
last proposal strikes me as unlikely (see my forthcoming review of Kiernan's
book in Speculum), one can safely say that the old consensus concerning an
early Beowulf his crumbled.
10. Linguistic Means of Determining the Dates of Old English Literary
Texts (Cambridge, Mass.: Medieval Academy of America, 1980). I am grate-
ful to Amos for having furnished me with an advance copy of her book. The
linguistic tests are the subject of a briefer review by Kiernan, "Beowulf' and
the "Beowulf" Manuscript, pp. 23-27.
11. John McKinnell, "On the Date of'The Battle of Maldon,' " M/E,
44 (1975): 121-136, argues for a date as late as 1030 on the basis of the
poet's consistent use of the word eorl in the sense of Old Norse jarl rather
than as a synonym for "warrior." N. F. Blake, "The Genesis of'The Battle
of Maldon,' " ASE, 7 (1978): 119-129, accepts a late date and takes the
Latin Vita Oswaldi (995-1005) as the poem's chief source. Historical verisi-
militude in this poem cannot be taken as a criterion for dating, for verisimili-
tude can be an aspect of literary style.
12. Karl Luick, Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache, I (Leip-
282 N O T E S T O PAGES 1 0 0 - 1 0 3
zig: Tauchnitz, 1921), sec. 320; A. Campbell, Old English Grammar (Ox-
ford: Clarendon, 1959), sec. 363.
13. Winfrid P. Lehmann, "Post-Consonantal l m η r and Metrical
Practice in Beowulf.in Nordica et anglica: Studies in Honor of Stefán Einars-
son, ed. Allan H. Orrick (The Hague: Mouton, 1968), pp. 148-167.
14. See Amos, Linguistic Means, p. 121. Similar variability can be ob-
served among multiple versions of two prose texts analyzed by Amos in an
appendix (pp. 171-196).
15. I leave out of this discussion the putative manuscript reading wun-
dini in line 1382, for the validity of this reading has been undermined by
Kenneth Sisam, Studies in the History, p. 36 n. 1, and destroyed by Kiernan,
"Beowulf" and the "Beowulf" Manuscript, pp. 31-37. The correct reading is
wundmi, an evident minim error for wundnü (= wundnum).
16. R. T. Farrell, "Beowulf" Swedes, and Geats (London: Viking So-
ciety for Northern Research, 1972), p. 53. Farrell speaks against the judg-
ments of Rupert Bruce-Mitford, "Sutton Hoo and the Background to the
Poem," in Ritchie Girvan, "Beowulf" and the Seventh Century: Language and
Content, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1971), pp. 85-98. Girvan's grounds for
attributing the poem to the last decades of the seventh century in Northum-
bria also carry little or no weight. To cite two examples: "In Beowulf. . .
ships are everywhere conceived as propelled by sails, and such was the famil-
iar practice of late seventh-century England" (p. 35), and "One characteristic
of Beowulf which cannot easily be separated from the English environment,
and at that precise time, is the atmosphere of pensive melancholy, a mood of
sorrow excited by the decay of the splendours of the past, by the destruction
which attends mortality and the works of man" (p. 50, my italics). Ships with
sails, an attitude of melancholy, and the mutability of earthly things have
been known in more than one time and place since the human race emerged
into history.
17. See, however, the Chronicle entry for the year 876: "Healfdene
shared out the land of the Northumbrians, and they proceeded to plough and
to support themselves" ( E H D , p. 195).
18. Sisam, "Anglo-Saxon Royal Genealogies," PBA, 39 (1953): 341.
19. F. M. Stenton, "The Danes in England," in Preparatory to Anglo-
Saxon England: Being the Collected Papers of Frank Merry Stenton, ed. Doris
Mary Stenton (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), p. 139. C. D. Morris, "North-
umbria and the Viking Settlement: The Evidence for Land-holding," Ar-
chaeologia Aeliana, 5 (1977): 81-103, points out the orderly and peaceful way
in which the Vikings settled the north of England and suggests that "in some
cases, the Scandinavians took over blocks of land as going concerns" (p. 101).
20. F. T. Wainwright, "The Scandinavians in Lancashire," in Scandi-
navian England: Collected Papers of F. T. Wainwright, ed. H. P. R. Finberg
(Chichester, Sussex: Phillimore, 1975), p. 195.
21. See D. M. Wilson, "The Vikings' Relationship with Christianity in
Northern England," Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 3rd ser.,
30 (1967): 37-46, and "The Scandinavians in England," in The Archaeology
N O T E S T O PAGES 1 0 3 - 1 0 6 283
of Anglo-Saxon England, ed. D. M. Wilson (London: Methuen, 1976), pp.
393-403.
22. F. M. Stenton, "The Historical Bearing of Place-Name Studies:
The Danish Settlement of Eastern England," in Preparatory to Anglo-Saxon
England, pp. 298-313.
23. The affirmative conclusions of Wainwright and Stenton now seem
somewhat exaggerated; on the other hand, so do the strongly negative judg-
ments of Peter H. Sawyer, as expressed in "The Density of the Danish Set-
tlement in England," University of Birmingham Historical Journal, 6 (1958):
1-17, and The Age of the Vikings, 2nd ed. (London: Edward Arnold, 1971).
See "The Two Viking Ages of Britain: A Discussion," Mediaeval Scandina-
via, 2 (1969): 163-207. For a review of scholarship on the question, see Gil-
lian Fellows Jensen, "The Vikings in England: A Review," ASE, 4 (1975):
181-206. Kenneth Cameron, "The Scandinavian Settlement of Eastern
England," Ortnamnssällskapets i Uppsala Ârsskrift (1978), pp. 7-17, has re-
cently reaffirmed his plausible view that while the micel here ("great host")
that warred against Alfred may have numbered in the hundreds rather than
the thousands, the original division of eastern England by the host was fol-
lowed by a substantial secondary migration from Scandinavia.
24. Note particularly Dorothy Whitelock, "The Conversion of the
Eastern Danelaw," Saga-Book of the Viking Society, 12 (1941): 159-176. On
the subject of the Danish conversion, as well as on other subjects discussed
here, see also H. R. Loyn, The Vikings in Britain (London: Batsford, 1977).
25. See Roger Fowler, ed., Wulfstan's "Canons of Edgar," EETS no.
266 (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), sec. 16; and Law of the
Northumbrian Priests 47-54.1, and Laws of Cnut 5 and 5.1, cited in EHD,
pp. 474-475 and 455, respectively.
26. EHD, p. 216. See Margaret Ashdown, "The Attitude of the
Anglo-Saxons to Their Scandinavian Invaders," Saga-Book of the Viking So-
ciety, 10 (1928-29): 88.
27. F. M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon,
1971), p. 323.
28. Ibid., p. 353 n. 1; Walter de Gray Birch, Cartularium Saxonicum, 3
vols. (London: Whiting and Co., 1885-1893), no. 648.
29. Egil's Saga, chaps. 50-55; a convenient translation is by Gwyn Jones
(New York: Twayne, 1960), pp. 120-135.
30. See Birch, Cartularium Saxonicum, no. 702, and note further EHD,
pp. 548-551 (a translation of Birch, no. 703). See also R. L. Reynolds, "An
Echo of Beowulf in ^Ethelstan's Charters of 931-933 A . D . ? " Mr.E, 24 (1955):
103. Onomastic evidence alone cannot yield a clear picture of the extent of
Scandinavian influence in England at this time, for many Norsemen took on
English names when they were baptized.
31. See Allen Mawer, "The Redemption of the Five Boroughs,"
English Historical Review, 38 (1923): 551-557.
32. EHD, pp. 436-437; and see Niels Lund, "King Edgar and the
Danelaw," Medieval Scandinavia, 9 (1976): 181-195.
284 N O T E S T O PAGES 106-112
33. W. Dunn Macray, ed., Chronicon abbatiae Rameseiensis, Rolls Series
83 (London, 1886), p. 11.
34. See Whitelock, "The Dealings of the Kings of England with
Northumbria in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries," in The Anglo-Saxons:
Studies . . . Bruce Dickens, ed. Peter Clemoes (London: Bowes and Bowes,
1959), pp. 75-76.
35. See the Chronicle entry for the year 959 ( E H D , p. 225).
36. According to William of Malmesbury, De gestis regum Anglorum,
ed. William Stubbs, Rolls Series 90 (London, 1887), I, 207.
37. Chambers, p. 327; F. Liebermann, "Ort und Zeit der Beowulfdich-
tung," Nachrichten von Königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttin-
gen, Philologisch-historische Klasse (1920), pp. 225-256. More recent at-
tempts to cast the Danes in a disparaging light are polemically rejected by A.
P. Campbell, "The Decline and Fall of Hrothgar and His Danes," Revue de
l'Université d'Ottawa, 45 (1975): 417-429.
38. See Sisam, "Anglo-Saxon Royal Genealogies," pp. 339-345. For
convenient translations of the documents in question see G. N. Garmonsway
and Jacqueline Simpson, trans., "Beowulf" and Its Analogues (New York:
Dutton, 1971), pp. 118-119. Alexander Callander Murray, 1 Beowulf, the
Danish Invasions, and Royal Genealogy," in The Dating of "Beowulf," ed.
Chase, pp. 101-111, points out the significance of the genealogies to dating
Beowulf
39. L. L. Schücking, Beiträge, 42 (1917): 347-410. R. I. Page, "The
Audience of Beowulf and the Vikings," in The Dating of "Beowulf" pp.
113-122, provides convincing new arguments for the possibility of a post-
Viking Beowulf, while Poussa, "The Date of Beowulf Reconsidered," renews
the argument in favor of the Danelaw as the place of origin.
40. Erik Björkman, Studien über die Eigennamen im "Beowulf, " Studien
zur englischen Philologie, 58 (Halle, 1920), p. 77; Chambers, pp. 322-323.
Cf. Kemp Malone, untitled review in Speculum, 6 (1931): 149-150. Lieber-
mann, "Ort und Zeit der Beowulfdichtung," pp. 255-276, rejects
Schücking's proposal on a variety of grounds, none of them weighty. The
Beowulf poet makes no mention of the battle-ax, for example—the Vikings'
pet weapon—but any such allusion would have been an anachronism in a
poem set in fifth- or sixth-century Scandinavia. Even the late poem "The
Battle of Maldon" makes no mention of the ax. There are descriptions of
heathen funerals in Beowulf, and the Church was opposed to such funerals,
but can such opposition be a criterion for dating? Pagan customs were con-
stantly being reintroduced to England. The ideals honored in Beowulf (for
example, personal loyalty to a chieftain or king) evidently derive from an
early period. By the tenth century had they ceased to be valued, especially by
conservators of an aristocratic poetic tradition? The poet's knowledge of leg-
ends of the Age of Migrations has been held to be evidence for an early date,
but such legends survived tenaciously in oral tradition and, suitably romanti-
cized, inspired poets long after Beowulf was forgotten.
N O T E S T O PAGES 1 1 2 - 1 1 6 285
chieftain who, with his brother Horsa, led the Jutes to England in 449, then
he has been made a champion of the Danes. The prominence given his song
is thus understandable: Englishmen and Danes could unite in praising their
ancestral hero.
53. See Chapter 1, note 29. The tenth homily declares that the date is
971 years after the Incarnation. Stanley B. Greenfield, A Critical History of
Old English Literature (New York: New York University Press, 1965), p.
59, accepts this as the date of compilation of the homiliary and leaves open
the possibility of an earlier date of composition.
54. See Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England\ p. 349.
55. Birch, Cartularium Saxonicum, no. 677; and see Chambers, pp.
42-45, and Reynolds, "An Echo."
5. F O R M U L A A N D F O R M U L A I C SYSTEM
1. This chapter should be read in conjunction with much of Chapter 2.
In slightly different form it first appeared in Lord Studies, pp. 394-415, and
in my "Aspects of the Oral Art of Beowulf: A Comparative Investigation"
(Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1972), pp. 1-37.
2. See Donald K. Fry, "Variation and Economy in Beowulf," MPh, 65
(1968): 353-356.
3. By George Calhoun, "The Art of the Formula in Homer—έ'πεα
πτερόεντα," CPh, 30 (1935): 215-227.
4. Milman Parry, "About Winged Words," CPh, 32 (1937): 59. Parry
is quoting his own words in "The Traditional Metaphor in Homer," CPh, 28
(1933): 39.
5. In this chapter and the next, all references to the text of Beowulf are
to the edition by Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, Beowulf and Judith, ASPR, IV. I
make this change because the Dobbie edition is the basis of the fundamental
reference tools for research into the formulaic language of the poem, A Con-
cordance to "Beowulf' and A Concordance to the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records,
ed. J. B. Bessinger, Jr., and programmed by Philip H. Smith, Jr. (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1969 and 1978, respectively).
6. In "Beowulf431-32 and the Hero's Civility in Denmark," Notesand
Queries, n.s. 27 (1980): 99-100, I propose that the word ond ("and") sup-
plied by editors to fill a lacuna in line 431 should be replaced by mid ("with").
If this suggestion is accepted, the formulaic resemblance between the five
verses is even stronger.
7. Donald K. Fry, "Old English Formulas and Systems," ES, 48
(1967): 203. Note also Fry's subsequent article "Some Aesthetic Implica-
tions of a New Definition of the Formula," NM, 69 (1968): 516-522, in
which he slightly rephrases his definition, omitting the word "loosely."
8. Frederick G. Cassidy, "How Free Was the Anglo-Saxon Scop?" in
Magoun Studies, pp. 75-85, maintains that of greater importance to a scop
than either fixed formulas or formulaic systems were abstract "archetypal
NOTES T O PAGES 1 2 5 - 1 2 7
syntactic patterns," of which he finds twenty-five in Beowulf. To judge from
Cassidy's examples, these syntactic frames include widely disparate verses.
He œt wige gecrang (1337b) and of er sa sohtan (2380a) are both examples of
the "PV frame," for example, while breostgewœdu (1211a) and we synt gum-
cynnes (260a) are both examples of the "N frame" (pp. 79-80). It is hard to
see how such syntactic frames would have helped the scop a great deal in the
process of rapid composition before an audience. In his discussion of the oral-
formulaic theory in his revision of Bright's Old English Grammar and Reader
(New York: Holt, 1971), pp. 270-272, Cassidy appears to abandon the con-
cept of syntactic frames in favor of a concept of the formula much like what is
advocated here.
9. See the studies by Nagler cited in Chap. 2, n. 17.
10. See Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press, 1960), chap. 2: "Singers: Performance and Training."
11. Lord, "The Role of Sound-Patterns in Serbo-Croatian Epic," in For
Roman Jakobson: Essays on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday (The Hague:
Mouton, 1956), p. 302.
12. This wealth of recorded song is now the core of the Milman Parry
Collection of Oral Literature, Harvard University. I have arrived at the
rough estimate of 700,000 lines by multiplying the number of discs of epic po-
etry that Lord personally recorded by the playing time per disc, then multi-
plying the resulting sum by the estimated average number of lines sung by an
epic singer per minute.
13. Lord, The Singer of Tales, pp. 30 and 31, respectively.
14. Robert L. Kellogg, "The South Germanic Oral Tradition," in Ma-
goun Studies, pp. 67-68. Patrick W. Conner, "Schematization of Oral-
Formulaic Processes in Old English Poetry," Language and Style, 5 (1972):
204-220, has carried the observations of Lord and Kellogg one step further.
Using a concept of the formula as "the product—one half-line in length—of
a grammar of poetic diction superimposed upon the grammar of the spoken
language," Conner has developed a structural model of the "grammar of po-
etic diction" of Old English poetry that is a refinement of Chomsky's de-
scription of the grammar of a natural language. John Miles Foley has added
his voice to those of Lord and Kellogg in urging that scholars turn their at-
tention away from the surface phenomenon of the repeated phrase toward
the more abstract form that underlies both repeated and nonrepeated
phrases. According to Foley, "what we read—the formula—is only the foot-
print, the verbal trace" of the underlying form, which he sees as chiefly met-
rical: "Formula and Theme in Old English Poetry," in Oral Literature and
the Formula, ed. Benjamin A. Stolz and Richard S. Shannon (Ann Arbor:
Center for the Coordination of Ancient and Modern Studies, The University
of Michigan, 1976), p. 212.
15. Francis P. Magoun, Jr., "Oral-Formulaic Character of Anglo-
Saxon Narrative Poetry," Speculum, 28 (1953): 446-467.
16. For a discussion of this point see Joseph J. Duggan, "The Song of
Roland": Formulaic Style and Poetic Craft, Publications of the Center for Me-
288 N O T E S T O PAGES 1 2 7 - 1 4 0
dieval and Renaissance Studies, 6 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1973), pp. 17-25.
17. The main contention of Ann Chalmers Watts in her study The Lyre
and the Harp: A Comparative Reconsideration of Oral Tradition in Homer and
Old English Epic Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969)—that
when closely scrutinized, Anglo-Saxon narrative poetry is not highly formu-
laic and therefore has no claim to be called oral—therefore cannot be ac-
cepted, because it is based on a concept of the formula as a fixed phrase.
Watts rightly discards Parry's definition of the formula as inapplicable to Old
English poetry, but her own definition is no more helpful. To Watts, a for-
mula in Old English is "a repeated sequence that fills one of Sievers's five
basic rhythmical types" (p. 90), or, in other words, a repeated verse. She
correctly concludes that the formula thus defined is not important in Beowulf.
6. C O M P O U N D D I C T I O N
1. This chapter is based on my article "Compound Diction and the Style
of BeowulfEnglish Studies, 62 (1981): 489-503. See Otto Krackow, Die
Nominalcomposita als Kunstmittel im altenglischen Epos (Weimar, 1903), pp.
55-56, for data indicating the frequency of occurrence of nominal com-
pounds in the poems of the Anglo-Saxon corpus. Note also the thorough
work by C. T. Carr, Nominal Compounds in Germanic (London: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1939). An excellent literary study of compounding in Beowulf
is Arthur G. Brodeur, The Art of "Beowulf" (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1959), chap. 1, "The Diction of Beowulf" together with Appen-
dix B.
2. With the first verse of my hypothetical pair of lines may be compared
Beowulf 116b, hu hit Hringdene; 1279b, Sœr Hringdene; and 1769a, Swa ic
Hringdena. With the second verse may be compared 1039b, heahcyninges. In
Beowulf the compound œrdœg occurs only in the singular in the sense of
"early morning"; elsewhere in Old English poetry it occurs four times in the
phrase on œrdagum, "in former days"). For a more extended example of how
Beowulf might be rewritten using the poet's own formulaic diction, see Rob-
ert P. Creed, "The Making of an Anglo-Saxon Poem," ELH, 26 (1959):
445-454.
3. See Milman Parry, MHV\ p. 226 and passim.
4. Klaeber, pp. lxix and lxv, respectively. See also Donald K. Fry,
"Variation and Economy in Beowulf," MPh, 65 (1968): 353-356; and Wil-
liam Whallon, Formula, Character, and Context: Studies in Homeric, Old
English, and Old Testament Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1969), pp. 113-116. By failing to note the uselessness of thrift to a
poet composing in Old English, both Whallon, "The Diction of Beowulf
PMLA, 76 (1961): 309-319, and Michael Capek, "A Note on Formula De-
velopment in Old Saxon," MPh, 67 (1970): 357-363, misjudge the oral ele-
ment in Old English poetic diction. Whallon concludes that because the dic-
tion of Beowulf is "much less completely stereotyped" than the diction of the
N O T E S T O PAGES 140-146 289
7. RING C O M P O S I T I O N
1. This chapter is based on my article "Ring Composition and the
Structure oí Beowulf" PMLA, 94 (1979): 924-935, which in turn is based
on chapter 5 of my "Aspects of the Oral Art of Beowulf: A Comparative In-
vestigation" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1972), pp.
154-190.
2. For studies illustrating the workings of ring composition in early
Greek literature see W. A. A. van Otterlo, "Untersuchungen über Begriff,
Anwendung, und Entstehung der griechischen Ringkomposition," Mededel-
ingen der Nederlandsche Akademie van Wetenschappen, Afdeling Letter-
kunde, n.s. 7, no. 3 (Amsterdam: Noord-Hollandsche Uitgevers Maatschap-
pij, 1944); "Eine merkwürdige Kompositionsform der älteren griechischen
Literatur," Mnemosyne, 3rd ser., 12 (1944): 192-207, and De Ringcomposi-
tie als Opbuowprincipe in de epische Gedichten van Homerus, Verhandelingen
der Koninklijke Nederlandsche Akademie van Wetenschappen, Afdeling
Letterkunde, n.s. 51, no. 1 (Amsterdam: Noord-Hollandsche Uitgevers
Maatschappij, 1948). Cedric Whitman develops and refines Otterlo's
methods of structural analysis in his book Homer and the Heroic Tradition
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), pp. 87-101,
249-284, 287-290, and the chart at the end of the book. Further, see Ste-
phen Bertman, "The Telemachy and Structural Symmetry," TAPA, 97
(1966): 15-27, and "Structural Symmetry at the End of the Odyssey," Greek,
Roman and Byzantine Studies, 9 (1968): 115-123; Julie Haig Gaisser, "A
Structural Analysis of the Digressions in the Iliad and the Odyssey," HSCP,
73 (1969): 1-44; and my note "On the Design of the Hymn to Delian
ApolloClassical Journal, 75 (1979): 36-39. For examples of the extension
of similar methods of analysis to literatures other than early Greek, see Bert-
man, "Symmetrical Design in the Book of Ruth," Journal of Biblical Litera-
292 N O T E S T O PAGES 1 5 2 - 1 5 3
ture, 84 (1965): 165-168; Michael Fishbane, "Composition and Structure in
the Jacob Cycle (Gen. 25:19-35:22)," Journal of Jewish Studies, 36 (1975):
19-32; David Buchan, The Ballad and the Folk (London: Routledge, 1972),
pp. 87-144 and 230; and my "Ring-Composition in La Chanson de Roland
and La Chançun de Willame," Olifant, 1 (Dec. 1973): 4-12.
3. Adeline Courtney Bartlett, The Larger Rhetorical Patterns in Anglo-
Saxon Poetry, Columbia University Studies in English and Comparative Lit-
erature, no. 122 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935), pp. 9-29.
Bartlett cites the following lines from Beowulf as exhibiting simple or com-
plex envelope patterning: 115-125, 129-193, 237-257, 491a-646a,
767-770, 837-924, 1063-1162a, 1323b-29, 1384b-89, 1425-41a,
1441b-72, 1591-1622, 2247-66, and (depending on the emendation
"nsefne" for "naes he" in 3074b) 3051-75. See also Constance B. Hieatt,
"Envelope Patterns and the Structure of Beowulf, " English Studies in Canada,
1 (1975): 249-265. In developing Bartlett's mode of analysis, Hieatt pays
close attention to the echoing of isolated words. On verbal echo see also J. O.
Beaty, "The Echo-Word in Beowulf with a Note on the Finnsburg Frag-
ment'," PMLA, 49 (1934): 365-373, and James L. Rosier, "Generative
Composition in Beowulf" ES, 58 (1977), 193-203. Two other recent stud-
ies of structural patterning in Beowulf are David R. Howlett, "Form and
Genre in Beowulf," Studia neophilologica, 46 (1974): 309-325 (esp. pp.
318-325), and H. Ward Tonsfeldt, "Ring Structure in Beowulf¡" Neoph., 61
(1977): 443-452. Tonsfeldt analyzes the ring structure of lines 129b-149a,
237-270, 1017-1168, 1885b-1924, 2355-72, and 2426-2512a. Howlett
attempts to identify a number of examples of thematic envelopment in
Beowulf In his close attention to the line numeration of the text and to the
division of the text into numbered fitts, he appears to be influenced by the
numerological analyses of Thomas E. Hart, "Ellen: Some Tectonic Relation-
ships in Beowulf and Their Formal Resemblance to Anglo-Saxon Art,"
Papers on Language and Literature, 6 (1970): 263-290, and "Tectonic De-
sign, Formulaic Craft, and Literary Execution: The Episodes of Finn and
Ingeld in Beowulf " Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik, 2 (1972):
1-61. In two more recent studies, Hart has continued this line of approach:
see his "Tectonic Methodology and an Application to Beowulf," in Essays in
the Numerical Criticism of Medieval Literature, ed. Caroline D. Eckhardt
(Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1980), pp. 185-210, and "Cal-
culated Casualties in Beowulf: Geometrical Scaffolding and Verbal Symbol,"
Studia neophilologica, 53 (1981): 3-35. Space does not permit a review of the
dangers attendant upon the numerological analyses of medieval texts. Unlike
the fitt division, the line numeration of Beowulf is a modern invention. In the
manuscript, as in all Old English manuscripts, the lines are written out not
separately but continuously, like prose. Given the presence of lacunae in the
text, the modern lineation of the poem is arbitrary and devoid of significance.
4. For a discussion of the symmetry of the two sea voyages see Lee
Carter Ramsey, "The Sea-Voyages in Beowulf," NM, 72 (1971): 51-59; and
Tonsfeldt, "Ring Structure," p. 445.
N O T E S T O PAGES 1 5 3 - 1 5 9 293
5. Bartlett, Rhetorical Patterns, pp. 19-22; Hieatt, "Envelope Pat-
terns," pp. 250-251, 254-256, 258-259, and the diagram on p. 260; and
Howlett, "Form and Genre," diagram on p. 324.
6. It may be useful to relate my concerns in this chapter to those of John
Nist, "The Structure of Beowulf," Papers of the Michigan Academy of Sci-
ence, Arts, and Letters, 43 (1958): 307-314; Thomas E. Carrigan, "Structure
and Thematic Development in Beowulf" Proceedings of the Royal Irish Acad-
emy, 66 (1967), sec. C, pp. 1-51; and John Leyerle, "The Interlace Struc-
ture οϊ Beowulf" UTQ, 37 (1967): 1-17. All three authors find evidence of
detailed structural parallelism and balance in the poem. Nist shows how cer-
tain themes (such as "Grendel motifs" or "details of Beowulf's life") recur in
a complex and apparently meaningful sequence that he calls "spiral" design.
Carrigan analyzes the poem into a discrete number of fitt groupings and
shows how thematically they balance one another. In addition, he shows that
one such grouping (covering the events of the dragon fight) has such a bal-
anced structure of its own, albeit on a smaller scale. Leyerle points out how
certain themes (for example, the Frisian raid, monsters, or women as the
bond of kinship) interweave with one another in a manner that he finds analo-
gous to the interlace design characteristic of much Anglo-Saxon art. Of the
three studies, Leyerle's seems to me the most rewarding, and yet both his and
Nist's are open to the objection that the recurrence of certain themes is in
itself of little significance. In such a long and complex work, some themes are
bound to recur. What one wants to know is, is there a meaningful pattern to
this recurrence? Leyerle would say yes, but he does not identify this pattern
except in general terms. This chapter attempts to supplement Leyerle's case
for the interlaced structure of Beowulf by reference to the specific structure
of the hero's three great fights. From this point of view, ring composition
(like parallel composition) might be regarded as one special type of interlace
design.
7. On the interplay of the images of äschere's head and Grendel's, see
Hieatt, "Envelope Patterns," p. 257, writing in response to Stanley B.
Greenfield, The Interpretation of Old English Poems (London: Routledge,
1972), pp. 58-59.
8. See Christopher Knipp, "Beowulf 2210b—2323: Repetition in the
Description of the Dragon's Hoard," NM, Ti (1972): 783; and Carrigan,
"Structure and Thematic Development," p. 44. In figure 2 of a plate ap-
pended to the end of his essay, Carrigan diagrams his conception of the de-
sign of the episode of the dragon fight (lines 2221-3182) with particular ref-
erence to speeches before and after the fight, to the roles of Wiglaf and the
last survivor, and to allusions to Beowulf's peaceful reign; see also pp. 30-49
of his essay. On how the "Lament of the Last Survivor" helps prepare the
way for the dominant mood of the end of the poem, see also Bonjour, The
Digressions in Beowulf, Medium /Evum Monographs, 5 (Oxford: Blackwell,
1950), pp. 68-69.
9. J. R. R. Tolkien, "Beowulf.': The Monsters and the Critics," in Ni-
cholson, p. 81.
294 N O T E S T O PAGES 1 5 9 - 1 6 4
10. Albert Β. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1960), p. 201.
11. Gabriel Germain, Genèse de l'Odyssée (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1954), p. 333; Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition, p. 288.
12. For a tenth-century Latin version, see H. C. Kim, ed., The Gospel of
Nicodemus: Gesta salvatoris (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Stud-
ies, 1973). There is also an Old English version dating from the tenth or
eleventh century: The Gospel of Nicodemus, ed. S. J. Crawford (Edinburgh:
Hutchen, 1927). The theme of the descensus, which probably was widely
known in Anglo-Saxon England by the early eighth century, recurs fre-
quently in Old English devotional literature, notably in the poem known as
"The Descent into Hell" included on fols. 119b—12 lb of the Exeter Book.
13. For a revival of the analytical heresy concerning the structure of
Beowulf, see Francis P. Magoun, Jr., "BéowulfA': A Folk-Variant," Arv, 14
(1958): 95-101, and "Béowulf Β: A Folk-Poem on Béowulf's Death," in
Early English and Norse Studies Presented to Hugh Smith, ed. A. Brown and P.
Foote (London: Methuen, 1963), pp. 127-140. That the action of the poem
falls into two great parts is beyond dispute. Few scholars follow Magoun,
however, in seeing the extant text as the work of two or three authors.
14. Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition, p. 98.
15. R. G. Peterson calls attention to various examples of such pattern-
ing, with appropriate bibliographical citations, in "Critical Calculations:
Measure and Symmetry in Literature," PMLA, 91 (1976): 367-375. Any-
one who wished to make a case for the specifically oral character of the ring
structure of Beowulf would have to make a distinction between the sorts of
patterning found in this poem and in, for example, Tom Jones.
16. Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition, p. 256.
17. See Herbert G. Wright, "Good and Evil; Light and Darkness; Joy
and Sorrow in Beowulf," RES, n.s. 8 (1957): 1-11, and Jerome Mandel,
"Contrast in Old English Poetry," Chaucer Review, 6 (1971): 1-13.
18. Norman E. Eliason, "The Burning of Heorot," Speculum, 55
(1980): 75-83, has shaken the time-honored belief that the hall is burnt by
Ingeld's Heathobards. The poet tells us only that the hall "awaited its inevita-
ble fate—destruction by war or by fire" (82b-83a), without specifying how
this fate is to come about.
19. Joan Blomfield, "The Style and Structure of Beowulf in Fry, p.
58.
20. Leyerle, "Interlace Structure," pp. 14-15.
8. BARBARIC STYLE
1. Stanley B. Greenfield, The Interpretation of Old English Poems (Lon-
don: Routledge, 1972), p. 1.
2. R. M. Lumiansky, "The Dramatic Audience in Beowulf in Fry, pp.
79-80.
N O T E S T O PAGES 1 6 4 - 1 6 9 295
3. Ibid., p. 81. Lumiansky reiterates this view in his article "Wiglaf,"
College English, 14 (1953): 202-206.
4. Compare the analogous suspension of verisimilitude in "The Battle of
Maldon," lines 205-325, when various followers of the dead Byrhtnoth
ceremoniously declare their intentions before entering into the battle that
surges around them but that is suspended, as it were, for the duration of each
speech.
5. Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences
on Western Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), p. 24.
6. In his standard studies Anglo-Saxon Art to A.D. 900 (London: Me-
thuen, 1938) and Late Saxon and Viking Art (London: Methuen, 1949), pp.
1-22, for example, T. D. Kendrick contrasts insular "barbaric" illumination
with its gentler classical counterpart. While the term is not now much used it
serves my purposes because it decisively sums up an aesthetics that stands
apart from the main Western tradition.
7. John Leyerle, "The Interlace Structure of Beowulf," UTQ, 37
(1967): 1-17. See Chap. 7, n. 6.
8. Peter R. Schroeder, "Stylistic Analogies between Old English Art
and Poetry," Viator, 5 (1974): 185-198. Schroeder uses the term barbaric
abstraction to refer to this sort of art. See also Stefán Einarsson, "Anti-Natu-
ralism, Tough Composition, and Punning in Skaldic Poetry and Modern
Painting," Saga-Book of the Viking Society, 16 (1963-64): 124-143. Accord-
ing to Einarsson, the deliberate deformation or distortion of nature character-
istic of much modern art is found in skaldic poetry as well. "This principle of
distortion makes modern art—like Skaldic poetry—as unclassical, unnatu-
ralistic and unrealistic as possible" (p. 132). if the secretive, contorted poetry
of the skalds represents an extreme of anti-naturalism, then Beowulf occupies
a middle ground wherein the natural world, while always recognizable as
such, is sometimes rearranged for poetic purposes. The relatively straight-
forward stylization of Beowulf could likewise be distinguished from what
Thomas D. Hill refers to as the "learned exuberance" of the Old English Ex-
odus, a poem that he sees as verbally "baroque," like the "hermeneutic"
Latin of Aldhelm. In his eyes both Exodus and Aldhelm reflect "a specifically
'barbarian' Old English sensibility." See his "The Virga of Moses and the
Old English Exodus," in OEL, pp. 63-65.
9. Joan Blomfield, "The Style and Structure of Beowulf, " in Fry, pp.
64-65.
10. The best comment on this passage that I have seen is by Michael
Swanton, ed., Beowulf (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978), p.
192: "That Beowulf's comitatus should all fall asleep under those circum-
stances is strange; possibly they had been entertained too well!"
11. See Albert B. Lord, "Homer and Huso II: Narrative Inconsistencies
in Homer and Oral Poetry," TAPA, 69 (1938): 439-445; and David M.
Gunn, "Narrative Inconsistency and the Oral Dictated Text in the Homeric
Epic," American Journal of Philology, 91 (1970): 192-203. In "Narrative
Anomalies in La Chançun de Willame," Viator, 9 (1978): 251-264, I have
296 N O T E S T O PAGES 169-175
shown how the anomalous structure of one Old French chanson de geste may
have its origin in an oral narrative technique. In his excellent article
''''Beowulf: Oral Presentation and the Criterion of Immediate Rhetorical Ef-
fect," Genre, 3 (1970): 214-228, Michael D. Cherniss offers a series of sug-
gestions concerning how a work composed for oral performance is to be read;
he then discusses specific examples of inconsistency, digression, and moralis-
tic commentary that cease to appear puzzling when each passage is read with
reference to its immediate narrative context. His article pursues a few com-
ments made by Robert P. Creed, "On the Possibility of Criticizing Old
English Poetry," Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 3 (1961):
97-106, regarding the inutility of approaching Beowulf-with expectations ap-
propriate to works composed for an audience of readers.
12. In making this statement I do not wish to suggest that modern
works of fiction either do not strive for thematic unity or generally fail to at-
tain it. I mean that whereas a modern author's failure to achieve unity of plot
will strike most readers as anomalous, as a "mistake," his failure to achieve
unity of theme will only be taken as an artistic shortcoming. In much oral
narrative, priorities are the reverse.
13. Kemp Malone, "Beowulf the Headstrong," ASE, 1 (1972): 140.
Compare Kenneth Sisam, "Beowulf's Fight with the Dragon," RES, n.s. 9
(1958): 129: "[The audience] could not study a long poem minutely as they
heard it read or recited. Even if the delivery was slow, they had no opportu-
nity to examine any verse or sentence closely, comparing what had been said
already and what came later."
- 14. See the similar opinions of Cherniss, "Oral Presentation," pp.
218-220; and Adrien Bonjour, "Jottings on Beowulf and the Aesthetic Ap-
proach," in Creed, pp. 182-183. For different views see Kemp Malone,
"Young Beowulf," JEGPh, 36 (1937): 21-23, and Norman E. Eliason,
"Beowulf's Inglorious Youth," SPh, 76 (1979): 101-108.
15. See Magoun's two articles cited in Chap. 7, n. 13.
16. See R. L. S. Bruce-Mitford, The Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial: A Hand-
book, 2nd ed. (London: British Museum, 1968), plate D (facing p. 81).
17. See Max Lüthi, The European Folktale: Form and Nature, trans. J.
Niles (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1982), p. 40. I
have borrowed the term truncated motif from Liithi's stumpfes Motiv, dis-
cussed on pp. 60-64 of this English edition.
18. Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1960), pp. 94-95.
19. This latter possibility has been argued forcefully by Kenneth Sisam,
The Structure of "Beowulf" (Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 80-82.
Sisam points out that any such treachery is not verified by sources outside the
poem and is never mentioned explicitly by the Beowulf poet, who, on the
contrary, chooses to depict the Danes as a united people who (with the ex-
ception of Unferth) behave civilly to one another and to their guest. Such a
view is supported by Gerald Morgan, "The Treachery of Hrothulf," ES, 53
(1972): 23-39.
N O T E S T O PAGES 1 8 0 - 1 9 3 297
9. T H E D I M E N S I O N O F T I M E
11. T H E L I S T E N I N G A U D I E N C E
1. See Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1960), pp. 14-16.
2. Here I am adapting to new purposes the phrasing of Wolfgang Iser,
"The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach," in his The Implied
Reader (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 275.
3. "The Seafarer," lines 72-80a. On the positive connotations of lof in
Beowulf see Stanley B. Greenfield, The Interpretation of Old English Poems
(London: Routledge, 1972), pp. 40-43.
4. See Klaeber, p. 122 (note to lines 4-52).
5. See Donald K. Fry, ed., Finnsburh: Fragment and Episode (London:
Methuen, 1974), p. 22, as well as John F. Vickrey, "The Narrative Structure
of Hengest's Revenge in Beowulf," ASE, 6 (1977): 91-103.
6. See Klaeber, pp. 178-179 (note to lines 1197-1201).
7. R. M. Lumiansky, "The Dramatic Audience in BeowulfJEGPh,
51 (1952): 545-550. On ways in which the poet maintains dramatic interest
in the absence of suspense, see also Adrien Bonjour, "The Use of Anticipa-
tion in Beowulfin his Twelve "Beowulf" Papers, 1940-1960 (Neuchâtel:
Faculté des Lettres, 1962), pp. 11-28, and Charles Moorman's lighter
piece "Suspense and Foreknowledge in BeowulfCollege English, 15
(1953-1954): 379-383.
8. Alain Renoir, "Beowulf A Contextual Introduction to Its Contents
and Techniques," in Heroic Epic and Saga, ed. Felix J. Oinas (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1978), p. 114.
9. Joseph Russo and Bennett Simon, "Homeric Psychology and the
Oral Epic Tradition," Journal of the History of Ideas, 29 (1968): 492. John
300 N O T E S T O PAGES 212-214
Miles Foley calls attention to the work of Russo and Simon with additional
pertinent comments in "The Traditional Oral Audience," Balkan Studies, 18
(1977): 149.
12. RECIPROCITY
1. Among those who have seen treasure as representing something posi-
tive in Beowulf are Edward B. Irving, Jr., A Reading of "Beowulf" (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1968) ("To express the very highest ideals of
fidelity and sacrifice in terms of material things is more than frequent in Ger-
manic heroic poetry, it is inevitable," p. 208); Alvin A. Lee, The Guest-Hall
of Eden: Four Essays on the Design of Old English Poetry (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1972), pp. 171-223 ("The symbols of life and divinely
sanctioned human activity are the gold-hall, circulating treasures, and the
hero," p. 221); and John C. McGalliard, "The Poet's Comment in Beowulf,"
SPh, 75 (1978): 243-270 (wealth is "celebrated, even gloried in," p. 251).
Among those who have seen it as negative are H. L. Rogers, "Beowulf's
Three Great Fights," in Nicholson, pp. 233-256 ("to the poet treasure was
evil," p. 252); Randolph Quirk, "Poetic Language and Old English Metre,"
in Early English and Norse Studies Presented to Hugh Smith, ed. Arthur Brown
and Peter Foote (London: Methuen, 1963), pp. 150-171 ("Surely the most
important thematic undercurrent in the poem" is "an undermining of the he-
roic values attached to gold," p. 168); and Margaret E. Goldsmith, The
Mode and Meaning of "Beowulf" (London: Athlone, 1970) (the gold repre-
sents all temporalia, "the things that must die,"p. 255). Patricia Silber, "Gold
and Its Significance in Beowulf," Annuale mediaevale, 18 (1977): 5-19, sees
the poet's attitude toward treasure as shifting from positive to negative from
part I to part II. Stanley B. Greenfield, "Gifstol and Goldhoard in Beowulf,"
in Pope Studies, pp. 107-117, takes a middle stance and concludes that the
dragon's hoard represents "a contrariety of functions." In his subsequent dis-
cussion in The Interpretation of Old English Poems (London: Routledge,
1972), pp. 10-11 and 115-117, Greenfield suggests (speaking against Quirk
and Goldsmith) that the poet does not condemn all gold, only hoarded gold.
In his eyes, the poet's values put a premium on generosity and are consistent
throughout.
2. Michael D. Cherniss, "The Progress of the Hoard in Beowulf¡" PQ,
47 (1968): 475-476. See further his Ingeld and Christ: Heroic Concepts and
Values in Old English Christian Poetry (The Hague: Mouton, 1972), chap. 4:
"Treasure: The Material Symbol of Human Worth." Cherniss acknowl-
edges his debt to Ernst Leisi, "Gold und Manneswert im Beowulf" Anglia,
71 (1953): 259-273. On material objects as emblems of worth, see also
T. A. Shippey, Beowulf (London: Edward Arnold, 1978), pp. 18-22.
3. See M. I. Finley, The World of Odysseus, 2nd ed. (1956; rpt. Har-
mondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1972), pp. 131-143, on treasure as a
symbol of prestige in early Greek society.
4. See the classic study by Marcel Mauss, Essai sur le don (1925), trans.
N O T E S T O PAGES 2 1 4 - 2 2 2 301
Ian Cunnison as The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Society
(New York: Norton, 1967), especially pp. 37-41. Charles Donahue, "Pot-
latch and Charity: Notes on the Heroic in Beowulf," in Anglo-Saxon Poetry
. . . for John C. McGalliard\ ed. Lewis E. Nicholson and Dolores Warwick
Frese (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), pp. 23-40,
offers a reading of the poem that takes its departure from Mauss and that fo-
cuses on gifts and counter-gifts.
5. Gyfena gehwilc unde[r] bœc besih]>: Olof Arngart, "The Durham
Proverbs," Speculum, 56 (1981): 293 (maxim 28).
6. For example, Marie Nelson, "It Is More Honorific to Give . . . , "
NM, 74 (1973): 624-629, argues that by showing how Hrothgar gives gifts
to Beowulf, the poet honors the Dane as much as the Geat.
7. H. R. Loyn, "Kinship in Anglo-Saxon England," ASE, 3 (1974):
203.
8. See N. P. Brooks, "Arms, Status, and Warfare in Late-Saxon
England," in Ethelred the Unready: Papers from the Millenary Conference,
ed. David Hill, British Archaeological Reports, British Series 59 (Oxford,
1978), pp. 81-103, and "The Development of Military Obligations in
Eighth- and Ninth-Century England," in England before the Conquest: Studies
in Primary Sources Presented to Dorothy JVhitelock, ed. Peter Clemoes and
Kathleen Hughes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), pp.
69-84.
9. This point is made by Brooks, "Arms, Status, and Warfare," p. 92.
10. See Rosemary Cramp, "Beowulf and Archaeology," in Fry, pp.
135-136. Regardless of whether or not decorative gilding was a feature of
any actual Germanic halls, the poet is explicit on the subject of the use of gold
to adorn Heorot (lines 308, 715-716, and 926-927).
11. The manuscript reading brand Healfdenes ("Healfdene's sword,"
1020b) is usually emended to beam Healfdenes ("Healfdene's son") or, alter-
natively, brand Healfdenes is kept and is taken to be a half-kenning for
"Hrothgar," but the literal meaning of the verse is worth saving: see Sher-
man M. Kuhn, "Further Thoughts on Brand Healfdenes," JEGPh, lb
(1977): 231-237.
12. Alain Renoir, "The Heroic Oath in Beowulf, the Chanson de Ro-
land, and the Nibelungenlied" in Brodeur Studies, p. 249.
13. Quirk, "Poetic Language," pp. 165-170. On the possible pitfalls of
reading this kind of irony into the text, see Greenfield, The Interpretation, p.
158, and Shippey, Beowulf, pp. 34-41. As Thomas G. Rosenmeyer has re-
marked in "Irony and Tragic Choruses," in Ancient and Modern: Essays in
Honor of Gerald F. Else, ed. John D'Arms and John W. Eadle (Michigan:
Center for Coordination of Ancient and Modern Studies, 1977), p. 31,
"There is very little in a good piece of writing that cannot, with some tug-
ging and stretching, be called 'ironical' in one way or another."
14. On the sense of "useless" in this context, see Edward I. Condren,
"Unnyt Gold in Beowulf 3168" PQ, 52 (1973): 296-299.
15. Irving, A Reading of "Beowulf", p. 181.
302 N O T E S T O PAGES 2 2 2 - 2 3 5
16. Eugene J. Crook, "Pagan Gold in Beowulf" American Benedictine
Review, 25 (1974): 233. See Michael Tangl, ed., Die Briefe des Heiligen
Bonifatius undLullus, MGH, Epistolae selectae, I (Berlin: Weidmann, 1916),
5: "Et universa mundi huius pretiosa . . . ut umbra pretereunt, ut fumus fati-
scunt, ut spuma marcescunt."
13. T H E C O N T R O L L I N G T H E M E
1. Robert E. Kaske, " Sapientia et fortitudo as the Controlling Theme of
Beowulf " SPh, 55 (1958): 423-457. Also see Kaske, "Beowulf " in Critical
Approaches to Six Major English Works, ed. R. M. Lumiansky and Herschel
Baker (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968), pp. 18-31.
2. The Homilies of IVulfstan, ed. Dorothy Bethurum (Oxford: Claren-
don, 1957), homily 9 (pp. 185-186).
3. Kaske's case seems to be strengthened at several points when words
denoting "brave" and "wise" are juxtaposed, as when Hrothgar speaks high
praise of Beowulf shortly before the young Geat departs for home: Ou eart
nuzgenes Strang, ond on modefrod, "You are strong of might and discerning of
mind" (1844). Hrothgar's words do not stop here, however, but continue im-
mediately with a third term of praise, wis wordcwida, "wise in speech"
(1845a). The poet's threefold distinction between bodily strength, mental
wisdom, and wise speech goes back to good medieval precedent, for example
Bede's reference in Historia ecclesiastica 5.12 to those who in omni verbo et
opere et cogitationeperfecti sunt. One may compare the conventional threefold
division of sins into those of thought, word, and deed (cogitatione, locutione, et
operatione). The twofold theme of sapientia etfortitudo is therefore present in
the poem, but not necessarily as a controlling force.
4. Maurice B. McNamee, "Beowulf—An Allegory of Salvation?"
JEGPh, 59 (1960): 190-207.
5. H. L. Rogers, "Beowulf's Three Great Fights," in Nicholson, p.
236.
6. Kathryn Hume, "The Theme and Structure of Beowulf" SPh, 72
(1975): 1-27 (quotation from p. 5).
14. T H E F A T A L C O N T R A D I C T I O N
1. W. F. Bolton, Alcuin and Beowulf: An Eighth-Century View (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1978), pp. 149-150, 166-167.
Bolton develops points made by E. G. Stanley, "Haejjenra Hyht in Beowulf "
in Brodeur Studies, pp. 136-151. It is a long way from this to the view of
Maurice B. McNamee as set forth in chap. 6 of his Honor and the Epic Hero
(New York: Holt, 1960): "The character of Beowulf is such a complete veri-
fication of the Christian notion of the heroic or the magnanimous that it
would almost seem to have been created to exemplify the virtue as St. Paul
and the early Church fathers sketched it—limited by the virtues of humility
and charity" (p. 109).
N O T E S T O PAGES 2 3 5 - 2 4 3 303
2. Larry D. Benson, "The Originality of Beowulf" Harvard English
Studies, 1 (1970), esp. pp. 31-33. Cf. the view of Arthur G. Brodeur, The
Art of "Beowulf " (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), p. 76: "It
is more than the death of Beowulf which constitutes the tragedy of Part II,
and so of the whole work; in death he is victorious; and he is old enough and
sufficiently full of honors, to die happily. His tragedy is that he dies in vain—
indeed that his death brings in his train the overthrow of his people."
3. Barbara Raw, The Art and Background of Old English Poetry (New
York: St. Martin's, 1978), p. 96.
4. John Leyerle, "Beowulf the Hero and the King," MM, 34 (1965):
89-102. Compare Harry Berger, Jr., and H. Marshall Leicester, Jr., "Social
Structure as Doom: The Limits of Heroism in Beowulf," in Pope Studies, pp.
37-79. Berger and Leicester discern an ambivalent attitude in Beowulf to-
ward the institutions of heroic society and hear "the sounds of doom working
within"—not against—"the social order" (p. 74).
5. See Tolkien's study "Ofermod" following his poem "The Homecom-
ing of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son," Essays and Studies (1953), 13-18.
Leyerle, "Beowulf the Hero and the King," p. 97 n. 13, observes that this
study was the genesis of his own article.
6. Margaret E. Goldsmith, "The Christian Theme of Beowulf MAL,
29 (1960): 81-101; "The Christian Perspective in Beowulf"' in Brodeur
Studies, pp. 71-90; "The Choice in Beowulf," Neoph., 48 (1964): 60-72;
The Mode and Meaning of "Beowulf" (London: Athlone, 1970).
7. Compare the pointed remark of Kemp Malone, "Beowulf the Head-
strong," ASE, 1 (1972), p. 143: "How well he took the measure of his retain-
ers!
8. I am taking this much-disputed term in the general sense of "God's
eternal law" rather than in the specific sense of lex naturae that is proposed by
Charles Donahue, "Beowulf, Ireland, and the Natural Good," Traditio, 7
(1949-51): 263-277; and Morton W. Bloomfield, "Patristics and Old
English Literature: Notes on Some Poems," in Brodeur Studies, pp. 39-41.
For a defense of the former reading see Adelaide Hardy, "Historical Per-
spective and the Beowulf Poet," Neoph., 63 (1979): 437. My point does not
depend on either interpretation.
9. G. N. Garmonsway, "Anglo-Saxon Heroic Attitudes," in Magoun
Studies, p. 145. John C. McGalliard, "The Poet's Comment in Beowulf,"
SPh, 75 (1978): 269, likewise sees the hero's actions as both "objectively ra-
tional" and "a courageous but thoroughly responsible e f f o r t . . . to protect his
people from the ravages of the dragon and to win treasure for their benefit."
10. ASPR, III, 147-149; for alternative editions with translations, see
Bernard F. Huppé, The Web of Words (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1970), pp. 2-26, and T. A. Shippey, ed., Poems of Wisdom and
Learning in Old English (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1976), pp. 54-57.
11. With these judgments by Benson and Goldsmith compare Lee's un-
compromisingly pessimistic view of the poem's close in The Guest-Hall of
Eden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972). Lee speaks of the poet and
304 N O T E S T O PAGES 2 4 3 - 2 5 2
AFTERWORD
1. See Godfrid Storms, "The Author of Beowulf" NM, 75 (1974): 23
and 39.
2. John C. Pope, "Beowulf's Old Age," in Philological Essays: Studies
. . . in Honour of Herbert Dean Meriti, ed. James L. Rosier (The Hague:
Mouton, 1970), pp. 55-64, discusses this stage with sympathetic insight.
3. J. R. R. Tolkien, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," in Ni-
cholson, p. 81.
4. One may compare The Song of Roland, an epic of militant Christian-
ity that assuredly played a part in the enculturation of the knights who were
spearheading the first crusades: see John F. Benton, " 'Nostre Franceis n'unt
talent de fuïr': The Song of Roland and the Enculturation of a Warrior
Class," Olifant, 6 (1979): 237-258.
5. As Edward B. Irving, Jr., points out in A Reading of "Beowulf" (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), p. 190, "Consistently Beowulf's ener-
gies are directed outward and away from the world of human violence and
warfare, directed outward with the purpose of preserving human community
by fending off threats from the outside." Margaret E. Goldsmith, "The
Christian Perspective in Beowulf" in Brodeur Studies, p. 72, notes "the ex-
traordinary way in which the poet has avoided writing an epic about a martial
N O T E S T O PAGES 2 5 2 - 2 5 3 305
hero." Dorothy Whitelock, The Audience of "Beowulf" (Oxford: Clarendon,
1951), suggests that the poet made a deliberate distinction between
Beowulf's kinds of fights, which are directed against inhuman enemies, and
the other heroes' kinds of fights, which provoke violence among tribes. Stan-
ley J. Kahrl, "Feuds in Beowulf: A Tragic Necessity?" MPh, 69 (1972):
189-192, likewise calls attention to the way that the hero steers away from
the violent feuding practiced by others. In general the poet loses few oppor-
tunities to undercut or excoriate the vicious circle of man's violence toward
man.
6. Mary P. Richards, "A Reexamination of Beowulf 11. 3180-3182,"
ELN, 10 (1973): 163-167, supports Kemp Malone's reading of mannum for
manna in 3181a; the translation would then be "most mild and gentle to
men." Either reading is consistent with my point.
7. See Bosworth and Toller, s.v. "mannpware" (p. 670) and "mann-
pwœrness" (supplement, p. 632).
8. For the similar achievement of the authors of some Icelandic sagas,
see Lars Lönnroth, "The Noble Heathen: A Theme in the Sagas," Scandi-
navian Studies, 41 (1969): 1-29. Cf. Claiborne W. Thompson, "Moral
Values in the Icelandic Sagas: Recent Re-evaluations," in The Epic in Medie-
val Society: Aesthetic and Moral Values, ed. Harald Scholler (Tübingen: Nie-
meyer, 1977), pp. 347-360; and see the related thesis of Charles J. Donahue,
"Social Function and Literary Value in Beowulf " ibid., pp. 382-390, to the
effect that the poem would have helped thoughtful warriors reconcile their
Christian faith with an admiration for their ancestors.
9. W. W. Lawrence, "Beowulf" and Epic Tradition (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1928), p. 231.
INDEX
^ l f r i c , 12, 69, 70, 79, 252 Beow (Scyld's son), 107, 152-153,
Aeneid, see Virgil 216-217
Age of Migrations, 51, 56 Beowulf (the hero): marvelous charac-
Alcuin, 46, 47, 71, 73, 74, 79, 89-90 teristics, 19-23, 27-29; active char-
Aldhelm, 71, 72, 79, 80 acter, 108-111, 201; unpromising
Alfred the Great, 51; program of edu- youth, 171, 250; faith in God, 185,
cational reform, 67-69, 72, 243; tragedy of, 187-188; death,
273-274n6 191, 193, 246-247; fate of soul,
Allegory, 26, 83; in Beowulf, 12, 19, 192, 200, 211; exemplary charac-
27, 225 ter, 202, 220, 223, 236-247; as
"Alliterative Revival," 46 controlling subject, 225-226, 227;
Andreas, 66, 249 pride, 241-243, 250; long rule,
Anglo-Latin literature, 70, 71, 87-90. 244-245; stages of life, 249-251;
See also Alcuin; Aldhelm; Asser; gentleness, 251-252
Bede; Felix of Croyland Beowulf codex, 13, 249
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 61, 69, 72, Bible, 90-91, 249, 252; Genesis, 77,
103, 105, 106, 214 87, 90; Job, 86; Psalms, 86
Antihero, 21 Bückling homilies, 17-19, 20, 116
Apollonius of Tyre, 69 Boethius, 68, 71, 79, 83, 146,
Art (Anglo-Saxon), 14-15, 102, 278n41. See also Meters of Boethius
165-167, 173, 223 Boniface, 71, 222-223
^ssc j. η2
Athelstan' 72, 97, 105, 112, 116-117 Caedmon, 34-35, 38-39, 56, 96;
Audience of Beowulf, 112, 146, "Caedmon's Hymn," 35, 48, 71,
161-162, 197, 198, 199, 204, 81, 92
205-206, 235, 253; present audi- Chansons de geste, 40. See also Song of
ence, 189-190, 192; as active par- Roland
ticipants, 206-207, 212; special Charters, 105, 117
knowledge of, 207-208; dramatic Chaucer, 46, 198, 201, 223, 225
audience, 208-212 Christ and Satan, 12
Augustine, St., 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, Christian elements, 16-20, 26-27,
90; Soliloquies, 68 73, 81-95, 182-183, 188, 235,
236, 237, 242, 247, 251-252;
"Battle of Brunanburh," 56, 117, 203 brood of Cain, 11, 12-13, 184;
"Battle of Finnsburh," 36, 47, 50, Flood, 12, 13, 88, 183, 184; hell,
56, 58, 64, 115 15, 16, 17-19, 26, 159, 193; terms
"Battle of Maldon," 47, 64, 97, 117, for devil, 92-93; harrowing of hell,
150, 221, 231, 240-241, 248 159-160; Last Judgment,
Bede, 68, 71, 73, 79, 87-88, 113, 192-193. See also Allegory; Hroth-
274n7; Ecclesiastical History, 34-35, gar's "sermon"; Patristics
68; "Death Song," 71-72 Community, 226-234
307
3O8 INDEX