These values had evolved to some extent in the intervening centuries and were continuing to change. In the Scandinavian world of the story, tiny tribes of people rally around strong kings, who protect their people from danger—especially from confrontations with other tribes. The warrior culture that results from this early feudal arrangement is extremely important, both to the story and to our understanding of Saxon civilization. Strong kings demand bravery and loyalty from their warriors, whom they repay with treasures won in war.
Mead-halls such as Heorot in Beowulf were places where warriors would gather in the presence of their lord to drink, boast, tell stories, and receive gifts. Although these mead-halls offered sanctuary, the early Middle Ages were a dangerous time, and the paranoid sense of foreboding and doom that runs throughout Beowulf evidences the constant fear of invasion that plagued Scandinavian society.
Only a single manuscript of Beowulf survived the Anglo-Saxon era. For many centuries, the manuscript was all but forgotten, and, in the s, it was nearly destroyed in a fire. It was not until the nineteenth century that widespread interest in the document emerged among scholars and translators of Old English. It was not until , when the Oxford scholar J.
Beowulf is now widely taught and is often presented as the first important work of English literature, creating the impression that Beowulf is in some way the source of the English canon. But because it was not widely read until the s and not widely regarded as an important artwork until the s, Beowulf has had little direct impact on the development of English poetry. In fact, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Pope, Shelley, Keats, and most other important English writers before the s had little or no knowledge of the epic.
It was not until the mid-to-late twentieth century that Beowulf began to influence writers, and, since then, it has had a marked impact on the work of many important novelists and poets, including W. Beowulf is often referred to as the first important work of literature in English, even though it was written in Old English, an ancient form of the language that slowly evolved into the English now spoken.
As English history developed, after the French Normans conquered the Anglo-Saxons in , Old English was gradually broadened by offerings from those languages. Thus modern English is derived from a number of sources. As a result, its vocabulary is rich with synonyms. Fortunately, most students encountering Beowulf read it in a form translated into modern English.
Still, a familiarity with the rudiments of Anglo-Saxon poetry enables a deeper understanding of the Beowulf text. This is an image of the first page of the surviving original written copy of Beowulf. Now about 1, years old, it is referred to as the "Beowulf Manuscript" and is housed in the national British Library.
Here are a few of the books we have on this topic in the library. To find more, try a Power search in the library catalog. It looks like you're using Internet Explorer 11 or older. This website works best with modern browsers such as the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. If you continue with this browser, you may see unexpected results. Beowulf: Beowulf, the Poem A guide to information about the origins and composition of the epic poem Beowulf.
The Beowulf Manuscript The epic Beowulf, set in the pagan world of 6th century Scandinavia, was originally passed down from generation to generation through spoken performances and word-of-mouth. But we cannot know for sure. There Beowulf lay buried in its obscure codex for more than five hundred years, unread and soon virtually unreadable, until King Henry VIII nationalized the monasteries in the sixteenth century, after which it emerged among antiquarian book collectors before coming within inches of being destroyed by fire in It is scorched and crumbling around its edges, from which at least 2, letters have been lost since the end of the eighteenth century.
The text of this damaged poem would itself seem to exemplify the fate it depicts for all human achievements. Yet, since the time Beowulf was first translated badly, into Latin in and then presented in a more reliable scholarly edition in , the power of its language, the starkness of its imagery, the subtlety of its thought, and the poignancy of its sad, brave view of life have inspired as many scholarly studies, at least until recently, as the combined tragedies of Shakespeare.
It is the first great poem in English and, after centuries of silence of its own, speaks for generations of mute speakers of that language. It is perhaps the single most expressive statement of the imaginative world of northern Europe during the centuries that followed the fall of Rome, at least among those barbarian nobles who formed the first ruling elites in postimperial lowland Britain. It is remarkable that this long-forgotten and poorly understood poem should finally have come into its own only at the beginning of the twenty-first century, emerging from its cloistered manuscript in the nineteenth and from anthologies for students in the twentieth to find itself even more compelling to translators, poets, scholars, writers, filmmakers, graphic artists, musical composers, and other interpreters than at any other time of its existence on earth.
In addition, the recent revolution of postmodern literary theory has opened up many new approaches to the interpretation of this old poem, transcending former debates about whether it is essentially a Christian work or a pagan one, whether it is the product of monastic literary culture or an ancient oral heritage, and whether its hero is to be seen as a doomed heathen warlord or a Christian role model, even a self-sacrificial figure of Christ.
As we will see, current discussions of the meaning of Beowulf or its conscientious lack thereof in certain deconstructive analyses revive and reframe these scholarly controversies in ways that naturally reflect our own historical moment and cultural preoccupations. Their character and significance has continued to exercise scholars ever since J. To the contrary, Tolkien argues, the monsters make the poem. Beowulf is not demeaned but dignified by the dire antagonists he must face: Grendel as a young hero at the beginning of his career, the dragon as an old king at its end.
These monsters represent forces beyond all human understanding and control, powers inimical to human civilization and social order. The structure of Beowulf is simpler, Tolkien suggests, than the three monster fights into which it is divided. Some of these episodes are recounted at considerable length by the poet in his own voice or by characters within his poem, but more often they are simply adduced by the slimmest and most cryptic of allusions, so that we often have a hard time reconstructing the backstory that would clarify the point of the reference.
He himself falls into a memory-riddled funk moments before calling out the chthonic worm, brooding obsessively on the sad and morally confusing deaths of his royal kinsmen before him. And these creatures themselves are described in such suggestive language and juxtaposed to human characters in such striking ways that we begin to suspect that the poet is using them not only to challenge his hero but also to reflect upon his own motivations and those of other human figures in the poem.
Grendel Yet he names this character after a creature familiar from Anglo-Saxon folklore, a grendel , a marsh or boundary troll, whom the poet further rationalizes not as a fallen angel but as a mortal human renegade:. This last is an allusion to the great Flood of Genesis 6 from which the Beowulf poet imagines some of the wicked giants surviving amphibiously in their watery refuges.
But none of the human characters in the poem knows any of this. But we know, because the poet tells us: It was the sweet song of the scop singing of divine order in the world, plus the sound of mirth among former enemies to whom the tough but generous Scylding monarchs have brought peace and amity.
There is no trace of condolence for the various tribal chieftains who were crushed and despoiled by Scyld, or intimidated into submission, local warlords from whom the upstart king wrested their mead benches, symbols of the autonomy with which they had once feasted their own followers in their own mead halls. Even in pagan times the Christian God promotes broad national monarchy and the political stability it brings. But it was not to last.
The moment Hrothgar finishes building Heorot, the poet alludes to its imminent destruction—not by monsters, but by humans:. We learn the details later. Hrothgar hopes that Ingeld will be seduced to forget his grief and humiliation with this advantageous match, but he will not succeed.
Grendel foreshadows in monstrous caricature the angry spirit that will well up in the breast of the all too predictable human king. The poet uses flame as a symbol of hatred and its power to destroy.
Fire burns everywhere in this dark poem. It is no wonder the Beowulf poet makes Grendel a direct descendent of Cain, the perpetrator, he implies, of the real original sin of mankind, 26 a view shared by other Old English poets.
That of Maxims I says:. Grendel embodies our violent human heritage in its most hideous, characteristic, and predictable form; his cannibalism incarnates a system of human interaction that incessantly devours the lives of men. He did not find the hero similarly enhanced by his encounter with her. Why not? Who would have thought that man-eating fen trolls had fretful moms waiting for them back in their lairs?
But the poet is only teasing us. She is difficult for Beowulf even to find among the many hazards at the bottom of her mere; she is slippery, quick, and clever as she reverses his grip on her shoulder or hair , flips him under her, and draws her long knife. She almost gets him, too, and would certainly have done for Beowulf if Almighty God himself had not intervened at that very moment in one of the most explicit intrusions of divine agency in the entire poem:.
She leaves her lair for one very specific reason: to avenge her son. Her behavior has both intellectual clarity and a certain moral rigor: She scrupulously exacts a life for a life, according to the strict rules of the old lex talionis Exodus We know exactly how this mother—any mother—would feel.
However, the poet of Beowulf has already shown that any deterrent, equalizing, or cohesive purpose to a system of mutual exchange had long since broken down in Denmark. His loss is specially and bitterly mourned, even after all the other deaths suffered by the Danes. But this way, he suggests, both sides will always lose those they love the most. It is primordial love, he realizes, that is the bottomless wellspring of human hatred.
We hate so hard because we love so much and so protectively those whom we see as moral appendages of own persons, a mother especially, since her physical connection to her offspring is so obvious and tangible.
Families are the same. We are sprung from their bodies, bone of their bone, flesh of their flesh. Wounded love of kind is thus the indefatigable engine of violence in human affairs. We best express our love not through sorrow but through more violence.
What Beowulf is most proud of is that his beloved uncle Hygelac had never needed to seek among other peoples a warrior worse than him to fight their enemies. This gloating memory is what gives Beowulf the final gumption to call out the dragon a few moments later.
And there are other moments in the poem where we feel the same thrill of revenge. He is a really nice man. When he dies, the Geats mourn him from the bottom of their hearts:. Much f this esteem comes from the fact that Beowulf never killed a kinsman, a blessing for which he thanks God lines b—a and a rarity among Germanic princes, historical or legendary. But neither did Beowulf let his kinsmen lie unavenged, even when they were stupidly, wickedly, disastrously in the wrong.
Beowulf does not become a monster by killing monsters: The monsters of Beowulf become human by killing humans. It comes naturally to us, especially when someone harms our loved ones.
The Dragon They both get their revenge, of course, but lose their lives in the process. Our damaged and disfigured hero is now something of a monster himself, exulting almost pathetically in the wealth he has won for his people, not realizing that it is worthless to them without him.
Swedes and Franks and other enemies will all remember the many injuries Geats have done them in the past, including some big ones by Beowulf himself. This is not at all a good exchange, that on all sides everyone ends up paying with the lives of their loved ones, the hero of the poem just like everybody else. Unlike Grendel and his mother, however, the dragon is not a humanoid monster. It is supercultural and therefore ultimately insuperable, 37 an earthly analogue of the great world serpent that the god Thor will kill on the last day, stepping, just like Beowulf, only paces away to his own death.
These are not ironies for the Beowulf poet. Despite his many references to the Christian God, then, whose presence is so palpable in the earlier parts of his poem, the poet of Beowulf chooses to end his story the old-fashioned way, a choice that may help explain why his work never achieved the kind of cultural authority in Christian Anglo-Saxon England enjoyed by other epics of comparable depth and artistry, which express for their societies a clearer sense of divine purpose, national mission, dynastic legitimacy, or folk character.
Instead, Beowulf slipped away into the corners of English literary culture, quietly awaiting its revival in our own post-Christian, postmodern, less confident age. Anlezark, Daniel. Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
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