Beowulf: An Epic Poem of Germanic Heritage and Christian Influence
Unit 2: Old English Literature
General Remarks
Some 30,000 lines of Old English poetry have come down to us from Anglo-Saxon times. Their alliterative form appears in the oldest poetic remains of other early Germanic languages, such as Old Icelandic. Certain features of its diction, even verse formulas and themes, are similarly shared and betray a common Germanic inheritance. In England itself, the earliest poetry of the Anglo-Saxon settlers was necessarily composed orally. It was often sung or chanted to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument; oral composition was practiced throughout the period.
Writing as a literary art was introduced among the Anglo-Saxons in the seventh century by missionaries from the Mediterranean world. Englishmen were engaged in literary pursuits, writing in Latin or English, prose or verse, soon after the Conversion. Thus, we have some four and a half centuries of writings in Old English before the Norman Conquest.
Poetic discourse in Old English is marked by the use of poetic vocabulary. Many Old English words are found only in verse with the frequent occurrence of hapax legomenon. Everything in Old English verse promotes the use of a wide variety of poetic terms. The need to multiply poetic diction prompts the widespread use of apposition as a rhetorical device.
Much of the appeal of poetic vocabulary to the Anglo-Saxons derived from its traditional nature: poetic words are mostly archaic or dialectal terms that have passed out of use. They evoke the better world of days gone by. The poets also continually coined new poetic terms by the method of compounding. This is a vital process of word formation in all the Germanic languages to this day—English examples are battleship and barefoot.
A particular type of compound is characteristic of the traditional diction of heroic verse: neither element of the compound refers literally to the thing denoted, but meaning is derived from the juxtaposition of terms in a metaphoric or metonymic process. For example, feorh-hus is literally “life-house”. Compounds of this sort are known as kennings or kenningar.
So conservative are the traditions of Old English verse composition that the formal properties of Cædmon’s Hymn, composed between 657 and 680, are indistinguishable from those of The Battle of Brunanburh, written between 937 and 955. As a consequence of this compositional uniformity, in conjunction with the Anglo-Saxon practice of anonymity, most Old English poems cannot be dated even to a particular century or two.
Most Old English poetry is preserved in manuscripts datable to the second half of the tenth century, the time of the Benedictine reform, when monastic life was revitalized throughout England.
Scribes did not always treat vernacular texts in verse the way they did texts in Latin; they sometimes recomposed the poems as they copied them. The result is the virtual assurance that the Old English poetic texts known to us must contain many manuscript readings that were never intended by those who first wrote them down.
2.2 An Introduction to Beowulf
Localization of the Text
Beowulf, the oldest of the great long poems written in English, was probably composed more than twelve hundred years ago, in the first half of the eighth century. Its author may have been a native of what was then West Mercia, the West Midlands of England today. The text is preserved in a single manuscript, dated to the late tenth century, which originated in the south, in the kingdom of the West Saxons.
In 1731, the manuscript was seriously damaged in the fire that destroyed the building in London which housed the collection of medieval English manuscripts made by Sir Robert Bruce Cotton (1571-1631). As a result, a number of lines and words have been lost from the poem.
While the poem itself is English in language and origin, it deals not with native Englishmen, but with their Germanic forebears, especially with two south Scandinavian tribes, the Danes and the Geats, who lived on the Danish island of Zealand and in southern Sweden. The historical period it concerns is some two centuries before the poem was written. It concerns a time following the initial invasion of England by Germanic tribes in 449, but before the Anglo-Saxon migration was completed. The audience may have considered itself to be of the same Geatish stock as the hero, Beowulf.
The one datable fact of the history mentioned in the poem is a raid on the Franks made by Hygelac, the king of the Geats at the time Beowulf was a young man, and this raid occurred in the year 520.
Beowulf is not only unique as an example of the Old English epic, but is also the greatest of the surviving epics composed by the Germanic peoples.
The Author and the Christian Tradition
It is generally agreed that the poet who put the old materials into their present form was a Christian, and that his poem reflects a Christian tradition: the conversion of the Germanic settlers in England had largely been completed during the century preceding the one in which the poet wrote. But there is little general agreement as to how clearly Beowulf reflects a Christian tradition or, conversely, the actual nature of the Christian tradition that it is held to reflect.
Many specifically Christian references occur, especially to the Old Testament:
- God is said to be the Creator of all things and His will seems recognized as being identical with Fate.
- Grendel is described as a descendant of Cain.
- The sword that Beowulf finds in Grendel’s mother’s lair has engraved on it the story of the race of giants and their destruction by the flood.
- The dead await God’s judgment.
Yet there is no reference to the New Testament—to Christ and His Sacrifice which are the real bases of Christianity. The poet also invokes values that seem to belong to an ancient, pagan, warrior society of the kind described by the Roman historian Tacitus at the end of the first century in his Germania.
One must, indeed, draw the conclusion from the poem itself that while Christian is a correct term for the religion of the poet and of his audience, it was a Christianity that had not yet by any means succeeded in obliterating an older pagan tradition, which still called forth powerful responses from men’s hearts.
The Warrior Society
In the warrior society, the most important of human relationships was that which existed between the warrior and his lord, a relationship based less on subordination of one man’s will to another’s than on mutual trust and respect. When a warrior vowed loyalty to his lord, he became not so much his servant as his voluntary companion, one who would take pride in defending him and fighting in his wars. In return, the lord was expected to take affectionate care of his thanes and to reward them richly for their valour.
A good king, one like Hrothgar or Beowulf, is referred to by such poetic epithets as “protector of warriors” and “dispenser of treasure” or “ring-giver”. The relationship between kinsmen was also of deep significance to this society and provides another emotional value for Old English heroic poetry.
If one of his kinsmen had been slain, a man had the special duty of either killing the slayer or exacting from him the payment of wergild. Relatives who failed either to exact wergild or to take vengeance could never be happy, having found no practical way of satisfying their grief for their kinsmen’s death.
It is evident that the need to take vengeance would create never-ending feuds. Hrothgar wishes to make peace with the Heatho-Bards by marrying his daughter to their king, Ingeld, whose father was killed by the Danes. But as Beowulf predicts, sooner or later the Heatho-Bards’ desire for vengeance on the Danes will erupt. The Danish princess Hildeburh, married to Finn of the Jutes, will see her son and her brother both killed.
Beowulf himself is chiefly concerned not with tribal feuds but with fatal evil. Grendel and the dragon are threats to the security of the lands, but they are not part of the social order and presumably have no one to avenge their deaths. It is the clear duty of the king and his companions to put down the evil. But the Danish Hrothgar is old and his companions unenterprising, and Hrothgar later impels the old Beowulf to fight the dragon that threatens his people.
Beowulf and Fate
In undertaking to slay Grendel, and later Grendel’s mother, Beowulf is testing his relationship with unknowable destiny. At any time his luck may abandon him and he may be killed, as he is in the otherwise successful encounter with the dragon. But whether he lives or dies, he will have done all that any man could do to develop his character heroically. Courage is the instrument by which the hero realizes himself.
Fate has not entirely doomed a man in advance; courage is the quality that can perhaps influence Fate against its natural tendency to doom him now. Doom ultimately claims him, but not until he has fulfilled to its limits the pagan ideal of a heroic life. And despite the desire he often shows to Christianize pagan virtues, the Christian poet remains true to the older tradition when, at the end of his poem, he leaves us with the impression that Beowulf’s chief reward is pagan immortality: the memory in the minds of later men of a hero’s heroic actions.