Beowulf (2 page)

The final third of the poem becomes strongly elegiac, an account of Beowulf as an old man fighting his final, futile battle, the end of a long and remarkable life. Worked into this section, not in chronological order but in a natural way, are four accounts of the Geat-Swede conflicts. There are also three accounts of Hygelac's last battle, Beowulf's nostalgic reminiscences, two anonymous speeches which contain some of the most beautiful elegiac verses in English literature, the introduction of Wiglaf, and a long, foreboding speech by an anonymous “messenger” to the Geats awaiting news of Beowulf's fight with the dragon. The handling of time in this section anticipates modern literature and greatly enhances its elegiac quality.

Thus the entire poem is an account of Beowulf's fights with three monsters surrounded by and interlarded with “digressions,” as they are too often called, which round out the poem and give it that rich background that so annoyed early critics who wished to have Beowulf fighting other heroes instead of monsters. It was in response to this sort of criticism that Tolkien delivered his lecture, explaining why the poem is exactly right as it is, and pointing out that the contrast between the Grendel and dragon sections is “essentially a balance, an opposition of ends and beginnings. In its simplest terms it is a contrasted description of 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.”

The unique manuscript of
Beowulf
, produced about 1000 A.D., was preserved in ways unknown and eventually included in the great library of Sir Robert Cotton, who died in 1631. This manuscript, copied on vellum by two scribes, was damaged at the top and outer edges by a fire in 1731, which obscured letters and some entire words. But the Icelandic scholar Grimur Thorkelin made a copy of the manuscript in 1787, before the scorched leaves had badly crumbled, and also commissioned a professional copyist ignorant of Old English to make another copy, imitating the Old English insular script, in that same year. The importance of these two copies, and of the early editions of the poem beginning with Thorkelin's in 1815, is profound, as the reading of any page of Frederick Klaeber's edition of
Beowulf
will indicate. Though there are some uncertain readings here and there, and a few leaves are badly damaged, a good modern edition presents the poem as about 95 percent sound, a miraculous survivor of the ravages of history.

The manuscript is obviously faithful for the most part to the original composition. The rich language and innovative quality of both poetry and structure indicate that a major talent, strong enough to override the few corruptions and possible interpolations of later scribes, composed the poem pretty much as we have it.

The date of the original composition will be forever debated. In earlier years, most scholars agreed that the poem was composed at some time during the life of Bede, the great Northern English teacher, biographer, and historian who died in 735. However, the supremacy of Mercia (the English Midlands) after Bede's death, under two successive kings who dominated all of England south of the Humber River, provided the best of poets with powerful patrons, and the later eighth century is therefore favored by some as a likely period for the poem's composition. Recently an entire book and a book-length anthology of essays have been published indicating that the
Beowulf
poet may have lived at any time between the late seventh century and the early eleventh. The important question is this: When and where lived an Anglo-Saxon king with enough wealth and sophistication to sponsor such a skillful poet as this, who must have been in demand at the best of courts?

Anglo-Saxon England is curiously viewed by most as a place of warring primitive tribes worshiping pagan gods and dominated by illiterate kings constantly fighting among themselves and drinking the nights away while their unlettered minstrels recited tales of conquest and bloodshed, sheltering in smoky halls strewn about with bones and cracked drinking horns. This may well have been true of some kingdoms from the first arrivals of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes in England around 450 and on down through the final conquest of the Romano-Celtic inhabitants about a century later, but beginning with the Christianization of Kent in 597 and the ensuing arrival in Northumbria of Celtic Christian missionaries from Wales, Ireland, and Iona, with the establishment of monastic seats of learning under several very literate and sophisticated kings, that picture must be drastically altered.

Anglo-Saxon audiences loved to hear tales of the early North Germanic peoples like the Danes, Swedes, and Geats of the sixth century, just as we enjoy books and movies about Henry VIII and Sir Thomas More, Henry's many wives and his daughter Elizabeth and all the battles and courtly intrigues of the sixteenth century. A poem like
Beowulf
—i.e., long and leisurely, distinguished by tales of the North Germanic Heroic Age—could have been composed at any time between about 650 and the beginning of serious Danish and Norwegian invasions of England after the first third of the ninth century. Northumbria in the seventh century was ruled for a time by two kings, Oswald and his successor, Oswiu, brothers who had been well educated when young by Celtic Christian teachers on the island of Iona. Following them came another educated king, Aldfrith, whose twenty-year reign (685–705) made possible the learning, scholarship, and artistic production of Northumbrian monasteries during the Age of Bede, from the late seventh century through the first third of the eighth. During this period were produced the many fine literary works of Bede, including the first great coordinated history of the European Middle Ages, his
Ecclesiastical History of the English People
. Bede's friend Eadfrith, bishop of Lindisfarne, produced one of the most beautiful illuminated manuscripts of any period anywhere in the world, the Lindisfarne Gospels. During this same period a magnificent stone cross, now preserved at the Ruthwell Church in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, and originally standing some eighteen feet tall, was produced by a master artist, who included, along the margins on two faces of the cross, runic inscriptions which form an early Northern version of one of the finest poems in Old English, “The Dream of the Rood,” in which the cross of the Crucifixion speaks, telling its marvelous story.

Immediately following this period, and covering most of the rest of the eighth century, two Mercian kings, Aethelbald and Offa, made their courts the most powerful throughout England south of the Humber, Offa being treated by Charlemagne as a friend and equal worth corresponding with. During the reign of either of these kings,
Beowulf
could have been composed. In fact, from the Age of Bede down to the Viking Age in England (an unlikely time for an English poem praising Danes), a number of kings in various areas of England held courts rich and knowledgeable enough to attract such a man as the
Beowulf
poet.

In addition to the learning and sophistication of several Anglo-Saxon kings, an early-seventh-century cenotaph ship burial in East Anglia, known as the Sutton Hoo burial, has given us an example of the numerous treasures and exquisite artwork to be found at the court of one early king, items too rich and varied to describe here but sufficient to rank him with any king in the Germanic world. Museums throughout England contain a splendid variety of other treasures; literary descriptions and manuscript illuminations add to this picture of royal wealth. And who knows what evidence of the magnificence of Anglo-Saxon courts disappeared after the Battle of Hastings?

The Old English poetry that has survived, most of it in four great manuscripts, is almost all a blend of the old Germanic poetic form with the new Christian teaching that was first composed, according to Bede, by Caedmon in the third quarter of the seventh century. It is much earlier than any other vernacular poetry in medieval Europe and in many ways distinct from the later recorded Icelandic poetry, the only other sizable body of early Germanic poetry that has survived in manuscript. The great variety of length and subject matter of Old English poetry, the more than 30,000 lines that have come down to us, precludes any kind of summary here. It is a noble body of verse, including many poems of great beauty and strength that fully reward the effort required to learn how to read them.

It was in this tradition that the
Beowulf
poet, innovative though he was, composed his work, and we may imagine the splendor of a court wherein such a poet may have worked. The hall would be hung with rich tapestries, furnished with handsomely wrought benches and trestle tables, distinguished by a “high-seat” inlaid with ivory and burnished with gold, the king's table graced with imported glass and silverware, elaborate drinking horns and cups of precious metals and stones. The royal family and important members of the king's retinue would be richly dressed, with brooches, bracelets, necklaces, and armlets of gold and garnets. Fine hawks and dogs and horses, heirloom armor and weapons, saddles and bridles often adorned with ivory and silver, would be a part of this picture. And of course the ever-present minstrel with his harp would be there at the feet of his king, ready to recite from his large repertory when the moment was right.

In the literature of Western Europe,
Beowulf
is by far the earliest poem of such length and distinction in any vernacular language after the fall of Rome. In it we find the earliest references to heroes of such later Icelandic works as the
Völsunga Saga
and the
Hrólfs Saga Kraka
. It is a thoroughly English poem, comparable in technique, language, patristic wisdom, and beauty to shorter poems like “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer,” yet different from and greater than any other Old English poem.
Beowulf
stands at the beginning of English poetry, “between the worlds” as R. W. Chambers said. It salutes the dying of the old and the birth of the new, and belongs to everyone whose native tongue is English.

The
Beowulf
poet was either a Christian or very familiar with and influenced by Christianity. The very tone of the poem in places, especially in the final third, reflects the Christian patristic influence that pervades much of Old English poetry. But some of the principal characters are historically North Germanic pagans, and much of this tradition is retained by the poet, notably in some of the characteristics of Beowulf. The poet's skill in blending these traditions is one of the most remarkable aspects of his work.

The way in which the poet solves the problem of religion in this heroic-elegiac poem composed for a Christian audience is one thing that leads me to believe that the poem was composed not long after 700. At that time, although the Anglo-Saxons were generally converted to Christianity, they were also strongly aware of their pagan past. Thus the poet, while introducing the idea of only one god, a kind of Old Testament god whose name is spelled exactly as today, does not push things further, makes no mention of Christ or anything else in the New Testament. Also the concepts of Heaven and Hell were ambivalent at that time, especially in a tale of Northern kings who lived in the distant past, and I have not capitalized these words in the translation.

Not one pagan god is ever mentioned. Although the Old English word
wyrd
, akin to Modern High German
werden
and based on a concept of “that which will happen,” appears in the poem, it is used only ten times as a proper noun, and far from being the name of a god, it is rather a kind of enigmatic force—once referred to as “she”—somewhat similar to Fortune in later medieval literature. It is used twice as a verb (to injure or destroy), once as a common noun (fact or deed), and once as an adjective (destined), and it is not capitalized by any modern editor of
Beowulf
. A significant passage, referring to Grendel's abduction of one of Beowulf's men, says that Grendel would have carried off even more men “had not wise God and that man's [Beowulf's] courage withstood
wyrd
.”

God, by contrast, is mentioned thirty-two times as God and at least sixty times (I have not tried to count them all) under several other names—Shaper, Wielder, Measurer, Father, Deemer, Glory-King, and Old English words now lost such as
Frea
and
Dryhten
. Though the pagan Germanic tradition is reflected in many ways, one god, named God and introduced through Christianity, is in charge.

Beowulf is obviously a creation of the poet, though partial comparisons have been made between him and somewhat similar characters in folklore and Icelandic sagas. As related to other characters in the poem, he would probably have been born shortly before 500 and died as a very old man. His “fifty-year reign” (like that of Hrothgar and Grendel's mother) is a poetic cliché.

That Beowulf's origin is obscure, that he apparently never married and/or produced any children, that he returned alone from the battle that took the life of his king instead of dying by his side in the best Germanic-heroic tradition, that he was almost entirely inactive in the Geat-Swede conflicts, that he seems at times superhuman and at other times merely a remarkable man, that he is such a curious blend of pagan and Christian (compared by some with a Christian knight), that he never appears anywhere else in all the literature of the North—these things are not bothersome or difficult to understand when we realize that a major poet was trying something big and new, and that he created for his work an original character to bring together all of its complex features.

As for the monsters, they were real enough to Anglo-Saxons ten or twelve centuries ago. Grendel and his mother were creatures of evil and darkness, feared by the Anglo-Saxons before and after conversion to Christianity, seen by Christians as descendants of Cain, God's enemies, lurking in the night outside the firelit halls. The way the poet describes these monsters, with just a few details here and there, somehow makes them more fearful and menacing than any kind of detailed portrait would have done.