I understand why scholars approach primary sources with a scientific lens. I really do, but sometimes I feel like when we approach them scientifically we lose sight of some of the magic they hold. This is why I wanted to read Beowulf with my imaginative mind ready and open, ready to hear one of those epic tales I adore so much. I didn’t want to overanalyze everything but simply savor it. So first, I read it as I imagine it would have originally been heard…sitting in a mead hall, surrounded by rowdy drunk battle-hardened warriors and their families, listening to a scop entertaining with stories of epic heroes while simultaneously passing on the oral legends that make up the people’s history, all of us on the edge of our seats, eager to hear of the great feats and feuds of their ancestors and neighboring kingdoms. And this is what I heard… (NOTE: since this poem is over a thousand years old, I don’t feel too bad including spoilers below. But thought I’d just give you a heads up, in case you don’t want me to ruin it for ya. so…this is your official SPOILER ALERT!)
A young, fearless man, with the strength of thirty men, Beowulf, boldly set out to earn his fame and renown as a famous warrior by killing a monster no one had been able to vanquish. He and his men travel the seas to a land far from their own and present themselves to the king plagued by this monster. Beowulf describes his previous daring exploits to King Hrothgar where he delivers a great one-liner —“For unless he is already doomed, fortune is apt to favor the man who keeps his nerve.” Then he describes his decisive plan of action in fighting the monster, saying in one instance that the verdict of who will win is up to God. But then finishes his speech with, “Fate must decide.” They are well received and a banquet is held in their honor. Then in the dead of night, when the beast sneaks into the hall to attack the sleeping knights, in grand fashion, Beowulf rips his arm off, sending the beast scurrying out of the hall to die in agony. Everyone celebrates his success until the demon’s vengeful mother returns wrecking devastation in retaliation for the death of her son. Beowulf decides to go after her. He is gifted a sword named Hrunting “a pre-eminent among ancestral treasures, whose patterned blade was tempered in blood. It had never failed any man who carried it or who dared to undertake exploits on the field of battle. Nor was it the first time it had been called upon to perform a bold deed,” (I just love it when the sword is a character in its own right). Beowulf chases her down into the depths of a lake of fire. But his sword fails him! Don’t despair though, because he suddenly finds another one in her lair which he uses to slay the ‘enormous water-hag.’ Thus Beowulf ends the massacres and rids the kingdom of the horrors that had been terrorizing them for twelve years. It’s a gloriously epic tale. Beowulf worthily earns his reputation and the riches and treasure King Hrothgar bestows on him in thanks and gratitude.
After he returns to his homeland, he becomes king and justly rules for fifty years, earning more praise and admiration this time from his own people.
But fate. At the end of Beowulf’s life, he is once again faced with fighting a monster when a dragon, woken from his slumber by a slave stealing a goblet from his treasure hoard, begins burning Beowulf’s kingdom. He knows this is the end. He sets out with a select few of his best men to fight the dragon. He pridefully tells the men not to intervene, this is his battle he must do alone. As he fights the dragon, he loses the advantage and begins to struggle. His men abandon him, fleeing to the forest for safety. All but one, a young man named Wiglaf. Wiglaf runs to Beowulf’s side and they defeat the dragon together. But in doing so, Beowulf is mortally wounded. He slowly dies next to the slain monster…so apropos for a monster killer. His people grieve and build a large funeral pyre for him, burying the riches of the dragon’s treasure hoard underneath. The end.
I loved learning that all ogres, hobgoblins, and monsters are Cain’s progeny! Who knew?! I also loved King Hrothgar's great diatribe on virtue when sending Beowulf home. Hrothgar explains how God blesses a man, giving him wealth, and a place to rule with luxury and no dangers or threats (foreshadowing much?!). But he cautions against this, saying that “within him, arrogance grows and festers. Conscience, which is sentinel of the soul, falls asleep.” Then he wisely warns, “Be on your guard against such wickedness, my dear Beowulf! Choose the better part, which is eternal gain. Avoid pride, illustrious hero. For a little while you will be at the peak of your strength; but it will not be long before sickness or the sword, or the hand of fire, or the raging sea, a thrust of the knife, a whizzing arrow, or hideous dotage, or failure and darkening of the eyes, will plunder you of your might; and in the end, brave soldier, death will defeat you.”
The fact that Beowulf would finally see his demise by the very creature he earned glory killing is just so poetic. “Both the king, whose worth had long been manifest, and the Worm which had watched over its treasure-hoard for so many ages, were to quit this world together.”
Then to wrap it all up with another line about fate. “For the first time Beowulf had to fight without success because fate refused to grant it to him.” And, “Collecting his wits, the king pulled out a razor-sharp dagger which he wore at his corselet and ripped open the belly of the Worm. Together the kinsmen killed their adversary. That is how a man should act in a tight corner! It was Beowulf’s crowning hour of triumph, his last feat of arms, and the end of his life’s work.”
Guys, it doesn’t get better than this. An epic tale of warriors earning glory, monsters, fate, themes of good and evil, an exploration of the virtues of men, and the poetic grand end of things coming full circle, because that’s the jest of life, is it not? We are all beholden to fate. I so thoroughly enjoyed Beowulf.
HISTORIOGRAPHY
Once I was done enjoying it as a reader, I put my historian hat back on. One of the first things I came across was a famous article written by none other than J.R.R. Tolkien where he says he preferred the monsters in Beowulf to the critics of Beowulf. He said, “Beowulf had been used as a quarry of fact and fancy far more assiduously than it had been studied as a work of art.” The critics had basically sucked the life out of the epic tale in search of historical or literary significance. Ha, I knew I liked him. He sums up the historiography/critique of Beowulf better than I could. So here’s how Beowulf has been understood so far, in Tolkien’s more eloquent words:
'Beowulf is a half-baked native epic the development of which was killed by Latin learning; it was inspired by emulation of Virgil, and is a product of the education that came in with Christianity; it is feeble and incompetent as a narrative; the rules of narrative are cleverly observed in the manner of the learned epic; it is the confused product of a committee of muddle-headed and probably beer-bemused Anglo-Saxons (this is a Gallic voice); it is a string of pagan lays edited by monks; it is the work of a learned but inaccurate Christian antiquarian; it is a work of genius, rare and surprising in the period, though the genius seems to have been shown principally in doing something much better left undone (this is a very recent voice); it is a wild folk-tale (general chorus); it is a poem of an aristocratic and courtly tradition (same voices); it is a hotchpotch; it is a sociological, anthropological, archaeological document; it is a mythical allegory (very old voices these and generally shouted down, but not so far out as some of the newer cries); it is rude and rough; it is a masterpiece of metrical art; it has no shape at all; it is singularly weak in construction; it is a clever allegory of contemporary politics (old John Earle with some slight support from Mr. Girvan, only they look to different periods); its architecture is solid; it is thin and cheap (a solemn voice); it is undeniably weighty (the same voice); it is a national epic; it is a translation from the Danish; it was imported by Frisian traders; it is a burden to English syllabuses; and (final universal chorus of all voices) it is worth studying.' - JRR Tolkien, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”
TRANSLATIONS
According to Tolkien, Beowulf was “just a poem—an elegy,” (Acocella, “Slaying Monsters” article). He held esteem for the poem by pointing out the brilliance of its construction built on balance rather than straightforward narrative. He focused on this when he translated Beowulf himself, a feat few scholars are adequately equipped to do. His translation was published posthumously by his son. Another famous translation is by Seamus Heaney. Heaney won the Noble Prize in 1995 “for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.” With his translation of Beowulf, he is attributed to have “made a masterpiece out of a masterpiece,” (Acocella).
The translation I read was a Penguin Classic, first published in 1957, by David Wright. I stumbled upon this translation like I do a lot of my books, tucked away on a dusty shelf in a used book store somewhere, the binding crusty and peeling so much I had to tape it together when I got home. So I can’t say you should read my translation over others, because I don’t know where Mr. Wright sits in the hierarchy of Beowulfiana, but I did thoroughly enjoy it. He claims his translation is “a readable prose translation of the poem rather than a word-for-word version of the text…his aim was not to distract the reader’s attention from the story that is presented by the poet,” (Wright, 24-25). When I tried different translations after his, ones like Heaney’s and Tolkien’s, they were harder to follow and some of the epicness (is that a word?) was lost because I couldn’t tell what the hell was happening. But that is most definitely due to the reader’s ignorance and not the translator’s fault. Their translations were beautiful though. So I guess it depends on what you want out of it, to enjoy the epic legendary story of Beowulf (go with a prose translation), or to appreciate and savor the craftsmanship of the poem Beowulf (go with a more literal translation). HERE is an article discussing several good translations to help you figure out which one to go with.
THE BASICS
Beowulf is known as one of the finest products of the Dark Ages (Wright, 9). It’s an English heroic epic. It was originally written in Old English. Today, there are at least 688 different translations of it. That’s a staggeringly large corpus built around a single poem. You can also really get lost down some rabbit holes when researching Beowulf. There is A LOT of scholarly material on it, whether on excavating it for historical fact, analyzing its structure and cadence, viewing it through its cultural or linguistic value, or reading it as an epithet of Anglo-Saxon Literature. I mean, there are so many articles with lots of voices arguing one point over another. What is its theme? Did you see the parallels between the monsters and Beowulf? How many ways can you translate the word wyrd and how significant your word choice changes the tone of the poem? Was that king a real king? How about that king? Did those people actually fight those other people? And so on.
It was composed in the eighth century (maybe). Nobody knows for certain. We do know the poem was written down into a manuscript circa 1000 CE, but the story itself was most likely told orally for centuries before that. What’s fascinating to me is that it was put in a manuscript in 1000 CE, but then there’s nothing mentioned about it anywhere until the sixteenth century when it became part of a collection owned by an antiquarian, Laurence Nowell (who signed his name on the first page! Can you imagine signing your name on a manuscript from circa 1000 CE?!?) and then it became a part of a collection owned by Sir Robert Cotton. But where was it for over FIVE HUNDRED years? Who owned it? Who enjoyed and read it over and over? Where did it travel?
Originally, it was known as a pagan poem, but that has since been corrected and is now widely accepted as Christian. We don’t know who actually wrote it, although there are plenty of scholars out there who have tried to identify the author. It was composed in Mercia or Northumbria. The oldest surviving manuscript now lives in the British Museum. It’s known as the Nowell Codex or Cotton Vitellius A. xv.
There are many arguments on what the poem is essentially about. The translator I read claims it’s about earning the esteem and praise of one’s contemporaries (Wright, 17). It’s the idea that fame is the most precious thing a man can have because it is all that survives in a very transient world (Wright, 17). Wright says Beowulf is about how the human being ought to behave when he is without hope.
“It affirms the human being in a world where everything is transient, whether life, happiness, power, or splendor; where darkness too quickly follows upon light, just as the long northern winter overwhelms the brief season of spring. It ends with the smoke of a funeral fire: the primeval Dragon defeated, but the man lying dead, with disaster waiting round the corner for the people he defended. But his glory survives; and that is the consolation,” (Wright, 19).
Tolkien says the tragedy is that Beowulf is simply a man and he is on the losing side of life. Many English Lit classes devote a considerable time to Beowulf. So I won’t even begin to attempt to debate the merits of it. I will just say that it was all about fate to me. “Fate is inexorable!” as Uhtred of Bebbanburg would say. Perhaps, the great Bernard Cornwell was familiar with Beowulf when he wrote his Saxon series (which is also excellent, btw).
KENNINGS!!!
Last, but not least, kennings. Beowulf is full of them. What are they? Don’t feel bad, I didn’t know either. I had to look them up. They are a type of artistic metaphorical expression found in Anglo-Saxon poetry where the author uses a saying or description in place of a noun. They’re kind of like riddles, where you have to discern what the author is trying to describe. They’re pretty cool! Here are some examples to help build your appreciation for them:
“sky-candle” for “sun”
“swan-road” for “sea”
“storm of swords” for “battle”
“Peace-weaver” for “Queen”
“Twilight-spoiler” for “Dragon”
“Battle-Sweat” for “Blood”
“Stout-hearted” for “Brave”
Guys, they’re so fun! I wish we still did this. Oh wait, we do in a sense:
“fender-bender” for car accident
“tree-hugger” for someone who cares for the environment
“Book-worm” for someone who reads a lot
“Brown-noser” for someone who…well we all know at least one of these
“couch potato” for a lazy person
“early bird” & “night owl” for someone who rises early or stays up late
“a tongue lashing” for getting yelled at
“a tear-jerker” a movie/book that makes you cry
Ok, that is a brief overview of this amazing medieval primary source. I hope it has encouraged you to go out and read it for yourself. Try different translations. Try modern renderings and retellings from different character perspectives. Try it as a graphic novel. Watch the movie. But please engage with it, it’ll be worth your effort.
If you’ve read it, please share your thoughts in the comments. Also, take a stab at creating your own kenning! Here’s mine: “magic-weaver” for witch (what do ya think?)
RESOURCES & FURTHER READING
Grendel by John Gardner (a retelling through the monster’s perspective)
Grendel’s Mother by Susan Signe Morrison (a story about Grendel’s mother)
“Slaying Monsters” by Joan Acocella, The New Yorker article
“Why bother with Beowlf” by Melissa Snell, ThoughtCo. article
Wonderful essay, wonderful style. I took a course in Anglo-Saxon 70 years ago and STILL remember the lectures on Beowulf, the imagery