Beowulf Companion (Includes Study Guide, Historical Context, and Character Index)

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.

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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. 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.

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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: 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.

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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. And rather than leave us merely appalled at this conclusion, within seventy lines the poet troubles to associate his own noble hero with this very same reaction: We best express our love not through sorrow but through more violence.

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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.

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It comes naturally to us, especially when someone harms our loved ones. 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. Both god and hero try to defend their people from this existential threat, but their own great strength redounds upon them: 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. University of Toronto Press, Harvard University Press, Endings Embedded in Beginnings. The Role of the Monsters in Beowulf. A Reassessment , ed. Love and Vengeance in Beowulf. Harris, Michael Moynihan, and Sherrill Harbison, pp. Bjork, and John D. Marcin Krygier, Liliana Sikorska, et al.

The Poem and Its Tradition. Manchester University Press, University of Tennessee Press, David Konstan and Kurt A. The Monsters and the Critics.

Beowulf - Oxford Handbooks

Translations of poetry are my own, but I have been guided by Fulk in rendering key words and phrases in Judith and the prose texts of the Nowell Codex, as noted below. University of Exeter Press, , line 7a. Clarendon Press, , p. Leonard Neidorf Cambridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, forthcoming , from which the following comments have been adapted.

The Histories , ed. University of Toronto Press, , vol. University of Pennsylvania Press, , pp. University of Michigan Press, British Library, , DVD. Dorothy Whitelock, et al. Eyre and Spottiswoode, , sub anno for Clarendon Press, , bk. Early English Text Society, — , vol. Clarendon Press, , chap.

Brewer, , chaps. In addition, poet Seamus Heaney first published his acclaimed and controversial rendering in London: Faber and Faber , which has subsequently appeared in different editions by Norton in New York, plus many other translations and adaptations of the poem in several languages and various media.

University of Pennsylvania Press, , p. Columbia University Press, , p. Brewer, , p. Jacob Black-Michaud, Cohesive Force: Andrews Medieval Texts, , stanza Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice. Publications Pages Publications Pages. Search within my subject: Politics Urban Studies U.

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Beowulf Companion (Includes Study Guide, Historical Context, and Character Index)

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