Beowulf

In brief

Beowulf is about 3,182 lines of Old English verse with no title, no known author, and a single surviving copy that nearly burned. It tells of a young Geatish warrior who sails to Denmark and kills the monster Grendel and then Grendel’s mother, and who, about fifty years later, as an old king at home, kills a dragon and dies of it. His people burn him, bury the treasure, and wait to be destroyed by their neighbours.

The setting is Scandinavia in the fifth and sixth centuries, though the poem is English and Christian. It looks back with sympathy and some grief at pagan ancestors who could not know what its audience knew. The tone is what sets it apart. A plot this simple could be a romp, but the poem is an elegy from the first funeral to the last.

The argument

The poem asks whether fame is enough, and it answers with a straight face in both directions. Beowulf states the warrior’s creed when Hrothgar is grieving: “Each of us must the end-day abide of” his life, so win glory before death, since that is what a dead man keeps. The poem honours this. Yet in the same part of the story Hrothgar gives the contrary lesson, the old man’s version: “Beware of arrogance, world-famous champion!” Sword, fire, flood or age will get you, he says, and he has ruled fifty years to discover that a monster can undo it in a night.

Both speakers are right, and the poem’s structure proves it. Beowulf wins everything the code offers, and at the end the gold he paid for with his life goes back in the ground: “The gold to the dust, where yet it remaineth” and “As useless to mortals as in foregoing eras.” The poem does not call him a fool. Its last line praises him, and his people are nevertheless finished. That combination, admiration with no illusions about what it buys, is the poem’s hardest and best thing.

The three fights

Hall’s text has forty-three numbered sections, close to the manuscript’s division into fitts, reckoning the prologue as the first. The links here go to his sections.

Grendel, XII and XIII. After twelve winters of raids on the hall Heorot, Beowulf fights bare-handed, which proves the only way since no sword will bite, and tears off the monster’s arm. It is short and physical, and the hall almost comes down.
Grendel’s mother, XX to XXIV. She comes to avenge her son and takes Hrothgar’s friend Æschere. Beowulf goes down through the mere, his borrowed sword Hrunting fails, and “An ancient giant-sword” on her own wall saves him. The Danes give him up for dead at “The ninth hour” and leave, while the Geats stay.
The dragon, XXXII to XXXVIII. A fugitive steals a cup from a hoard, the dragon burns Beowulf’s own hall, and the old king goes out against advice. Nægling breaks, his men run, and only Wiglaf stays.

The fights escalate in their cost and not only in their danger. The first brings a party, the second a warning, and the third the end of a people. The long middle stretch of feasting, gifts and old stories is not padding either: the Finn episode sung at the victory feast tells of a queen, Hildeburh, burning her son and brother on one pyre. It is sung in front of another queen, Wealhtheow, who has reason to listen.

The voice

Old English verse has four stressed beats to a line, split by a pause and tied by alliteration, with compounds doing much of the work: Hall has “The torch of the firmament” for the sun and “breast-hoard” for the chest. Statements come by understatement and double negative, and the poet repeats a thought in different words, a habit called variation. The voice sounds like someone who has heard these stories many times and knows how they end.

All free English versions struggle with this. J. Lesslie Hall’s of 1892 is used here because it is complete, can be linked line by line, and carries a glossary and a story outline. It keeps alliteration and four beats, and he said he meant to give “a decided flavor of archaism”. That is the weakness: “Reaved of his joyance” and “Lo! the Spear-Danes’ glory through splendid achievements” sound like no one. He needs a list of “words and phrases not in general use” to explain himself. He also prints rows of asterisks where the manuscript fails, which is honest but disconcerting.

Grendel’s mother

She has no name, and the poem’s account of her is the most argued-over thing in it. The narrator introduces her as an avenger and at once downplays her: the fear she brings is less “By even so much as the vigor of maidens” and “War-strength of women” are reckoned below a man’s. Then she comes closer to killing Beowulf than Grendel ever did, and he survives only through his mail, God’s favour and a sword from her own wall. The poet’s reassurance turns out to be wrong, and it is hard to believe he did not notice.

The dispute is about a phrase at line 1259 of the Old English, ides aglæcwif. Hall, following the view of his day, has “Devil-shaped woman”. Klaeber’s standard glossary gave “wretch, or monster of a woman”, Heaney has “monstrous hell-bride”, and others have followed. Yet ides elsewhere means a noble lady, and the related word æglæca is used of Grendel and also of Sigemund and Beowulf himself. Doreen Gillam explored the double use in 1961. Later Kevin Kiernan wrote of “Grendel’s Heroic Mother” (1984), and Jane Chance argued for a three-part poem in which her fight counts on its own.

The other point is simple. Her motive is the one every human being in this poem respects: she is “mindful of vengeance” for a dead son. Two sections later Beowulf tells Hrothgar: “Grieve not, O wise one! for each it is better, His friend to avenge than with vehemence wail him”. She would agree.

The people

Beowulf is a boaster, as the culture requires, whose boasts are true. He is also oddly gentle: the end of the poem remembers him as kind before it remembers him as eager. Whether his last fight is heroism, a duty, or an old man’s pride that leaves his people without a king is the poem’s central open question.

Hrothgar and Wealhtheow

Hrothgar is a good king who has aged out of his ability to protect his hall, and he says so with an honesty unusual in heroic verse. His sermon in XXVI is one of the most striking speeches in Old English. Wealhtheow, his queen, is doing political work at every feast, in speeches for her sons’ inheritance that the audience probably knew would fail.

Unferth

Unferth, who taunts Beowulf at the feast and is silenced by the swimming story, later lends him Hrunting without comment. The poet never explains him and readers have argued about his status at court ever since.

Wiglaf

Wiglaf is the young kinsman who enters only at the end, and he does what the code says everyone should do. The poem gives him one physical detail: “Hand was consumed” as he strikes low at the dragon. Then it has him tell the ten who ran what will now happen to them. He inherits nothing good.

The ending

Beowulf dies looking at the treasure he has won for his people, which they then refuse to keep. Wiglaf’s denunciation of the deserters leads into a messenger’s speech in XL and XLI, which spells it out: when the news spreads, Franks, Frisians and Swedes will settle old scores. The poem’s long memory of feuds now pays off, as a list of who is coming.

The funeral in XLIII is the great set piece. As the pyre burns, a woman sings. Hall calls her “the much-grieving widow” and then prints six lines of asterisks, because the manuscript is badly burned just there; modern editors read a Geatish woman, whose song foresees invasion and slavery. Twelve riders circle the barrow and speak his praise, and the last words call him “Gentlest of men, most winning of manner” and “Friendliest to folk-troops and fondest of honor.” “Fondest of honor” renders lofgeornost, the poem’s final word, “most eager for praise”, a word that elsewhere can carry some reproach. Critics still disagree whether it is the summit of praise or a last small doubt, and I think the poet left it there on purpose.

The manuscript and the fire

The only copy is in British Library, Cotton Vitellius A.xv, part of a composite volume made of two codices first bound together in the seventeenth century. The Beowulf part is called the Nowell Codex after Laurence Nowell, who wrote his name on it in the sixteenth century. It has a fragment of a life of St Christopher, The Wonders of the East, the Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, then Beowulf and Judith. Its date is generally put around the year 1000. Two scribes wrote it, and the second takes over in mid-sentence at line 1939. Nobody knows who ordered it or why, and how far monsters explain the collection is an open guess.

On 23 October 1731 fire broke out at Ashburnham House in Westminster, where Sir Robert Cotton’s library was kept. Thirteen manuscripts were lost and more than two hundred damaged; the manuscript of The Battle of Maldon was among those destroyed. Beowulf survived with charred margins, and the edges kept crumbling for decades, taking letters with them. So the transcripts commissioned and made by the Icelandic scholar Grímur Thorkelin in the later 1780s are witnesses to letters now gone. He printed the first edition in 1815. Kevin Kiernan’s Electronic Beowulf (first edition 1999) later used backlighting and ultraviolet to recover letters hidden by binding and damage.

The dating dispute

The poem cannot be dated from the manuscript, and estimates run from about 700 to about 1000, the scribes’ own time. One real event anchors the story and not the poem: Hygelac’s raid into Frisia, which Gregory of Tours records and which is dated to about 521.

The old consensus for an eighth-century poem, supported by Tolkien, was shaken in 1981 by two books. Colin Chase’s collection The Dating of Beowulf, from a Toronto conference, and Kiernan’s Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript made a late date respectable, and Kiernan argued that the poem might be contemporary with its copy. Roberta Frank’s 2007 retrospective is called “A Scandal in Toronto”. Since then metrical and linguistic work has pushed back towards an early date. R. D. Fulk’s arguments rest on Kaluza’s law, a pattern in vowel length in the verse thought to require composition before the ninth century, and Leonard Neidorf’s volume The Dating of Beowulf: A Reassessment (2014) collects the early case. B. R. Hutcheson and others doubt the law can date anything. The early date has regained ground, but it is not settled, and anyone who gives you the date without a qualifier is simplifying.

Tolkien’s lecture

J. R. R. Tolkien’s “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” was the Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture at the British Academy on 25 November 1936, published in the Academy’s Proceedings. Before it, the poem was mostly a quarry for history and philology, critics played down its monsters, and W. P. Ker thought some of its digressions irrelevant. Tolkien argued the reverse: the monsters are the point, because they make the poem about mortality and not about tribal politics, and the structure is a balance of two moments, youth and age, instead of a narrative with a flawed middle.

Almost all later criticism starts here. Its weakness is that the two-part scheme has little room for Grendel’s mother, which is exactly what Chance attacked.

Afterlives

Tolkien’s own imagination is the largest afterlife: the dragon’s stolen cup reappears in The Hobbit. John Gardner’s Grendel (1971) tells it from the monster’s side, Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead (1976) makes a thriller of it, and Robert Zemeckis’s motion-capture film appeared in 2007. Maria Dahvana Headley’s novel The Mere Wife (2018) moves the story to a wealthy American suburb, told largely by Grendel’s mother.

How to read it

Read a modern version if you can. Seamus Heaney (1999) won the Whitbread and is the strongest poem in English, though some scholars criticised its liberties. Roy Liuzza (Broadview, 2000; second edition 2013) is the best for students, with parallel text and contexts. R. D. Fulk’s facing-page The Beowulf Manuscript (Dumbarton Oaks, 2010) is close prose and includes the rest of the codex. Maria Dahvana Headley (2020) opens with “Bro!” and is the most alive, and the least reverent. Tolkien’s prose, made by 1926 and published in 2014, comes with a commentary worth the price.
Free, use Hall or Gummere. Francis Gummere (1910) is similar in its archaism, smoother in rhythm, and on Gutenberg lacks section anchors. William Morris and A. J. Wyatt (1895) are the curiosity: “What! we of the Spear-Danes of yore days” shows the problem.
Start with sections XII to XIII, XX to XXIV, and XXXVI to XLIII. Then go back for the feasts, which will now read as threats.
Keep a list of names. Hall’s glossary helps, since the feuds are half the poem.
Read it aloud, in any version with alliteration. It was composed for the ear.

J. R. R. Tolkien, Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics (1936). Short, polemical, and still the place to start.
John Gardner, Grendel (1971). The monster as a sour philosopher, and a very good short novel.
Maria Dahvana Headley, The Mere Wife (2018). The mother finally gets the argument.
Anonymous, The Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 1300–1000 BC). Another great hero, monsters, and the failure to escape death.
Homer, The Iliad (c. 750–650 BC). The nearest match in its ending: a funeral and no consolation.