Theme

Beowulf is a story informed by heroic values. Its central action is a warrior’s epic struggle against three alien presences who exist on the fringes of the human society they threaten to destroy. Dwelling in the shadowy realms of half-lit night, in bogs and caves and nightmarish imagination, these creatures embody the fears of a people whose precarious existence is sustained by the crucial bonds of kinship. This form of social organization, an early form of feudalism based on hierarchy, merit, and reciprocal duties and obligations, is symbolized in the poem by Heorot, the great hall wherein the Danes and their allies find refuge and protection from the dark forces that always surround them.

The kinship bond in Beowulf’s culture is paramount. Betraying a member of one’s own family, for example, is the ultimate disgrace, as is failing to seek recompense (“man-price” or Old English wergild) by avenging an injured or murdered family member. The rule of kings and lords in this world is supported by their loyal thanes, retainers who serve their respective lords in exchange for protection and a secure position in the society. (Their service is usually of a military sort, but there are other bureaucratic and functionary roles.) Without a lord to serve, the thane is rudderless, his life devoid of any meaning. His very identity is defined by the opportunity to do good service.

Beowulf is the living embodiment of this form of self-actualization, paradoxically seeking glory through service and sacrifice. In what, then, consists his heroism?

Beowulf’s struggle is heroic because it is a struggle against overwhelming odds, risking nothing less than his life. The hero is stoic and courageous, willing to endure tremendous pain and suffering in order to benefit others. He risks life and limb, moreover, on behalf of a foreign people to whom he owes nothing but his own sense of duty to rescue the afflicted.

Why would a young warrior journey from his native land to a foreign country to rescue a foreign people from an unimaginable evil? Indeed, the Danes to whom Beowulf offers his services have in the past been an enemy to his own people, the Geats. Why does he do it? What motivates him to place his life at such risk?

In Beowulf we are asked to admire a seemingly irrational quest for glory, or Old English dome (line 1470). Beowulf does gain materially and perhaps even politically. He is awarded great treasure for his deeds, and succeeds in part to establish a firmer alliance between the hitherto warring Geats and Danes. But it would seem that he is motivated less by such material rewards than by the merit and reputation he earns for the deeds they commemorate.

The tremendous value placed on glory is perhaps difficult for modern readers to appreciate. There are other difficulties. As with much else on the course syllabus, Beowulf presents a world so foreign to our own values and experience that it might as well be another planet. Yes, the poem is imaginative literature and features fantastical elements; but it springs from a culture for which monsters, dragons, and other dark threats inhabited not only the human psyche but were thought actually to exist in some fleshly form.

Background and History

Beowulf was composed in England sometime between the eighth and tenth centuries C.E. But the poem is about Scandinavian peoples and tribes, principally the Danes, Geats (from the south of Sweden), and Swedes. The poet, then, probably descended from Scandinavian migrants who came to England during the centuries following the initial Saxon (Germanic) invasion in the fifth century.

England until then had been a remnant of the Roman Empire and was inhabited largely by its ancient peoples, the Britons or Celts (whose descendents today live in the region known as Wales where their original language is still spoken).

The invading Saxons were pagan, i.e., not Christian. Christianity—which had dominated the Roman Empire since the conversion of the emperor Constantine in the fourth century—effectively went underground for about two hundred years following the Saxon invasion. Christianity began once again to proliferate, however, when Pope Gregory, near the end of the sixth century, sent the missionary St. Augustine to convert the island. By the time of Beowulf’s composition, Anglo-Saxon England had been largely converted to Christianity.

One of the more interesting features of the poem is that it is composed by a Christian (or Christians) writing not about the historical Christian present, but rather the pagan past. Beowulf is a story whose characters, hero, and setting derive from the pre-Christian world of Germanic Scandinavia. While there are many unmistakably Christian references in the poem, these largely come from the narrator, a voice speaking in the present about events supposed to have taken place several hundred years in the past.

So not only is the story of Beowulf foreign to us. It depicts a world that for the writer(s) was in the distant if recognizable past. The poem is elegiac in tone, mourning the passing of an era. But there is also some sense in which the narrator’s Christian perspective clashes with the heroic world he celebrates.

What is the effect of this culture clash on our understanding of the poem? Is not the hero’s quest for dome or glory merely vanity from a Christian perspective? What about such Christian imperatives as “Forgive your enemies” and “Turn the other cheek”? Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount also endorses an idea that for Beowulf’s pagan society would have been foreign: that one is to forsake and even hate his or her own family if such loyalty would compromise the duty to serve God. In Beowulf’s world, as we have seen, glory and kinship are closely related. For a pagan, to neglect familial obligation and duty would be a very great shame, a permanent and devastating stain on his character. But perhaps the greatest conflict between heroic and Christian values pertains to “grace,” the idea that human beings are so corrupted by the taint of original sin as to be utterly incapable of redeeming themselves through effort of any kind. Deeds, achievements, reputation, rewards, glory, dome—these heroic values, even if deriving from service and sacrifice, are no subsitute for the grace and salvation freely bestowed by a deity who cannot help but love his supposedly fallen creatures.

In what ways do the narrator’s Christian values accommodate the pagan values informing his great story? Are the poem’s Christian and pagan world-views reconciled? Does one finally supersede the other?

Structure

Narratives, like all language and literature, unfold linearly in time. Not only do they describe temporal events; they are themselves temporal phenomena. We experience literature sequentially as our eyes move across and down the page. Having read a story, however, it is possible to see it—i.e., to conceive of its structure as an aggregate of parts connected not only as a sequence unfolding in time, but as interrelated components.

We can read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation and attend to its disparate parts individually as we read. It is also possible to see that one vast work as an aggregate of related parts, organically unified: Creation, Fall, Exile, Redemption, and Apocalypse. To take another example, a Classical or Renaissance play consists of the protasis (introduction of principle characters and plot); the epitasis (motion of plot towards its conclusion); and the catastrophe (meaning literally “final turn,” the culminating action, whether marriage or death).

Beowulf too has a structure, which, on one level, is really quite simple. The story is organized around one central action, the hero’s quest for glory, manifested as three great struggles (what the poem’s translator, Seamus Heaney, refers to as agones, a Greek word that is the root for English “agony,” “protagonist,” and “antagonist”). These three struggles or sections of the poem correspond to three tremendous enemies: Grendel (lines 1-1231); Grendel’s mother (1232-2212); and the Dragon (2213ff.).

The telling of these related tales, however, is interspersed with a number of digressions, other stories told variously by the narrator and certain characters within his narrative. We thus have here a frame narrative, a central story or plot in which additional stories are inserted and somehow related to the main story. (See Synopsis for a linear guide to the plot structure and key events.)

Our primary foci, however, are the three central agones or struggles, the great contests pitting the hero against his world’s implacable enemies. The discussion forums for the next two classes are organized around these three narrative phases.