Beowulf

Beowulf is an Old English heroic epic, generally regarded as the highest achievement of Old English literature? and the earliest European vernacular epic of substantial length.¹⁰ The work survives in a single manuscript and recounts the deeds of Beowulf, a warrior of the Geats who fights three monstrous adversaries across two phases of his life.⁹¹⁴ It is the longest poem written in Old English.¹³

The poem was composed in England by an anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet, though the date is uncertain: opinions on the time of its composition have ranged from about 650 to 1025, while most linguists and archaeologists date it between 700 and 750.¹⁴⁵ Some scholars believe it was written in the 8th century ¹⁰, and it is possible the poem was shaped and transmitted by several different poets before being preserved in writing.¹⁰ Much of its material had circulated in oral narrative for many years before the surviving text was set down.⁵

Story

The action is set in Scandinavia in the early 6th century, principally in what is now Denmark and southern Sweden.¹⁰⁹ King Hrothgar of the Danes, grown rich and powerful through success in battle, builds a magnificent mead hall named Heorot as a symbol of his power, a place for feasting, drinking, boasting, and the songs of the scops.¹⁵⁴ The hall, called “the biggest of halls,” stands high and wide-gabled as a bright counterpart to the dark, watery regions where its enemy dwells.⁴

The merriment of Heorot angers Grendel, a monster descended from Cain, who raids the hall nightly, carrying off and devouring Hrothgar’s warriors.¹⁵¹¹ The terror continues for twelve years, until Beowulf, a young Geatish warrior of superhuman strength, sails to Denmark with a band of companions to offer his help.¹⁰¹⁵ After a feast at which the warrior Unferth taunts him over a youthful swimming contest with Breca, Beowulf grapples with Grendel and tears off the monster’s arm; Grendel flees to his fen to die, and the arm is hung as a trophy under Heorot’s roof.¹¹¹⁵

The next night Grendel’s mother comes to avenge her son, killing Hrothgar’s adviser Aeschere.¹⁵¹¹ Beowulf pursues her into her underwater cave; when the sword Hrunting, lent by Unferth, fails him, he kills her with an ancient giant-forged sword found in the hoard, then beheads Grendel’s corpse and returns the head and the sword’s hilt to Hrothgar.¹⁵¹⁰ Enriched with gifts and honors, and parting tearfully from Hrothgar, who has come to regard him as a son, Beowulf returns home to his uncle King Hygelac of the Geats.¹⁰¹¹

The second part passes rapidly over Hygelac’s death in a battle of historical record and the death of his son Heardred, after which Beowulf succeeds to the throne and rules in prosperity for fifty years.¹⁰¹⁵ When a thief steals a cup from a dragon’s hoard, the enraged dragon ravages Geatland and burns Beowulf’s hall.¹⁵¹⁴ The aging king resolves to fight it; all his retainers flee except his young kinsman Wiglaf, with whose aid the dragon is killed, though Beowulf is mortally wounded.¹⁰¹¹ Before dying he names Wiglaf his successor; the Geats cremate him on a pyre and raise a barrow overlooking the sea, burying the dragon’s cursed treasure with him.¹⁰¹⁵

Form and language

The poem is composed in Old English, a heavily Germanic form of the language with little influence from Latin or French, the kind of vocabulary that would later be broadened by French and Latin after the Norman Conquest of 1066.⁵ Old English verse is highly formal: each line is divided into two halves separated by a caesura, with two stressed syllables in each half and an alliterative pattern carried across the pause.⁵¹³ The complicated rules of alliteration helped scops, the Anglo-Saxon poets, memorize the many thousands of lines they recited from oral tradition.⁵ The verse also makes characteristic use of kennings, compressed metaphors such as “whale’s road” for the sea.¹³

Though set among pagan warriors, Beowulf as it survives is the work of a Christian poet, who attributes Christian thoughts to characters who often behave in distinctly un-Christian ways.⁵ The poet’s Christianity is peculiar: his only biblical references are to the book of Genesis, and there is never any mention of a savior, though God is invoked more than four dozen times.¹⁴ The text also contains gnomic sayings, or maxims, which some critics regard as central to the poem, binding the characters, poet, and audience together in shared cultural ideals.⁷

Historical setting and legend

The world the poem depicts is a relic of pre–Anglo-Saxon culture, set in Scandinavia before the migration in which Angles, Saxons, and Jutes crossed from Denmark and northwest Germany to conquer Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries.⁵¹⁴ Many characters correspond to historical or legendary figures: Hrothgar and his nephew Hrothulf are generally believed to be based on historical persons, and Hygelac’s death in a raid in the Rhineland is a matter of historical record.¹⁰¹¹ The Danish royal line of the poem, the Scyldingas, is identified with the Skjõldungar, a dynasty of early Danish kings prominent in later Scandinavian sources such as the lost Skjõldunga saga, Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum, and Snorri Sturluson’s Edda.³

Manuscript and reception

Beowulf survives in a single manuscript, the Beowulf manuscript (Cotton MS Vitellius A XV), copied onto vellum around the year 1000.¹⁰¹⁴ After the Norman Conquest changed the nature of the English language in 1066, the poem was probably unread for centuries.¹⁴ The manuscript passed into the collection of the antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton (1571–1631), and in 1731 a fire in the building housing the collection destroyed a quarter of its books; the Beowulf manuscript was reportedly thrown from a window, but the top and outer edge of each leaf were badly scorched.¹⁴ In 1787 the Icelandic historian Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin commissioned a transcript, and his readings preserve nearly two thousand letters since lost to the crumbling edges; he published the first edition in 1815.¹⁴

For the first century of its prominence, interest in the poem was chiefly historical, as a source of information about the Anglo-Saxon era.⁵ It was not until the Oxford scholar J. R. R. Tolkien published his paper “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” in 1936 that the work gained wide recognition as a serious literary artwork.⁵¹⁴ Because it was not widely read until the 1800s, Beowulf had little direct impact on earlier English poetry; Chaucer, Shakespeare, and most major English writers before the 1930s had little or no knowledge of it.⁵ Since the mid-twentieth century it has influenced novelists and poets including W. H. Auden, Ted Hughes, and Seamus Heaney, whose translation appeared in tandem with renewed popular interest.⁵

Tolkien, a professor of Anglo-Saxon English who completed his own translation in 1926, is widely thought to have drawn on Beowulf for The Lord of the Rings.²⁰⁹ Beowulf has been retold and adapted repeatedly: John Gardner’s novel Grendel recounts the first part of the tale from the monster’s viewpoint, Benjamin Bagby has performed it in Old English to an Anglo-Saxon harp, and Robert Zemeckis directed a 2007 motion-capture film with a script by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary.⁹