Beowulf (2 page)

Beowulf
is generally regarded as the first true masterpiece in English literature, but generations of readers have also found the epic to be so filled with complexities that its qualities are not always easy to define. The work provides us with a unique representation of the distant world of the early Middle Ages in Northern Europe, and yet in its very complexity it disrupts our commonplace simplifications of that culture and its historical period. We know that the poem was composed in Anglo-Saxon England using Old English, which was spoken from the early 400s to around 1100 (when, after the Norman Conquest of 1066, the language changed to Middle English). We also know that the only manuscript in which
Beowulf
survives can be dated from around the year 1000, having endured the effects of time and even of fire, and its present resting place is the British Library.

Even so, we do not know when the poem was composed, and scholars differ so widely on this point that some would date it in the early 700s, while others would place it in the 900s, or possibly even slightly later. This debate is not a matter of interest only to antiquarians, since the time to which we assign the composition of
Beowulf,
at least in its present form, will affect how we interpret key features of the poem. Moreover, while composed in Old English, this earliest literary masterpiece in our language is set in Scandinavia, and virtually all of the characters are Scandinavian. Why this should be so is still a mystery, especially given the often troubled relations between Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavian Vikings during this period.

Other mysteries likewise abound. We do not know who composed the poem in the form in which it exists in the manuscript. Scholars have generally taken it for granted that the poet was a man, but recent archeological research has unearthed evidence of women serving as scribes in monastic houses. Thus, it is at least possible that a woman could have been involved at some stage of the production of the manuscript. We do know that the poet was working with materials that were, at least in certain notable cases, inherited from a store of traditions. Thus, in addition to the main plot, there are several subplots embedded in the narrative that were drawn from these traditions. As a consequence, many scholars in the nineteenth century believed that
Beowulf
was composed of many separate traditional lays, or sung narratives, but scholars are now generally convinced that a single poet created the poem as we know it, though it was written down by two different scribes. Especially since J. R. R. Tolkien’s famous
“Beowulf.
The Monsters and the Critics” was published in 1936 (see For Further Reading), most scholars have stressed the unity of the poem, including its unity of authorship, and have sought to discover the keys to its artistic construction. Even so, there are still fundamental questions about the kind of unity one may find, both in terms of theme and in terms of structure—and even more fundamental questions about the kind of unity one would require in order to judge the success of the poem as a work of art.

Questions about the composition of the epic lead to further questions about the role of the author: How did the poet compose? What kinds of choices did the poet make? On what basis? To what effect? Clearly, all of these questions presuppose an author who made conscious and deliberate artistic choices in selecting, arranging, and highlighting certain characters and actions, while assigning others to subsidiary roles in the narrative. But what if the poet were not an original creator in our modern Romantic and Post-Romantic sense? What if we are dealing here with a traditional poet in the full sense of the term “traditional”? Such a poet would be working with, and to some extent be constrained by, the traditional nature of the narratives circulating in the culture—and retained in the cultural memory in forms that themselves conferred value on the narratives.

Then there is the issue of oral composition. Milman Parry and Albert Lord conducted extremely influential research, first on Homer and then on living Serbo-Croatian poets, showing that singers of traditional tales composed their works orally—and during the very act of performing them. This composing-as-performing was only possible, they argued, because the materials the singers used were largely formulaic. The theory of oral composition will be discussed in greater detail below, but it is important to note here that scholars soon applied it to
Beowulf
(starting in the 1950s), thus raising the questions of what kind of “author” would have composed the Anglo-Saxon epic and what kind of “composing” that would have been. Debates over these questions have come to dominate much of the criticism of the poem.

Moreover, there is the perplexing mystery about the audience for whom
Beowulf
was intended. While it is commonplace to view literary works from the perspective of their authors, it is not always recognized that audience is a vital force in the creative process. This is especially true for an art that represents traditional stories and values in performances that are shaped, at least in part, by the expectations of the audience. And so we may well ask, who was the audience for
Beowulf?
First of all, was it basically English, or was it Anglo-Scandinavian? The numerous references to historical legends about Scandinavians and their struggles for power with and against one another suggest a collective cultural memory that reaches well beyond England to the far North. These legends frequently appear in the poem as fragments, without coherent chronological order, presupposing an audience that already knew the main outlines of a larger narrative of which the fragmentary allusions were parts—and this audience may have recognized meanings in these bits of legendary history that we can no longer fully trace. After decades of warfare, starting at the end of the eighth century, there were parts of eastern England in which Scandinavians had settled more or less peaceably and where they had largely assimilated Anglo-Saxon culture, especially at times in the 900s. Yet scholars are by no means agreed that
Beowulf
was the product of such an Anglo-Scandinavian community.

Even more perplexing is the question of values and beliefs in the poem. The world of
Beowulf
is the world of heroic epic, with its legendary fights among larger-than-life figures, both human and monstrous, its scenes of feasting in great beer halls presided over by kings, its accounts of bloody feuds trapping men and women alike in cycles of violence, its praise of giving riches to loyal followers rather than amassing wealth for oneself, its moments of magic in stories of powers gained or lost—and over all, a sense of some larger force that shapes their destinies, both individual and collective. Readers have often looked upon this long-gone heroic world for a glimpse of a pagan past in Northern Europe before Christianity was brought by foreign missionaries, yet the poem is filled with references to the new religion and the power of its God. This tension between the ancient past and what was, in the time of the poet, a new worldview disturbed many romantic and nationalistic critics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They sought in
Beowulf
the origins of Germanic, including Scandinavian, culture—or at least clues from which that culture could be reconstructed. Yet many were for the most part frustrated, for they saw the epic of Northern antiquity “marred” by the intrusions of foreign beliefs and values, such as the Christianity imposed by missionaries from the Mediterranean South, and equally “marred” by the fantastic fights with monsters in the center of the poem, while the historical materials that most interested them were placed on the outer edges. In this view, the poem simply was not the poem that it should have been.

However, the great work of Friedrich Klaeber, and especially the influence of Tolkien, cited above, would change all that. In recent times, scholars have not only stressed the Christian element as integral to the poem as a whole, but they have spent enormous energy in ferreting out its sources and functions. All of which brings us back, not just to the question of the poet, but more importantly to the question of the audience. After all, the poet was composing the work for a community that already shared certain core values, though those values appear at times to emerge from a moment of cultural transition between the memory of the old and the power of the new. So, once again, we are faced with complexity, and attempts to reduce
Beowulf
to some single, or at least predominant, worldview cannot explain the creative tensions in this complexity.

Yet there are further questions about audience. Did it consist, as some scholars have proposed, of people so well versed in Christian teachings, and even in learned theology, that it would have been a monastic community? The answer is by no means clear. We do have the famous letter from Alcuin to the monks of Lindisfarne (797) en-joining them not to include secular heroic narratives in their entertainments. But we also have the even more famous story of the poet Caedmon in Bede’s
History of the English Church and People
(731), which shows the members of the monastery at Whitby singing narrative lays, while accompanying themselves on the harp. Their lays must have been secular since it was only after the miracle of Caedmon’s poetic inspiration that Christian biblical narratives were set to traditional Anglo-Saxon poetic forms. Such a community would not only house scholars, as well as monks with considerably less education, but also the monastic
familia
was made up of all the lay people—men, women, and children—who occupied and generally worked the lands surrounding (and dependent on) the monastery.

Our modern view of medieval monasteries has been shaped by later reforms, in which walled structures often shut reclusive monks in cloistered protection from the temptations of the larger world. But in Anglo-Saxon England, the monasteries were generally open to the social world, and the
Rule of St. Benedict
lays great stress on the need to extend hospitality to all who come to the community. We also have depictions in monastic works, such as lives of the saints, of storytelling events that included monks and laypeople alike. Thus, even if one were to claim that
Beowulf
was aimed at a monastic audience, it is clear that such an audience would most probably include many who were not monks. And, of course, one need not postulate a monastic audience at all in order to account for the Christian element in the poem. For the dominant ethos of the poem is a celebration of the values of heroic society, and while the poet-narrator’s comments often reflect a Christian point of view, the heroic values in the poem are in themselves primarily secular. Or do we have, once again, a complex creative tension between the two?

 

As mentioned earlier, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some scholars regarded
Beowulf
as an essentially pagan epic depicting, and even glorifying, the worldview and practices of prehistoric Northern European culture—the culture that was described in considerable detail by the Roman historian Tacitus in his
Germania
(around the year 98). In this view, Christianity came northward as an alien culture, and as it spread, the earlier cultural materials became overlaid by what was sometimes called the “Christian coloring.” In the case of
Beowulf,
this meant that the poem must originally have consisted of heroic lays that at some distant time had been stitched together into something like the epic that has come down to us. But along the way, some “meddling monks” must have been so disturbed by this celebration of a pre-Christian tradition, and so eager to appropriate its power for themselves, that one or more of them added Christian elements, perhaps in the process of writing down the work in manuscript form. Thus, these elements were not only not integral to the poem, but they could be peeled away to see the remains of the nearly lost earlier epic. Such a view represented the poem as thematically inconsistent, if not downright contradictory, in the form given it by the political ambitions of monastic culture. But then, in the early twentieth century, the great scholar Klaeber was in the vanguard of a movement that demonstrated decisively that the Christian elements in the only
Beowulf
we have are so fully integrated into the fabric of the poem that they could not simply have been inserted here and there in the finished work. But what are these elements, and how do they function?

Early in the poem, after Grendel has begun ravaging Hrothgar’s hall and gobbling down his men, the Danes sought help from the only supernatural force they knew:

The poet-narrator, whoever he may have been, is clearly distancing himself here from the beliefs and practices of the characters in the poem. They were heathens, but he knows the true God. Moreover, he also does not simply observe the difference between their worldview and his own, but he describes their beliefs in the most disparaging terms—praying at altars of idol-worship for help from the Slayer of Souls. Such language was commonplace in monastic writings, as we can see in Bede’s great
History
and in numerous saints’ lives. But we might not expect the poet-narrator to go on at such length to assure his audience of his Christian beliefs and, at least by implication, to confirm the audience in the same beliefs. Even so, this passage comes right before the introduction of Beowulf, who will become the agent for saving the Danes from the terror of Grendel. The hero, like them, is a “heathen,” but he is apparently God’s instrument in defeating the monstrous forces of evil.