Beowulf

Beowulf is the oldest long poem in English and the greatest work of Old English literature — 3,182 lines of alliterative verse about a warrior of the Geats (a people of what is now southern Sweden) who comes to the aid of the Danish king Hrothgar, whose great hall, Heorot, is being raided every night by a man-eating monster, Grendel. Beowulf tears off Grendel’s arm with his bare hands; the next night Grendel’s vengeful mother attacks, and Beowulf pursues her to her lair beneath a haunted lake and kills her. Fifty years later, Beowulf, now the old king of the Geats, goes out to fight a dragon that is ravaging his land; he kills it, but is mortally wounded, and the poem ends with his funeral pyre and the lament of his people, who foresee their own destruction.

It is a poem about monsters and heroes, but its true subject, as J. R. R. Tolkien argued, is mortality: the brief splendour of human life against the darkness, and the courage with which a man meets a death he cannot escape. It was composed in England by an anonymous Christian poet about pagan Scandinavians of the sixth century, and its mood is elegiac — full of admiration for the heroic past and sorrow at its passing.

At a glance

Composed	Unknown — estimates range from c. 700 to c. 1000; many scholars favour the eighth century
Manuscript	One copy only, c. 1000, in British Library Cotton Vitellius A.xv (the Nowell Codex), damaged in a fire in 1731
Language	Old English (West Saxon literary dialect with Anglian forms)
Setting	Denmark and Geatland (southern Sweden), early sixth century
Historical figures	Hygelac, Beowulf’s king, is the Chlochilaicus whose raid on Frisia c. 521 is recorded by Gregory of Tours
First printed	1815, by the Icelandic-Danish scholar Grímur Thorkelin
Verse	Alliterative four-stress lines divided by a caesura

Background: the poem and its world

Beowulf survives by a thread. The only manuscript was copied by two scribes around the year 1000, possibly centuries after the poem was composed; it passed into the library of the antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton, and in 1731, when the Cotton library was stored at Ashburnham House in Westminster, a fire scorched its edges. In the next century the charred margins crumbled; the transcriptions Thorkelin made in 1787 preserve hundreds of letters since lost.

We do not know who composed it, when, where or for whom. The poem’s world, though, is clear. It is set among the Germanic peoples of Scandinavia in the early sixth century — the Danes (Scyldings), the Geats, the Swedes — whose legends the Anglo-Saxons, who had come from the same region, still remembered. Several characters are historical, or semi-historical: Hrothgar and his nephew Hrothulf appear in Scandinavian sources; Beowulf’s uncle and lord Hygelac died raiding Frisia around 521. Beowulf himself is not otherwise attested and is probably fictional. The archaeological finds at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk (1939) — the ship burial of an East Anglian king around 625, with its helmet, sword, gold buckle and drinking horns — show the material world the poem imagines.

The poet is a Christian: he knows Genesis (Grendel is descended from Cain, the first murderer), speaks of God the Creator and of the Last Judgment, and his characters thank and acknowledge God. Yet the characters are pagans who know nothing of Christ, and the poem nowhere mentions him. The poem’s mixture of heroic pagan values and Christian reflection is one of its great interests.

The story

The poem opens with the legendary founder of the Danish royal line, Scyld Scefing, who came to the Danes as a foundling child in a boat and became a mighty king, and whose funeral — his body laid in a ship heaped with treasure and pushed out to sea — begins the poem with a death: “Men cannot say, in truth, who received that cargo.” His descendant Hrothgar builds the greatest hall in the world, Heorot (“Hart”), where he gives out treasure to his warriors and the poet sings the song of Creation.

The sound of joy in the hall enrages Grendel, a monstrous man-like creature who lives in the fens and moors, one of the “kin of Cain” whom God exiled. One night he enters Heorot and carries off thirty sleeping warriors to devour. For twelve years he raids the hall at night; it stands empty after dark, and Hrothgar’s grief becomes known far and wide.

In Geatland, across the sea, a young warrior of Hygelac’s court hears of it — the strongest man alive, with the grip of thirty men. Beowulf sails to Denmark with fourteen companions. Challenged by the Danish coastguard and then at the door of Heorot, he is welcomed by Hrothgar, who knew his father Ecgtheow. At the feast, a jealous Danish courtier, Unferth, taunts Beowulf with a story of a swimming contest he lost as a youth to Breca; Beowulf replies that he did not lose — he swam for five days in the winter sea in armour, killed nine sea-monsters, and that Unferth, who killed his own brothers, would not be in this trouble if he were as brave as he talks. Hrothgar’s queen, Wealhtheow, passes the mead-cup; Beowulf vows to defeat Grendel or die.

That night Beowulf and his men sleep in the hall. Beowulf, since Grendel uses no weapon, will fight him without sword or shield. Grendel strides in from the misty moor, bursts the door, seizes and eats one sleeping Geat — then grips Beowulf, and feels a grip such as he has never known. The hall shakes; benches are torn from the floor; Grendel howls. At last Beowulf tears his arm off at the shoulder, and Grendel flees, mortally wounded, to die in his lair. The arm is hung beneath the roof of Heorot as a trophy.

The Danes celebrate. A poet sings of Beowulf’s deed and tells the story of Sigemund the dragon-slayer, and, at the feast, the tragic tale of Finnsburh — a war of Danes and Frisians in which a queen, Hildeburh, loses brother and son. Hrothgar adopts Beowulf “as a son” in his heart and gives him rich treasures; Wealhtheow gives him a magnificent neck-ring, and anxiously reminds Hrothgar of their own sons’ claims.

That night Grendel’s mother, a “monstrous ogress”, comes to avenge her son; she seizes Æschere, Hrothgar’s dearest counsellor, and Grendel’s arm, and escapes. Hrothgar, grief-stricken, describes the monsters’ home: a haunted mere in a wild land, beneath overhanging trees, where at night fire burns on the water, and where a hunted stag would rather die on the bank than plunge in. Beowulf answers with the poem’s heroic creed:

Do not grieve, wise man. It is always better to avenge a friend than to mourn too much. Each of us must come to the end of this world’s life; let him who can win glory before death: that is best for a warrior, after life is gone.

They ride to the lake, where they find Æschere’s head on the cliff. Unferth, reconciled, lends Beowulf his famous sword Hrunting. Beowulf dives in and sinks for a great part of the day before reaching the bottom, where Grendel’s mother seizes him and drags him into her underwater hall, a cave lit by firelight. Hrunting cannot bite her; he wrestles her; she sits on him and stabs with her knife, but his mail shirt holds. Then he sees on the wall a giant sword forged in ancient times, too heavy for any other man, seizes it and cuts through her neck. Light floods the cave. He finds Grendel’s corpse and cuts off its head; the blade of the giant sword melts in the monster’s hot blood, leaving only the hilt. The watchers on the shore, seeing blood rising through the water, give him up for dead; the Danes go home; only his Geats wait. He surfaces with the head and the hilt.

At Heorot, Hrothgar studies the ancient hilt, engraved with the story of the Flood that destroyed the race of giants, and delivers his great sermon to Beowulf: a warning against pride. He tells of Heremod, a Danish king who turned cruel and miserly; he warns that prosperity breeds arrogance, that a man forgets the end of all things, “until the arrow of the slayer strikes”; that sickness or the sword, fire or flood, or old age will take his strength. “Choose the better part, eternal gains.” Beowulf returns home laden with treasure, recounts his adventures to Hygelac, and gives most of the treasure to his lord.

The second part leaps forward fifty years. Hygelac has died in battle in Frisia, and his son after him; Beowulf has ruled the Geats well for fifty winters. Then a fugitive slave stumbles into a barrow where a dragon has lain for three hundred years on a hoard of ancient treasure, left there by the last survivor of a vanished people — whose lament, “the Lay of the Last Survivor”, is one of the poem’s most beautiful passages (“Hold now, earth, what men could not, the wealth of nobles”). The slave steals a golden cup. The dragon wakes, finds the theft, and at night flies out in flame and burns the Geats’ homes, including Beowulf’s own hall.

Old Beowulf resolves to fight it alone. He has an iron shield made, since wood would burn. With eleven companions and the thief as guide, he goes to the barrow. Before the fight, he speaks at length, recalling his youth and the feuds between the Geats and the Swedes, and then announces that he will fight the dragon alone, as once he fought Grendel. He enters; the dragon attacks in flame; Beowulf’s sword Nægling fails. His companions, terrified, flee to the woods — all but one, the young Wiglaf, who rebukes the others, reminds them of their oaths and the gifts their lord gave them, and goes in to stand by his king. The dragon burns Wiglaf’s wooden shield; he shelters behind Beowulf’s. Beowulf strikes again; his sword shatters; the dragon bites him in the neck. Wiglaf stabs the dragon in its belly; Beowulf draws his knife and cuts it in two.

Beowulf is dying, the poison burning in him. He asks Wiglaf to bring out the treasure so that he can see what he has won for his people, gives thanks, and names Wiglaf his heir, giving him his collar, helmet and mail shirt. “You are the last of our kin, the Wægmundings. Fate has swept all my kinsmen away to their destiny… I must follow them.” He dies.

Wiglaf bitterly reproaches the cowardly retainers. A messenger announces the king’s death to the people and prophesies the ruin that will follow: now that Beowulf is gone, the Swedes and Franks will attack the Geats; their women will go into exile; the raven will tell the eagle how he feasted with the wolf on the slain. The dragon’s treasure, cursed, is buried with Beowulf, “as useless to men as it was before.” The Geats build a great pyre hung with helmets and shields; a Geatish woman sings a lament, her hair bound up, foretelling invasion, slaughter and captivity; they raise a barrow on a headland, visible to seafarers far out, and twelve warriors ride round it, chanting his praise:

They said that of all the kings of the world he was the mildest of men and the kindest, most gentle to his people and most eager for fame.

The art of the poem

Verse. Each line has two halves joined by alliteration (see Old English Literature). The style is grave, ceremonious and rich in kennings — the sea is the “whale-road”, “swan-road” and “seal’s bath”; the body is the “bone-house”; a king is a “ring-giver” — and in variation, the restating of a thing in several different phrases.

Digressions. The poem constantly turns aside to tell other stories — Sigemund, Finnsburh, Heremod, the feuds of Swedes and Geats, the future burning of Heorot in a family war. Older critics found these distracting. Modern readers see them as essential: they set Beowulf’s deeds within a vast web of history, compare him with good and bad kings, and darken the triumphs with knowledge of what is to come. At the very height of Heorot’s glory, the poet tells us that the hall will one day burn.

Structure. Tolkien compared the poem to a balanced pair: “a contrasted description of two moments in a great life, rising and setting; an elaboration of the ancient and intensely moving contrast between youth and age, first achievement and final death.”

Themes

The heroic code. The poem’s values are those of the Germanic war-band: a lord gives treasure and protection; his warriors give loyalty, courage and their lives. Glory (lof, dom) — fame among men that outlives death — is the one immortality. Beowulf embodies the code; Unferth, the fleeing retainers and Heremod violate it; Wiglaf renews it.

Mortality and transience. Everything in the poem passes: halls are built and burned, treasures buried and dug up and buried again, kingdoms rise and are destroyed. The poem begins and ends with a funeral. Hrothgar’s sermon and the Last Survivor’s lament are meditations on this truth.

Monsters. Tolkien’s lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” (1936) insisted that the monsters are not a childish flaw, as earlier scholars thought, but the heart of the poem: they embody the hostile forces — chaos, darkness, death — against which human society and courage stand. Grendel is the outcast who hates the joy of the hall; his mother avenges kin as the heroic code demands; the dragon hoards gold and destroys, an inverted image of the good king.

Christianity and paganism. The poet looks back on his pagan ancestors with sympathy, giving them knowledge of a single God but not of Christ, and leaves their salvation uncertain. Beowulf’s final concern for the treasure, and the poem’s ambivalence about the cursed hoard, have been read as a subtle Christian critique of heroic values; others see the poem as celebrating them without irony.

Kingship. The good king is generous, wise and protective; the bad king is cruel and miserly. Some critics read Beowulf’s decision to fight the dragon alone as heroic, others as a reckless pride that leaves his people defenceless.

Reception and influence

Ignored for centuries, Beowulf was first printed in 1815 and was long studied chiefly as a source of linguistic and historical information. Tolkien’s 1936 lecture made it a poem. Tolkien’s own work — The Hobbit’s stolen cup and wrathful dragon, Rohan’s mead-hall Meduseld — is steeped in it. John Gardner’s novel Grendel (1971) tells the story from the monster’s existentialist point of view. Seamus Heaney’s translation (1999), opening with a colloquial “So.” for Hwæt, won the Whitbread Prize and became a bestseller. Maria Dahvana Headley’s version (2020) begins “Bro!” There have been operas, comics, films (Robert Zemeckis, 2007) and the novel The Mere Wife.

In conversation

• “Let him who can win glory before death” — Beowulf’s creed; the heroic answer to mortality.
• A Grendel — a monster who hates the joy and community of others; also a modern image of the outsider’s rage.
• The dragon’s hoard — wealth that is hoarded and useless, which curses its keeper.