I believe that one can easily discern three levels on which
Beowulf can be profitably read: the heroic character of Beowulf,
the nature of leadership and, hence, of the politics of the society, and
the forces to which humans are subject. I also believe that most of
these levels are apparent from the beginning of the work.
There are a few points of background that one should understand if one
is to appreciate some of the nuances of the speeches and to make some of
the actions of the story understandable. Most of what follows is my own
view of that background, and it is not necessarily definitive. Every time
I read a work, I see more in it than I saw the time before, and I have
learned not to claim that I understand what anything is really
about.
I've also learned that the person who reads and thinks about what he is
reading generally understands things a lot better than those who are
content to judge things on the basis of a superficial reading and
thoughtless conclusion. Everyone has a right to their opinion, but not all
opinions are created equal.
Someday, you will all have become mature adults and will have given up
drinking beer at some flesh pot. Instead, you will go to cocktail parties
where your host and hostess will serve caviar with your choice of onion or
lemon (take the lemon), brie, kiwi fruit, play Palestrina on their hi-fi,
and where your fellow guests will get soused in a genteel and
sophisticated manner. While in the process, they will talk about erudite
things, and someone will say to you I find Beowulf dreadfully
primitive, don't you? I really don't see why anyone would ever have
written such a boring poem about someone like Beowulf, do you?" When
that happens, you will be able to say (in a loud voice, attracting the
attention of everyone in the room):
"BEOWULF ISN'T REALLY ABOUT BEOWULF.
IT'S ABOUT HROTHGAR"
The poem seems to me to be composed of two separate works. The first
section, the adventure of Grendel and his mother, is really centered on
the figure of Hrothgar. The poem opens with the story of the death and
funeral of Scyld Scefing, the mysterious ruler who had come to the Danes
as a babe cast adrift in a box on the sea and whose body is returned in a
blazing ship to wherever it was from whence he had come. The episode as
recounted in Beowulf is probably just a reference to a longer poem
about Scyld, just as the mention of his son, Beowulf, "famed in Scandia,"
and his grandson, Healfdeane, who divided the kingdom between his two
sons, are probably references to songs in which they were the
protagonists.
The story of Beowulf probably takes up somewhere in the middle
of a series of songs about Hrothgar. The first would have dealt
with his youth and perhaps ended with his sheltering of Ecgtheow, a man
cast out by his Geat kindred and being hunted down by the entire clan of
the Wylfings for killing their kinsman. The second story might then have
been about the building of Heorot and is the section in which Beowulf
appears. It tells how Grendel, a marsh-monster, had begun to attack
Heorot. The poem has several explanations of why Grendel had begun his
feud with Hrothgar's men. One is that he is offended by the sounds of
happiness within the mead-hall, another is that Hrothgar, although a
Christian himself, had not introduced his followers to the True God who
would have protected them and taken up the feud with Grendel for killing
His people. Still another is that it is simply Grendel's nature to be
nasty. Yet another reason might be that Hrothgar's building of Heorot may
have been like the building of the Tower of Babel in the Bible, a display
of human pride and arrogance.
Whatever the cause, Beowulf and his followers arrive to help Hrothgar.
There is a good deal of tension in the gracious welcome that Hrothgar
shows the young hero. Beowulf says that he has come because he heard that
Hrothgar's men were "idle and useless," and so the Danes needed help from
a Geat champion. He shows his sword, an heirloom of his grandfather, King
Hrethel. Hrothgar sets matters straight by saying that the best of his men
had died in attacking Grendel during the past twelve years, and that it
was he who had taken in Beowulf's father when the Geats, including
Hrethel, had thrown him out and refused to fight for him against the
Wylfings. The Wylfings had, for some reason, declared a feud against
Ecgtheow and were out to kill him, if possible. When his own kinsmen
refused to protect him, he turned to Hrothgar, who had given him a home
and had defied to Wylfings to try to take him. Moreover, Hrothgar had paid
the price necessary to convince the Wylfings to call off the feud and so
allow Ecgtheow to return home, to marry Hrethel's sister and to father
Beowulf himself. In the course of Hrothgar's speech, the reader should have
become aware that, contrary to his boasting, Beowulf had not come simply
on a heroic quest, but to pay off a very great and long overdue debt
of honor.
Even so, Beowulf did not attack Grendel to aid Hrothgar as one might
expected him to have done. He waited until Grendel had killed and eaten
one of his own companions before taking up the fight. He waited until he
was obligated to pursue a feud against Grendel as vengeance for having
killed his follower. So his fight with Grendel was a personal affair, a
trial by combat in which he expected God to help him because the reason
for his feud was just. Nevertheless, he did not refuse the honorable gifts
that Hrothgar heaped on him as compensation for having come to his aid,
fighting Grendel (supposedly) on his behalf and having saved Heorot.
This last point might alert the reader to some aspect of Beowulf's
character that hardly seem heroic.
The third part of this poem of Hrothgar would have been the story of
how Hothgar's son-in-law rose up against him, attacked Heorot and destroyed it
by fire, a fire in which Hrothgar died and the line of the descendants of
Scyld Scefing came to an end. If this was in fact the sequence of the
songs, these poems would have formed an epic cycle of the rise and fall of
the Scefings, something like that of the Niebelungens, to whom reference
is made when the mead-hall minstrel mixes his song of praise of Beowulf
with the legend of Sigismund, the founder of the Niebelung family.
THE CHARACTER OF BEOWULF
So this part of the poem is not really about Beowulf, but has been
taken from another poetic cycle. It's a good introduction to the matter of
Beowulf, though, because it tells us a good deal about our hero.
Beowulf tries to convince people that he has come only in pursuit of glory
and to offer the poor Danes the assistance of a real man. He is a not a
very polite guest and loses no opportunity to insult his host's followers.
He is deferential to Hrothgar, but allows one of his men to be killed so
that he can claim God's aid in personal combat with Grendel. He is
unwilling to fight as Hrothgar's champion, which suggests that he thought
that Hrothgar's cause was perhaps not sufficiently righteous for God to
assist him against Grendel. Perhaps he suspected that Hrothgar may have
guilty of some misdeed, and because of this God has not been willing to
help his warriors when _they_ had fought Grendel and lost.
Beowulf boasts that he is not afraid of Grendel, and with good reason.
He has somehow discovered that Grendel cannot be harmed by weapons, which is
the reason that no one had yet been able to defeat him. He doesn't even
tell his own companions about this fact. When they come to Beowulf's aid
during his wrestling match with Grendel, they are not able to help him at
all with their swords and spears. So Beowulf is made to look even better
by allowing his own companions to appear completely ineffectual.
When the fight is over, Hrothgar suggests that God helped Beowulf
defeat
Grendel because it was a poor example to people to allow an evil force to
triumph over humans so regularly and for so long. Beowulf ignores this
pious reasoning and states that he won the fight on his own and that God
protected Grendel (presumably as a descendant of Cain), or Beowulf would
have been able to defeat him outright rather than only tearing his arm out
of the socket and so allowing the monster to escape. So Beowulf strives to
secure God's aid before the combat, and then claims that God was not a
help, but a hindrance, to him.
On the surface, the poet seems to portray Beowulf in an extraordinarily
heroic light, but if one reads the poem closely, one finds that the poet
puts the praise of Beowulf's heroism in the mouth of Beowulf himself, and
of those about him. The story the poet tells is that of a man so eager for
praise and glory that he is willing to deceive a gracious host to whom he
owed - even if indirectly - his very life, to elevate himself by
belittling those about him, to endanger his own companions and make them
look bad in order to make himself look even better, and even to deny God
in order to claim victory as his own personal and unaided
achievement.
In the end, at the close of the poem, Beowulf will die because of his
insistence upon trying to gain all of the glory of slaying a dragon for
himself and to be regarded as the equal of the famous Sigismund. His own
men run away at the sight of the dragon. Men learn to be courageous by
acting courageously, and Beowulf has never given them the opportunity to
act courageously. He has been so intent on enhancing his own reputation
that he has never bothered to train champions to defend his people after
his death. Nevertheless, his people treat him as the greatest of heroes
and do not seem to realize the extent to which he had neglected his
obligations to provide for his people's security because of his complete
absorption in his own reputation.
HOW THE UNIVERSE WORKS
The poet refers again and again to three forces that shape events in
the world. The most basic is wyrd, which is usually translated as
"fate," but means something even more basic. It appears at times to be the
logic of events, but a logic that humans most often cannot discern. The
Scandinavians of the time portrayed fate as a patterned cloth being woven
by three supernatural women called the Norns. The symbolism is
interesting. There is no hint in Scandinavian mythology that the Norns
know the future. They seem to be intent on weaving a cloth bearing a
complex pattern that will run the length of the cloth from the beginning
of time to the end of the world. One can see that pattern of the past,
and, if one studies the matter closely, one might be able to extrapolate
from the pattern of the past to the pattern of the future, since patterns
are inherently logical. Wotan, ruler of the gods of Asgard, has gained the
power to do that, but it seems to be beyond the ability of humans.
The second great power in the world is that of God. The God of
Beowulf is not the sort of deity that appears in The Acts of the
Apostles, The Life of Saint Martin, or The Life of Saint
Anthony, however. There are no amazing miracles in Beowulf by
which the power of God is made manifest to Man. The God of Beowulf
works his will by nudging humans, favoring some actions and frustrating
others. His power is so unobtrusive that it is possible for some people to
discount it as an effective force in the human world. This is perhaps the
reason that Beowulf, although he sought God's assistance in his struggle with
Grendel, once the fight was over and he had emerged victorious, he was so
easily able to convince himself that he had accomplished the feat without
any divine aid.
The third power is that of human action. The Scandinavians believed
that fate was leading to the destruction of the world, and that there was
nothing they could do about it. They could order affairs in the
meantime, however, and they tended to act according to rather rigid modes
of behavior. They tried to keep some sort of order through the feud, an
obligation upon all members of a family to seek vengeance for a wrong done
to any of their relations. But they knew that the feud also led to a
constant state of social warfare. They tried to ally families through
intermarriages, but this never worked out. Every now and then a man of
extraordinary physical ability and moral force, a hero, would arise, and
would become king and protector of his people. This prowess seemed to be
hereditary, but the lineage of heroes would eventually die out, just as
the race of the gods of Asgard would eventually die out. But heroism must
have seemed to be to the people of the time their best chance of enjoying
a life of relative prosperity and security. Their culture was conditioned
to create and identify heroes, and riches and fame were heaped on such
men. Moreover, they were given the closest approach to immortality the
society could provide -- praise in poetry and song that they took great
care to preserve and remember.
A QUESTION
In many ways, the songs of heroes were the school of the Scandinavians,
offering their listeners models of heroic conduct and an idea of the
rewards that such conduct could bring. What then should we say of
Beowulf? On the surface, the poem seems to be such a model, but we
cannot expect that its listeners were unaware of the undercurrents in the
account. I do not believe that we can say that the poet glorified Beowulf.
Instead, he was at pain to hint at the selfishness, pettiness, and deceit
that underlay much of what Beowulf said and did, and to emphasize how
unquestioningly the people about Beowulf accepted the heroic image he
attempted to project.
It is generally believed that the poet of Beowulf lived in the
Midlands of England and wrote in about the year 1000. It has also been
suggested that he wrote the poem, weaving many old songs into it, for
members of the family of the kings of the old Anglo-Saxon kingdom of
Mercia, who counted Beowulf among their ancestors. If that was in fact the
case, he may have been drawing an elaborate analogy. Beowulf relied upon
his personal prowess, and the kingdom of Hygelac was destroyed as a
result. The kings of Mercia were slow to accept Christianity and, when the
Danes invaded England in the ninth century, they did not ally with other
Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, but attempted to meet the enemy themselves. As a
result, the kingdom of Mercia was destroyed.
Was this what the poet was trying to say?
By the time you've said all of this, everyone left in the room will be
really impressed with you. But, since all of them except yourself will have
gotten bored and gone home, you'll decide that fame is fleeting and worldly regard is no substitute for self-respect.