Beowulf is a poem famous for, among other distinctions, having no faithful film adaptations—famous, also, for its connection to J.R.R. Tolkien, who both revolutionized the Beowulf scholarship of his day and incorporated copious influences from it into his little-known The Lord of the Rings. I read Beowulf because I was assigned it in school. Of all my school-books, it was the most enjoyable (rivaled by Till We Have Faces) and the easiest to read (rivaled by The Last Days of Socrates), and then I moved on. Years later, for a reason definitely named J.R.R. Tolkien, I returned; then, I returned again, this time for the book itself. I asked, at long last, what theology runs through Beowulf.

Theology, Running

When I say that ‘the theology that runs through Beowulf,’ don’t mistake me for talking about an allegory, a didactic impression, or even a fully conscious intention. The theology that runs through a work of art is its worldview; I name it ‘theology’ because (as a Christian) I know that all things relate to God and God to all things, so that a worldview is merely a permutation of a theology. Beowulf is not a work of instruction; it is not an allegory (I could be wrong here, but the idea is unsupported by the evidence). Beowulf is a story, and stories, being reflections of reality, portray specific understandings of that reality, specific worldviews. It is their nature.

My Thesis

I believe that Beowulf presents an answer, in narrative form, to the question, “How do we deal with the evident greatness present in our pagan fathers and pagan heritage?”

This question must have been pressing, at the time, irrespective of whether I’m right on the poem. England in the 600-900s was coming into Christianity in parts and peoples; they still remembered their pagan past, whether in a father, a grand-father, or a great-grandfather, and the stories still hung about them, coloring the world, resting uneasy with their newfound faith in God. How were they to account for this? It would run counter to their hearts and their people to abandon it entirely; in some ways, they couldn’t do that at all. Were they to live in halls bearing the shapes of their pagan past, without remembering that past? Moreover, they would see much beauty and even greatness in that past. He who reads the old Norse myths, the cousins and children of those Englishmen’s heritage, knows this to be true.

What were they to do with this heritage?

The poet of Beowulf, set out not to answer the question but to exemplify the answer. Beowulf is not a scholarly treatise or a theological meditation on how to deal with the greatness of a pagan ancestry. Beowulf is a story, a story whose bones were taken from that pagan past and re-fleshed to give the hearer a living-through of how he could remember the past without falling back into its depravities. It shows, to my eye, how the poet thought his people could honor their fathers, embrace their past’s virtues, and reject its vices. As is the nature of good stories, the teaching is not clean or even perfectly clear, but it is potent.

The Noble Ones

Beowulf, Hrothgar, and Hygelac stand as the virtuous pagans. They are, as Shippey notes, noble pagans, instinctive monotheists who speak in terms of a singular Divine, a Deity clearly intended to be identified with the Christian God, being consistent with Him where seen. In them, the poet shows us the highest virtues of the pagan past, as he sees them, for never are they truly denigrated (Shippey takes care to show how several passages often read as condemnatory (of glory-seeking) are at worst neutral).

Among the virtues of these men we find: generosity, search for glory, duty-keeping (a theme carried on from Germanic legend with its emphasis on conflicting duties), fidelity to the king by the thanes and to the thanes by the king, physical bravery, politeness, rhetorical ability, and valor. They have also that instinctive monotheism; in that trait, I think, the poet brings us out of the point of history into fiction and fictionalizing optimism, but he may not have thought so (and whether he believes their piety sufficient for salvation is unclear; he may have stopped at Dante or gotten to C.S. Lewis either one). At any rate, it signals that the height of paganism is the wisdom fundamental to Christianity: submission to the one true God.

For women, we have the models of Thryth (though each of my three translations has a different name for her) and Wealtheow, more mixed, and of Hygd. These get less time in the narrative, but their part in maintaining the relationships binding the kingdom is given focus, their part in upholding their husband’s virtues, in running the hall properly, and in generosity.

Amidst this, one virtue sticks out like a sore thumb to the modern: the pursuit of glory. In a striking passage (quoting Heaney’s version, as I’m most familiar with it), Beowulf declares, “For every one of us, living in this world means waiting for our end. Let whoever can win glory before death. When a warrior is gone, that will be his best and only bulwark” (ln 1386-9). Constantly, also, the pursuit of glory or its achieving are regarded as great.

We can set aside some of these passages; the word oft-translated ‘praiseworthy’ has more to do with that which cultivates and strengthens the relationship between king and retainer (as per Shipper), and in some cases the statements read to me more as realism than encomium, although that retreat is not really necessary.

The central problem remains, though; how can my interpretation be true if the Beowulf poet portrays such a constant fault in the heroes? It could be held that he simply introduces (maintains from the source material) a flaw into them to show the insufficiency of paganism, but I do not take that tack. No, I see in this (though perhaps I am wrong) not an implicit condemnation by the poet but the result of his theology differing from the modern tendency.

In the passage quoted above, I read this not as Beowulf discounting all eternal value but as the fruit of a Christianity which emphasized a little too much the here-and-now aspect of sanctification and righteousness. Whereas the tendency of the modern church (in recent years) is to emphasize the world-to-come to the exclusion of this world, either abandoning the law or retreating towards a merely-private legalism, the Beowulf author is comfortable with a strong emphasis on what a man does on this earth as his fruit, as his glory, as what eternity remembers of him. Man is truly supposed to bear fruit on this earth, and perhaps the poet is willing to accept (possibly in coordination with a measure of the next paragraph’s alternative) a man who sees his fruit on this earth as his testimony to eternity.

It could also be that Beowulf, being a virtuous pagan rather than an actual Christian, simply has a limited understanding; he sees the need for this-world sanctification and fruit, but he has cloudy eyes regarding what will come. This supposition draws strength from the relative paucity and undoubted vagueness of Beowulf’s statements on its character’s after-life and their understanding of it.

The Fiend

In Grendel I see an antagonist who lives out not the vices abhorred by paganism. Grendel is a cannibal; he seeks vengeance not for a true wrong but for his petty pleasure. Grendel is the wickedness that the pagan society seeks to expel, even in its degraded state.

Of this vice, the poet says in Grendel’s downfall, the great pagans can rid themselves. Beowulf triumphs; Hrothgar, though sore-pressed, endures; Hygelac benefits from the ogre’s defeat. This vice can push and threaten pagan society, but its height can repel the vices it recognizes as vices. The greatness of England’s pagan past truly had some virtue against darkness, the poet intimates, against that which both God and man hates.

The Tarn-Hag

Next comes a foe less terrible than Grendel to the Danes. Grendel’s mother has a very different reason from her son. Though she is still a cannibal, her cause is vengeance, explicitly so, for a son taken. The cause, in the framework of the constat feuds which run in the background of the story, is accepted as proper by the pagan society against which she strikes. Even taboo deeds, like cannibalism, are accepted to an extent as the fruit of such a vengeance-duty. The treachery of Hengest, in the sub-poem prior to her coming, is a virtue, being born of the duty of vengeance (I highly recommend Shippey’s commentary on this point); in another myth, the adulterous incest by which Sigurd is born of Sigemund is almost a virtue, being component to the revenge of his mother upon her father’s killer (her husband). Grendel’s dam lives out not the vice-recognized-as-vice but the vice-named-a-virtue of Beowulf’s civilization.

Still, Beowulf defeats her. The greatness in the midst of paganism, the poet says, can endure its own self-deceptions, at least for a while; Beowulf can defer the ruin wrought by vengeance (though only by the power of a thing outside his people, the giant’s sword, which among them only Beowulf, the highest power of their people, is great enough to wield). He will do so again as a king, in defending his people against their feuds (the Franks). That victory, incidentally, will have a caveat: upon his death, the people know that the vengeance he held off will come upon them inevitably. They will be destroyed, as Wiglaf warns. Beowulf can defeat the worker of vengeance; he can hold off his people’s sin. But he can only hold it off; when he dies, as all men must, it will be still alive to bring ruin.

Note also that Grendel, who worked the transgressive evil, is her child, the child of the one who works the society’s own evil. I do not think it a stretch to see in this an understanding that the evil endorsed by a society can readily birth the evil it denies; indeed, that understanding appears already nascent in the mother’s cannibalism and the power of vengeance-duty to justify the taboo.

The Dragon

The dragon is the point which brought me to much of the refinement of this hypothesis. Why? Because the dragon has almost a justification for its wrath: the theft of a cup. More, while burning the land may be disproportionate for such a petty theft, it is the theft of a cup from a burial mound, a theft which the slave’s master then endorses, taking on its guilt, by accepting the cup. The Geats, in this act, have defiled themselves, and they have brought down the curse of the hoard.

Yet the dragon is not righteous in his destruction any more than the slave was in his theft. He too is an interloper to the hoard, not its proper owner and not pure of motivation (as Beowulf is). He is Assyria or the city of Ai. Like Israel with Achan, the Geats have taken into their belly one who has stolen the devoted (not that the Beowulf poet is borrowing that story; the motif has been known since its original in the Garden of Eden and repeated regularly across the world), and as it was for Israel-bearing-Achan, an evil force (Canaan; the dragon) has come to destroy the Geats. Unlike with Achan, the Geats have no way of finding and ending the sacrilege; they must send Beowulf to defeat it head-on.

Note here that I am relying in a part upon the idea that to take from the hoard is sacrilegious or taboo. Perhaps, to that people or to the poet, it would not be. The poem is not explicit on this point, so far as my skill reveals. But this hoard in particular, irrespective of that taboo, is forbidden.

(Shippey notes also the possibility that in the source material for the poem, the dragon was the last survivor taking dragon-from, al a Regin the dwarf or (in more modern times) Eustace Scrubb. This would increase the dragon’s propriety, of course, though perhaps the change has more significance than merely being the poet’s discomfort with shape-shifting, in that it makes the dragon more clearly wicked- though gold-hoarding in greed is not particularly virtuous in Beowulf’s terms (given the importance of generosity). The possibility also emphasizes the dragon’s role as working out the curse protecting the treasure.)

Consider how each reacts to the gold. The dragon hoards it. The thrall steals it for his own use. Beowulf sees but does not covet, intending it for virtuous use, to uplift his people. Wiglaf sees and takes only for Beowulf’s benefit; in the end, he casts it all away, so that the Geats, who would desire it for themselves, get none of it. Now, quite explicitly the gold is protected so that the unworthy may not take it; that the covetous-unworthy does indeed take it, in the thrall’s person, is no problem for this. The bar to the taking is that to take unworthily, for oneself, is to be cursed. Beowulf alone could have taken safely; all the rest would take it for their own good (Wiglaf and his Geats escape only by rejecting it).

The gold could have been a great good for the Geats; generosity (by means of gold, often) is the primary method of binding their society together, king to retainer. Yet because of their sin and their coveting, it brings on them only destruction: dragon-fire, their king dead, and the hoard dumped in the ocean after the only man who could claim it rightly. Taking the gold was clearly a wrong act, a transgression which the dead punished, even if graverobbing generally were not taboo to them.

The dragon, I believe, stands as the outworking of evil generally in the civilization of the poet’s forefathers. All sin and all sinners it comprehends; it is the judgement and the sinner both. It is not a specific vice; it is the judgement which follows a pagan people. The dragon is itself evil, and it is judgement for evildoing. The evil it judges is at once a sacrilege to that people (to steal from a tomb protected) and a part of life (to loot the slain), at once the work of an outcast (a thrall) and the means of his reconciliation (by paying his way back with the cup). Moreover, the dragon has no right to judge this evil; it guards a hoard not its own and is outraged at the loss of what is not properly owned by it. The people suffer, even those who had no part in the sin (for sin, without redemption, burns all around); the dragon dies, cursed as much as curse.

Nor is Beowulf invulnerable. Against this foe, his strength fails him. Not just the implements of his people fail (his sword snaps) but his own might will not be enough. The greatest pagan defeats the snake only with aid from another, from Wiglaf, and is slain despite his victory. His thanes have abandoned him, save Wiglaf- and Wiglaf, clear-eyed, knows that Beowulf’s death is the first step to his people’s ruin.

This, I think, is the verdict of the poet upon his forefathers.

Their greatest could not withstand sin or the degradation and judgement of their civilizations. They could hold it off for a while; they could slay one dragon and one hag and one ogre. But the sin would lay even them low in the end (Beowulf’s death) and all their work would prove only a delay (the doom of the Geats at the hand of those with vengeance-duty against them). They were great, but they were insufficient, in the end, glorious, but glorious without true victory. Their only hope, if they had any, was in a God they hardly knew. They were great and should be remembered as such, but they were not enough to defeat sin.

Conclusion

I cannot say that my interpretation is certainly correct. I believe it fits the narrative, but perhaps that is merely a by-product of another intent in the poet’s mind. Perhaps he thought of some of this, and the rest fell into place by the nature of narrative, which arranges itself in echo of a reality which echoes itself, so that a search for verisimilitude can often lend unexpected and unrealized depth to an intended idea. Maybe I’m just flat wrong; in such matters of interpretation, an interpretation can override the interpreting.

Still, try to answer the question for yourself. How do we deals with a flawed heritage? We all have one. Does Beowulf speak well? When you live through the story and its words, do you find a path worth walking? My eye finds it a good start, though not complete by any means. Completion, in the sense of didactic exhaustion, is not the point of a story. Beowulf presents a question and gives the living of an answer; now, it is for the reader to turn that experience into wisdom (Ps. 111:10).

God bless