Beowulf - Imperium Press (Western Canon)

Western Canon Series

The Western Canon’s value is self-evident. Its status, however, has been under threat since the middle of the 20th century. Feminists, Marxists, intersectionalists, and others deny the Canon’s existence by refusing to observe its traditional boundaries, throwing the borders open to invite all manner of second- and third-rate material. They intentionally misread the Canon, deconstructing it and looking for incoherence where men have only ever found genius.

Imperium Press’ Western Canon series reclaims the Canon from the forces hostile to it. The series offers not only definitive versions of these works, but also supplementary material placing them at the centre of our aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual life—where they belong.

The Beowulf Poet

is unknown to us. Tolkien places him in the 8th century CE, just a few generations after Christianization, but the poem has proven notoriously difficult to date, with dates of its authorship ranging to the 11th century. He wrote in a West Saxon dialect and was steeped in the ecclesiastical didactic tradition of his time, but the poem retains many folkloric, historical, and mythic elements of great antiquity.

Francis Barton Gummere

was Professor of English at Haverford College, a school which his grandfather had a hand in founding. A scholar of folklore and ancient languages, he earned a PhD magna cum laude at the University of Freiburg in 1881. His translation of Beowulf has long been recognized as a classic, and he wrote many other scholarly works on poetics such as Old English Ballads, A Handbook of Poetics, and The Beginnings of Poetry.

Contents

Foreword

Translator’s Preface

Beowulf

Introduction

Note on the Text

Map

Beowulf

Prelude: The Passing of Scyld

I: The Hall Heorot

II: Grendel’s Visits

III: Hygelac’s Thane

IV: The Errand

V: Beowulf’s Speech

VI: Hrothgar’s Welcome

VII: Hrothgar Tells of Grendel

VIII: Unferth Objects to Beowulf

IX: Beowulf’s Contest With Breca — The Feast

X: The Watch For Grendel

XI: Grendel’s Raid

XII: Beowulf Tears Off Grendel’s Arm

XIII: Joy at Heorot

XIV: Hrothgar’s Congratulation

XV: The Banquet and the Gifts

XVI: Song of Hrothgar’s Poet — Lay of Finn and Hengest

XVII: The Gleeman’s Song is Ended

XVIII: Beowulf’s Jewelled Collar — The Heroes Rest

XIX: Grendel’s Mother Attacks the Danes

XX: Sorrow at Heorot: Æschere’s Death

XXI: Beowulf Seeks the Monster in the Haunts of the Nicors

XXII: Battle With The Brine-Wolf

XXIII: Beowulf Slays The Sprite

XXIV: Hrothgar’s Gratitude and Discourse

XXV: The Discourse Ended — Beowulf Prepares to Leave

XXVI: Parting Words

XXVII: Beowulf Returns to Geatland — The Queens Hygd and Thryth

XXVIII-XXX: His Arrival and Reception — Beowulf’s Story of the Slayings

XXXI: Gifts For Hygelac — Hygelac’s Death — Reign of Beowulf

XXXII: The Dragon and the Hoard

XXXIII: Beowulf Resolves to Kill the Dragon

XXXIV: Retrospect of Beowulf — Strife Between Swedes and Geats

XXXV: Memories of Past Time — The Feud With the Dragon

XXXVI: Wiglaf Helps Beowulf in the Feud

XXXVII: Beowulf Wounded Unto Death

XXXVIII: The Jewel-Hoard — The Passing of Beowulf

XXXIX: The Coward-Thanes

XL: The Soldier’s Dirge and Prophecy

XLI: He Tells of the Swedes and the Geats

XLII: Wiglaf Speaks — Building of the Balefire

XLIII: Beowulf’s Funeral Pyre

Finnsburg

Introduction

The Attack on Finnsburg

Waldere

Introduction

Waldere

Hildebrandslied

Introduction

Hildebrand and Hathubrand

Deor

Introduction

Deor the Singer

Widsith

Introduction

Widsith: The Far-Wanderer

Genealogies

Bibliography

Glossary of Names

Glossary of Obscure and Archaic Terms

Foreword

Beowulf! What does it conjure for you, reader? I cannot help but wonder, for I am in too deep. A vast world of meaning unfolds itself when I hear the name. I have taken on the task of introducing this great poem, and there is a certain hubris in standing here, between you and the text. Yet I feel a great need to do so, in the hopes that you can glean a little of what I think and feel about an epic that is often passed over. If you do not care to read introductions, I will give you a singular author to keep in mind as you read Beowulf . Flying over a millennium of history, I will point to Lovecraft , for above all Beowulf is horror , and effective horror at that. The comparison is not perfect, but if you can imagine for a moment the lone man, besieged by a slavering dark, the specter of death hanging over him, descending beneath the earth to battle with the slinking terrors that have lain coiled there since ages immemorial, you will be off to a good start in gleaning something of the author ’ s mind.

To speak on Beowulf is to stand in the shadow of a giant; I do not presume to climb on his shoulders, but perhaps I can tread ground where his shadow does not lie. I speak of Tolkien, who redeemed Beowulf scholarship; his seminal lecture on the poem will be at least as useful to you as anything I can say. So we will begin on a path too well-beaten for Tolkien to bother with, though you are likely unfamiliar with; the poem’s historical, over its literary, value. Some readers will need no introduction beyond this. Merely to catch a first-hand glimpse into the ethos of the Dark Ages, to hear the voice of the men who laid the foundations of civilization in Europe, is enough. It might come as a surprise to the historically-minded reader that the Anglo-Saxons, their society fully established in England at the date of Beowulf’s composition, would write an epic about the history of the Danes, ancestors of the viking seafarers that had spent a century raiding England, even settling and establishing states from ca. 850–900. Some use this fact to argue that the poem is a work of pagan apologia, yet it should not be forgotten that the Angles and Saxons, in the days in which Beowulf were set, lived scarcely a day’s travel from southern Denmark; the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings were kin.

This fact was not forgotten by the author of Beowulf and it should not be forgotten by its reader. The affairs of the Geats and the Danes in the 6th century, the era in which the historical figures mentioned in the poem lived and died, were the affairs of the Saxons as well. Beowulf is the memory of a settler-people for the ancestral homeland and its ancient values, and to read it is to read the nostalgia of a man who stands between the Dark Ages and the Medieval, a man who knew somewhat of the old ways, when the only law was the law of the close-knit war-band of fighting men, and the only peace the half-sleep of a man who rests with a spear near at hand. The society depicted in Beowulf is no fantasy, no mish-mash of old and new, as Homer’s imperfectly remembered Bronze Age which thus possesses a certain unreal and mythical quality. It is in fact a living historical memory, the very human juxtaposed with the monstrous other.

One should imagine the civilization of the Danes and Geats in Beowulf as set against a vast backdrop of chaos; anarchy, war and violence being the mean to which society regresses. Civilization was small in those days, extending scarcely farther than the reach of a warrior’s spear. The hall of Heorot and its surrounding environs, its stone-fair streets and golden beams, are a tiny stronghold of peace and comfort amidst a barren wilderness, filled with monsters both human and inhuman. This was not yet the feudal Europe of legally-defined fiefs, of King and Duke and Earl, of parceled holdings to be sold, granted, and transferred, where the realm of a King’s sovereignty was clear and recorded in a book.

Yet the ghost of the later Europe in this depiction of the earlier, where the Lord was still loaf-guard, and the King a ring-breaker and giver of gifts to his loyal and accomplished warriors. It would likely have been considered unimaginably crass at the time to replace gift with pay; the gift from the King to his followers had not been entirely replaced by the time of Beowulf’s composition, and indeed had not even been entirely replaced by 1300. Yet the long development from the spontaneous reward for service to the formalized one of rights was ongoing even as Beowulf was composed. There is a logic to each, but we will consider the more primitive version in depth as pertaining to the action of the poem.

To the men of the Germanic society that Beowulf describes, the gift of military service is a sublime and ineffable act. It is the gift of both heroism and one’s own life, not a thing to be taken lightly at all. It is thus to be repaid with a generosity that transcends mere logic; from this we have the kenning ring-breaker for the King, who would not enter his treasury and count out what he deems to be a suitable reward for service in coin, but would snap off gold from the very torque on his arm as a gift, in a spontaneous display of gratitude. This expectation that the gift for service be spontaneous and unthinking has a certain logic of its own to it, for we can imagine that the true feelings of a lord to his retainers are more sincerely reflected in this kind of gift, that stinginess, ingratitude, or even darker feelings toward a subordinate are more readily apparent.

We glean thus a picture of a Europe before divine right was a twinkling in a sovereign’s eye. The God who made a man a king could just as easily undo him; the unworthy or stingy ruler was swiftly deposed. Likewise, a retainer held no land of indefinite right, but as reward for service in war; a father might win renown and land both, but the implication is that the son must prove himself worthy to retain his inheritance. There is a specific tension in Beowulf that is political, and often unremarked on. As manly, as noble, and as heroic as the old way was, it was a source of feud and conflict and constant war, as the lament of the Geat woman that closes the poem reminds us. These old ways were similarly responsible for the state of the world, of the tiny society and the ravenous dark the besieges it. More likely than not, this is a tension that the author was quite unaware of, and the poem is better for it, for it shadows the action and does not flaunt its naked allegory. But here we tread into the realm of the literary.

As we shift our focus to Beowulf’s literary worth, a word on the language and translation is necessary. It may seem bold to claim that good translation of English from Old to Modern is nearly impossible, but this is indeed the case. Few who invest the time to learn to read the Old Anglo-Saxon language fail to be enchanted by it. There is a sublime unity between a language and the character of the people who produced it; sadly, the difficulties posed by translation merely serve to illustrate a vast gulf between our own thoughts and feelings and those of our ancestors.

To read Beowulf in translation, versus in the original, is like looking through a pane of frosted glass. Old English is at once rough as stone, rolls as the sea, and is elegant as wrought gold. For those with the time to do so, I recommend that you learn to read this language. Plainly spoken, it is good for the soul. In translation, the use of language too simple does a disservice to the hard elegance of Anglo-Saxon grammar; precise meaning requires an excess of words, which entirely ruins the spirit of the original. The language of Old English is tightly bound; a single noun that sounds like a grunt contains an expansive scenery of meaning within it, but to unwind it entirely into excessive verbosity is to do the original a great disservice. The language of the Beowulf poet is best described as evocative, with a world of image and meaning conjured by simple and precise diction. Modern English is sometimes capable of this and sometimes not; the translation chosen for this version walks a middle ground in attempting to capture the feel of the original, its alliteration and poetic syntax, without losing much precise meaning. Here I must again point the reader to Tolkien for further illustration; his On Translating Beowulf, for the interested reader, will grant more elucidation on the nature of Old English than I can provide in this brief introduction.

Beowulf, even in its original version, is written in a high poetic style that features unusual diction and poetic syntax; it is by far the most difficult thing written in Old English for the modern reader of the language to parse. Fully one-third of its diction occurs nowhere in surviving prose, and many words are entirely unique to Beowulf itself, and can only be translated through context. Some translations even differ on the meaning of specific sentences, unusual for a meticulously inflected language with such well-defined grammatical rules. This serves, however, to illustrate the refinement of Beowulf. The poem was not a one-off product of a group of unlearned Dark Age barbarians, but exists within the context of a high poetic culture, in what was in fact the most advanced European nation of its day. Because of the poem’s linguistic complexity, I favor as late a date as possible for its composition, almost certainly after King Alfred’s scholarly reforms, as the poet’s use of the Wessex dialect indicates. Fulk makes the case that linguistic evidence points to the 8th century; while not disputing his evidence, this does not account for the possibility that the poet wrote Beowulf in a deliberately dated manner to evoke the poem’s historical subject matter. While Beowulf stands alone among surviving Old English literature in its depth and complexity, this depth also hints at a contemporary milieu of comparably high literature. Regardless, it is extremely likely that the Beowulf poet would have read Virgil; it is even possible that he read Homer, for Bede introduced scholarship in Greek into England.

Beowulf must then be understood, as literature, in the context of a learned and thriving culture that had access to Latin poetry and scholarship at the very least. It was only the Norman conquest and subsequent replacement of English with Norman French (among the learned class) that led to the greater part of Old English literature being lost. Rather than being a unique and insular narrative crafted in isolation on a distant island, the Anglo-Saxons in fact inherited from Rome the poetic tradition that began at least with Homer. The unique character of the Germanic peoples makes their literature in some ways radically different, but to place Beowulf in juxtaposition with the Iliad or Aeneid is not a notion that should be dismissed out of hand.

The first thing to be remarked upon, for it is in fact where the narrative of Beowulf begins, is its poet’s focus on historicity. In many places throughout Beowulf, the poem’s narrative is ruptured by accounts of the deeds of ancestors; their feuds, alliances, and wars, whether told by a bard or recalled by a character. Critics have found these interludes confusing and out of place, as our translator in his footnotes attempts to refute. I am in a position to reject the blindness of critics in greater depth. It is in fact necessary to consider the historical interludes of Beowulf as having specific and deliberate literary intention; they cannot indeed be understood otherwise. The epic even begins with such an interlude: Lo, praise of the prowess of people-kings of spear-armed Danes, in days long sped... This device, and the constant recurrence of history in Beowulf must not be ignored or dismissed by any means. Beowulf is not meant to be considered by its reader as an isolated incident, a tale of mere entertainment, pulp-fiction for the ninth century. For much of the poem’s history in the eyes of scholars, it was indeed regarded as such, the fairy-tale nature of a story about a man slaying monsters disqualifying it from serious consideration as literature. The author of Beowulf certainly anticipated such a criticism, but rather than write a work of history in verse, as was a very common matter among the Anglo-Saxons, he chose to stand his ground on a tale of a hero with the strength of thirty men fighting trolls and dragons.

All serious literature, for most of history, took the form of retelling. For an author to take a common tale, familiar to the youngest child, and reveal its deeper significance through his reworking of it; such is the form of Homer, and Virgil, and Malory, and even Milton. In this, the genre of the epic is defined. It would likely have been considered ridiculous for an author to have been taken seriously were he to concoct a story entirely from his imagination. In this, perhaps, the ancients were entirely correct. There is really nothing original in art, nothing without older influence. The author, then, acts mainly as a curator, his creative powers serving to judge and discern and arrange.

One may claim Beowulf belongs to the bardic tradition, and analyze it wholly through this lens, but that is to miss the forest for the trees. The reductio ad absurdum of this argument ends in the discovery that all literature can be stripped down to its most primitive inspirations. Tolkien’s writings owe much and more to Beowulf; can they be considered a part of the same bardic tradition? And why not go farther back, to what inspired the oral traditions themselves? If we do so, we will find that all of our literature originates in the simple deeds of primitive men, in which a hunter kills a deadly lizard or brains another man with a stone axe. Yet to say that this is true does not detract at all from the significance of great literature, or the artistic force of its author. To regard no literature as wholly original counter-intuitively strengthens the position of the author himself, and lends a clearer view of his intentions. For how the author chooses to tell the story, how he arranges the ancient myths and tropes, in which elements the epic differs from the basic or primordial story, lend us a means of inquiry into the most elusive and phantasmal aspect of criticism: discerning the author’s intent.

For example, we may ask the extremely pertinent question of why Homer begins the Iliad where he does, as the feud of Agamemnon and Achilles begins, and ends it with the funeral games of Patroclus rather than with the sack of Troy. It would be a digression longer than this introduction itself were I to discuss this in depth, but there is a very good reason why Homer did so, and this reason strikes at the very heart of Homer’s own intentions with the Iliad. It is enough for the moment to know that it is in these points of variation that the author, as author, is found.

This method becomes difficult when dealing with later literature, for the trend in literary Modernism was not to retell a single story, but to weave countless, seemingly unrelated threads of the past into what is ostensibly a new epic. We may hold up Joyce’s Ulysses or Pound’s Cantos as the purest example of such, though it is also found in the more realist Modernists such as Hemingway. It becomes even more difficult in Postmodernism; if Modernism can be summed up as the desperate search for meaning, Postmodernism is the abandonment of this quest, characterized by the redefinition of symbology in which an author may ascribe a specific meaning to a lamppost; the seemingly mundane replaces the external common referent for what can only be called literary authority.

Literary authority is the oft-ignored but ever-present element of art that may be summed up in a simple question: Why should I, the reader, take this seriously? Why does a given work have significance? (The postmodernist replies that the reader should not; consequently, the West has largely stopped reading.) All of literary history can be viewed through this lens, the idea that there is a center or source of authority that lends literature its significance. I have said that the epic, as genre, is the retelling of ancient deeds of note, the feats of great ancestors. It was only when faith in the greatness of the past died that this center of authority shifted entirely in literature, corresponding with the Romantic movement and the invention of the novel in the West. (The Renaissance represented mainly an introduction of the Classical as a parallel source of authority.) Even the Canterbury Tales contains something of this, as an epic about people telling stories. Chaucer may have been cannier than we give him credit for; he intuits this idea of literary authority, for the stories people choose to tell lend great insight into what they value, who they are.

When the Beowulf poet makes his frequent references to history, he is calling on this authority. Beowulf is laced with references to history because the basic narrative of man-slays-monsters is, to him, as important as history. I implore the reader to take the poet’s premise seriously. An author, always and everywhere, feels an urge to create; there is a great something that must be said or expressed. Without a font of literary authority, the author has no material to work with; he is a sculptor without stone. Without an eternal truth, as I will uncynically describe it, the basic story that serves as the author’s material is complete; the stone is already perfect without being carved, and the story need not be told. To write, to try one’s hand at retelling an existing myth, is an extreme act of hubris and imposition of will. It is only the intent of the author, a notion so vigorously minimized and dismissed by the postmodern critic, that can explain why literature is ever written to begin with, for the basic material, the old stories, the primitive tropes, are all already extant. Thus it is that the epic exists as a result of tensions, an interplay between stone and chisel. Without authorial intent, there would be no literature at all.

This all, of course, leads to a simple question. Why is the battle between Beowulf and Grendel as significant as a real-life war, with real-life consequences, between the Geats and the Danes? As I have alluded to earlier, the simplest explanation is that the hero’s battle with monsters is allegorically aligned with the actual clan-feuds of men with each other. The poet makes no attempt to hide this connection; Grendel’s grudge against Heorot is explicitly described as a feud, and the revenge of Grendel’s mother against Hrothgar’s men is an equally obvious reference to escalating acts of vengeance between two feuding families. The blood-feud weighed heavily on the minds of the ancient German peoples. It was the greatest cause of war and the single unraveler of peace; a wife given to a clan at enmity with your own was a peace-weaver, though this did not, of course, work out for Froda and Ingeld!

In this light, it is no surprise at all that Grendel is a demonic descendant of Cain; it must have resonated intensely with the Anglo-Saxon ethos that the first deed after the fall of man was brother’s slaying of brother, the first primeval kin-feud begetting an everlasting war between man and monster, between worldly good and worldly evil. In the light of this theme of the feud, the Pagan Beowulf notion that Grendel’s descent from Cain is mere Christian window-dressing to make a fundamentally pagan monster more acceptable to Christian audiences seems rather blind. Grendel’s descent from Cain is a matter of heavy spiritual and literary importance, and the Anglo-Saxon audience of Beowulf would certainly have recognized it as such.

To discuss Beowulf as literature in modern times is extremely difficult. So many of its tropes and assumptions are to be found in our own culture that even to describe them, to say for example that Beowulf concerns the battle between good and evil, would be blindingly obvious. Of course there’s a battle between good and evil! The greatest advice I can give the reader of Beowulf is to wipe away the "of course". Beowulf has been retold so many times that it is fruitless to compare it to what has come later. Instead, I will compare it to what has come before. Can you, my reader, think of a story about the battle between good and evil that was written… before Beowulf?

It has long been said that Homer is the classical world, that all which the later history of Greece and Rome contains has the root of its soul in Homer. And yet, if I were to claim that you were about to open the book that contains the kernel of Europe within it, perhaps a handful of people would agree. Yet I will say it. Beowulf is better than the Iliad, better than the Odyssey to a European reader because it is immensely relatable. There is much that we can comprehend in the Iliad, and much in the Odyssey. I do not mean to dwell for too long on the other great epic, or write an exhaustive comparison of the two, but I must lend a necessary tool to the reader of Beowulf.

For example, Homer has little historical memory; the war of the Danaans with Troy may be history, but it does not have a history. The events of the Iliad were isolated and encapsulated, leading neither to the future nor possessing a past. The events of Beowulf both are and possess history; they begin and end with funerals, as fragments in a great chronicle, stretching interminably