Though composed between A.D. 700 and 800, the Anglo-Saxon poem “Beowulf” calls to us with a moving voice and spirit of heroism as applicable today as it was in the mist-enfolded ages that gave it birth.
The poem is set about A.D. 500 in Scandinavia, an uncertain time around the fall of the Roman Empire in a place already beyond the borders of the cracking Roman bulwark of order and civilization.
It’s a time of oaths and blood feuds, honor and revenge, warlords and warriors, and great wooden halls, which were little refuges of civilization and culture, holding back the dark.
A Great Hero
Blending history and legend, the poem tells the story of a Geatish (Swedish) hero named Beowulf, who sails across the sea to aid Hrothgar, king of the Danes, because his great hall, Heorot, is plagued by a demonic creature called Grendel. Every night, the stealthy predator seizes and devours some of Hrothgar’s men—and he’s been at it for 12 years. Beowulf grapples with the monster, disdaining the use of weapons, and wins the wrestling match with his bare hands.
Hrothgar, overjoyed, rewards the hero who has brought back life and culture to his people. But the joy is short-lived, for Grendel’s mother (even monsters have mothers) comes for revenge, killing more of Hrothgar’s followers. Beowulf tracks the “troll-dam” to her lair in a haunted lake, dives to the bottom, and severs her head from her body with a sword from the days of giants. Upon his return to Geatland, Beowulf becomes king of his own people.
A sudden break occurs in the narrative here, which jumps 50 years into the future. Beowulf, now an old man, must face one last enemy when a dragon is awakened and begins terrorizing and ravaging the land.
How It All Ends
In a seminal 1936 essay called “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” J.R.R. Tolkien explained that the two halves of the poem are meant to balance one another, contrasting youth and old age, beginnings and endings, and setting up the necessary background for Beowulf’s final battle. In fact, he argued that the whole of “Beowulf” is really one long “dirge,” that is, a funeral song in commemoration of the fallen, and the relating of Beowulf’s heroic exploits when he was young are meant to make his fate in old age more poignant.Tolkien tells us that the poem’s relatively simple plot and structure are meant to highlight its lofty and universal theme: the death and failure that comes to all of us, even the heroic and powerful.
Dedication and Courage
So far, I may have only convinced readers that “Beowulf” is a depressing, hopeless poem. But that is far from the truth. Though it’s true that a melancholy mood hangs over the work, there are still the stirrings of something more—something, if not fully hopeful, yet truly inspiring. “It is the strength of the Northern mythological imagination that it faced this problem [of mortality], put the monsters in the center, gave them Victory but no honor, and found a potent but terrible solution in naked will and courage,” wrote Tolkien.What quickens the pulse and moves the heart when you read “Beowulf” is the remarkable dedication to duty and courage displayed by Beowulf even in the face of the dragon, which has become the very personification of failure and death. We might call this “the heroism of the lost cause.” The cause may be lost, but that doesn’t make it any less worth fighting for.
The vetern king sat down on the cliff-top. He wished good luck to the Geats who had shared his hearth and his gold. He was sad at heart, unsettled yet ready, sensing his death. His fate hovered near, unknowable but certain.That fate is embodied in the dragon, the primeval image of evil. In his introduction to the poem, Irish poet and playwright Seamus Heaney wrote: “Dragon equals shadow-line, the psalmist’s valley of the shadow of death, the embodiment of a knowledge deeply ingrained in the species which is the very knowledge of the price to be paid for physical and spiritual survival. ... In the final movement of ‘Beowulf,’ he lodges himself in the imaginations as ... more a destiny than a set of reptilian vertebrae.”
Throughout the poem, Beowulf has been a man of action, confronting evil head-on, his exploits bordering on impetuosity, though he remains always aware of the possibility of defeat. At the end of the poem, that possibility becomes a certainty in Beowulf’s mind, yet his commitment to right action hasn’t changed. “What occurs on the wall/ between the two of us will turn out as fate,/ overseer of men, decides. I am resolved.” Beowulf is not a particularly complex character. Tolkien wrote: “He has no enmeshed loyalties, nor hapless love. He is a man, and that for him and many is sufficient tragedy.”
Abandoned by all but one of his followers, Beowulf’s fight with the dragon costs him his life. And with the death of Beowulf, who was the protector of his people, the doom of the Geats is sealed: At Beowulf’s funeral, a wild lament rises from the throat of a Geat woman who prophesies “her nation invaded … slavery and abasement.”
And yet, something still glimmers in the shadows, here. The fight cost the dragon its life, too. Beowulf dies while looking over the treasure they have captured from the worm. To the end, he thinks of his people, giving thanks to God that he can leave them well-endowed. If Beowulf had not embraced the heroism of the lost cause and yielded up his own life in the process, would that evil, the evil of the dragon, have been destroyed? There was no one else up to the task. The fact that other evils may come (invasion, enslavement) does not lessen the triumph of overcoming this evil, the evil that was at hand, nor does it devalue the beauty of a man fulfilling his duty as king and protector. It isn’t Beowulf’s fault that he had only one life to give.
The Anglo-Saxon verse in the poem is weighty, stalwart as a ship’s bulwarks, and like all great poetry, it expresses universal truths that evade easy articulation. “It glimpses the cosmic and moves with the thought of all men concerning the fate of human life and efforts,” Tolkien wrote.
“At the end [of the poem], we look down as if from a visionary height upon the house of man in the valley of the world. A light starts … and there is a sound of music; but outer darkness and its hostile offspring lie ever in wait for the torches to fail and the voices to cease. Grendel is maddened by the sound of harps.”
There’s no lack of Grendels or dragons to face, who are maddened by good things like the music of flourishing human life. But Beowulf teaches us not to trouble ourselves about ultimate success or failure. Fidelity to duty is itself a victory that no later consequences can diminish. Our part is simply to fight—maybe to deliver just one hall of human life from evil, and even if only for a little while. It is enough.
Beowulf’s words to Hrothgar ring out as a challenge to us, too: “Let whoever can win glory before death. … Endure your troubles today. Bear up and be the man I expect you to be.”
