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Slaying Monsters

By Joan Acocella

In the nineteen-twenties, there were probably few people better qualified to translate “Beowulf” than J. R. R. (John Ronald Reuel) Tolkien. He had learned Old English and started reading the poem at an early age. He loved “Beowulf” and would declaim passages of it to the private literary club that he had founded with his schoolmates. “Hwæt!” (“Lo!”) he would begin. (He did the same, later, as a professor, at the beginning of Old English classes. Some of the students thought “Hwæt!” meant “Quiet!”) He also loved stories, especially medieval ones, with lots of wayfaring and dragon-slaying—activities prominent in his books “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings.” In 1920, he began teaching Old English at the University of Leeds. He needed money—by now he had a wife and children—and he supplemented his income by marking examination papers. Anyone could have told him that he should translate “Beowulf.” How this would have advanced his reputation! Finally, he sat down and did it. He finished the translation in 1926, at the age of thirty-four. Then he put it in a drawer and never published it. Now, forty years after his death, his son Christopher has brought it out (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). It is a thrill.

“Beowulf” was most likely written in Britain—by whom, we don’t know—in around the eighth century. (That is Tolkien’s date. Some scholars put it later.) The plot is simple and exalted. Beowulf is a prince of the Geats, a tribe living in what is now southern Sweden. He is peerlessly noble, brave, and strong. Each of his hands has a grip equal to that of thirty men. He is alone in the world; he was an orphan, and he never acquires a wife or children. Partly for that reason—because he has no one to behave toward in an intimate way—he has no real psychology. Unlike Anna Karenina or Huckleberry Finn, he is not a filter, a point of view, standing between us and his world.

This unself-consciousness gives that world a sparkling vividness. Here are Beowulf and his men, after a journey, sailing back to Geatland (this and all uncredited translations are by Tolkien):

Forth sped the bark troubling the deep waters and forsook the land of the Danes. Then upon the mast was the raiment of the sea, the sail, with rope made fast. The watery timbers groaned. Nought did the wind upon the waves keep her from her course as she rode the billows. A traveller upon the sea she fared, fleeting on with foam about her throat over the waves, over the ocean-streams with wreathéd prow, until they might espy the Geatish cliffs and headlands that they knew. Urged by the airs up drove the bark. It rested upon the land.

The boat must have been enormous—it carries Beowulf and what seems to have been at least a dozen knights, plus their horses, their battle gear, and heaps of treasure. The timbers groan. Yet the boat fairly flies, gathering a necklace of sea foam. Then, suddenly, the men see the cliffs of their homeland and, mirroring their eagerness, the boat lands in five short words.

That passage is speed incarnate. Others, many others, are portraits of dark or light, such as the description of dinnertime at Hearot, the King of Denmark’s mead hall:

There was the sound of harp and the clear singing of the minstrel; there spake he that had knowledge to unfold from far-off days the first beginning of men, telling how the Almighty wrought the earth, a vale of bright loveliness that the waters encircle; how triumphant He set the radiance of the sun and moon as a light for the dwellers in the lands.

But outside the hall there lurks a monster, Grendel. Grendel hates music, and for twelve years he has been coming to Hearot after dark, to prey on the Danish knights. The poet describes one of Grendel’s visits:

The door at once sprang back, barred with forgéd iron, when claws he laid on it. He wrenched then wide, baleful with raging heart, the gaping entrance of the house; then swift on the bright-patterned floor the demon paced. In angry mood he went, and from his eyes stood forth most like to flame unholy light. He in the house espied there many a man asleep, a throng of kinsmen side by side, and band of youthful knights. Then his heart laughed.

He seized one sleeping man, “biting the bone-joints, drinking blood from veins, great gobbets gorging down. Quickly he took all of that lifeless thing to be his food, even feet and hands.” How lovely, the bright-patterned floor. How appalling, Grendel’s dinner.

“Beowulf” is the story of the hero’s defeat of three successive monsters. The first is Grendel. The Geats are allies of the Danes, and Beowulf, who by then seems to be about thirty, decides to go to Denmark and rid it of this menace. It is hard to say what Grendel looks like. He is apparently about four times the size of a man. He has claws; he does not speak. But he also has human qualities. He has to enter Hearot by a door. When wounded, he bleeds, as Beowulf soon discovers. With his powerful hands, the hero grabs Grendel’s wrist and tears off his arm and shoulder. His shoulder! He then hangs the whole business—shoulder, arm, hand—from the rafters. Imagine the Danish knights drinking their mead as half of Grendel’s torso drips blood onto them. Grendel is the most real of the monsters. (It means something that he is the only one of the three who has a name.) As Seamus Heaney, another “Beowulf” translator, has written, Grendel “comes alive in the reader’s imagination as a kind of dog-breath in the dark.” Almost with embarrassment, you pity him somewhat. (Tolkien describes how, after the fight with Beowulf, Grendel, “sick at heart,” dragged himself home, “bleeding out his life.”) He is also a bit childlike. It is no surprise that John Gardner, in his 1971 novel “Grendel,” portrays the monster as a boy.

One reason Grendel seems childlike is that he has a mother. When her son comes home to die, Grendel’s mother goes on a rampage. So Beowulf must suit up again. The mother lives in a chamber below a stinking swamp: “The water surged with gore, with blood yet hot.” Beowulf dives right in, with his helmet on. His knights, afraid to join him, stand at the edge of the water. Grendel’s mother is waiting for him—with helpers, a gang of sea monsters, which tear at him with their tusks, to soften him up. Finally, she takes over. Demon or not, she clearly loved her son, and she goes at Beowulf with a blinding fury. The hero finds that his famous—and previously invincible—sword, Hrunting, is of no use against her plated hide. It bounces off her. But he sees, close by, another sword, forged by giants, which no man can pick up—except him. He waves it through the air, piercing the monster’s throat and breaking her neck bone. This is more horrid even than Beowulf’s removal of Grendel’s arm and shoulder, or, at least, it feels more painful. (It also shows a man killing a woman.) Before he leaves the den, Beowulf beheads Grendel’s corpse, lying nearby. Normally, the poet says, it would have taken four men to pick up that head. But Beowulf carries it alone, to the surface, and hands it to his knights. When they get back to the mead hall, they tug it around by its hair, as a game.

Beowulf’s third fight, which takes place back home, in Geatland, is with a dragon, who, unlike Grendel and his mother, is less a monster than a symbol. He is not sad or weird. Indeed, he is rather glamorous. He is fifty feet long and breathes fire. He has wings—he can fly—and he doesn’t live in a nasty fen. He has a nice cave, where he guards a treasure that has been his for three hundred years, and which he feels strongly about. But now someone has come and stolen a jewelled cup. This enrages him, and he begins incinerating the Geatish countryside.

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Many years have passed since Beowulf killed Grendel and his mother. He has become the King of the Geats and ruled them for fifty years. He is about eighty years old now, and tired. Still, to protect his people he must eliminate this menace. He sets out, but “heavy was his mood.” Speaking to his knights, he reviews his great deeds. He bids them farewell. In what is probably the poem’s most iconic image, he goes and sits on a promontory that juts out over the sea. (This says everything. Beowulf will soon be part of nature—the land, the sea.) As always, he insists on going into the contest alone. His knights, relieved, slink off into the forest. The dragon emerges from the cave, “blazing, gliding in loopéd curves.” Beowulf brings his huge sword down on the monster’s body, but, as with Grendel’s mother, it doesn’t make a dent. The dragon sinks his teeth into the hero’s neck. His blood “welled forth in gushing streams.”

Will he lose the fight? No. Not all his men ran into the forest. One young knight, Wiglaf, stayed and, unbeknownst to the King, followed him close behind. Seeing Beowulf wounded, Wiglaf rushes forth and stabs the dragon “a little lower down.” As the poet is too polite to say, Wiglaf took better aim than Beowulf did, and thus weakened the dragon to the point where the old man could go in for the kill. Beowulf has not lost his touch: “he ripped up the serpent.” That’s the end of the dragon—the Geatish knights unceremoniously dump the body over a cliff—but it’s also the end of Beowulf. Wiglaf unclasps the King’s helmet, and bathes his wounds, to no avail. In the final lines of the poem, we see the knights, in tears, riding their horses in a circle around Beowulf’s tomb. “Thus bemoaned the Geatish folk their master’s fall, comrades of his hearth, crying that he was ever of the kings of earth of men most generous and to men most gracious, to his people most tender and for praise most eager.”

Tolkien may have put away his translation of “Beowulf,” but about a decade later he published a paper that many people regard as not just the finest essay on the poem but one of the finest essays on English literature. This is “ ‘Beowulf’: The Monsters and the Critics.” Tolkien preferred the monsters to the critics. In his view, the meaning of the poem had been ignored in favor of archeological and philological study. How much of “Beowulf” was fact, and how much fancy? What was its relationship to recent archeological finds?

Tolkien saw all this as an evasion of the poem’s true subject: death, defeat, which come not only to Beowulf but to his kingdom, and every kingdom. Many critics, Tolkien says, consider “Beowulf” to be something of a mess, artistically—for example, in its mixing of pagan with Christian ideas. But the narrator of “Beowulf” repeatedly says that, like the minstrels who entertain the knights, he is telling a tale from the old days. “I have heard,” he says. “I have learned.” Tolkien claims that the events of the poem, insofar as they are real, occurred in about 500 A.D. But the poet was a man of the new days, when the British Isles were being converted to Christianity. It didn’t happen overnight. And so, while he tells how God girded the earth with the seas, and hung the sun in the sky, he again and again reverts to pagan values. None of the people in the poem care anything about modesty, simplicity (they adore treasure, they count it up), or humility (they boast of their valorous deeds). And death is regarded as final. No one, including Beowulf, is said to be going on to a better place.

Another aspect of “Beowulf” that critics seeking a tidier poem deplore is the constant switching of time planes: the time-very-past, in which a noble tribe created the treasure that becomes the dragon’s hoard; the times-less-past (there are several), in which we are told of the greatness and the downfall of legendary kings and heroes; the time-present, in which Beowulf kills the monsters; the time-future, when other peoples, hearing of Beowulf’s death, will make bold to move against the Geats, and will conquer them, pressing them into slavery. Geatish maidens scream as they imagine it. They know that it will come to pass. This is like something out of “The Trojan Women.”

As the time planes collide, spoilers proliferate. When Beowulf goes to meet the dragon, the poet tells us fully four times that the hero is going to die. As in Greek tragedy, the audience for the poem knew the ending. It knew the middle, too, which is a good thing, since the events of Beowulf’s fifty-year reign are barely mentioned until the dragon appears. This bothered many early commentators. It did not bother Tolkien. The three fights were enough. Beowulf, Tolkien writes in his essay, was just a man:

And that for him and many is sufficient tragedy . It is not an irritating accident that the tone of the poem is so high and its theme so low. It is the theme in its deadly seriousness that begets the dignity of tone: lif is læne: eal scæceð leoht and lif somod (life is transitory: light and life together hasten away). So deadly and ineluctable is the underlying thought, that those who in the circle of light, within the besieged hall, are absorbed in work or talk and do not look to the battlements, either do not regard it or recoil. Death comes to the feast.

According to Tolkien, “Beowulf” was not an epic or a heroic lay, which might need narrative thrust. It was just a poem—an elegy. Light and life hasten away.

Few people—indeed, few literary scholars—can read “Beowulf” in the original Old English. Most of them can barely refer to it. The characters in the Iliad and the Odyssey, poems that were written down more than a millennium before “Beowulf,” are known even to people who haven’t read their source. Achilles, Hector: in some parts of the world, babies are given these names. But people do not know the names of the characters in “Beowulf,” and, if they did, they still wouldn’t know how to pronounce them: Heoroweard, Ecgtheow, Daeghrefn. That is because Old English, as the standard language of the Anglo-Saxons, preceded the Norman invasion, in 1066, when the French, and their Latinate language, conquered England. Here are the lines, at the opening of “Beowulf,” that Tolkien used to shout out to his literary club:

Hwæt wē Gār-Dena in geār-dagum þēod-cyninga þrym gefrūnon, hū ðā æþelingas ellen fremedon.

This sounds more like German than like English. If you don’t know German, it doesn’t sound like anything at all.

Old English did not become an object of academic study until the mid-nineteenth century, and by that time there was little chance of its being included, with Greek and Latin, as a requirement in university curricula. Also, little of the surviving Old English literature is artistically comparable to what Greece and Rome produced. In consequence, it was treated as a sidelong matter. In Tolkien’s time, Oxford required that students specializing in English literature know the language well enough to be able to read, and translate from, the first half of “Beowulf.” That is why Tolkien had a job: at Oxford, for decades, he taught the first half of “Beowulf.”

Then, there were the conventions of Old English poetry. “Beowulf” does not rhyme at the ends of its lines, and it doesn’t have a rhythm as regular as, say, Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter. Instead, each line has a caesura, or a division in the middle, and the two halves of the line are linked by alliteration. (Look at the opening line that Tolkien recited to his literary club: “Hwæt wē Gār-Dena in geār-dagum.”) The pattern of the consonants creates the stresses, and thereby the rhythm.

What is the modern translator to do with this? It is hard, in discussing Tolkien’s translation, not to compare it with Seamus Heaney’s famous 2000 version. Heaney was a poet by trade—indeed, a Nobel laureate in literature—and to him it would probably have been unthinkable to translate “Beowulf” as anything but verse. He also chose to obey the “Beowulf” poet’s prosody: the caesura, the alliteration. As for tone, he says that the language of “Beowulf” reminded him of his family’s native Gaelic: solemn, “big voiced.” This magniloquence, it seems to me, is the leading edge, linguistically, of Heaney’s poem. It is an Irish-sounding translation, and he wanted it that way.

To achieve all this, he had to make some compromises. Consider the lines where Tolkien shows us Grendel eating a knight. The monster seizes the man, “biting the bone-joints, drinking blood from veins, great gobbets gorging down. Quickly he took all of that lifeless thing to be his food, even feet and hands.” In Heaney’s translation, the monster, picking up the knight,

bit into his bone-lappings, bolted down his blood and gorged on him in lumps, leaving the body utterly lifeless, eaten up hand and foot.

Here, for the sake of alliteration and rhythm, we lose, among other things, the great gobbets (what a phrase!), the idea of using a man as food, and, most unfortunately, the picture of Grendel eating the feet and hands. Heaney’s “hand and foot” seems to mean just that Grendel went from the top of the man to the bottom. We don’t have to imagine, as we do in Tolkien’s translation, the monster crunching on the little bones and the cartilage—harder to swallow, no doubt, than the “great gobbets.” We’re forced to think about what it would be like to eat a man.

The same problems arise from line to line. Heaney, to his credit, took responsibility for this poem, and turned it into something that regular people would want to read, and enjoy. (Who knew that a translation of a poem more than a thousand years old, about people killing dragons, could reach the top of the Times best-seller list?) In the words of Andrew Motion, in the Financial Times , Heaney “made a masterpiece out of a masterpiece.” I have no doubt that Heaney grieved over some of the choices he had to make, but by his rules he had to act as an artist, create a new poem. This is the sacrifice always made in a “free” translation. To help those who could read Old English, he reproduced the original on facing pages.

Tolkien, though he wrote poetry, did not consider himself primarily a poet, and his “Beowulf” is a prose translation. In the words of Christopher Tolkien, his father “determined to make a translation as close as he could to the exact meaning in detail of the Old English poem, far closer than could ever be attained by translation into ‘alliterative verse,’ but with some suggestion of the rhythm of the original.” In fact, the alliteration is there throughout. Consequently, you can tap out the rhythm, with your foot, line by line. But Tolkien doesn’t insist on any of this.

Such acts of faithfulness do not necessarily make his poem more accessible to the modern reader than Heaney’s free translation. Especially because Tolkien reproduces the “Beowulf” poet’s inversions (“Didst thou for Hrothgar king renowned in any wise amend his grief so widely noised?”), his translation is probably harder to read. But you get used to the inversions; you can understand the sentence even if you have to read it twice. And what is won by the archaism—or just by the willingness to sound strange, as in the “feet and hands”—is a rare immediacy.

Why did Tolkien never publish his “Beowulf”? It could be said that he didn’t have the time. As he was finishing his translation, he got the appointment at Oxford and had to move his family. Such a disruption can put a writer off his feed. A few years later, he began “The Hobbit,” which, with its three sequels, in “The Lord of the Rings,” took up many of his remaining healthy years. It has also been argued, by Tolkien’s very sympathetic biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, that he was too much of a perfectionist to let the poem go. Christopher Tolkien, in the introduction to “Beowulf,” says that, in editing, the typescript he worked from—and this was a “clean” copy, a retyping from preceding marked-up copies—was full of changes, plus marginal notes as to other, possible changes. Christopher also supplies a commentary consisting of Tolkien’s lectures on “Beowulf” and the notes he wrote to himself before and after the lectures. This material, which Christopher says he cut substantially, is longer than the poem: two hundred and seventeen pages, as opposed to ninety-three. So although Tolkien told his publisher in 1926 that he had finished the translation, he went on fiddling with it for a long time. When he published “The Hobbit,” in 1937, a number of his colleagues said to him, “Now we know what you have been doing all these years!” But he wasn’t just writing “The Hobbit.” He hadn’t stopped working on “Beowulf.”

Was this really due primarily to perfectionism? “Beowulf” was by no means Tolkien’s only translation from Old English, and he gave a number of them, such as “Pearl” and “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” the same treatment that he gave “Beowulf.” Both “Pearl” and “Sir Gawain” were actually set in print, but Tolkien could not bring himself to write the introductions, and so the contracts lapsed. Nor should it be thought that Tolkien’s problem was that he feared criticism from other scholars of Old English. “The Hobbit,” too, though it was not an academic enterprise, was laid aside for years, until a representative of the publisher George Allen & Unwin went to Oxford to see Tolkien, borrowed the typescript, read it, and prevailed upon him to complete it.

Another possible explanation for Tolkien’s putting “Beowulf” aside—a theory that has been advanced in the case of many unpublished manuscripts—is that the work was so important to him that if he finished it his life, or the life of his mind, would be over. I think this makes some sense. “Beowulf” was Tolkien’s lodestar. Everything he did led up to or away from it. This idea suggests another. Tolkien was a serious philologist from the time he was a child. He and his cousin Mary had a private language, Nevbosh, and wrote limericks in it. One of their efforts went:

Dar fys ma vel gom co palt “Hoc Pys go iskili far maino woc? Pro si go fys do roc de Do cat ym maino bocte De volt fact soc ma taimful gyroc!”

(“There was an old man who said ‘How / Can I possibly carry my cow? / For if I were to ask it /To get in my basket / It would make such a terrible row!’ ”) Later, he made up a private alphabet, and then another, to use in writing his diary.

As an adult, Tolkien could read many languages—and he made up more, including Elvish—but the number is not the point. Even in secondary school, Carpenter says, “Tolkien had started to look for the bones, the elements that were common to them all.” Or, in the words of C. S. Lewis, his closest friend, for a time, in adulthood, he had been inside language. Perhaps he couldn’t come back out. By this I don’t mean that he couldn’t talk to his wife or his postman, but that Old English, or at least that of “Beowulf,” was where he was happiest. He knew how it worked, he loved its ways: how the words joined and separated, what came after what. Old English is where he spent most of the day, in his reading, writing, and teaching. He might have come to think that this language was better than our modern one. The sympathy may have gone even deeper. Like Beowulf, Tolkien was an orphan. (He was taken in by his grandparents.) He grew up in the West Midlands, and said that the “Beowulf” poet, too, was probably from there. He did not have difficulty living in a world of images and symbols. (He was a Catholic from childhood.) He liked golden treasure and coiled dragons. Perhaps, in the dark of night, he already knew what would happen: that he would never publish his beautiful “Beowulf,” and that his intimacy with the poem, more beautiful, would remain between him and the poet—a secret love. ♦

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A Summary and Analysis of Beowulf

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

What happens in Beowulf , the jewel in the crown of Anglo-Saxon poetry? The title of the poem is probably the most famous thing about it – that, and the fact that a monster named Grendel features at some point. But because the specific details of the story are not widely known, numerous misconceptions about the poem abound. When was Beowulf  written?

This is a matter of some conjecture, with guesses ranging anywhere between the eighth century and the first half of the eleventh century. Critics can’t even agree on what the first line of the poem means . In the following post, we offer a short summary of  Beowulf , and an introduction to its main themes.

Plot Summary

We’ll start with a brief summary of  Beowulf  before proceeding to some textual analysis and critical reading.  Beowulf is a classic ‘overcoming the monster’ story. Most people know that the poem documents the struggle of the title character in vanquishing a monster named Grendel.

But what is less well known is that Beowulf has to slay not one big monster, but three: after he has taken care of Grendel, the dead monster’s mother shows up, and she proves even more of a challenge for our hero (though ultimately Beowulf triumphs and wins the day).

The poem then ends with Beowulf, now in his twilight years, slaying a third monster (this time, a dragon), although this encounter proves his undoing, as he is fatally wounded in the battle. The poem ends with his subsequent death and ‘burial’ at sea.

But the poem doesn’t begin with Beowulf. It opens with an account of a Danish king named Hrothgar, who was the one responsible for building a great hall (named Heorot), a hall which is now being terrorised by the monstrous Grendel. Beowulf hears that Grendel is killing Hrothgar’s men at Heorot and so our hero departs from home to go and help rid Heorot of this monster.

Beowulf is from a different kingdom – the nearby Geatland, in modern-day Sweden – so we have one of the classic tropes of adventure narratives, that of the hero leaving home to go and vanquish some foe in a foreign land. Think of Bilbo Baggins leaving the Shire, or Frodo for that matter, in  The Hobbit  and  The Lord of the Rings (and, indeed, we’ll return to Tolkien shortly).

Beowulf and his men spend the night at Heorot and wait for Grendel to turn up. When the monster appears, Beowulf and his men attack the troll-like monster with their swords.

But the monster – which is described as resembling a troll – cannot be killed with a blade, as Beowulf soon realises. So he does what lesser men would fear to do: he wrestles the monster with his bare hands, eventually tearing off one of its arms. Grendel flees, eventually dying of his wound.

The next night, Grendel’s mother – angered by the attack on her son – turns up to wreak vengeance, and once again Beowulf finds himself having to roll up his sleeves and engage in fierce combat, which this time takes place in the underwater lair of the monster deep beneath the surface of a lake.

Although he has been given a strong sword (named Hrunting) by Unferth (a man who had previously doubted Beowulf – the sword is given as a token of friendship), Beowulf finds this sword useless against Grendel’s mother. (Immunity to swords evidently runs in the family.) But this time, hand-to-hand fighting, which had proved handy against Grendel, is equally useless.

Beowulf only succeeds in vanquishing the monster when he grabs a magic sword from the pile of treasure lying in the monster’s lair, and is able to behead the monster with the weapon.

Travelling deeper into the monster’s lair, Beowulf comes across the dying Grendel, and – armed with his new magic sword – decides to lop off the son’s head as well, for good measure. Both monsters have now been slain, and Beowulf is a hero.

Following his victory over the two monsters, Beowulf then returns to the water’s surface (at ‘noon’ – which, interestingly, when the poem was written, was actually three o’clock in the afternoon, or the ninth hour after dawn) before rejoining his men and journeying back to the hall for mead and rejoicing.

The poem then moves forward fifty years to Beowulf’s last fight, his run-in with the dragon (which has been angered by the theft of some of its treasure – shades of The Hobbit once more?). This fight results in one last victory for our great hero, followed by his own death from the mortal would inflicted by the poisoned horn of the beast (though presumably Beowulf was rather advanced in years by this point anyway).

The poem ends with Beowulf’s burial at sea, which is described in much detail – why this might be is discussed below. But this much constitutes a reasonably complete summary of the plot of  Beowulf . So, what about the context for the poem?

Facts about  Beowulf

Although it is celebrated nowadays as an important work of Anglo-Saxon – indeed, ‘English’ – literature, Beowulf was virtually unknown and forgotten about, amazingly, for nearly a thousand years. It was only rescued from obscurity in 1815, when an Icelandic-Danish scholar named Thorkelin printed an edition of the poem.

And although it is seen as the starting-point of great English literature – at many universities, it is still the earliest literary text studied as part of the literary canon – it is very different from other medieval poetry, such as that by Chaucer or Langland, who were writing many centuries later.

It is set in Denmark, has a Swedish hero, and – when read in the original Anglo-Saxon – seems almost more German than ‘English’. This is, of course, because Anglo-Saxon (i.e. the language of the Angles and Saxons from north Germany)  was  Old English (the two terms are used synonymously), and at the very latest the poem was written down some time in the early eleventh century, before 1066 and the Norman invasion, which would bring many French words into English and would pave the way for Middle English (or the English of the Middle Ages).

In ending with the tale of a dragon attempting to defend a mound of treasure, the poem prefigures not only the works of J. R. R. Tolkien (who, as well as being the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings , was also an influential Anglo-Saxon scholar who translated Beowulf   and wrote an important article on it   – of which more below) but also, more surprisingly, other poems like Lewis Carroll’s nonsense masterpiece, ‘Jabberwocky’ . It also looks back to Greek and Roman epics like Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid .

Indeed, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries many scholars endeavoured to show that the author of Beowulf had been influenced by these classical works, but, in summary, the truth appears to be far more interesting. Rather than directly drawing on the work of Homer and Virgil, the Beowulf poet simply seems to have hit upon the idea of using similar plot devices and character types.

This suggests that different cultures, in these old days of oral storytelling, utilised the same methods in very different works of literature, without having direct knowledge of each other. We can compare Beowulf , too, with the legend of King Arthur (which began to appear in written sources around the same time), specifically in terms of the magic sword which the hero of both stories uses in order to fulfil his quest.

These aspects seem to be hard-wired within us and to be integral parts of human nature: for instance, ideas of bravery and of triumphing over an evil, superhuman force.

This plot, as our brief summary of Beowulf above suggests, shares many of the typical elements of heroic narratives. Although the analogy might seem a little crude, the mechanics of the plot are not so far removed from, say, a James Bond or Indiana Jones film, or a fast-paced fantasy novel or superhero comic strip. The hero takes it upon himself to save the kingdom at immense personal risk to himself.

The foe he faces is no ordinary foe, and conventional weapons are powerless against it. Despite the odds being stacked against him, he manages to ‘overcome the monster’, to borrow Christopher Booker’s phrase for this type of narrative . But this action has consequences, and is in fact merely the prologue to a bigger conflict that must take place: that between Beowulf and Grendel’s mother.

This is why it is odd that the story of the poem is generally thought of as ‘Beowulf versus Grendel’. But this next conflict will prove even more difficult: as well as swords being useless, the strong sword (Hrunting) given to Beowulf by Unferth will also be powerless against Grendel’s mother. But hand-to-hand combat – which was deployed successfully in the vanquishing of Grendel – is also of no use now.

The odds continue to be stacked against our hero, the difficulties multiplying, the tension raised to an almost unbearable pitch. Can he still save the day, when everything he tries seems to be of no avail? Well, yes – though for a while the chances of Beowulf triumphing are looking less and less likely.

The final encounter, with the dragon years later, will prove the most difficult of all – and although he is successful and overcomes the monster, he will pay the ultimate price: victory will come at the cost of his own life.

This patterning of three – three monsters, each of which proves successively more of a challenge to the hero – is found in numerous adventure plots. To a greater or lesser extent, it can be seen in much modern fantasy fiction – such as that by Tolkien.

One thing that the basic overarching story or plot summary of  Beowulf makes clear is just how formative and archetypal it is, not just in heroic ‘English’ literature, but in fantasy literature, too.

Interpretations of  Beowulf

Talking of Tolkien, it was his influential 1936 essay, ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’, which was really responsible for a shift in the way that people read Beowulf.  Rather than viewing it as a historical document, Tolkien urged, we should be reading and appreciating it as a work of poetry.   Tolkien also argued that the poem is not an ‘epic’ but an  elegy , ending as it does with the moving account of its hero’s funeral.

Tolkien also argues that Beowulf’s death following his combat with the dragon represents a fitting and more ‘elemental’ end for the hero, who had successfully vanquished the monster Grendel and Grendel’s mother (who, although not human, were nevertheless closer to man than a dragon).

The story is about overcoming an evil foe, only to have to give way to death at the end: even heroes must accept that they will not live forever, even if their names will. ‘Men must endure their going hence’, as Shakespeare has it in  King Lear (a line borrowed for C. S. Lewis’s tombstone).

But Beowulf’s life has been a life well lived because he stood up to evil and was victorious. And Grendel and his mother are ‘evil’ in the Christian sense of the word: the author of  Beowulf tells us that they were spawned from Cain (the first murderer in the Bible) when he was cast out of Eden. Grendel and his mother, then, are similarly outcasts, something that has been rejected by mainstream society and whose violence must be overcome. (For more on Tolkien, have a read of our five fascinating facts about him .)

Beowulf’s name, by the way, was long thought to mean ‘bee-wolf’, as in the two animals. The ‘bee’ theory appears unlikely, however – as does the idea that it is from the same root as our word ‘bear’, suggesting bearlike strength.

No, it turns out that the first part of Beowulf’s name is more probably related to a pre-Christian god named ‘Beow’. Beowulf has an almost divine strength, but also something primal and temporal, but just as valuable: the courage of a wolf.

If you enjoyed this brief summary of, and introduction to,  Beowulf , then you can learn more about the poem here  at the British Library website.

Further Reading

26 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of Beowulf”

Beowulf is indeed a fascinating work and I always look forward to introducing my students to this foundation of hero motifs. Beowulf, despite his tendency to boast a bit (isn’t that where we get kennings?), he was pretty much the perfect hero–intregrity, strong, clever, self-sacrificing.

Reblogged this on Willow's Corner and commented: We read a snippet of Beowulf in Jr. High School (the dragon part) and I’ve always found the story fascinating. I can’t quite read the Old English, but I love to read the different translations. And anyone who’s a Tolkien fan should read his essay.

I would argue that Grendel’s mother (who is interestingly only ever referred to as “the mother”) commits her acts of revenge out of grief, as well as anger. Also, Beowulf is most commonly described as an epic poem; the label makes its main character, Beowulf, an epic-hero. By virtue of being a hero, Beowulf is set-apart from the society presented in the heroic epic. However, in order to be recognized as heroic hero, Beowulf must participate in society in some meaningful way. Thus the character’s role is split and this binary role is portrayed in different ways depending on the translation of Beowulf. There are more than 85 translations of Beowulf, and each one is slightly biased in its interpretation. Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney’s translation in particular equates Beowulf with the dragon, another “other” figure, in a way that is not replicated by the other translators to emphasize Beowulf’s role as a distinct hero. Since translation is a form of interpretation, I believe Heaney’s translation is particularly biased in thinking about Beowulf in the ancient Ango-Saxon tale and makes Beowulf a more complex character than the original tale describes, torn by his glorious role as epic hero and his duty to his people within a carefully constructed social structure. As the author of this post writes, the morals, tropes, and figures create a bases for understanding many other English works that were to follow, so it’s interesting to see how relatively young Britain works with this tale and interprets its own history.

Tolkien was also heavily influenced by the old Norse (Norwegian/Icelandic) prose Edda and Voluspa; this was where he found the names of his dwarves. In addition, the poem Havamal also speaks of how everyone must die, except a man’s reputation.

Reblogged this on F.T. McKinstry and commented: Some interesting thoughts here on a classic, with references to J.R.R. Tolkien’s take on it.

Reblogged this on Mistrz i Małgorzata .

Fantastic article, it was education and entertaining all at once. I definitely want to go read Tolkien’s essay.

I have often wondered why the Beowulf story was lost for so long. The Arthurian story was passed down for generations, but Beowulf and his bravery forgotten. I think it is because people could relate to, and thus embrace, the faults of Arthur over the heroism in Beowulf.

Reblogged this on Storey on a Story Blog and commented: This is a great commentary on the story of Beowulf. I wanted to share it with you all.

The poem actually begins with Scyld Sheffing’s funeral, and it ends with Beowulf’s. This is deliberate. The central section is the killing of the monsters. The pattern is the establishment of the house of the Geats, the rescue of the house of Heorot by destroyng the house of Grendel, and the end of the house of the Geats with Beowulf.

How utterly fascinating! I have a copy of Beowolf which I confess to my shame I’ve never read despite it being on my shelf for more than 30 years. I must make amends!

Interesting post (!) and it struck a chord (!) funnily enough with a podcast i was listening to yesterday made by a music blogger, who did a 20 minute podcast on the 12 bar blues https://goodmusicspeaks.wordpress.com/good-music-speaks-podcast-3/ . Which of course is heavily dependent on the rule of 3 – line A; repeat line A; variation/resolution. And funnily enough, listening to a Mozart piano concerto, the same pattern was in the phrases, with the third line, the variation, leading of course to a musical resolution /transformation which enables the lead on the the complete next stage – so, in this, there is Beowulf triumphs, Beowulf triumphs again, Beowulf triumphs but in this third phrase his ‘phrase’ resolves with transformation/death.

I guess the ‘rule of three’ is viscerally satisfying!

There’s an excellent film called ‘The Thirteenth Warrior’, in which an exiled Islamic poet joins a band of Vikings to defeat what appears to be a Beowulfian monster attacking a hall. The producers showed some respect for scholarship by including authentic details, for instance the rituals surrounding the ship burial of a Viking chief.

The film being referenced in the comment above by poetmcgonagall, is a film adaptation of Michael Crighton’s excellent ‘Eaters of the Dead’ which gives a facinating take on the Beowulf/Grendel legend. Pay particular attention to his treatment of the Dragon which is all the more horrifying for not being a giant lizard.

I’ve read Beowulf many times over the years (was introduced to the Old-English version back in High School) and you’ve provided an excellent summary.

“not so far removed from, say, a James Bond or Indiana Jones film, or a fast-paced fantasy novel or superhero comic strip” Yes–but also, surely, the Western? What this tells us, I think, is how deep-rooted is the human need for the idea of the stranger who rides (all right, comes by boat) into town, deals with the monster/fear/rich landowner/evil bandit who is terrorising the townfolk and rides out again. No?

Reblogged this on Blogging Beowulf and commented: A great post on one of my favorite works.

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Reblogged this on cjheries and commented: If, in my first year at Reading University in 1964/65, we had studied Beowulf instead of extracts from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (so dull!) maybe I should have stuck with reading English instead of switching to Philosophy and obtained a better class of degree than the Gentleman’s I ended up woth (a pass, just like T S Eliot).

I’ve just startd reading Seamus Heaney’s translation and I must say it’s easy to follow so far!

I’ve had the Heaney translation on my shelves for years, but your post has piqued my interest. It will be moved to my TBR pile. Thank you!

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Reblogged this on beocorgi and commented: Very Interesting. I never thought of Jabberwocky like that but now that its pointed out I can definitely see it

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Beowulf | Summary, Poem, Characters, Monster, Analysis

Beowulf, an iconic piece of Old English literature, transcends time with its gripping narrative and profound themes. Journey through the legendary tale as we dissect its summary, explore its characters, and delve deep into its analysis.

Table of Contents

The Epic Saga Unveiled

A hero’s journey.

Beowulf | Summary, Poem, Characters, Monster, Analysis begins with the valiant hero Beowulf, who sets out on a perilous journey to rid the Danish kingdom of the menacing monster Grendel.

The Arrival of Beowulf

In this gripping chapter of Beowulf | Summary, Poem, Characters, Monster, Analysis, we witness Beowulf’s arrival in Denmark and his bold proclamation to King Hrothgar.

Exploring the Poem’s Depths

Rich symbolism.

Within Beowulf | Summary, Poem, Characters, Monster, Analysis lies a tapestry of rich symbolism, woven through its poetic verses. Explore the depths of its allegorical significance and unravel its hidden meanings.

Themes of Good vs. Evil

Delve into the heart of Beowulf | Summary, Poem, Characters, Monster, Analysis as we dissect the timeless battle between good and evil depicted in its verses.

Characters: Heroes and Villains

Beowulf: the heroic protagonist.

Meet Beowulf, the epitome of heroism and valor. Explore his character arc and delve into the depths of his noble deeds in Beowulf | Summary, Poem, Characters, Monster, Analysis.

Grendel: The Malevolent Menace

In this chapter of Beowulf | Summary, Poem, Characters, Monster, Analysis, we encounter the nefarious Grendel, a formidable foe who terrorizes the Danish kingdom.

Confronting the Monstrous Challenge

Battle with grendel.

Experience the adrenaline-pumping encounter between Beowulf and Grendel as we dissect this pivotal moment in Beowulf | Summary, Poem, Characters, Monster, Analysis.

The Wrath of Grendel’s Mother

In this thrilling segment of Beowulf | Summary, Poem, Characters, Monster, Analysis, witness Beowulf’s epic confrontation with the vengeful Grendel’s mother.

READ MORE :

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Analyzing the Epic Tale

Literary analysis.

Embark on a journey of literary exploration as we analyze the themes, motifs, and stylistic elements of Beowulf | Summary, Poem, Characters, Monster, Analysis.

Historical Context

Delve into the historical backdrop of Beowulf | Summary, Poem, Characters, Monster, Analysis, and gain insights into its significance in the context of Old English literature.

FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)

What is the central theme of beowulf.

The central theme of Beowulf revolves around the timeless battle between good and evil, valor, and heroism.

Who is the author of Beowulf?

The authorship of Beowulf remains a subject of scholarly debate, with no definitive answer.

What role does Grendel play in Beowulf?

Grendel serves as the primary antagonist in Beowulf, symbolizing the embodiment of evil and chaos.

Is Beowulf based on true events?

While Beowulf is a work of fiction, it is believed to be inspired by historical events and figures.

What is the significance of Beowulf in literature?

Beowulf holds immense significance in the realm of literature, serving as a cornerstone of Old English poetry and a timeless exploration of heroism and valor.

How does Beowulf reflect Anglo-Saxon culture?

Beowulf reflects various aspects of Anglo-Saxon culture, including its emphasis on bravery, loyalty, and the heroic code.

In conclusion, Beowulf | Summary, Poem, Characters, Monster, Analysis stands as a timeless masterpiece, captivating readers with its epic narrative and profound themes. Dive into this legendary tale, unravel its mysteries, and discover the essence of heroism and valor.

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Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" Seventy-Five Years Later

2011, Mythlore

Related Papers

Nacho Sigal

Discourse analysis of J.R.R. Tolkien through "Beowulf: the monsters and the critics" by Nacho Sigal The essay "Beowulf: the monsters and the critics" was originally conceived to be presented at a lecture given at the British Academy for humanities and social sciences, on November 25, 1936 in tribute to Sir Israel Gollancz. The lecture was published a year later in the journal "Proceedings of the British Academy" and subsequently in various compilations of critical essays on the poem. The three elements that will be essential for our essay can be outlined from the title of Tolkien's: 1) 'critics: the reading made by critics of Beowulf, 2) 'monsters': the reception of monsters according to modern aesthetic canons and the importance of the monsters figure in the poetic structure of the work and 3) 'Beowulf': the analysis of the work itself.

Michael Kightley

Tom Shippey

This introduction to a volume of mostly-translated excerpts from early Beowulf scholarship gives an overview of reactions to the poem in Germany, Scandinavia and Britain from its first mention in 1705 to 1935 - at which point Tolkien's famous essay is generally thought to have begun a new era. The poem's involvement with European politics is a major theme.

Julieta González

Tolkien: From Beowulf to Bilbo & Beyond

Matt Coombes

Since his birth in 1892, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien walked many paths during his life, which led him to be known as an author, a linguist, an academic and a mythologist, along with less career-orientated factions denoting him as a soldier, a Roman Catholic and a father. Therefore, it beggars logic to isolate the attributes of Tolkien’s multiplexed career, such that suitable references can be made in retrospect, highlighting the points in his life that pay dividends to the man as he is known today.

Tracing Paradigms: One Hundred Years of Neophilologus

Rolf H . Bremmer Jr

No essay has exercised a greater impact on Beowulf studies in the twentieth century and indeed, until the present day, than has J. R. R. Tolkien's "Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics". Originally a lecture delivered in 1936, the essay has been reprinted numerous times both separately and in various anthologies of essays on Anglo-Saxon literature. Critical voices were few in the 1950s, but van Meurs (1955) was one of them. In this contribution his remarkable article, still relevant, is placed in the context of its time and critically evaluated.

Ciberteologia

Diego Klautau

This article presents the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, written in the 8 th century A.D.. The poem narrates the adventures of Beowulf, the hero of the Geats, a Northern Germanic tribe that used to inhabit the area now occupied by Sweden in the land of the Scylfings, now Denmark. Considered the first epic poem produced after Christ, Beowulf has Greco-Roman and Christian matrices and also some elements from Nordic mythology. From the work of the British philologist R.R. Tolkien, a scholar at Oxford University, who studied and translated the poem, and the writings of the Argentinean Jorge Luis Borges, a man of letters at the University of Buenos Aires, it is possible to perceive a formative proposal, in the sense of the Platonic Paideia, of Christian inspiration, in the writing of the poem. With this proposal, the writings of the two scholars present a perspective that permits the understanding of Beowulf as an epic exhortation of the virtue of courage as a way to confront Evil.

Amirhossein Nemati

This book is the end result of my extensive researches carried out on and into the lone survivor of a genre of Old English long epics, Beowulf—a painstakingly laborious, yet pleasurable task through the journey of which I discovered, unearthed, gleaned, and absorbed a great wealth of previously-unknown-to-me information about Old English Literature in general and Beowulf in particular.

Dr Sonya R Jensen

'Beowulf and the Monsters', Sydney, 1997 (corr. edn 1999) – pertinent extracts only, in reprint. The original publication is an abridged Modern English translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem, 'Beowulf'. It is divided into three sections, relating to Grendel, to Grendel’s Mother, and to the Dragon. It suggests, moreover, that the tale is designed as an ancient detective story; that the monsters represent real and historical humans; that a number of sequences in the poem point back to well-known old Scandinavian stories; and that the poet actually presents certain clues to solving the riddle of the monsters’ ‘human’ identities. Explanatory extracts from each of the three Introductions appear here, as reprints. The general suggestions are that Grendel represents Agnar, son of Ingeld; that Grendel’s Mother is the counterpart of Ingeld’s first wife (the daughter of Earl Swerting of Sweden); and that the fire-breathing Dragon is a literary representation of Onela, king of the Swedes.

Christopher Vaccaro

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Literary Matters

The Literary Magazine of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers

The Monsters and the Translators: Grappling with Beowulf in the Third Millenium

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Maria Dahvana Headley Beowulf: A New Translation (FSG, August 25, 2020, 175 pp., $16)

Long ago, when I was in graduate school and deep in Old English poetry, some wag of a friend gave me a DC Comics issue entitled “Beowulf, Dragon Slayer.” It depicted our hero in full superhero kit, leaping to plunge his sword into the beast, young and muscular and not at all like the graying king who fought the dragon and lost his life doing it. I remember showing the comic to my teacher, Calvin Kendall. I remember that he grimaced.

All this came back to me when my son, an avid reader of science fiction, mentioned noticing among the winners of the Hugo Awards a new translation of Beowulf. I knew only a bit about Maria Dahvana Headley’s book, having heard on social media various comments about its opening Bro! and up-to-the-minute vocabulary. I hunted up the New Yorker’s review.

“Revisionist,” “feminism,” and “social-media slang” are the phrases that stand out in the review’s subhead. Reviewer Ruth Franklin gives readers the basics about the poem, its language, and the hero-versus-monsters story (basics that readers of this journal probably know), then expresses wowed approval of the book. But she never holds that Headley’s work is a translation in the strict sense. Franklin doesn’t say this, but “version,” “adaptation,” and “retelling” would be better terms, since they announce at the outset that we’re seeing the poem through a lens that colors it in a particular way. Still, she marshals several points in defense of Headley’s approach. The points that interest me are, first, that translators have always taken liberties because the manuscript is faulty in many places, and second, that we aren’t always sure what the Old English words mean. The words that describe the monsters—particularly Grendel and his mother—are an important case in point.

I am, I confess, used to the old school of Beowulf translators, of whom Franklin says, “[T]hat crunching noise in the background is the sound of [Headley’s] predecessors rolling in their burial ships.” But I hadn’t been back to the original poem in a long time, though I’d translated shorter Old English works . I wanted to test Headley’s claims about the language she manipulates. And I wanted to test whether her approach leaves Beowulf the poem I think it is. I decided it was time to go head-to-head again with the great beast.

While I waited for Headley’s book, I raided my bookshelves and was taken aback by certain copyright dates. Frederick Klaeber’s third edition of the text—the basis of my Beowulf education—is dated 1950. Bad enough, but the first edition it was built on is from 1922, a rather alarming hundred years ago. Supplements at the back of the book tack on updated critical and textual notes that are too brief and too easy to miss; they barely mention, for example, the discovery in 1939 of the Sutton Hoo ship burial, and they say too little about the way it corroborates the funeral stories in the poem. There must be better tools for the modern student.

There are. The most impressive is the Electronic Beowulf, a collaboration of the British Library and the University of Kentucky. Edited by Kevin Kiernan and programmed by Ionut Emil Iacob, it has a dazzling assortment of lookup tools. These tools let students and scholars see every page of the manuscript called the Nowell Codex, the sole surviving manuscript of Beowulf (which is part of the larger book called Cotton Vitellius A. xv), and they let us see it in bright light or ultraviolet, next to its edited version. They also let us zero in on each individual problem-spot with enlarged images of the unclear words, and they let us open with a click windows of commentary about those words so that we can dig into the layers of past scholarly emendations and conjectures.

Even at a glance, the Electronic Beowulf (which I’ll call EB from here on) is a striking visual lesson. It shows the manuscript facing the edited text, so it lets us see how much the student owes to the work of editors. People doing graduate work in literature are supposed to grasp this—to understand critical editions and textual notes—but only recently have internet manuscript images made it this clear. We see immediately that the manuscript text has almost no punctuation—certainly none of the quotation marks that clarify who is speaking, none of the marks of vowel length that help sort out which word is which, and not even the line breaks and caesuras that clarify the four-stress meter and patterned alliteration that are the distinguishing features of Old English poetry.

Most unsettlingly, EB shows how badly damaged the manuscript is. It’s well known that the book was injured in the 1731 fire in the library of Sir Robert Cotton, saved from destruction only because whole case-fulls of books were at last thrown out the windows. Klaeber’s textual notes give specific information about the damage—for example, that some words are pure conjecture because those bits of vellum are missing. But it’s one thing to read in a footnote in six-point type that certain lines are miserrime lacerati (very sadly torn) . It’s altogether more shocking to see folio 198, with its mangled top, bottom, and right side , and hole in the middle, and so to understand that some information is gone forever.

That same folio 198 (at the end of the poem) demonstrates how much guesswork and imagination can be involved in translating Beowulf, even conservatively . On the verso of that page—just to the right of a gaping hole shaped a bit like Lake Superior—it is possible to read the partial word unden. What follows unden is heorde or hiorde, taken to mean ‘-haired’. So what is that compound modifier? How should we picture that hair?

Kiernan, the EB editor, reports confidently that the missing letter is presumably b. The other commonly guessed letter is wyn, the Old English version of w (and I will use w in this essay) . But Kiernan doesn’t see any sign of the descender that would have signaled the presence of a wyn—so he’s certain the word is bunden (bound), and not wunden (wound or twisted).

Does that settle the matter? Editors by the score and translators in the hundreds, with and without online images, have differed. Klaeber, in my old Third Edition, glosses the word as if there were no question: “with hair bound up (ref. to an old woman, in contrast with the flowing hair of young women).” Tolkien’s picture (in his posthumously published prose translation) is different: “a Geatish maiden with braided tresses.” Seamus Heaney leaves the question of age alone but uses “bound up.” Timothy Murphy and Alan Sullivan say the hair is “wound up,” which for me conjures the image of a gathered or twisted hairstyle—except that they add a careful note, quoting Carol Clover, who argues that the word has to be “wound” or wavy, and not bound, because “mourning women, married or otherwise. . . .are widely described, even emblematized, as having unbound or disheveled hair.” So not only letterforms on the page but assumptions about the culture shape translations, producing different mental images. It’s not a subtle effect.

Headley’s effects are not subtle at all, as I could see once I got the book in my hands. To the scholarly, it seems that she makes an end-run around paleography, syntax, etymology, and editorial habit when she says that the woman of folio 198 “tore her hair and screamed her horror.” Where most translators say that the woman sang— noting that the pyre and smoke and song re-echo a funeral description earlier in the poem — Headley runs with the knowledge that sang, too, is only a conjecture for a word that has completely disappeared. Once we dispense with sang and its connotations of artistic control, this much grittier picture of mourning comes into focus, tinted with fear of the violence and chaos that will follow the death of a king.

What Headley does—ramping up intensity, adding detail and color, making motivations clear for us moderns—is not as off-the-wall as reviewers suggest when they hype her use of slang and vulgarity. Thwacking the reader with constant surprise—abrupt shifts from coarseness to lyricism, alliteration and rhyme used in unpredictable ways not at all like the original’s four-stress pattern, poetic tropes thrown together with stock phrases and cliches—these are her ways of “charging her language” or “load[ing] every rift with ore.” The whole has a slam or performance-poetry feel; it’s consistent with the demands of pop culture. On the page, to the individual reader, the approach can seem clunky in some of Beowulf’s speeches, edging him closer to braggart than hero, almost recalling my old comic book:

So, we’re back from the brink, Halfdane’s son, Scyldings’ savior, bringing you this token of our esteem, sea-booty, gore-loot, no big whoop. Here’s to glory! And now my story. I don’t mean to say this shit was no thing. I lived through your basic fistfight underwater, a tryst with destruction. I did the deed you deemed necessary, but I’d be bluffing if I didn’t say I would’ve died had God not kept me close. (1652–1659)

It works much more effectively in the third person, in vivid descriptive passages:

They shoved the ship from the spit, keel splashing into salt, Denmark soon distant. Sails whipped about her mast, a veil for her sea-gaze. Ropes tautened and timbers moaned. Winds surged to skip the vessel like a smooth stone across the ocean, white with foam, the cliffs of Geatland grown visible, counted, claimed, and the ship sang out for the final push, thrusting herself at the shore, shoving keel at country. (1903–1913)

No accentual meter, no patterned alliteration, no foreign flavor or old-timey anything, but plenty of satisfying mouth-feel. Readers who love Tolkien’s translation will miss in Headley his elevated diction and clear adherence to the original grammar, but readers who can’t stomach Tolkien’s archaisms will like Headley’s zip. Readers who prefer Heaney’s freer treatment might be jolted by Headley’s mix of high and low registers. The jolt seems to be essential to her technique.

Of the several approaches to translation laid out on Wikipedia’s “Translating Beowulf,” page, Headley uses the “modernizing” and “domesticating” methods: she “brings the poem to the audience rather than bringing the audience to the poem.” It’s a valid approach (and for a whole anthology of such valid approaches to Old English, take a look at the 2011 collection called The Word Exchange ). But it sidesteps much of the work of showing what the original poem was trying to do on its own terms, as usually happens when a formal poem is translated as free verse. That translators sidestep is no wonder: the careful method doesn’t sell many new books, is unlikely to be noticed or win prizes, and is laborious. And because the Beowulf poet really did have ideas that are not like ours, presenting the poem fully involves introductions, notes, commentary, samples of other translations, and supplementary readings from Old English and the Old Norse sagas. The Murphy and Sullivan book has generous helpings of all those types of context.

Headley spends many pages offering a rationale for her method. The unexpected benefit of those pages is that they make certain arguments based on textual criticism—the real condition of the manuscript—so that they often send me back to it, in its new electronic form.

Here’s an especially complicated example of such a manuscript crux, and one that leads us to the question of who or what exactly the monsters are. The problem spot is a statement about Grendel’s biblical ancestor. Editions and translations name this person as Cain, son of Adam, cursed for murdering his brother Abel. In the manuscript, however, on folio 132r, what the scribe initially wrote was cames, later corrected to caines, “of Cain.” (Headley’s note reports the first attempt as chames, but I disagree.) Mistakes of this kind, confusing the lowercase letters m, n, i, and u, are extremely common in medieval books. So it isn’t difficult to believe that here an error was made and fixed. But sometimes even correctors are wrong, especially when they think they know better than what they see in front of them. And on folio 157v, the word taken as “Cain” is even more wrong-looking: written as camp and never altered.

Headley makes heavy weather of these errors, arguing that the original cames should have been read, not as “of Cain,” but as “of Ham,” son of Noah and another subject of a curse. And it’s true that the name of Ham is spelled cam or cames or cham elsewhere in Old English poetry: for example, in lines 1550 to 1600 of the poem known as Genesis B, a retelling of Genesis 8:20-27, found in the book commonly called the Junius Manuscript.

How important is this? Not important enough for Headley to discard “Cain” in telling the story, or to make the discussion more than a learned footnote in her introduction. The curse of Cain would make Grendel a wanderer; the curse of Ham would make him a slave; neither seems to fit the poem exactly. But this leads back to the question: what sort of being is Grendel, and what sort of being is his mother, and are they the same sort?

Headley’s point is that Grendel has reason to be aggrieved because he has been cursed and cast out. She describes Grendel’s outrage against the rejoicing in Heorot and the song of creation (lines 90 and following) not as an evil being’s hatred of human joy, but as a reaction to pain: “Grendel hurt, and so he hunted.” Making Grendel a figure of sympathy is not a new idea; John Gardner’s Grendel began the trend in 1971. Whether that sympathy actually exists in Beowulf is not at all clear. For better or worse, the poem takes sides, and it places on the Wrong Side the kinds of beings feared by the pagan culture that underlies the story, a culture described well for non-specialists in Neil Price’s Children of Ash and Elm.

Consider eoten, one of the words used to refer to Grendel. Tolkien, in an appendix to “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”—the famous 1936 lecture that has shaped Beowulf criticism ever after—claims that Grendel is “ the eoten”: he is the only being of whom the word is used in Old English poetry. The online version of the Old English dictionary familiarly known as “Bosworth-Toller” (another tool I wish I’d had decades ago) shows no example of the word from other works. Klaeber in his glossary marks the word as not used elsewhere except in prose, and only quite exceptionally. How then do we know what it means? Hints come from cognates in related medieval languages, like jötunn in Old Norse, and forms in modern dialects (modern a hundred years ago, when the Oxford English Dictionary was new), like eten . Both suggest the meaning giant, which agrees with other elements of the poem, like the size of Grendel’s wrenched-off arm. His size ( mæra þonne ænig man oðer ), his shape, human but misshapen ( earmsceapen / on weres wæstmum ), and his tendency to kill and eat people move him into the class of “ogre.” And in the overall workings of the poem, he and all the monsters stand for the doom that comes eventually for all human beings. Sympathy for eotenas is out of order for our poet.

Concerning Grendel’s mother, Headley explains in detail her nonstandard take. My first teachers of the poem presumed that the mother was beastly, to the extent of calling her “Grendel’s dam,” making her more animal than human being. But for Headley, Grendel’s mother is not a monstrous being but a human woman. The son, says Headley, is a descendant of someone God-cursed, but by his unknown father; the mother is not.

That argument owes more to Headley’s childhood fascination with pop-culture images of Grendel’s mother—and to research for her novel The Mere Wife —than to the words of the poem. In the poem, they’re alike: At line 1282, for instance, we read that the ferocity of Grendel’s mother’s attack was less than Grendel’s only to the extent that woman’s strength is less than man’s—different only in degree, not in kind. And at lines 1347-48, Hrothgar says that the country people have seen “two such great borderland wanderers”, (my translation) which suggests that the two are more similar than different, apart from size.

Still, Headley makes some valid scholarly points about the words that describe the mother. One is that aglæc-wif, usually taken to mean “wretched or monstrous woman,” has as one of its elements aglæc-, a word that Klaeber glosses as “wretch, monster, demon, fiend” when it’s used of Grendel or his mother, but “warrior, hero” when it’s used of Beowulf. Is this merely bias? If Klaeber is biased, so is Bosworth-Toller. For aglæca, I find, it offers the Latin glosses miser, perditus, monstrum, bellator immanis . The first three—“sad,” “lost,” “monster”—are certainly negative. But bellator is simply “fighter, warrior” and immanis can mean both “really big” and “inhuman, savage, brutal, frightful.” It’s as though English lacks a word for the overlap of these meanings. Clearly, words that are present and legible in the text can be just as shape-shifty for the translator as those that are missing or mistaken.

Despite her explanations, Headley’s poetry treats Grendel’s mother as a properly terrifying enemy and an appropriate figure of wyrd. What about the other women in the poem? In this very masculine story, women are mostly subordinate, and Headley claims to be trying to make them—and their mistreatment—more visible. Hunting for those women in her retelling, I found that they’re often played up by clever handling of various manuscript puzzles.

One such puzzle is in line 63 (folio 130r). The manuscript reading hyrde ic þæt elan cwen is, as Tolkien explains in his commentary, obviously corrupt: it leaves a line with too few stresses and a clause without a verb. Editors have made various repairs. Klaeber puts an ellipsis in the line and makes- elan the end of the correct case of Onela , a known name from the old stories and one that appears later in the poem. Guided by Klaeber, any number of translators say simply that “a daughter” of Hrothgar “was Onela’s queen.” But Headley writes cheekily of that nameless daughter “her name’s a blur.”

Another sly dig is at lines 942 to 946. At that spot Hrothgar, who knows Beowulf’s parentage perfectly well early in the poem, seems suddenly confused about it in a way commentators labor to explain. Headley simply has the king exclaim about Beowulf’s mother “I forget who she is—is she still alive?”—like the sort of witless modern guy who calls all women “honey.” Nor does Headley ignore the little frisson of kingly machismo at line 664-5, when the narrator announces that Hrothgar is leaving the hall to seek the queen’s bed ( wolde wigfruma Wealhtheow secgan / cwen to gebeddan ).

These brief touches are worth pointing out because they’re easy to miss in the great sweep of the story. That sweep is all there in Headley’s telling: the flashbacks and flash-forwards to history before Beowulf and after him, the press of human mortality and the working of wyrd, particularly at the poem’s end after the fight with the dragon. The whole is well done.

Headley does make one “domesticating” decision that jars me, stepping too far outside the limits I would place even on “retelling.” She makes her narrator a character, “an old-timer at the end of the bar,” as she puts it, a man who keeps addressing his listener as “bro,” that much-discussed first word of her book. (And although Headley has Wiglaf use “bro” to address a group, the word sounds to many readers as though the narrator has only a single listener.) Her narrator has a personal take on all the stories he tells, and he shares them like gossip; he can say of a queen that she was “[n]othing like Modthryth, oh shit, remember her?”

There is no such colorful personage in the original. The omniscient teller of the poem we have transmits ancient opinions—he repeatedly tells us who was a good king—but apart from a few instances of ic hyrde (I heard), his self is veiled behind centuries-old stories and formal structures. We may like to imagine the poem’s speaker as intensely present, a scop like the ones described in the poem, reciting the old stories in Scandinavian halls. Our mental images may be shaped by ideas about oral-formulaic epic, the bard concocting the tale out of memory and formula as described in Albert Lord’s The Singer of Tales. But by the time of this poem’s written composition, what we have is literate and literary creation, as Tolkien stresses in “The Monsters and the Critics.” The book of Beowulf’s deeds existed, which means it was read from, almost certainly aloud and to an audience because books were so rare. The speaker of this poem, as experienced by those who lived after it was written down, was someone reading out loud. Who was his audience? I favor Craig Davis’s thesis that connects the poem’s creation with the court of Alfred the Great, a better-behaved crew than Headley seems to envision.

That narrator of Headley’s, along with a few other elements of her retelling, can make me grimace the way Professor Kendall did at my old comic book. But Headley’s book is not the comic I feared it would be after reading reviews that emphasize bro and dude ; it’s an effective and enjoyable poem. I debate with myself: are my reservations fair, or are they biases built on too much early exposure to Old Stuff? I’m pleased to have read Headley. I’m more pleased to have been invited back to old books and notes and blasted forward to marvelous new ways of learning.

Works Consulted

Bosworth Toller’s Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online . Online at https://bosworthtoller.com.

Davis, Craig R. “An Ethnic Dating of ‘Beowulf,’” Anglo-Saxon England (Vol. 35 (2006), pp. 111-129.

The Electronic Beowulf, 4th edition. Ed. Kevin Kiernan. Online at http://ebeowulf.uky.edu/ebeo4.0 . University of Kentucky / The British Library, 2015.

Franklin, Ruth, “A Beowulf for Our Moment,” New Yorker, August 31, 2020. Online at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/31/a-beowulf-for-our-moment

Headley, Maria Dahvana, trans. Beowulf: A New Translation. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.

Heaney, Seamus, trans. Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.

Hieatt, Constance B., trans. Beowulf and Other Old English Poems. New York: The Odyssey Press, 1967.

Klaeber, Frederick, ed. Beowulf and The Fight at Finnsburg, third edition. Lexington, Massachusetts: D.C. Health and Company, 1950.

Krapp, George Philip, ed. The Junius Manuscript. New York: Columbia University Press, 1931.

Murphy, Timothy, and Alan Sullivan, trans. Beowulf. Ed. Sarah Anderson. New York: Pearson Education, Inc., 2004

Price, Neil. Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings . New York: Basic Books, 2020.

Tolkien, J.R.R. Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, together with Sellic Spell. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014.

            . “The Monsters and the Critics.” Online at https://jenniferjsnow.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/11790039-jrr-tolkien-beowulf-the-monsters-and-the-critics.pdf

The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation. Greg Delanty and Michael Matto, eds. Foreword by Seamus Heaney. New York: W.W. Norton, 2011.

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Beowulf: Heroism Beyond Monsters

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Defeating grendel, confronting grendel's mother, defeating the dragon, legacy and influence.

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The Epic Poem “Beowulf”: Arms and Armor Essay (Critical Writing)

The authors of epic poems and heroic ballads have always drawn attention to arms and armor, using them for pictorial and symbolic means. Beowulf is not an exception, depicting a warring and savage heroic world. Beowulf uses all manner of tools to slay and protect himself from being slain, and the poet constantly compares the hero to the monsters he fights. Beowulf’s three great battles are the most prominent: the fight against Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon. The author vividly describes these battles, not leaving out a detail. Every battle is more challenging than the previous one, and Beowulf’s arms and armor point that out. I believe that what Beowulf wears and carries is used to show his progression as a hero and inevitable aging as a human.

In the poem’s first part, Beowulf comes to King Hrothgar’s aid and fearlessly brawls Grendel, a coarse and violent giant, naked. The hero is young and powerful and sees Grendel as equal in terms of strength, boasting of his ability to fight the giant ‘without edges.’ Grendel is not skillful in the art of war; thus, weapons and shields would give an apparent advantage against him. It seems, however, that the decision to fight barehanded is not made out of honor or chivalry. The battle is an ultimate show of Beowulf’s power and courage. While Beowulf and Grendel are grappling, Beowulf’s band tries to finish the giant off with their weapons but cannot do so because Grendel’s skin repels all steel. In the end, Beowulf rips Grendel’s arm, and the giant runs away mortally wounded. The remark that weapons do not harm Grendel makes the hero appear absurdly strong and hardy.

Preceding the second battle, Beowulf tracks Grendel’s mother to the moors, where he prepares for the one-on-one fight. Interestingly, he wears some armor this time and uses a weapon, which indicates that Grendel’s mother is more fearsome than her son. Her sheer will to kill Beowulf out of vengeance gives her strength, and the moors are filled with lesser monsters as well. The hero wears a hand-woven breastplate and a chain helmet and carries a sword gifted by King’s retainer. Such preparations suggest that Beowulf is not as confident that he will survive and show that he is not reckless and can strategically assess the upcoming battle. True enough, the breastplate saves his life, although the blade that supposedly has not failed anyone till this time proves to be useless against Grendel’s mother. Again, Beowulf shows his power and cleverness by using a giant sword from the layer’s walls to kill the monster.

The third battle occurs many years later when the dragon ravages Beowulf’s land. Beowulf prepares to slay the beast, ordering a wholly iron shield, dressing in a full chain-mail armor, and carrying a couple of swords and a dagger. Beowulf shows his tactical mind yet again as the dragon is the strongest foe he has ever fought. The shield will protect him from the beast’s fire, while several weapons will be necessary if any of them breaks. Surely enough, the swords fail him one after another, and ultimately Beowulf uses the dagger to kill the dragon. Beowulf knows that he is old, and the preparations make it clear, but the hero’s fatal mistake has been to think that he can slay the dragon alone. No matter of armor could replace Beowulf’s youth, and he dies because of his prideful nature, trying to prove that he is as strong as he has been.

Warriors battle their foes using weapons and armor, and the same goes for heroes, the best warriors known. Beowulf’s equipment in his major battles progressively improves with the increasing strength of his foes. It shows that Beowulf is a clever but boastful hero who loves to prove his power to others. He always wears and carries a bare minimum needed to slay the monster, leaving no advantages to himself. Beowulf believes the combatants must be equal; therefore, Beowulf always strives for this equality. In the end, it kills him because he overestimates himself.

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IvyPanda. (2022, December 14). The Epic Poem "Beowulf": Arms and Armor. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-epic-poem-beowulf-arms-and-armor/

"The Epic Poem "Beowulf": Arms and Armor." IvyPanda , 14 Dec. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/the-epic-poem-beowulf-arms-and-armor/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'The Epic Poem "Beowulf": Arms and Armor'. 14 December.

IvyPanda . 2022. "The Epic Poem "Beowulf": Arms and Armor." December 14, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-epic-poem-beowulf-arms-and-armor/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Epic Poem "Beowulf": Arms and Armor." December 14, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-epic-poem-beowulf-arms-and-armor/.

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IvyPanda . "The Epic Poem "Beowulf": Arms and Armor." December 14, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-epic-poem-beowulf-arms-and-armor/.

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