Beowulf is a hard poem, even with willing readers. Part of the difficulty is in the variety of translations. Part is the language, which antiquity tends to bleed through in translation — I’ll come back to this when we talk about the challenges of translation, since many translators can’t help but be swayed by the archaisms and formalities [and the alliteration] and so their renderings come out stilted in places — but much of the trouble comes from the structure. We’re just not familiar enough with the aesthetics of Old English long verse to get a grip on what’s going on.
Most poems, especially those poems that tell a story, have a clear forward momentum, a chain of causes and effects. Beowulf is different, of course. We can’t even agree on the structure — but we shall tiptoe past the reams of criticism trying to understand all the wrinkles and exoticisms and go right to the core of why Beowulf is difficult: it’s the digressions.
On the surface, Beowulf is straightforward: A young hero shows up help to an ally in trouble, slays his monsters, and goes home. In time, he becomes king, rules well, and in the end dies protecting his people. But it seems like, every time we’re on the cusp of something big happening, here comes a digression and we’re off into a story that has nothing to do with the story we’re reading. Supposedly.
A lot of people hate the digressions — they clog up otherwise gripping and exciting action scenes. After all, who wants everything to stop while we listen to a scop tell an unrelated story? It’s about as welcome as a Harpo or Chico musical interlude in a Marx Brothers movie.
Explaining the digressions has been something of a cottage industry in criticism. They’re what the 18th- and 19th-century scholars first seized on when they tried to turn Beowulf into historic saga, which it is not. Tracing the historic figures and events (Onela, Finn, the burning of Heorot — maybe, etc.) came first. Also came the supposition that Beowulf is the sole survivor of a robust tradition of interlocking stories in Old English culture, and what a rich tradition it would have been, if only those meddling monks had written it all down! Or that evil Henry VIII hadn’t dissolved the monasteries and their libraries!
That may have been true. We’ll never know.
What we do know is what we have, what has survived, albeit by the thinnest of chances and one fragile manuscript: Beowulf.
Over the past two weeks we’ve looked (really superficially) at Beowulf scholarship, which is really quite a mountain to climb. We’ve looked at the early historicists and culture warriors who saw the poem as nothing more than history; then at Tolkien, who insisted we look at the poem as a poem first, and as a successful elegy of what he called “Northern Courage,” which is a kind of existential doomed ethic that demands we go down fighting despite the odds and which informed his treatment of the Elves in The Silmarillion; then after Tolkien it was open season on critical approaches, all of which make for refreshing (and some earnestly hilarious) reading. Last week I featured Michael Drout’s plea for moderation in Beowulf criticism — if you want to read serious scholarship that’s also accessible, check last week’s links to his essays. By the way, “accessible” is a sneer word among “serious” scholars of a certain age, but that stuffiness is thankfully passing away.
This past week I’ve been refreshing my memory about the digressions and some of the attendant criticism. Some writers ignore them entirely; others gloss over them as embarrassing excesses from a poet with poor impulse control. But the scholars who engage with the digressions have in general found something interesting and revealing, and that’s what I want to share.
Structure and Theme
Rarely has there been a less useful and more dull subheading, right? But in this case, since we all know the poem, it’s useful. The action in Beowulf is about the rise and fall of a king, but not in a “life story” sense, but a critical episode one. We see Beowulf first in the episode that catapults him to fame such that Hrothgar heaps him with treasure and the scops [the c is pronounced like an h and the o is long — shope with a silent e] compose songs in his praise — his slaying of Grendel and his mother. Fast forward 50 years and Beowulf has been a strong, wise, and reluctant king, taking the crown only to preserve the Geats after the death of the ruling line, and we see his last great feat — killing the dragon. He dies. The treasure he has won is burned and buried with him, and the Geats gather around his burial mound, knowing their time of safety and order is done, and invaders are already gathering. The sun has set in the west, the horn blown, the rider long gone, and all the ubi sunt? metaphors are apt. That’s the structure.
The theme: What is a good king?
There’s a tradition in medieval literature that comes out of both scholarly and popular religious writing that eventually crossed over into secular tradition: the exemplum, which is an example of a quality or an ideal. A few centuries after Beowulf and you can’t swing a cat without hitting exempla left and right. They all pose a question “what is x?” and then answer it with examples.
This sounds very simple, but the execution is often quite sophisticated (putting paid to the idea that medieval people were not as smart as we are — we often underestimate their artistry, craft, sophistication and wisdom, embarrassing ourselves). We can read Beowulf as an exemplum of kingship and, in that light, the digressions don’t detract from the story, but instead add considerably to them, shading a definition of kingship and offering limitations on what is possible for a king.
Enough of this — let’s look at some digressions. I’m using Seamus Heaney’s translation, but you’re not, you should find the passages by referring to the line numbers.
Scyld Scēfing
We start with a digression (just in case you didn’t notice that they’re important). Scyld Scēfing, a foundling who grows up to be a great king: he not only keeps his people safe, his neighbors send him tribute, and he founds a dynasty, fathering Beow, who fathers Halfdane, who fathers four children: Heorogar, Hrothgar, Halga, and an unnamed daughter he marries off to the Swedish king Onela, and thereby secures peace. When he dies, he’s sent back the way he came — on a ship, but now laden with treasure, and “Þæt wæs gōd cyning” (line 11) “That was one good king.”
If Scyld is the model of kingship, he’s also the yardstick by which everyone else is measured. Each of the digressions that follow illustrate how other kings fail, whether by circumstance or character flaw. Even Hrothgar, a good king and wise man by all measures, can’t protect his people from Grendel, and needs a hero to come and save his hall.
He was a peerless king
until old age sapped his strength and did him
mortal harm, as it has done so many.
(lines 1886b-1888)
Sigemund and Heremond (lines 883b-914)
The scop sings about another great hero, Sigemund, who was a great guy except for those whispers of “feuds and foul doings” (line 878) that he kept quiet about, who killed a dragon and claimed her hoard of treasure (foreshadow much?) as a segue into a bad kingly example: Heremond, who started out well, but fell into decline and evil.
The waves of his grief
had beaten him down, made him a burden,
a source of anxiety to his own nobles:
that expedition was often condemned
in those earlier times by experienced men,
men who relied on his lordship for redress,
who presumed that the part of a prince was to thrive
on his father’s throne and defend the nation.
(lines 903-909)
Beowulf, the poet (not the scop) assures us in this passage, is certainly not such a man. He will kill a dragon but not be burdened with “feuds and foul doings.” Likewise, he starts out well, like Heremond, but unlike Heremond, he will not be corrupted.
Finn and Hildeburh (lines 1070-1158a)
Reams of criticism have been written on the Finn fragment, a bit of the scop’s song inserted directly into the Beowulf text. In brief, Hildeburh, a Danish princess, has been married to Finn, king of the Frisians, in the same kind of peace deal that sends Halfdane’s daughter to Sweden to marry Onela. But her brother Hnaef attacks the Frisians and, in the ensuing (but inconclusive) battle, Hildeburh sees both her brother and her son killed. Talk about a double bind!1 Unable to win outright, Finn makes a truce with Hengest, who has taken over from Hnaef, and agrees to share power, but the feud simmers until spring, when the Danes rise up again, slaughter Finn and his men, and take Hildeburh back to Denmark. Point is: Hildeburh’s marriage didn’t bring peace. Neither did a peace treaty, not while warriors grieved their dead leaders and resented their adversaries. This is less an example of kingly conduct, but rather examines the limits of kingly and queenly power, despite their good intentions.
Modthryth and Offa
This is another of the digressions that has attracted a lot of attention, mostly because so many critics don’t know what to make of it. Beowulf has just come home, victorious and laden with treasure. His own king Hygelac, the gold giver, and the entire court have assembled to hear the breathtaking story of Beowulf’s adventures when Hyld, Hygelac’s young queen, enters to take her place….and we divert to 35 lines about a bad queen and the king who gentled her in a scene right out of The Taming of the Shrew.
Modthryth (we’re not even sure that’s her name, it might be a corrupted adjective) was quite a hellion and led many men to their executions in her youth.
Even a queen
outstanding in beauty must not overstep like that.
A queen should weave peace, not punish the innocent
with loss of life for imagined insults.
(lines 1940b-1943)
But she settles down and becomes a good queen, famous for her good deeds, loyalty to her husband and devotion to her people. Talking about Modthryth, the anti-Hyld, leads the poet to speak of her husband Offa,
who was the best king, it has been said,
between the two seas or anywhere else
(lines 1955-1956)
Why was Offa a great king? He was generous to his followers, a great fighter and defender of the people, and father of a son Eomer, who would become “his warriors’ mainstay and master of the field” (line 1962).
You see a theme here?
Freawaru and Ingeld (lines 2020-2069)
(This is one of my favorite passages in the poem.) Beowulf mentions seeing Hrothgar’s daughter, who is unnamed but called “freawaru” or “peace-weaver.” She’s betrothed to the Heathobard’s king Ingeld as part of a peace treaty to end an old feud, but Beowulf foresees it will be a vain attempt to paper over too deep a rift. At the wedding feast, he says, some old warrior will
speak while they are drinking,
having glimpsed some heirloom that brings alive
memories of the massacre; his mood will darken
and heart-stricken, in the stress of his emotion,
he will begin to test a young man’s temper
and stir up trouble, starting like this:
’Now, my friend, don’t you recognize
your father’s sword, his favourite weapon,
the one he wore when he went out in his war-mask
to face the Danes on that final day?’
(lines 2041b-2050)
He’ll keep on until someone is killed. Not even a beautiful and loving bride will stop a war. And we already know from Hildeburh’s example that a peace-weaver who bears a king sons isn’t proof against an old feud. We also know that Heorot, Hrothgar’s hall, will burn when the peace fails.
One More Digression — Beowulf’s Rise to Kingship (lines 2154b-2390)
This passage is a condensed version of Beowulf’s role as a thane to Hygelac, his king, who is killed in a raid in Friesland. But Beowulf escapes the slaughter and returns home where Hyld, the queen, recognizing his fitness to rule, offers him the throne. He refuses but pledges his support to Hygelac’s son Heardred, who becomes king and gets involved in some intrigue with the sons of Ohthere, who rebelled against Onela “the best of all / the sea-kings in Sweden” (and husband to Hrothgar’s unnamed daughter, bringing the digressions full circle.) Heardred ends up dead in the melee and, lacking any other heir to support, Beowulf takes the throne: “Þæt wæs gōd cyning” (line 2390).
What to Make of All This
If Beowulf is an exemplum, the structure of the poem weaves the definition of what is a good king through the poem’s action, refining the definition of worthy kingship as Beowulf rises in fame and accomplishment. We see good kings who preserve their people and others who fail, we see queens trying to cement alliances, protect dynasties, or end wars (and sometimes succeeding), and we see bad kings. We see good kings who fail because they grow old, like Hrothgar, or are killed in battle, like Hygelac, or fall to political intrigue, like Heardred. By all measures, Beowulf is a good and successful king.
So why does the poem end with a keening wail and a dying light? [insert shrug emoji here] We don’t know, except that it’s fitting. Francis Leneghan has one certainly engaging idea. In “The Poetic Purpose of the Offa Digression in Beowulf,” Leneghan argues that Beowulf is an ideal king in all respects but one: he doesn’t marry and leave heirs. Scyld rises from nothing to become king based on his deeds, and so does Beowulf. But Scyld, whose funeral opens Beowulf, leaves behind a dynasty as a protection to his people. Beowulf, whose funeral ends the poem, doesn’t. He leaves no one sufficiently strong to step into his kingship, and it’s this failure that dooms his people. Leneghan’s argument is certainly thought-provoking (and in keeping with my own promise not to drown you in critics, this is my one-per-week) and worth considering.
There is another option, one that doesn’t rule out the great king exempla form, but enhances it and also fulfills the role of a Christian poet writing a tale of pagan rulers, and that is that the poem closes on an age of heroes who struggle against both monsters and men, but in lives that are doomed to a cold twilight gleam. At the end, the stage is cleared and empty; all the promise of the pagan world comes to nothing. A heroic, admirable, but ultimately fruitless nothing. It sets the stage for the next age to come, and that age is the Christian age.
I would not have thought of the ending of Beowulf as an anticipation of Christianity had I not been thinking about Shakespeare’s King Lear, which is also set in pre-Christian Britain but was performed first on December 26, 1606. It’s a Christmas play. With an utterly bleak ending — as Kent exits to kill himself, the survivors huddle in the dying light and the stage is swept….for what? What but the advent of Christianity and the promise of hope that outlasts the grave?
In other words, even the well-equipped and well-favored king can fail, and lesser heroes can only fail with greater catastrophe. A king who is wise and fortunate is still also only a man, and will die inevitably, and will/must leave his people behind. Even a dragon’s hoard is vain comfort when the people’s shield fails. In this case, the poem implies, you need a shield that won’t fail.
Now, where would such a thing be found? Hmmm….I wonder (glancing around the monastic scriptorium), I wonder.
Nota Bene
1 In a culture that demanded either vengeance or wergild (literally “man price”), the killing of kin presents a double-bind: justice requires vengeance. Kinslaying is also one of the greatest crimes possible — and presents the family with an insoluble dilemma. Wergild is a less-satisfying substitute, as we shall learn. By the way, Unferth, who is initially jealous of Beowulf, has killed his brother — accidentally, but still...the burden on his family, as well as the moral stain on him, is insoluble.
Reference
Heaney, Seamus. Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. NY: Norton, 2000.
Other parts of this little series