I have, of course, read The Beowulf, as have most (but not all) of those who have criticized it.
J. R. R. Tolkien, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”1
It’s Confession Time: Last week’s introduction to Beowulf was a setup. You see, I wasn’t being clueless or boorish (despite my capacity for both) when I wrote that most people were forced to read Beowulf at some point in school and hated it. Beyond the fact that it’s true, the comment had its desired effect: it brought the Beowulf fans out of the shadows. I see you and know who you are. Welcome — the next few weeks are going to be fun.
Tonight, we’re talking about Tolkien’s essay, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” because the whole of modern Beowulf studies turns on it. Rarely does a single essay, (this one delivered as the Sir Isaac Gollancz Memorial Lecture to the British Academy in 1936), turn an entire field of study on its head, but this one did. Kurt, in a comment last week, quoted Michael Drout’s pithy observation:
It is possible that “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” is the single most influential essay in the history of literary studies in the twentieth century. Very likely it has done more to shape the discipline of medieval studies than any short scholarly piece ever written, and it is certainly the fons et origo of modern Beowulf criticism. Had Tolkien never published The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, he would still have a towering reputation in Anglo-Saxon studies due to this one essay.
Drout is right — it’s impossible to overstate the importance of the essay. It was an earthquake. It revitalized Old English studies. It took the focus from Old English as a language and subject only for philologists and made it worth studying as literature. Although the essay focuses on Beowulf, its effects reverberated across the field. And it’s worth looking at in some detail, so here goes.
First, You Slay the Critics
There are a few conventions that good scholars have always followed (this is for y’all who are unacquainted with academic scholarship). Scholars should recognize the work that’s come before them, and especially acknowledge the great scholars in the field. It’s basic courtesy to salute the people who tilled and fertilized the field you are now preparing to plant, and to respectfully acknowledge the critics you’re about to savage — politely savage, I should say. Really, what you’re doing is differentiating yourself and explaining why your position is more “correct,” but this is Beowulf and the battle metaphors just write themselves.
Tolkien is a gentle scholar; even as he nods to the titans of the field and calls himself a “dwarf on the spot [who] sometimes sees things missed by the travelling giant,” he lines them up in order to dispatch them, by explaining how they missed the obvious. They have all measured Beowulf in comparison to other things — and the “other things” are all beside the point. Beowulf is not
primitive, pagan, Teutonic, an allegory (political or mythical), or most often, an epic...[it’s not] a heathen heroic lay, a history of Sweden, a manual of Germanic antiquities, or a Nordic Summa Theologica.
page 7
It’s a poem. And Tolkien is going to insist that we judge it as a poem. Moreover, it’s a poem written in a particular point in time: Christianity is in England, but the memory of the old ways are still present. There’ll be more about this shortly.
After dispensing with the genealogist/historians, the most prominent criticism that Tolkien must disarm is that, while the poem uses dignified language — the language of the epic — the subject material is cheap folklore (monsters, really! [prim Classicist shudder]). In other words, Beowulf is a lousy epic, and its hero is not a Virgilian hero.
Oh, really? Tolkien says. Well, perhaps your standards are lopsided or, more charitably, misaligned. Yes, he says, Beowulf deals with folklore. Folklore springs from myth, and myth is powerful (as we all who read fantasy know already) but difficult to analyze.
It is at its best when it is presented by a poet who feels rather than makes explicit what his theme portends….For myth is alive at once and in all its parts, and dies before it can be dissected.
page 15
To the critics who shudder at the monsters, well, Tolkien has Thoughts, but first he must talk about the importance of myth and so we move on from slaying critics.
Then You Talk Monsters
Well, less monsters than myth, and Tolkien spends some time dismantling Classicist assumptions about mythology. Greek and Roman mythology, he contends, passed wholesale into literary device, ready-made metaphor and pretty exposition, lifted neatly out of pagan belief and ghettoized into Christian rhetoric. Part of the reason for this is that, in Classical myth, the gods are immortal and unconcerned with the doings of men. They’re remote, and easily abstracted. Northern European pagan myth, at least what we know of it, was abstracted and more suppressed when it met with Christianity. There are volumes we don’t know about pre-Christian Old English culture because so much of their literature didn’t survive. But we know the general outline, thanks to Nordic and Icelandic sources:
The monsters had been the foes of the gods, the captains of men, and within Time the monsters would win. In the heroic siege and last defeat men and gods alike had been imagined in the same host. Now the heroic figures, the men of old, hæleð under heofenum remained and still fought on until defeat. For the monsters do not depart, whether the gods go or come.
page 22
This is an essential feature of what Tolkien called Northern Courage — a “paradox of defeat inevitable yet unacknowledged” (p. 18), that life is at best a struggle against darkness and chaos, and what makes a hero is not victory but rather facing the inevitable defeat still fighting. Our own Jeffersonian Democrat will I hope have some things to say about this, since he’s an expert on the subject of Tolkien’s Northern Courage and how it figures in the elves “long defeat” in Tolkien’s legendarium. Pending his comments, I will quote Tolkien, who thinks that “southern mythology” elides over the problem that we inevitably die and all our works fail, but the northerners face reality unflinching:
It is the strength of the northern mythological imagination that it faced this problem, put the monsters in the center, gave them victory but no honor, and found a potent but terrible solution in naked will and courage….[W]e may remember that the poet of Beowulf saw clearly: the wages of heroism is death.
pages 25-27
Death by dragon. Why a dragon? Because a dragon is the most potent and fearsome figure of chaos in Northern European imagination. Only a dragon is fit to kill a hero like Beowulf. ”Nowhere,” Tolkien writes, “does a dragon come in so precisely where he should” (p. 31).
So if a dragon is a fitting end to the great king’s life, his early foes have to have similar credentials. Therefore Grendel and Grendel’s mother. Outcasts, cast out by the Creator as descendents of Cain, cast out from human company too. It’s Hrothgar’s joy in building his great hall Heorot, that enrages Grendel. Inside, there’s light and music, “but the outer darkness and its hostile offspring lie ever in wait for the torches to fail and the voices to cease” (p. 33). The Beowulf poet would understand entropy and thermodynamics far better than Virgil would, because the Beowulf poet also understood Ragnarok.
So, Who Was This Guy?
Ah, the thousand dollar question, one that occupied a raft of scholars pre-Tolkien. According to Tolkien, who the poet was is less important (and unanswerable anyway) than when the poet was. Composed around 1000 CE, the poet lived on the cusp of the Christian era, but still in a time when the pagan past has been neither suppressed nor forgotten.
Even among the Christians of the Old English period — well, let’s just say their Christianity was very different from the faith that developed over the subsequent millenium:
A Christian was (and is) still like his forefathers a mortal hemmed in a hostile world. The monsters remained the enemies of mankind, the infantry of the old war, and became inevitably the new enemies of the one God, ece Dryhten, the eternal Captain of the new. Even so the vision of the war changes…
page 22
There’s not a lot of gentle Jesus in Old English. God is Metod, the World-maker, frea ælmihtig — the almighty lord. Jesus is a warrior in The Dream of the Rood who harrows hell, freeing the righteous who lived before the incarnation of Christ. And although Christianity offered the Old English a vision of eternity not summed up by “everyone dies and everything fails,” the memory of the old faith is still powerful.
[T]hat shift is not complete in Beowulf … Its author is still concerned primarily with man on earth, rehandling in a new perspective an ancient theme: that man, each man and all men, and all their works shall die. A theme no Christian need despise. Yet this theme plainly would not be so treated, but for the nearness of a pagan time. The shadow of its despair, if only as a mood, as an intense emotion of regret, is still there. The worth of defeated valour in this world is deeply felt.
page 23
The poet’s power of language, fused with the cultural time — on the cusp of Christianity, still infused with memory of the past — makes, Tolkien argues, Beowulf an elegy. Its static form is intentional, because the poem is not an epic. Instead, it turns on balance, the “opposition of ends and beginnings,” (p. 28). We see Beowulf as a worthy young hero, balanced by the vision of Beowulf as a worthy old king. His death is a passing away of the light and order, as the monsters and the Geats’ enemies gather. Because the monsters are always there, in the dark. That’s something that Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary got right in their better-than-it-shoulda-been Beowulf (2007).
The monsters are always there. In the dark. Waiting.
That’s what I have for tonight. What are your thoughts about Beowulf, and what should we talk about next week? We could go for a long time about the scholarship, but really it’s no substitute for reading the poem. We could talk about translations, good ones and not-so-good ones. After we’re done with next week, I want to talk about the newest post-punk Beowulf translation by Maria Dahvana Headley (because it’s a firecracker). And to finish, I think we might discuss what others have made of Beowulf — in poetry, novel, and film. Art begets Art. Beowulf is art.
Reference
1J. R. R. Tolkien. “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” In The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, ed. Christopher Tolkien. New York: Harper-Collins, 2006. All subsequent quotations are from this edition.