The Art and Thought of the ‘Beowulf’ Poet

The author explores the relationship between the Old English poem Beowulf and what can be reconstructed of the heroic legends its poet had inherited as part of an oral tradition first brought to Britain by migrants from Jutland and northern Germany during the fifth and sixth centuries CE. The emergent early medieval English kingdoms converted to Roman Christianity in the seventh century, after which many of these alliterative oral histories continued to be performed in royal courts and monasteries. Neidorf sees the Christian poet responding thoughtfully to these archaic poetic narratives as an opportunity to imagine a new kind of hero, one different from those who were part of that old legendary world and who might comport better with his own religious convictions and courtly values. The Beowulf poet pushes back against what Neidorf calls the "amoral" (p. 2) or "transgressive" (p. 51) behavior of the older protagonists, the "feuds and crimes" (l. 879a) that were perpetrated by even the greatest of them, like Sigemund the dragon-slayer to whom the hero is explicitly compared. In fact, the poet focuses upon Beowulf's fights with preternatural monsters, Neidorf argues, rather than human antagonists in order to lift him above the bloody tribal and dynastic conflicts in which his legendary predecessors had been involved, where "fathers kill sons, brothers kill brothers, and wives kill husbands" (jacket). Neidorf thus understands the art and thought of the Beowulf poet as a conscientious effort to renovate this "amoral heroic tradition" (p. 114).Amorality is in the eye of the beholder, of course, and most traditional epic narratives similarly interrogate their inherited values in light of changing cultural circumstances. In fact, epic poems are precisely where traditional cultures do their hardest thinking about such values, distanced from contemporary political entanglements through tales of long ago. And all epic poets face their protagonists with choices between competing priorities, very often forcing characters to violate one norm or ideal in order to satisfy another, then dramatizing the results of those decisions. Even in the poet's own Biblical tradition, brothers kill or cheat brothers, fathers acquiesce in or seek the death of sons, and wives enable the demise of husbands. Germanic legend is, in this sense, no more "transgressive" than any other body of early epic narrative. Even our noble hero himself is made to express an older kind of value more succinctly than any other character in the poem. Beowulf says to Hrothgar when that king sits grieving over the slaughter of his oldest and most faithful thegn Æschere: "Do not sorrow, wise man. It is better for anyone to avenge his friend than mourn much" (ll. 1384–85). And when his own hall is burned to the ground by a dragon, the elderly Beowulf decides he has no recourse, except one: the Dark Age answer to all injuries. He wræce leornode (studied revenge) (l. 2336b). The lex talionis is our hero's default position, his ethical philosophy in a nutshell, one not too different, we uncomfortably begin to realize, from that of Grendel's mother herself.Beowulf's character has been the subject of disagreement among critics ever since the poem first became available in a good edition in the earlier nineteenth century. Judgments have ranged from the sharply negative—the pagan warlord becomes a monster by killing monsters—to the extremely positive, finding in him a sacrificial Christ-figure or at least an "airbrushed" idealization of a fine nobleman crafted to minimize objectionable features in order to spare the sensibilities of the poet's Christian audience. This is Neidorf's position, who insists that the Beowulf poet generally tries to downplay unpalatable features in the pagan world of his poem to create a hero without the rebarbative behavior of earlier protagonists. The poet did this moral softening, Neidorf argues, not to provoke regret at his hero's unfortunate pagan ignorance, as argued by Fred Robinson in his classic study, "Beowulf" and the Appositive Style (1985). Rather, the poet contrasts his hero with other figures of the pre-Christian tradition in order to offer an impeccable protagonist who would surpass all his predecessors in nobility of character and generosity of spirit, whose life could be celebrated and death mourned without qualification or compunction.The hero's people do indeed lament their king's death without reservation. They are truly grief-stricken and rightly fearful of the consequences of his death once their enemies learn of it. But they are not without reservations about his decision to seek out the dragon in the first place, especially after its disastrous result. As Wiglaf later laments: Often must many a man suffer punishmentfor the will of one, as has happened to us.We could not convince our beloved chieftain,our kingdom's protector, of any other plan,that he not greet that gold-guardian,let him stay where he long lay,lingering in his lair until the world's end;he held to his high purpose. (ll. 3077–3084a)If this last half-line is not damning with faint praise, neither is it an unqualified compliment. Wiglaf is calling into question not the courage, but the plain good sense of his king's insistence on confronting the dragon at once in the way he does. This is a monster too far: no human hero had ever been able to defeat a dragon in a head-to-head encounter. Even Sigemund, the hero to whom Hrothgar's scop compares the young Beowulf after his killing of Grendel, and whose slaying of Fáfnir was later attributed in Norse tradition to his son Sigurd, overcame that monster by stealth, stabbing upward into its soft belly with a special-made blade as it slithered over the hero's hiding place. And even so, Sigurd barely managed to dodge its boiling blood with three protective shields over his head to divert the scalding fluid into drainage trenches. In fact, we can remember that earlier in his own career Beowulf had only managed to get a purchase on Grendel's huge arm by a similar ploy, the stratagem of pretending to be asleep, playing possum. He even sacrificed one of his retainers as bait to the cannibal's greed, waiting for it to finish eating the young man and step overconfidently close enough for Beowulf to get a quick grip on Grendel's wrist as the troll reached towards him, pulling it behind his back and eventually tearing off the monster's arm as it tried to escape. In fact, it was Beowulf's own stoic geþyld, his "patient fortitude" in the execution of a smart wrestling move, a forethoughtful plan, as much as his physical strength, that brought down the giant. Yet now, the hero's well-known capacity for calm calculation is precisely what is missing from the impetuous old king's plan.So, Neidorf is quite right that the Beowulf poet has created a new kind of hero in contradistinction to many of those featured in the earlier poetic tradition—Heremod, Ingeld, et al.—but perhaps less as a renovation of those old heroes' conduct and more as a kind of thought experiment. He imagines an equally staunch tribal chieftain in the bad old days of the pagan northlands, one who is spiritually precocious, true, but ignorant of the Christian gospel, knowing nothing of the Sermon on the Mount or the Biblical backstory of the fallen and dangerous world in which he finds himself. Beowulf is a narrative inquiry into the origins of violence in human affairs and the capacity of individual leaders, even those with the best will in the world, to quell or control it. From the start, this poem is more forensic than prescriptive, without a clear theological agenda, certainly not with regard to the fate of the hero's soul. This, we are told, left his breast to seek soðfæstra dom "the judgment of those rooted in truth" (l. 2820). Yet who these judges are and what their appraisal might be is not specified. Even so, the poet does leave us with the judgment of one group of people on the quality of their departed king's character—those who knew him best. They said of Beowulf that he was of kings in the worldthe mildest of men and most gracious,kindest to his people and most eager for their regard. (ll. 3180b-3182)He had done his best, as had Hrothgar, too, for his people. They were good kings, even if their best efforts came to naught—seem, in fact, to have created more problems than they solved. Monster-slaying, it turns out, solves nothing in this poem, or not for long. We humans—not monsters—are our own worst enemies. Hrothgar's family would soon be ripped apart by internal rivalries—Heorot burned to the ground—once Beowulf had saved them from Grendel and his mother. After his death, Beowulf's people are more vulnerable than ever before, their enemies just waiting for this moment to avenge themselves upon the Geats for past injuries, many of them inflicted by our hero himself, often in vengeful retaliation after his own people's unprovoked aggressions. The Beowulf poet is as bemused by his hero's failures as moved by his successes, full of thought as always, but with more questions than answers in the end.