SOURCE: “Thematic Polarity,” in The Hero in the Earthly City, State University of New York Press, 1984, pp. 24-45.

[In the essay below, Huppé asserts that the author of Beowulf demonstrates by antithesis the concept of the Christian hero and shows how Beowulf's lack of Christianity reveals the emptiness of his heroic ideals.]

the contrapuntal narrative method of Beowulf demands close attention to the interweaving of the threads that make up the story of the hero. The narrative moves from puzzles to answers which raise further questions. Thus, the poem begins with the puzzle of Scyld and his succession. Although answers are later given, they leave a mystery to be understood only in the realization that Scyld is an agent of destinal or divine purpose, which man cannot comprehend any more than he can the mystery of death. The function of narrative puzzlement, in short, is thematic.²

The epic life of Beowulf unfolds by puzzlement and shadowy recall of the deeds he has done. An ultimate question, however, is not answered. Why does Beowulf, heroically virtuous in death, leave a legacy of worthless gold and a future of unrelieved misery for his people? Although he is the heroic antithesis of Heremod, both leave their people wretched. Why? When Beowulf determines to fight the dragon, why is he filled, not with fear, but with doubt? Why does he have misgivings about transgressing the ancient law when in dying he is aware only of having lived with pious regard to the right uses of the strenth given him for destinal purposes? In short, why does the second part of the poem not move to triumphant affirmation of the glory of Beowulf's heroic death, but rather to lamentation over its waste?

These questions, as with Scyld, can only be answered thematically. The answers to them rest in the meaning that is given to the hero's life, and that meaning is based on the poet's concept of the heroic, which, in turn, must reflect a then-current climate of belief. Thus, it would appear essential to discover what this attitude was, a seemingly impossible task since the date of Beowulf has not been determined. It may have been written during the early, missionary stages of Christianity in England when the triumph of the new religion required apology and vigorous defense (seventh century). It may have been written when Christianity was firmly established and English energies were directed, for example, to the conversion of the continental Saxons (eighth century). Finally, it may have been written after the Viking invasions when English intellectual energies would have been responsive to Scandinavian paganism or, conversely, would have been influenced by Scandinavian Christianity (ninth, tenth, or even eleventh centuries).³

All these varying dates, however, belong as a whole to the Christian era when the intellectual life of England was dominated by Augustinian and monastic conceptions and constructs. This temporal-intellectual fact provides the opportunity and governs the attempt to recapture some approximate understanding of the preconceptions of an earlier age, the meta-linguistic imperatives that directed the poet's concept of his hero, Beowulf.

In this attempt to rediscover the territory of the poet's mind, we are like the makers of historical maps who plot the routes of communication of a forgotten past. They cannot use the grid of the modern highway system; rather they must disregard the modern to discover obliterated roads leading to obliterated villages, camouflaged and covered by the modern grid. Once we find the ancient road, however, we are met with the puzzle of a road sign pointing in two opposite directions. One directs us to the paganism of the poem that appears to govern its forms and the motivation of its characters. The other points to the Christianity of the poem. The authenticity of the signpost is attested by contemporary evidence. Thus Alcuin, Charlemagne's English school-master, asks the vital question, “Why Ingeld with Christ?”⁴ If Alcuin, in the poet's own monastic era, was troubled, surely the modern scholars who began the serious study of Beowulf appeared to be on the right track in assuming the poem to be basically Germanic and pagan, with interpolations designed to allow Ingeld to live more comfortably with Christ; that is, to give the basic paganism of the poem the coloring, if not the substance, of Christianity.

This satisfying direction, however, does not suffice in the face of the most recalcitrant of all facts, the poem itself. For Klaeber long ago observed, and modern scholarship is in agreement, that the pagan and Christian threads of the poem are too intertwined to be disentangled. If the Christian threads were removed from the poem, its unity would be destroyed. Thus it may be that our modern perception of what troubled Alcuin is at fault, for it is likely in the context of the Augustinian theory of literature to which he subscribed that Alcuin was no more disturbed by the juxtaposition itself than he would have been in finding God called Jove in a Latin Christian poem. What he was troubled by was not the juxtaposition, rhetorically permissible, but the need in a monastery to fashion Christian truths in poetic guise. Augustine had defended the use of literature as providing nourishment for babies in faith—until they could feed on the sturdy meat of doctrine itself. Alcuin, in turn, would not have questioned the use of pagan fable to inculcate Christian truth in neophytes and worldly men, but he might well have questioned the need of such a pedagogic device for monks who would presumably have been both knowledgeable and otherworldly.

The Christian moralizations of Beowulf may appear jarringly anachronistic, tangential to, and incompatible with the basic paganism of its story, language, and motivations. However, such a reaction is modern, a signpost hiding the old Janus-faced one which points in the direction of the intertwined existence of pagan and Christian in the poem. There is a reason for the bivalent sign, and this reason may be sought in the literary evidence of English attitudes toward the heroic.

Since we cannot be sure when the poet lived, it seems best to trace this evidence backwards from that expressed in the late tenth, early eleventh centuries, by Ælfric and in the Battle of Maldon. In dealing with ælfric's conception of the hero, we face the problem that his heroes are saints, in particular the kingly martyrs, Oswald and Edmund.⁵ These two are first of all saints, and only thus are heroes: they are examples of perfect living and perfect dying. The clash of swords, the bang of shields are missing in their stories—and the loss is essential. The hero, to be anything like Beowulf, must do battle as did Aeneas, one obvious prototype for the medieval hero.

Of prime importance in the conception of a hero like Aeneas is that he served an inner direction. Aeneas is governed by fate, in the Christian interpretation an emblem of divine providence directing man to his true home, the heavenly Jerusalem. But such a hero is not simply driven; he must himself act, and act heroically. It is only through his personal discovery of the right road, frequently after misdirection, that the operation of the divine plan can be seen. The saint, on the other hand, in his actions too clearly exemplifies the operation of divine providence. The saint's life is a miracle and is punctuated by miracles, the embodied evidence of things unseen. The saint is defined as a manifestation of divine purpose, whereas the hero, however superhuman, lives in a frequently strained relationship between himself as human agent and the larger purpose he must learn to serve. Except where his conversion may be involved, the saint knows his way and is devoid of strain in submitting to the will of God.

Thus Ælfric's saints, though they are heroic, are not Beowulfian heroes simply because they are too exemplary. They are living miracles: not superhuman as Beowulf is, but supra-human. Their battlefields are totally spiritual, and they are divinely, not humanly, motivated. Nothing more clearly illustrates the distinction between saint and hero than Ælfric's two martyred warrior kings. Oswald's reign is punctuated by a pair of heroic battles, his victory over the heathen Cedwalla and his death and defeat at the hands of the apostate Penda. The battles demand heroic treatment; they are the substance of the epic. But Ælfric sees Oswald not as a hero, but as a saint, so that the battles are deliberately slighted in favor of the development of the charity of his reign and of the miracles that followed his death. For example, the story of the sick horse who is cured after it wandered over Oswald's place of death is more developed than are both battles put together.

The first battle is described with startling brevity:

Oswald then raised up a cross to the honor of God before he came to battle and called out to his companions, “Let us kneel before the rood and pray to the Almighty that He protect us against the haughty enemy who wishes to slay us: God himself knows readily that we contend rightfully against this fierce king to protect our people.” They all then knelt with Oswald in prayer and afterwards in the early morning went to battle and won the victory as God aided them because of Oswald's faith, and they laid low their enemy, the proud Cedwalla with his great army, he who thought that no army might withstand him.

In essence the battle consists in the raising and worshipping of the cross; the victory is that of God's power and Oswald's faith—no shields are raised, no spears brandished. In the second battle “celebrated” by Ælfric, high heroic tragedy is implicit in the defeat and slaying of Oswald by the apostate Penda. Yet ælfric, with conscious artistry, erases from the scene all but the motif of Oswald's saintly martyrdom:

It came to pass that Penda waged war on him, Penda the king of the Mercians who had aided Cedwalla at the slaying sometime before of Oswald's kinsman, Edwin the king; and Penda understood nothing about Christ, and all the Mercian people were still unbaptized. They came then to battle at Maserfield and met together until the Christians fell and the heathens approached the holy Oswald. Then he saw the end of his life approach and prayed for his people who there fell in death and commended their souls and himself to God, and thus called out in his dying, “God have mercy on their souls!” Then the heathen king commanded that his head be cut off, and his right arm, and that they be set up as a sign.

Even the background for the action raises Beowulfian expectations of the heroic with the evocation of the motif of vengeance for a kinsman. Ælfric, however, merely notes as a matter of fact that Penda had been allied with Cedwalla when he slew Oswald's kinsman, Edwin. Apparently, the thought of vengeance is as foreign to Oswald as it was natural for Beowulf to consider vengeance as the highest of duties. ælfric's failure to exploit the possibilities inherent in the motif of vengeance and in the battle is deliberately designed to stress the saintliness of Oswald's character. The organization of Ælfric's account of the battle suggests that he was conscious of the contrast between saintly and heroic ideals, and that he deliberately plays one against the other, counter-pointing expectations of the heroic against the actuality of saintly conduct.

The death of Edmund, as Ælfric narrates it, even more clearly exemplifies his conscious disavowal of the heroic and emphasis on the saintly. In the scene, the saintly martyr facing the heathen Hingwar deliberately discards the heroic response to which he is naturally attracted. He rejects it to follow Christ's injunction literally:

Lo then when Hingwar came, King Edmund stood within his home mindful of the Savior and cast aside his weapons. He wished to imitate the example of Christ who forbade Peter to contend with weapons against the bloodthirsty Jews. Lo the heathens bound and humiliated Edmund shamefully and and beat him with cudgels and then led the confessorking to an earth-rooted tree and tied him thereto with strong bonds and beat him then for a long time with whips; and he always called out between the blows with true faith to the Savior Christ; and the heathens became madly angry because in his faith he called upon Christ for aid. They shot at him then with spears as if in a game until he was all covered with their shafts as if with the bristles of a porcupine, just as Sebastian had been. When Hingwar, the heathen pirate, saw that the noble king would not abandon Christ but with steadfast belief ever called upon Him, he commanded that he be beheaded, and the heathens did so. While still he called upon Christ the heathens drew the saint to slaughter and with one blow cut off his head, and his soul voyaged blessed to Christ.

In this scene ælfric has Edmund deliberately reject the heroic response, a rejection prepared for earlier by juxtaposing Christian and heroic ideals in the king's mind as he deliberates his response to the invasion. True to the patterns of heroic conduct, the king declares his wish not to survive the death of his dear retainers and continues:

It was never my custom to turn to flight; for if I must I would readily die for my country, and the Almighty God knows that I will never turn from His worship, nor from His true love, whether I live or die.

The king is motivated both by Christian and by heroic ideals, but at the crisis recognizes that they cannot coexist; he rejects heroic death for triumphant martyrdom in imitation of his Master's unheroic surrender to the enemy. His death, even to the image of the porcupine and the heathen game-playing, is made humiliating to reflect the ignominious victory of Christ's Passion and St. Sebastian's martyrdom. Edmund becomes saint and Christian hero in the act of rejecting the heroic.

Ælfric's awareness of the heroic tradition and his rhetorical use of it for antithesis is anticipated about a century earlier in the Old High German Ludwigslied.⁶ This poem, written in late 881 or early 882, celebrated the victory of the king of the Franks, Louis, over the Vikings, but the heroic potentials of the subject are realized only as antithesis to the king's Christian triumph through God. The poet concentrates his attention on celebrating Louis as the vicar of God, executing divine purpose. Louis has no personality in the poem except for his relationship to God. The king served God, we are told; indeed when Louis lost his father, God adopted him as His own son, became his foster father. However, for their sins, God visited punishment upon the Franks by permitting the attack of the Vikings, but then called on Louis to defend them: “Louis, my king, help my people.” In response Louis gathers his men to face the Northmen; he takes shield and spear, but this heroic gesture is followed by his singing the praise of God. To his saintly battle-cry, his men respond “Kyrie eleison!” The battle begins and victory and honor are immediately awarded to Louis. The potential for the heroic in such a battle is left unrealized except as it provides implicit counterpoint to the tendentiously Christian.

A tradition of rhetorical use of heroic motifs in antithesis to the Christian ideal appears to exist, as is attested by the Dream of the Rood, a poem written perhaps as early as the beginning of the eighth century. In it the Cross itself narrates the Crucifixion in terms appropriate to heroic battle:

                                                                                                    I saw mankind's Protector
                    most manfully hasten                     to ascend
me;
                    I did not dare                    in disobedience
                    to bow or crack                    though I saw the
bounds
                    of earth trembling;                    truly I had
the might
                    to fell these foes                    —yet I
stood fast.
The young hero prepared                    —He was Almighty God—
great and gallant to ascend                    the gallow's abject
height,
wishing as many watched                    magnanimously to free mankind.
Trembling in the Son's clasp                    I dared not crouch
on the ground
or fall to earth's boundaries                    —I had need
to stand fast;
                    erected as a cross                     I raised the
King
                    of the heavens above                    —I dared
not bow.
                    They pierced me with dark nails;                    on
me appear the wounds,
the gaping blows of hate                    —I dared not hurt them
in return.
They besmirched us both;                    I was besmeared with the
blood
which poured from the Man's side                    after he surrendered
his soul.

The rhetoric of the passage is complex, involving metaphorical extension, metonymy, oxymoron, and antithesis. For the present purpose, however, what is important is the metaphor of battle, with Christ pictured as a warrior preparing for battle and the Cross as the Lord's retainer, torn between his desire to attack and the compulsion to obedience. The effect of the poet's heroic metaphor is to emphasize the antithesis between the degradation of the crucifixion and the language of heroic battle employed to describe it. His bold rhetoric may be explained as serving the ends of missionary apology. By this hypothesis, the poet would have had the specific intention of engaging the imagination of an audience brought up on heroic poetry and responsive to it, so that they could perceive through the epic diction the higher heroism of the penitential life, the way of the cross.

The heroic, then, would have been employed to celebrate its antithesis, Christian humility. The poet's vision serves as apologia for an ideal in conflict with what was customary in a warrior society. It does so by suggesting that the penitential life has affinities with that of the warrior, who also must suffer privation that he may win triumph and glory; only the definition of what constitutes glory is changed. That is why, in The Dream of the Rood, both Christ and Cross appear as soldiers engaged in a conflict with victory as its goal. Like good soldiers, they are absolutely obedient to a command that calls upon them not to strike but to endure, not to be heroic but to be humble. The Cross tells the story of the Crucifixion as if he were a warrior who has had placed upon him a soldierly obligation not to be heroic. In so doing, the Cross reveals the tensions inherent in a warrior society, the ultimate values of which have been put in question by the new dispensation that refutes the heroic ideal by redefining glory, the reward of victory. Thus the Cross yearning for heroic battle is enjoined to the higher fortitude of humble suffering in order to gain Christian glory, the crown of victory in the kingdom of Heaven. This reward the Cross promises to all who forego wordly glory to follow the penitential way to heavenly glory.

The currency of the use of the heroic by antithesis to celebrate its opposite is attested in other poems. In The Wonder of Creation, of undetermined date, a striking equation is made between the contemplative (monastic) life and the life of fortitude. By redefinition, it claims for Christian contemplation a virtue which in the heroic warrior's definition was his alone. In Judith, perhaps of the ninth century, a battle scene appears celebrating the victory of the Hebrews over the Assyrians. The narrative mode is heroic: the banners move forward; the shields clash at dawn; the carrion wolf and raven are aroused and the eagle sings the battle song; the warriors advance under their shields, discharge arrows, cast spears, draw their swords and attack hand-to-hand. The battle, however, has no part in the Vulgate source, which expressly states that no battle took place, only the threat of attack and the consequent flight of the Assyrians. Thus the battle scene, rendered in the traditional formulaic patterns of heroic verse, involves an extended use of hysteron-proteron, the thematic function of which is to emphasize the presence of God's hand and to establish the spiritual, providential nature of the Hebrew victory. The Hebrew warriors, like Judith, are the agents of God, His executioners, as it were. Again, the heroic serves as emblem of its antithesis, Christian victory through faith.⁷

The battle in Judith is very like the symbolic battles between Abraham and the nine kings in Genesis A, a poem unquestionably among the earliest in the Old English poetic corpus. The account of the battles is lengthy and is characteristically heroic (lines 1960-2095). The northern kings are at first victorious, so that “many a fearful maiden had trembling to go to a stranger's embrace,” and the defenders perish, “sick with wounds.” In a second battle, the kings again attack; “the spears sing, the raven croaks, greedy for prey.” The “battleplay” is hard but the kings “possess the place of slaughter.” Abraham now gathers a small band, symbolically numbering three hundred and eighteen; he comforts his band by declaring his faith that “the Eternal Lord may easily grant good speed in the spear strife.” In the ensuing battle, “Abraham gave war as a ransom for his nephew [Lot], not the wound gold.” Finally, the army of the kings is left to be torn by the carrion birds. This heroic battle scene, however, both echoes and was written against standard interpretation of the Bible, where it was considered to be, as Bede puts it, an emblem of “a very great miracle of divine power.” The numbers of the kings and of Abraham's band are symbolic, so that the battle is, in its significance, a psychomachia in which Abraham's victory is “symbolic of the Christian soldier's victory over wordly temptation.”⁸ The poet's heroic battle scenes do not celebrate the memories of heathen poetry; rather by symbolic antithesis they celebrate the triumph of faith. The intended effect was through the use of traditional heroic idiom by antithesis to affirm Christian doctrine. The figure of Abraham does not evoke the pagan warrior but rather the ideal of Christian faith.

Judging from all this literary evidence, which spans the entire period in which Beowulf could have been written, the heroic tradition appears to have been very much alive, however negatively, in the consciousness of the early medieval poet and writer.⁹ Further, the antithesis between heroic and Christian ideals, it must be assumed, presented a primary social problem. The strain caused by the coexistence of Christian and pagan traditions in a war-like society may be shown by two examples, one from the court of Theodoric, the other from Charlemagne's court. Theodoric's successor, Athalaric, under the influence of his mother, was given clerical training in the arts. This effort, however, was successfully resisted by the unreconstructed nobility who considered such clerkly instruction to be opposed, as Reto Bezzola puts it, “to the spirit of the Ostrogoths.” It was not an education, they argued, suitable to “a young king of their race destined for a warrior and heroic career.” In short, Christianity was for priests and women, the heroic was for the warrior. The second example comes from a poem by Theodulf, a clerk and poet in Charlemagne's court. He tells how his verses pleased the court except for a certain “Wibrodus heros.” He, as Bezzola summarizes, “shook his huge head in a menacing and ferocious manner,” until Charlemagne himself was forced to stop him. The strain evident early in Theodoric's court remains in Charlemagne's court in the ninth century in the confrontation between the clerk and the warrior, so significantly termed “heros.”¹⁰

The conflict of ideals would also have presented a basic problem to Christian writers in England from the time of the Conversion until after the Viking invasions. After the Conversion they faced the dilemma of teaching Christianity to an audience brought up with, or vividly remembering, the heroic poetry of their pagan ancestors. Thus we hear of Aldhelm in the seventh century, according to William of Malmesbury, composing secular verses in the accustomed manner, but with the purpose of leading his listeners to doctrinal truth “by interweaving among foolish things, the words of Scripture.”¹¹ In the ninth century, Alcuin, it will be recalled, was aware of the commonplace interweaving of Ingeld with Christ. After the Viking incursions, the English poet, by definition Christian and probably monastic, would have written for a society facing the pagan Vikings whose attack upon Christendom required both prayer and, more importantly, a heroic, warrior-like response. It would have been the task of the poet somehow to reconcile the two ideals of the heroic and the Christian, not merely to use the heroic to serve by rhetorical antithesis as metaphor for penitential fortitude. This is the task, of the poet of The Battle of Maldon, and it was also that of the poet of Beowulf, as will be argued, whether he wrote at the same time as The Dream of the Rood or much later.

The problem these poets faced cannot be glossed over by hypothesizing the side-by-side existence of two cultures, that of the warrior and that of the clerk, in which the heroic poem is simply covered with a veneer of Christian moralization.¹² There may have been in fact a division in society, but the poetry that remains to us is inevitably the product of clerks, that is to say, at that time of monks. Yet, though the poetry is monastic, the heroic in Maldon and in Beowulf cannot be explained away simply as rhetorical manipulation, as is true of The Dream of the Rood. The heroic in the two poems under question cannot be transformed into Christian statement, for example, by allegorization.¹³ Rather, the poets were trying, according to my hypothesis, to effect a reconciliation, trying to bring together the split halves of their society. These were great poets writing about what was most profoundly important in their own times; there could have been nothing more important for them than to deal with the meaning of the Christian soldier in actuality, not merely metaphorically. The dilemma they faced is clear: the only valid life was that led in the imitatio Christi, yet meek surrender to the heathen could not have been contemplated in the actual world. Ælfric was aware of the dilemma and offered a traditional solution: that military (heroic) action with the intention of humble service to Christendom is justified. Thus, in commenting on his metrical version of the biblical Judith, he cites her both as an example of the triumph of humility and as “an example to you men that you with weapons should protect your land against the attacking enemy.”¹⁴ One way or another the Christian writers of Maldon and Beowulf were dealing with the problem of the relation between the parts of the equation, Christian and heroic.

The Battle of Maldon is a Christian poem of monastic provenance. In the traditional manner, it narrates a battle in which the English, led by the pious yet heroic Byrhthnoth, were defeated by the heathen Vikings.¹⁵ Two matters are of special interest in the attempt to discover how the poet conceived of the heroic in Byrhthnoth's conduct of the battle. First of all, it should be clear that Maldon is a poem, not an historical account to be judged by the principles of accurate representation. In all likelihood, the poet felt free to take what might be called poetic license with the accounts of the battle which he had heard. At any rate, he contrives his narrative so that the death of the hero, Byrhthnoth, appears not as the climax but as the center of his poem, as in ælfric's homilies on Oswald and Edmund. The first half of Maldon leads up to his death; the last part narrates the treachery of some of Byrhthnoth's followers and the faithfulness to death of the remainder. In consequence, the poem appears to enclose, to set off Byrhthnoth's dying speech:

I give Thee thanks,                    God of nations,
for my well-being                    here in the world;
now my greatest need,                    Gracious Lord,
is that You grant                    this grace to me
that now my soul                    may ascend to Thee,
Ruler of angels,                    and into your realm
may come in peace;                    upon Thee I call
to hold it safe                    from the devils of hell.

His speech is Edmund-like. He is a martyr turning to God in the full expectation of protection from devils and of eternal life because he is dying in battle against human devils, the Vikings. Yet, as the poet has made clear earlier, Byrhthnoth's own heroic actions contribute in a decisive way to his defeat and death and that of his men, when he recklessly abandons the advantageous position he holds at the ford. Out of heroic pride, for his ofermode, Byrhthnoth agrees to permit the Vikings to mass their forces on the shore instead of having to cross the ford singly. Then he taunts them and tempts God:¹⁶

Room has been made;                    now speed you men
to give us battle                    —God alone knows
who will be the victor                    on the battle-field

Byrhthnoth's action and his speech are governed by an heroic ideal of warrior conduct; in sharpest contrast, his death is pictured as that of a Christian martyr. The antithesis the poet establishes is similar to that found in The Dream of the Rood and Ælfric's homilies, but with a crucial difference. Here the antithesis is embodied in a single Christian hero, Byrhthnoth. Apparently the poet must have felt that in his portrait of Byrhthnoth he had achieved a reconciliation of the antithetical halves of his character. Relying upon a shared climate of belief, he found no need for explanation, so that his reconciliation of the Christian and the heroic must be examined to provide some clue to the concept of the Christian hero that he and his audience held.

Byrhthnoth's heroic recklessness in permitting the Vikings to fight on equal terms may be likened to that of Beowulf's in determining to battle Grendel on even terms by abandoning his sword and armor. Such conduct, however, though it may be appropriate to a pagan hero, seems ill-suited to the character of a Christian hero. The poet is aware of this in equating his heroism with pride, ofermode, the sin of Satan who is also given heroic stature in two poems, Genesis and Christ and Satan. At the same time, however, the poet appears to accept Byrhthnoth's heroic pride as an essential characteristic, in this case, not of a satanic heathen but of a pious Christian warrior. Byrhthnoth's decision to follow heroic precepts in giving away his advantage on the battlefield, accompanied by an heroic boast (beot), does not represent a sudden change, but is of a piece with his earlier defiant reply to the Viking messenger's demand for tribute. Here in epic formulas he reveals his heroic resolve (anræd):

Seaman do you hear                    what this people say?
They willingly give                    a gift of spears
to you in battle                    and profitless booty
of poisoned point                    of patrimonial sword.
Viking messenger,                    bring to your men
a loathsome tale                    in the telling:
here in loyalty                     a leader with his troop
stands to keep safe                    his native soil,
the land of his king,                    Lord æthelred's
fields and his folk.                    The heathens shall fall
in battle here;                    it seems to me base
that without battle                    you board your ships
with our treasure                    now you have traveled
the long way here                    into our land.
Without trouble                    you'll not gain treasure;
the point and the edge                    will be our appeasement,
rough battle-play                    before we pay tribute.

The heroic resolve of this speech anticipates the heroic pride involved in his giving fighting room to the heathen enemy. In heeding an heroic imperative he becomes responsible for disaster, so that in Byrhthnoth's heroism lies something akin to the tragic flaw. Conversely, he appears also to be governed by faith and Christian piety, as in his thanks to God for victory in his first skirmishes after he had drawn back to give the Vikings room:

                                                                                                    The doughty earl
was happy and laughed,                    gave thanks to heaven
for the day's labor                    the Lord gave him.

As his boast to the Viking messenger leads to his fatal heroic action, this speech of Christian thanksgiving, revealing the steadfastness of his Christian faith and purpose, leads to his dying speech in which as a martyr he expresses his hope of salvation.

In Maldon, Christian and heroic exist as antitheses, yet are reconciled in Byrhthnoth. His death as a martyr apparently absolves, for the poet, the fatal flaw of pride in his obeying the dictates of heroic conduct. The poet's line of reasoning is not difficult to follow because it flows from the rudimenatry Christian doctrine of grace. The heroic is human, thus part of man's estate, the result of original sin. But the heroic in Byrhthnoth, the taint of fallen humanity, is absolved because it has been placed in the service of the Faith, and, through grace, becomes good work. In his heroic bravado he falls, but in his death he imitates Christ and becomes a martyr. Because Byrhthnoth's martyrdom is an emblem of Christ's death, it shares in the mystery of grace by which erring humanity is reconciled with God. In the Christian interpretation of the Aeneid, the hero serves a divine purpose which he does not recognize; Byrhthnoth in Maldon, though flawed by his heroic recklessness, serves God's purpose, which he recognizes. Byrhthnoth's human heroism leads to defeat, but his heroic effort serves Christendom, so that his defeat reveals a high, providential purpose by providing a Christian example of a warrior's holy dying.

Implicit in the poem is the recognition that the human condition requires men to do battle. Such men are likely to be self-reliant, proud of their valor and, in their fallen humanity, heroic. The hero qua hero is without grace; his heroism, however, may be redeemed by its service to Christendom, and he may thus achieve the status of the saint through grace, right faith and holy dying. The concept is analogous to that of the felix culpa, the sin which through providence becomes the happy redemption. Though the dictates of the heroic lead to the sin of self-reliant pride, the heroic may be transformed in obedience to divine will. The act of doing battle with heathens in the defense of Christendom partakes of the penitential, and if death follows from the act it becomes martyrdom which exculpates the sinfulness of heroic conduct. Thus the battle for the Faith and the martyr's death transform heroic conduct into a model of salvation, and Byrhthnoth's folly is reconciled with his Christian life.

This concept provides an adequate explanation for the heroic in Byrhthnoth but may be of less value in explaining Beowulf, a pagan for whom the heroic imperatives are the essential motivations of his conduct. It is tempting to solve this difficulty by resort to the notion that Beowulf essentially conveys a pagan heroic ethic which cannot be explained by recourse to the concept of the Christian hero. In such a view the Christian, as merely external coloring, cannot lead to the heart of the poem. Such a solution will not suffice, however, because the Christianity of Beowulf has been shown to be an essential part of its form and structure, although its subject and the motivations of its characters are pagan. It would be naive to assume that the poet was not aware of the paganism of his hero and of his society. It would be equally naive to assume that he would have celebrated a society which lacked the knowledge of the truths of Christianity.¹⁷ The values of such a society, lacking in the saving grace of the theological virtues, he would have deplored.

However, even if a pagan hero were blessed with piety and the cardinal virtues, he could not thereby attain the status of Christian hero, which involves the possession of the three theological virtues of Faith, Hope and Charity. Like Aeneas, the pagan hero in Christian interpretation, may reveal the way in which providential design makes use of the hero, or may even typify the Christian search for the heavenly home.¹⁸ Nonetheless the pagan hero remains a pagan, blind himself to the real meaning of his life. Christian doctrine alone provides the key to such meaning; in and for themselves the epic adventures of a pagan hero can only reveal his limitations and those of his society, for he, without faith, is a blind man leading the blind. Yet this very antithesis between the Christian and pagan understanding of the epic hero provides an hypothesis for the understanding of how Beowulf was intended to be read by its Christian audience. The hypothesis assumes that the fictional world of Beowulf is pagan, its point of view Christian. From the Christian point of view, the pagan events of the poem reveal the limits of heathen society, the limits of the righteous pagan, and the limits of the heroic ideal.¹⁹ Such Christian revelation is the primary thematic function of the poem.

This hypothesis serves to explain much that is otherwise puzzling in the poem: for one major example, its descending line of mood and action, so that the omens of disaster in the first half of the poem are fulfilled and completed in the last half. After Beowulf returns home and gives his account of his exploits in Denmark, there is a scene of joyous, prosperous amity jarringly concluded without interruption by the twenty-line narrative of ensuing disasters leading to Beowulf's reign, which culminates in the coming of the dragon. Amidst forebodings of disaster, Beowulf decides to revenge the dragon's onslaught and gain the treasure. His mind, however, is darkened by ethical doubt and is filled with memories of past battles. He recalls the tangled net of Higelac's adventures and the internecine Swedish wars in which he became involved. Finally, he recalls the death in grief of ancient Hrethel, fatally unable to solve the dilemma to which his heroic ethic could give no answer: his duty to avenge his son; his duty not to be guilty of the death of his son. In the battle, Beowulf is fatally wounded and averts defeat only through the aid of Wiglaf. In his dying speech, Beowulf places his hope for the future upon the gold he has won. His speech, as he gazes upon the gold, recalls in counterpoint the lament of the last survivor as he looked on the useless treasure he was about to bury, a counterpoint of doom and disaster which dominates the last part of the poem. After Beowulf's death the mood is further darkened, not so much by grief over his passing as by forebodings of impending doom. The messenger retells the story of Higelac's fatal raid and of the deadly Swedish wars, not to celebrate the hero, but to foretell the disastrous legacy of lordless grief, suffering, and exile that Beowulf will leave to his people.

Further underscoring the dismal view of his death is the contrast between youthful Wiglaf and aged Beowulf. Wiglaf recalls the young Beowulf in Denmark as, concomitantly, Beowulf recalls the aged Hrothgar. Hrothgar, with his self-deceiving trust in the security provided by his power to reward through treasure, has his counterpart in Beowulf, with his equally self-deceiving trust in the security provided his nation by the dragon's treasure. Wiglaf, however, is not the exact counterpart of the young Beowulf. If he were, he would be expected to lighten the oppressive gloom in providing some hope for the future. Such expectation the poet takes pains not to fulfill. Beowulf transfers his kingship to Wiglaf who has proved his heroic quality, but Wiglaf does not respond with the assurance of the young Beowulf. He provides no expected show of determination to emulate his dead hero-king; rather he shares completely in the messenger's sense of inevitable disaster. He refuses to share Beowulf's trust in the dragon's treasure, but agrees that it should again be buried to remain as worthless as it was before. Further, he openly declares that Beowulf's encounter with the dragon was the result of a doomed, reckless heroism, a recklessness which will have the ruin of his people as a consequence. Wiglaf's grief is understandable; the failure of his will to succeed is not. The hope implicit in his heroic youth is not realized. Because he considers Beowulf's death only as a disaster brought about through heroic pride, and because he has no apparent hope for the future, Wiglaf reveals the ineffectual emptiness of his society, the failure of its ideal hero and of the heroic. Far from lightening the darkness, Wiglaf's bright, heroic youth intensifies it. From the cycle of trust in treasure and the heroic response there is no escape. Beowulf does not end in tragic celebration of the hero but in lament over the doomed waste of his youth and valor.

The heroic in Maldon is represented as a tragic flaw which precipitates disaster but leads through the mystery of the felix culpa to the good of redemption through martyrdom. Byrhthnoth's death is the tragic cause for celebration; Beowulf's is not. The heroic in Beowulf is self-contained; it is the ethos of a culture, of the heroic past as the poet envisioned it; it must be self-justified because it cannot, as in Maldon, appeal to redeeming grace. That is why the last words about Beowulf are about his search for glory, the empty ideal of a pagan, heroic world. To the contrary, the poet's attitude toward the heroic ethos and its goal of glory is Christian and critical.²⁰ That is why the direction of the poem is inevitably toward doom and disaster unrelieved by any sense of hope and redemption. Beowulf's flaw is tragic precisely because there are no means available to him by which the flaw may be redeemed. Thus his tragedy rests in his inability to rise above the ethos of his society, the mores of revenge and war which govern his actions. In the first part of the poem, in contrast to the aged and ineffectual Hrothgar and to the vigorously evil Heremod, Beowulf appears as a savior, a cleanser of evil; in the last part, Beowulf appears to echo and reflect not beginnings but endings. He has become involved in his world and in the ethos of the feud. Though he remains heroic, his heroism is no more effective than is Hrothgar's helplessness. Like Hrothgar he looks toward the past, as does also the last survivor, lamenting the glory that is gone.

The hero's role, as with Aeneas, is to be an agent of fate, that is, Divine Providence in Christian understanding. The beginning of Beowulf introduces the theme of agency in the figure of Scyld who appears mysteriously to succor the Danes and disappears in death into the unknown. His mystery is that of the agent of God by whom he has been sent, though a pagan, to alleviate pagan suffering. Yet, in counterpoint to this Christian understanding of his role is that of his pagan followers who see in him only the mystery of his coming and of his leaving. That is to say, Scyld's pagan followers reveal the limitations of their paganism, the limitations of an understanding lacking the truth of faith.

Beowulf, thus introduced, is also an agent of God, as is seen most clearly in his battles against Grendel and particularly against the mother whom he slays with a giant sword to which he is divinely guided.²¹ Beowulf brings back the hilt of this sword upon which is recorded the biblical tale of the downfall of the giants, the race of Cain. One effect of the story is to cast Beowulf in the role of God's avenger who eradicates a residue of Cain's generation of monsters. In turn, Hrothgar, gazing on the hilt, is inspired to utter a homily which reaches to the edges of Christian truth. The homily provides a warning to Beowulf against heroic self-reliance whereby his subsequent actions may be judged.²² Beowulf's own judgment of himself is clouded. On the one hand, when he determines to attack the dragon he is concerned about having violated the old law; on the other hand, in dying he finds comfort in knowing that he has not violated the code by which he has lived. His wavering between moral doubt and certainty results from his being both righteous and pagan. He strives for the truth but cannot escape from the necessary error of all who are without the grace of knowing through faith. Beowulf's striving for righteousness is blocked by the very ethical code which he has piously observed. He cannot understand his feeling that he has transgressed against the old law because he does not know the new law. He has no referent for righteousness except the heroic code, which has revenge as its most sacred obligation, glory and gold as its ultimate reward.²³ The futility of such a code is made evident in Hrethel's fatal ethical dilemma. From the Christian perspective, to seek revenge is sinful error; thus Hrethel, who accepts revenge as ethical obligation, cannot solve his dilemma because he seeks to find his answer in a false faith.

How Beowulf is himself caught in the iron circle of heroic error is evidenced in his inward determination to avenge the death of his nephew, Heardred, Higelac's son, by securing the death of his slayer, Onela, the Swedish king, who had entrusted Beowulf with the Geatish throne, presumably after appropriate swearing of oaths. Beowulf, however, does not perceive that his secret determination to betray Onela is dishonorable because he feels he is being morally obedient to the sacred and paramount duty of revenge.²⁴ This appears from his dying assertion that he has not dishonored himself with false oaths. Finally, his reasons for attacking the dragon flow from his allegiance to a false moral ideal. He need not have sought revenge; the dragon would have remained in his barrow unless he were again disturbed. For the hero, however, who strives for the ultimate goal of such abiding glory as Sigemund had attained, revenge is an absolute imperative which takes no count of practicalities. Further, the attack on the dragon holds the promise of another ultimate reward, the treasure, visible evidence of glory. In short, as Wiglaf puts it, Beowulf is driven by “relentless doom” because of his own will he seeks the two goals of worldly men living in error, glory and its visible sign, gold. He is doomed because his will now serves a faulty human end.²⁵ Before, in Denmark, he served as agent of a merciful design, though without understanding; now as king he serves only himself by seeking a heroic goal. In pursuing gold and glory Beowulf becomes the victim of fate because he has accepted the error of his society, and has lost his youthful role as agent of providence.

Thus the final action of the poem takes place not providentially but fatalistically. This fatalism reveals that Beowulf, governed by the law of revenge, is self-doomed, and it reveals the futility of a society not governed and directed by the goal of salvation. The movement of the poem is downward toward a fatally tragic end. Beowulf and the dragon are the victims, the first in seeking the gold, the other in keeping it, and Beowulf's doomed descent is that of all who lack saving grace. The poem ends, to be sure, with Beowulf's people celebrating him as the mildest of kings and the most worthy of praise. He is worthy of praise, however, as the last words of the poem reveal, because he was “most eager for glory.” That is, they praise him in terms that would befit any good pagan hero and apply equally well to Aeneas, to Hector, to Odysseus. Their praise is defined by purely human limitations and specifically lacks any of the Christian overtones of Maldon. For in direct contrast to Byrhthnoth, Beowulf in dying reveals no movement toward redemption. His death is completely unlike that of the Christian hero because it lacks the sense of revealed understanding suggested by Byrhthnoth's dying plea that his soul be brought home safely to his God.

Beowulf ends with the death and burial of the hero, which is precisely what might be expected in heroic epic, except that no sense of triumph is imparted.²⁶ The oddity is in the Battle of Maldon where the death of the hero comes at the center of the poem, with the result that his death is not the main point toward which the poem is leading. Rather his death serves to reveal the fulfillment of God's design, of which the hero's death is but part. The real point of Maldon does not rest in the battlefield death. Conversely, the death of the hero is the point of Beowulf. The first part of the poem reveals and celebrates the workings of God's hand; the death of the hero reveals the emptiness of Beowulf's heroic life when it serves the hero's own ends of glory rather than God's purpose. His death suggests that the heroic ideal is ineffectual and futile, that its supreme embodiment in a Beowulf or an Aeneas lacks any real dignity when compared with the ideal of the Christian as embodied in Byrhthnoth who serves the Lord in faith. In this implicit contrast, the tragic implications of Beowulf may most clearly be realized; its pathos rests in the irony of its conclusion where the Geats celebrate a hero who has left them literally nothing but the legacy of debts to be collected.

To conclude, for the author of Beowulf and his audience there can be but one ultimate hero, and he is Christ. Whatever is truly heroic comes from the imitation of Him, and the saint is the true hero. St. Edmund imitated Christ truly and is the saintly hero and martyr. Byrhthnoth is a hero who follows Christ and in so doing redeems that which is merely heroic within him. Beowulf is a hero who lacks Christ and reveals that the heroic in itself is an empty ideal. The contrast suggests the obvious, that Beowulf may have served as Christian apologetic, revealing the error of the ancestral way of the English, however eager for glory it was, and, in contrast, suggesting the truth and validity of Christian faith. Thus a central thematic function of Beowulf as Christian apologetic is, through the tragedy of its great and virtuous heathen hero, to promote by antithesis the concept of the Christian hero, true to himself in being true to Christ in seeking not glory but salvation. In the poet's intention the hero to emulate is not a Beowulf but a Byrhthnoth.

Notes

1. This chapter has been developed from a paper delivered in 1970 at the Fourth Annual Conference of the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, Binghamton, N.Y. which appears in Concepts of the Hero in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, edited by Norman Burns and Christopher Reagan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1975), pp. 1-26. Documentation has been up-dated through 1980 and less exhaustively through 1981.

2. W. F. Bolton, “Boethius and a Topos in Beowulf” (see Chapter One, note 2), illustrates the thematic role of what I have termed “polarity” by examination of the Boethian “topos, ‘one of two things,’” showing how for the hero “while the topos expresses a static view, the view is increasingly in error about the situation it observes and summarizes. … The pervasive dualism of Beowulf schematizes the conflicts that lie at the surface of the narrative. … Tragedy, accordingly, is not reversal of fortune but rather commitment to Fortune's sphere. … Beowulf's thrice repeated ‘one of two things’ predictions in the alternativefatal mode just before each of his three great fights express his grasp of his role in the world. The poet's concern is not with this world, however, but with man's understanding of it; epistemology is the central concern of Beowulf, and in this lie both its basic structure and close affinities with the Consolation,” pp. 16 ff. J. D. A. Ogilvy, “Beowulf, Alfred, and Christianity,” Saints, Scholars and Heroes (see Chapter One, note 2), observes the polarity and concludes that the poet “may have regarded Beowulf as a good pagan, like Dante's Vergil. At any rate, being a good Christian himself, he endowed Beowulf with such Christian virtues as were compatible with the heroic code. When Christian virtue and the code diverged, however—as in the matter of vengeance or of worldly fame—the Christian view came out a poor second (p. 64). Ogilvy is misled, I believe, by his failure to distinguish between the poet's attitude and that of his narrator and his characters. As Joseph Baird, “Unferth the Thyle,” Medium Aevum 39 (1970): 1-7, cogently observes, “The presence of conscious paganism in a poem has nothing to do with whether or not it is the work of a Christian poet”; rather it is “the attitude which he evinces toward this pagan subject matter.” Beowulf, indeed, splendidly exemplifies the heroic, but it is precisely the heroic which is being examined and found wanting on its own terms.

   Barbara Raw, The Art and Background of Old English Poetry (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978), observes the polarity but superimposes on it a modern point-of-view, coming to a somewhat anti-climatic view: “Heroism may be a glorious thing in poetry, but in real life it is seen to lead to nothing but misery. Moreover, by juxtaposing the mythical Beowulf, a type of the heroic ideal, with the real-life events of the digressions, the poet has shown the ideal for what it is: something splendid but impractical,” p. 96.

   Adelaide Hardy, “Historical Perspective and the ‘Beowulf’-poet,” Neophilologus 63 (1979): 430-49, from an historical perspective attempts an impossible reconciliation of the antitheses: “Through his hero the poet shows that faith in the Ruler of Man has immeasurable value because it inspires the esteemed Germanic ideal of absolute courage and loyalty,” 439. To consider that faith is justified by its reconciliation with the heroic is to posit a “historical perspective” which is closer by far to that of “ethical culture” than it is to either Germanic paganism (whatever that may have been) or Augustinian Christianity (whose limits of tolerance are not elastic). Only a resolute modernism could think of a Christian poet finding ultimate value in the ideal of the comitatus. It is such a view which leads to her conclusion: “The Beowulf-poet has accepted the challenge of conveying in formulaic verse the tension between old and new religions, evoking at the same time continuity through the complex theme of the comitatus—a court which is superficially noble, yet essentially ignoble, a vision of the human condition in which men enjoy the warmth and security of close-knit fellowship, yet are essentially alone in their freedom to choose alliance with a God they cannot see or touch” (pp. 445-46). This eloquent and perceptive conclusion cannot fail to evoke a responsive modern reaction; unfortunately, from the perspective of intellectual history, it is simply heretical and no part of an Augustinian frame of reference. A good corrective to Hardy's view is Anne Payne's “The Dane's Prayer to the ‘gastbona’ in Beowulf,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 80 (1979), which provides the right historical perspective on the poet's universality in observing that in his employment of the Christian-heathen polarity, he makes his audience aware that Christianity provides an antidote to the heroic, not a total cure, since man is always liable to mistake the values of the world for those of reality: “The poet was consciously drawing on the Christian-heathen dichotomy for a convenient metaphor to describe a state of mind which he found perpetually possible, perpetually destructive to his own society as well as to the heroic society he writes about” (pp. 508-9). W. F. Bolton, Alcuin and Beowulf (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1975), also provides a salutary reminder of what must be borne in mind when assessing the Christian poet's viewpoint on heroic virtue. “Beowulf has virtue, but virtues alone do not make a Christian; on the contrary, Alcuin insists, what makes a Christian—and hence saves a soul—is baptism and faith” (p. 155). Marijane Osborn, “The Great Feud: Scriptural History and Strife in Beowulf,” PMLA 93 (1978): 973-98, argues cogently for the need to maintain “two separate frames of reference” (p. 980), that is, the heroic against Augustine's two worlds.

   Finally, it should be noted that J. R. R. Tolkien, “Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics,” Proceedings of the British Academy 22 (1936): 245-95, marks the beginning of the serious study of the thematics of Beowulf, and that Dorothy Whitelock, The Audience of Beowulf (Oxford: the Clarendon Press, 1951), has laid the groundwork for our understanding of the intellectual milieu in which the poet wrote.

3. For citations see Douglas Short's bibliography (Chapter One, note 1.) The parameters are given recent illustration. Louise Wright, “Merewioingas and the Dating of Beowulf: a Reconsideration,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 42 (1980): 1-6, argues that the word gives a terminus a quo of possibly 751, but more likely early 800. Norman Blake, “The Dating of Old English Poetry,” An English Miscellany Presented to W. S. Mackie, edited by Brian Lee (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 14-27, argues for a date in the Alfredian period, and Nicolas Jacob, “Anglo-Danish Relations: Poetic Archaisms and the Date of Beowulf: a Reconsideration of the Evidence,” Poetica 8 (Tokyo, 1977): 23-43, also argues for the ninth century. In two recent books, which I have not had the opportunity to consult, the dating of Beowulf has been reconsidered: Kevin S. Kiernan, Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1981) has apparently presented a vigorously-argued dating of the poem in the eleventh century, but we are best advised to consider the matter as still open, a conclusion which follows from the collection of essays by various hands, The Dating of Beowulf, edited by Colin Chase (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981). In the light of what I have found in ælfric, Kiernan's dating would suit admirably my thesis that the poet's intellectual milieu is Augustinian, but is not essential to it since, early or late, the viewpoint is traditional and is based on an unchanging theological point of reference. Whatever the immediate context of the poet's own time may be, he remains within the parameters of the Christian view. Kiernan appears also to have presented important observations on the structure of Beowulf which, unfortunately must be left for later consideration in the detail they deserve.

4. Monumenta Alcuina, edited by Wattenbach and Duemmler (Berlin, 1873), p. 357.

5. Both lives are edited by G. I. Needham, Lives of Three English Saints (New York: Methuen, 1966). Translations are my own except where indicated.

6. Ludwigslied, edited by T. Schauffer in Althochdeutsche Litteratur, 2nd edition (Leipzig, 1900), pp. 119-23.

7. For The Dream of the Rood, Wonder of Creation and Judith see my Web of Words (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1970), pp. 85-88, 103-4, 173-78.

8. See my Doctrine and Poetry (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1959): 195-200; 237-38.

9. Widsith, Deor and Beowulf themselves testify, for example to the lively survival of the “heroic” literary conventions.

10. Reto Bezzola, Les Origines et la Formation de la Litterature Courtoise en Occident, Part I (Paris: Champion, 1958), pp. 19-21 and 98.

11. William of Malmesbury, Gesta Pontificum Anglorum, Vol. 5, edited by N. Hamilton (London, 1870), p. 38.

12. Just such an attempt is apparently made by Jon Kasik, “The Use of the Term ‘Wyrd’ in ‘Beowulf,’” Neophilologus 63 (1979): 128-35. He concludes that his “analysis shows that the Beowulf-poet used the term ‘Wyrd’ in neither a purely pagan nor a purely Christian sense” (p. 132). Although he does examine each example of ‘wyrd’ in the poem, his conclusion results from the primary critical error of failing to distinguish between a character's use of the term and the author's. Further, he totally ignores the background of intellectual history which must undergird any attempt at semantic analysis. For a somewhat similar attempt, see Adelaide Hardy, note 5 above, and Robert L. Kindrick, “Germanic Sapientia and the Heroic Ethos of Beowulf,” Medievalia et Humanistica 10 (1981): 1-17, who concludes that Beowulf represents a genuine advancement in the development of social consciousness” (p. 14), a comfortable conclusion whatever it may mean. Robert Levine, “Ingeld and Christ: a Medieval Problem,” Viator 2 (1971): 105-28, solved the problem ignotum per obscurum by finding a “compassable ambiguity” (p. 117).

13. M. B. McNamee, “Beowulf—an Allegory of Salvation,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 59 (1960): 190-207, demonstrates that almost anything can be allegorized, but that it is another matter to show that Beowulf is actually allegorical. Charles Donahue, “Beowulf and Christian Doctrine: a Reconsideration from a Celtic Stance.” Traditio 27 (1965): 55-116, although denying that allegory is involved (p. 116), would, however, make Beowulf a kind of type of Christ. His argument fails in not taking into account the downward movement of the poem. For an important study of typology in Beowulf, see Margaret Goldsmith, The Mode and Meaning of Beowulf (London: Athlone Press, 1970). John Halverson, “Beowulf and the Pitfalls of Piety,” The University of Toronto Quarterly 35 (1965-66): 260-78, with a certain amount of gleeful accuracy smashes the arguments for transforming Beowulf through allegory, significantly concluding against “an optimistic view of what happens in Beowulf,” that “its power … lies precisely in the fact that it represents a world without salvation” (p. 277). Curiously, however, he also considers that it is tragic because it is not Christian, failing again to distinguish the poet from his story.

    To conclude, Beowulf is not Christian allegory, but this is not to deny what Margaret Goldsmith and recently Sylvia Horowitz, “Beowulf, Samson, David and Christ,” Studies in Medieval Culture 12 (1978): 17-23, have demonstrated—that biblical typology exists in Beowulf. A distinction must be kept in mind, however, as Sylvia Horowitz makes clear in her conclusion that “in Beowulf we have a post-Christ figure who symbolizes Christ in the way that Samson and David did” (p. 22). David and Christ may be typologically similar in being agents of God, but David, through grace, may prefigure Christ; Beowulf cannot. He can, with reservations, symbolize David and through him Christ. Because he is outside grace, a basic limitation is in effect, and when he ceases to act as God's agent, he ceases to typify David. He is the dark mirror in which is reflected both of Augustine's cities; as God's agent in Denmark he typifies the citizen of Jerusalem, as heroic warrior facing the dragon he typifies the citizen of Babylon.

14. Web of Words, p. 146. ælfric's adjuration is based on traditional view, for a summary of which see my “The Concept of the Hero,” (note 1 above), pp. 24-25, note 10.

15. The Battle of Maldon, edited by Eric Gordon (New York: Methuen, 1966).

16. As Morton Bloomfield, “Beowulf, Byrthnoth, and the Judgment of God: Trial by Combat in Anglo-Saxon England,” Speculum 44 (1969): 547-48, observed. George Clark, “The Hero of Maldon: Vir Pius et Strenuus,” Speculum 44 (1979): 257-82, unconvincingly attempts to show that Byrhthnoth's decision to let the Vikings cross was sensible and thus that Byrhthnoth is an unsullied hero. It should be observed, however, that for the poet, Byrhthnoth was not less a hero because of his heroic pride, which is, indeed, essential to his being an heroic figure. But in finding him a true hero, he does not exonerate him from the Christian condemnation of the heroic ethic; from this he is exonerated through the operation of grace and his conscious service of God. Fred Robinson, “God, Death, and Loyalty in the Battle of Maldon,” J. R. R. Tolkien, Scholar and Story Teller, edited by Mary Salu and Robert Farrell (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 64-75, provides a convenient review of the controversy. He correctly observes “that Maldon was written out of a culture whose fundamental assumptions about God and death were incompatible with a heroic sense of life” (p. 77), but places the reconciliation of Christianity and the heroic (that is, the poet's universality), upon the pivot of the loyalty of Byrhthnoth's doomed men. This appears to me to miss the point of what is argued here and earlier in “Concepts,” (see note 1 above) of which he has not taken note.

17. This represents, in essence, the view of Patrick Wormald, “Bede, Beowulf and the Conversion of the Anglo-Saxon Aristocracy,” Bede and Anglo-Saxon England, edited by Robert Farrell (Oxford: British Archaeology Reports, 1978), pp. 32-95. He finds that “the early English Church was, in a sense, dominated by aristocratic values,” so that “the coming of Christianity displaced the old Gods, and diverted traditional values into new postures, but it did not change these values” (p. 67). He further considers that the dualism of Christianity and paganism “springs from a fundamental tension within the poet's soul” (p. 67). Tension, however, is not reconciliation of discordant views of value; such reconciliation can be found only in the concept of martyrdom.

18. See Doctrine and Poetry (note 8 above), pp. 28-29, 66-67. John Gardner, “Fulgentius' ‘Expositio Vergiliana Continentia’ and the Plan of Beowulf: an Approach to the Poem's Style and Structure,” Papers on Language and Literature 6 (1970): 227-62, provides an appealing suggestion of the influence of just such Christian allegorization on Beowulf.

19. Robert Finnegan, “Beowulf at the Mere (and elsewhere),” Mosaic 11, no. 4 (1978): 45-54, makes the point that in Beowulf “the characters within the artistic frame” do not have the Christian “perspective and cannot have it” (p. 48). He concludes that the hero “is the good man, manqué from the Christian point of view, struggling to defeat forces he cannot fully understand with weapons that often do not function at need … and becomes increasingly entrammeled in the meshes of the society of which he is part. … The society which as king he represents is judged and found wanting” (p. 54). Edmund Reiss, “Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism as Subject and Theme in Medieval Narrative,” Proceedings of the IVth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, edited by François Jost (The Hague: Mouton, 1966) 1: 619-22, finds Augustine's doctrine of the Two Cities reflected in Beowulf: as agent of God he reflects the heavenly, but in his pride when he attacks the dragon he reflects the worldly city.

20. Robert Hanning, “Beowulf as Heroic History,” Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series 5 (1974): 77-102, independently and from a different perspective arrived at conclusions encouragingly similar to my own. Beowulf, he cogently argues, “functions as a post-conversion essay in pre-conversion heroic history” (p. 88). Of Beowulf's death he says the poet “completely reverses all tendencies toward harmony in heroic history, and offers instead a soured, ironic version of what has gone on before, embodying a final assessment of a world without God as a world in which time and history are themselves negative concepts”; he further notes that the poet uses “the metaphor of treasure … as an image of flawed achievement and human limitation” (p. 94).

21. Robert Morrison, “Beowulf 698a: ‘frofor ond fultum,’” Notes and Queries, New Series 27 (1980): 193-94 in a detailed analysis of the biblical influence on the phrase supplies further evidence for Beowulf's being considered as God's agent in his adventures in Denmark.

22. See Chapter Five note to lines 1705-8.

23. A. J. Bliss, “Beowulf, Lines 3074-75,” J. R. R. Tolkien (see note 16 above), in his analysis of the much-debated curse on the treasure, which he finds symbolic (see Chapter Five, note to lines 3074-75), makes clear Beowulf's flaw. The curse, he states, “symbolizes the corrupting power of the gold (hæðen gold as it is called in line 2276), which the poet has described explicitly in lines 2764-66. … Far from being arbitrary, the curse is the direct consequence of Beowulf's avarice” (p. 60), and “in lines 2345-47, a verbal reminiscence emphasizes the fact that Beowulf … did succumb to arrogance” (p. 61). (See Chapter Five, note to line 2345). Thus, “far from being a hero without tragic flaw’ [Arthur Brodeur, The Art of Beowulf, p. 105], he is a hero with two tragic flaws.” John Gardner, “Guilt and the World's Complexity: the Murder of Ongentheow and the Slaying of the Dragon,” Anglo-Saxon Poetry: Essays in Appreciation for John C. McGalliard, edited by Lewis Nicholson and Dolores Frese (Notre Dame: University Press, 1975), pp. 14-22, comes to a somewhat similar conclusion (pp. 21-22). Robert Burlin, however, comes to a startlingly different one, in “Inner Weather and Interlace: A Note on the Semantic value of Structure in Beowulf,” Old English Studies in Honor of John C. Pope, edited by Robert Burlin and Edward Irving (Toronto: University Press, 1974). The poet “does not need to find some flaw—Augustinian or Aristotelian—in his hero or some inherent deficiency in the heroic society he embodies, to envision the death of Beowulf and its consequences.” He arrives at this conclusion without effective massing of evidence, as with Bliss, but I suspect that the dichotomy rests on almost inarguable premises. Both feel the force of the poet's “universality,” but Burlin, I would venture, feels that such universality is cabined and confined by reference to an historical frame, where I (and I assume Gardner and Bliss) feel that universality is thereby enhanced.

24. Norman Eliason, “Beowulf, Wiglaf and the Wægmundings,” Anglo-Saxon England 7 (1978): 95-118, puts the matter clearly: “The Wægmundings [through Weohstan] had earned Onela's gratitude. … Later when the Swedish king's gratitude was extended to Beowulf [in offering him the throne], we are surely to understand that this was because of Beowulf's connection with the Wægmunding family.” Beowulf attacks Onela, however, “to avenge the death of Heardred. … The moral is plain: man's transcendent duty is to avenge the killing of his kinsman or his king” (p. 100).

25. Anne Payne, “Three Aspects of Wyrd in Beowulf,” Old English Studies in Honor of John C. Pope (see note 23), presents the issue with clarity: “The nature of Beowulf's violation puts him in a narrow place where no universal forces reflect and magnify his energies. … He is not able to project in this episode an adequate understanding against the challenge, so as to put himself immediately in touch with what he should have done; he is too close to his error,” and thus his boast before the dragon battle “is characterized by a desperate search for a comprehensible mode of action and fulfillment” (p. 23). “The heroic code, even if followed at the highest of all ethical levels, is not sufficiently inclusive to materialize clearly the divine order of things for man to follow” (p. 26).

26. Larry Benson, “The Originality of Beowulf,” The Interpretation of Narrative, edited by Morton Bloomfield (Harvard English Studies 1, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), places Beowulf's death with accuracy as “an unusual death for a hero, for though heroes must die they die gloriously; their death is their victory. Not so with Beowulf. … The poet goes out of his way to stress the futility, the ultimate defeat that Beowulf suffers” (p. 32). See also his “The Pagan Coloring of Beowulf,” in Old English Poetry, edited by Robert Creed (Providence, R. I.: Brown University Press, 1967), pp. 193-213.