SOURCE: “The Theme and Structure of Beowulf,” in Studies in Philology, Vol. LXXII, No. 1, January, 1975, pp. 1-27.

[In the following essay, Hume maintains that Beowulf's construction emphasizes the author's concern with theme, rather than with the hero or the action. The major thematic issue of the poem, Hume states, is the threat to social order.]

I

What is Beowulf about? Ever since Turner, Conybeare, and Grundtvig impressed Beowulf's name on this titleless poem, the natural answer has been “Beowulf, the hero.” This assumption, so simple and inevitable as to be almost unconscious, lies behind most subsequent criticism, and is responsible for much that makes it contradictory and unsatisfactory. Actually, the author's handling of Beowulf and his selection of events neither suggest nor suit a hero-centered design.

No Heldenleben could overlook the steps in the edwenden from sleac, unfrom youth to monster queller; at the very least we might expect to be told as much about the transformation as appears in Viga-Glum's Saga. The author could hardly fail to make much of the rise to kingship, particularly since it was complicated by moral dilemmas concerning Heardred and Onela of a sort which would have delighted later saga writers. An ordinary celebration of a hero would probably have dilated upon the vengeance Beowulf exacted for the death of Hygelac, his beloved uncle and king.¹ Sherman Kuhn is correct in stating that the facts for a coherent life of Beowulf are present,² but the information appears in allusive and fragmented form—interlaced—and interlace narrative technique is better suited to the creation of juxtapositions of a moral or thematic nature than for simple heroic narrative.³

Were the poem centered on Beowulf himself, we would expect to learn something about him as a person. Instead, we hear his public pronouncements and watch his attempts to deal with three monsters. Virtually nothing else is given us: few private thoughts or personal hopes or misgivings; no characterizing features except extraordinary strength. Beowulf does not even have a striking possession used by the author to build our sense of his heroic presence. His helmet has boars on it (l. 1453), but so do those of his men (l. 303).⁴ His corselet is Welandes geweorc (l. 455), but except for a later testimonial to its efficacy, nothing is made of that fact. His sword is of so little import that he does not use it in the first two fights and breaks it in the third. Beowulf's relations with other people are all public and formal; and though we infer deep feeling for Hygelac, we witness no more personal an exchange than might take place between any staff commander and scout. We do not know if Beowulf ever married. He is his actions in three fights and their immediate contexts, and little else besides.

If one argues that the piece is not really hero- but rather action-oriented, other objections have to be met. The notorious lack of suspense is not consonant with adventure for its own sake. Nor can an action-centered reading explain the long passages describing Swedish wars or the elegiac digressions on the old man and last survivor. Moreover, a sad ending is so foreign to the adventure-story pattern that anyone treating the poem purely as an entertaining tale would have to consider whether something more were not hinted at in the melancholy of the conclusion.

Assumptions of hero- or action-orientation underlie many readings of the poem despite the complete inability of either approach to account for the poem's structure. There are three fights, each occupying one third of the whole; however, they take place at only two stages in Beowulf's life, in two countries, and involve only two kinds of monster. That critics should disagree over whether the structure has two parts or three is hardly surprising. Those concentrating on the hero tend to see two, those on action usually prefer three.⁵ But neither camp has produced a structural analysis which does not, by implication, damn the poet for gross incompetence, or leave the critic with a logically awkward position. Tolkien, for instance, who considers the structure one of the work's most admirable strengths, believes the poem to reflect “two moments in a great life, rising and setting … youth and age.”⁶ But if the poet meant to play life's extremes against each other, balancing them like verse half-lines, why are the two movements not more similar in length and plot-construction? Is the Grendel's mother episode anything but an excrescence in a youth/age dichotomy, or indeed in any two-part reading? If, on the other hand, the poet was more concerned with the monsters in a three-part action than with the hero, why should the first two antagonists be so similar? No critic of either persuasion has succeeded in explaining the nature and sequence of the monsters. Why are two so alike? Why does a dragon come last? Why three? Concentration on hero or action reduces the antagonists to mere folktale monstrosities, and to inexplicability.

Because nothing of Beowulf's life is presented in detail except his attempts to deal with monsters; because of the author's suppressions and omissions (exceedingly odd by any biographical standard); and because the three antagonists bulk so large in the poem, logic suggests that the poem's concern will be determined by whatever significance the poet assigns to the monsters, and that the poet's interest in Beowulf is not in him as a person, however heroic, but in his stand against his adversaries. Every feature of the poem's construction supposes concern with a theme rather than hero or action, and the clue to the theme seems to lie in the prominence and nature of the monsters.

The thematic approach to Beowulf is not new, though critics using it rarely seem aware of the changes in perspective which their stance demands, or of the corollaries such changes suggest. A representative spread of proposed themes would include the offerings of Schücking (Königsideal), Gradon (exemplary heroic action and the influence of Fortune's mutability), Kaske (sapientia and fortitudo), Goldsmith (pride and covetousness), Lee (hell's possession of middle-earth), Leyerle (the fatal contradiction at the core of heroic society), Kahrl and O'Loughlin (feuding), and Halverson (order versus chaos).⁷ Such thematic interpretations share, to a greater or lesser degree, one drawback: they tend to rest for supportive evidence on relatively few lines, and consequently the resultant readings, as can be seen, are wildly varied—indeed are often mutually exclusive—and none has gained general acceptance. Most students of the poem would agree that such readings are useful for sensitizing us to the poem's nuances, but that they are weak on broader issues. By failing to explain the role of Grendel's mother or the Swedish wars, or to account for the number, kind, and ordering of the monsters, most such readings have greatly lessened their claims to consideration as total and self-sufficient interpretations.

Because the logical objections to hero- or action-orientation are so strong, it seems unlikely that they can offer more light on the poem. The thematic approach however is not thus limited on theoretical grounds, and indeed idea-orientation seems called for by such features as the interlace-style. I will attempt, therefore, to establish a thematic reading able to withstand the objections just raised. The controlling theme of the poem, I believe, is threats to social order. Specifically, these threats are troublemaking, revenge, and war—problems inescapably inherent in this kind of heroic society, yet profoundly inimical to its existence. The poem's structure is simply the progressive sequence of these threats, each embodied in a suitable monster. In Beowulf's conduct, we see the best responses possible within this society. Stated so bluntly, such a reading sounds over-schematic and indifferent to the poem's emotional complexity. Indubitably too, “threats to social order” lacks the catchy appeal of sapientia and fortitudo, or youth and age, or man versus death. But this concept of the subject can greatly sharpen our grasp of the interrelation of the poem's parts and assist in explaining the function of apparently extraneous details.

II

If we examine the monsters in terms of their motives and the effects they have on those humans unfortunate enough to cross them, a definite pattern emerges. Grendel is driven by two intertwined motives. The first is a kind of envy—the envy of one dreamum bedæled for those living in wynn, of the dweller in darkness for those in light, of one from the lonely moors for those of the hall. He may envy their more harmonious relations with the Creator, even as Cain envied Abel. Such differences fill him with a lust to destroy. The second motive, less easily described but arguably more important, is the twist of character which leaves him untouched by all the usual social restraints and inhibitions against violence toward others. Not only does he kill freely, he even enjoys the act: his eyes light up (ll. 726-7), his mod ahlog (l. 730), he lust wigeð (l. 599).⁸ For whatever reasons of heredity or environment, he has the killer mentality which characterizes most of the deliberate troublemakers in heroic narrative. Thjostolf and Hrapp in Njal's Saga systematically say and do the unforgivable, and enjoy the results. So too does Egil Skallagrimsson, albeit successfully. Many a king's berserk or arrogant man-at-arms in the sagas conforms to the type. So apparently does Unferth.

Being a larger-than-life embodiment of the Cain-principle, Grendel's effect is proportionately hyperbolical. A troublemaker in a hall makes a sham of all expressions of brotherhood and solidarity. He undermines his lord's power and control. He causes bad feeling with his insults and taunts, and eventually he starts quarrels which lead to somebody's death. Grendel does all this and more. He literally makes hollow the hall and all its promise of social joy by rendering it uninhabitable at night. He undercuts Hrothgar's rule until only a feeble travesty of royal power remains, and of course he murders retainers at will. Though he must, by virtue of his monstrous nature, operate from outside, his symbolic equivalence to a force normally found within society is underlined by his human shape and by the author's ironic treatment of him as a healðegn.⁹ Like Cain, Grendel is an originator of feuds. Feuds do not start unless some interested party has a streak of unreasonableness, whether as aggressor or as injured party unwilling to accept fair compensation. Grendel, in his mentality, his descent from Cain, and his effect, is a personification of such unreason.

Grendel's mother represents the sequent force which complicates a feud once it is started. As is generally recognized, she has one simple motive—revenge. This too is often an unreasoning emotional drive. To everyone else, Grendel is a vicious killer whose death was an unmixed blessing. The lady of the mere only knows that her son is dead. The revenge principle cannot come into play until a feud has been initiated, but once invoked, can carry on and extend the scope of the violence indefinitely. In a typical saga act of vengeance, she comes when totally unexpected, falls upon those sleeping, and kills a man who bears no direct responsibility for her son's death. What makes vengeance so uncontrollable and tragic is the fact that it is directed by the same laudable forces which help create and ensure social order in a violent world—the desire to conserve and protect kin or allies. Exercised blindly, without regard for higher justice, however, this desire destroys social harmony as surely as does the troublemaker.

Folktales, because of their rapid pacing, can repeat an event or figure, and the incremental effect will be pleasing. What works in the Bear's Son Tale because description is minimal, however, is aesthetically clumsy in Beowulf. Grendel and his mother are simply too like each other for the good of the narrative, despite the pains the author took to vary them. Their similarity upsets our sense of the poem's structure; the later shift to a dragon is made to seem more of a discontinuity than is warranted just because of his differing species. This flaw has to be recognized and admitted. If my reading of the monsters' significance is correct, however, we can at least explain how the author got himself boxed into this corner. If the second adversary is to represent the revenge-principle, then Beowulf must do something which would incur vengeful retaliation. Were the second monster from a different land and period in his career, the author would have had to construct an elaborate setting to account for Beowulf's deserving such enmity, and would, moreover, have been hard pressed to concoct one in which Beowulf was as guiltless of wrongful aggression as here. The evidence of the analogues suggests that the author found ready to hand a monstrous relation living with the Grendel-counterpart, and decided that a mother would be ideally suited to the economical development of his thematic pattern.¹⁰ She qualifies as an avenger precisely because she is Grendel's relative and is naturally therefore very like him.

Reasons for the third monster not being just another of Grendel's kin lie in the typical interests and weapons of dragons. Draca sceal on hlæwe, / frod, frætwum wlanc.¹¹ The desire to possess gold motivates him, and his reaction when robbed is to exact appalling retribution by burning Beowulf's great hall as well as the lesser buildings of the land. If, judged by motive and effect, Grendel is the originator of feuds and his mother an unreasoning wreaker of vengeance, the dragon represents war,¹² more specifically the sort of war which can upset the balance of social order. Civil war has that effect; so does fighting on home territory against an invader. Even an unsuccessful foreign venture like Hygelac's rash Frisian raid may also prove so costly in important lives that it too can be said to upset the balance. The dragon behaves like an invader, firing the countryside and burning buildings. Since such national wars often followed as extensions of smaller feuds, the dragon logically comes third in this progression of threats to social order.

The author does not seem to have counted successful foreign fighting as evil in quite the same way as he does these other types of war. A king had to extract wealth from someone if he was to maintain order in his own realm. Without rings to give, he could not hope to keep his retainers loyal. The fatal flaw in heroic social theory may not have been the code of individual honor¹³ (which was in theory subject to reason and higher justice), but the necessity of waging wars to replenish a kingdom's coffers with immediate spoil and future tribute. Such wars may not bring instant trouble to the victor, but they lay it up for the future. Beowulf managed through his long reign to keep others from preying on his people—næs se folccyning, / ymbesittendra ðnig ðara, / þe mec guðwinum gretan dorste (ll. 2733-5)—and apparently gained enough gold to keep his kingdom prosperous and peaceful, but he and his predecessors incurred such envy and hatred from neighboring lands that the messenger expects invasion once news of the king's death spreads.

If a good man and the abstraction “troublemaking” are given heroic shapes and matched in contest, we expect the good man to win, for troublemaking is not a sin likely to overcome him. Likewise, with luck and God's grace, he may avoid being swept up by the wild dictates of revenge. Undoubtedly he will have to undertake occasional revenges, even as Beowulf agreed to face Grendel's mother, but he will act decisively and without malice, and without unreasonable obstinacy. But the good man cannot avoid taking part in war. He cannot, within heroic society, eradicate this threat to order; at best he can hope to minimize the possible miseries to his own people, and no nation can expect to succeed in war forever. Hence Beowulf's attempt to root out the third threat to society is a kind of stand off: as king, he has kept war from disturbing the harmony of his society, so he can rightfully defeat the dragon. But success at expense of rival nations is self-limiting. Too much of it, and envious neighbors will band together to gain revenge and plunder. Beowulf is overcome at the height of his triumph, precisely as his realm will be. But his death is no personal defeat, as we can sense from the magnificence of his last effort. Tolkien is surely right when he insists that the dragon is aesthetically “the right end for Beowulf” (p. 276). Had Beowulf been killed by one of the monsters while yet a young man, his death would have been tragic; that he should die so when old, especially when taking his antagonist with him and leaving treasure for his people, is the highest blaze of glory achievable within the heroic framework, Or, in terms of his motives and effects, þæt wæs god cyning.

III

Judged by their deeds, the monsters appear to represent the three forces most inimical to heroic social order. Even in physical shape and sequence, they fit a pattern: the two threats usually offered by single individuals within a society are given man-like form and are related, as befits the logical tie between instigation and revenge. That war should succeed feuding conforms to actual practice: Ecgtheow was refused refuge by the Geats lest he bring war on his protectors. Though the dragon's differing species is initially disconcerting, we can admit his extraordinary aptness to his role. Not only are his tactics those of war, but so is his concern with wealth. He is even encased in armor.

But the poem is not reducible to its three fights alone. Interpreters must also examine the other strands of narrative. “Historical” episodes are interwoven with the contests, some being mentioned only once; others, like Hygelac's raid, recurrently. And there are a number of set pieces whose contextual relevance is problematical: Hrothgar's sermon, the old man's lament, the lay of the last survivor. Allusions to other heroes form another body of referential matter. To be taken at all seriously, a thematic interpretation must account for the presence of such material. Most thematic interpreters have not even tried to be thorough. Halverson (order versus chaos) and Kahrl and O'Loughlin (feuding) are best able to be so because of the broad applicability of their themes, and obviously this reading resembles theirs. But I believe that more precise distinctions and arrangements are actually present, that the subsidiary material in each movement is specifically relevant to the monster.

The poem's first movement is preceded by the Scyld episode, generally considered a prelude to the total work, a variant equivalent to Beowulf's own life pattern rather than a narrowly relevant introit to the Grendel story. But it functions as both. The activity most important to Scyld's winning the poet's accolade þæt wæs god cyning seems to be his successful foreign fighting: he drove away or subjugated his neighbors and milked tribute from them. He also brought internal order after an interregnum, and left an heir of age to rule the realm. His people appreciated this combination of luck, policy, and success, and gave him a splendid funeral; thanks to him, they could afford such a gesture. His treasury, which his heirs increased through war (l. 64), led to the construction of Heorot and the subsequent envy of Grendel. If envy breeds feud on the personal level and war on the national, then we get in the Scyld passage the evidence we need to see the inevitability of the progressive rise to success and fall to misery which will occupy the Danes from Scyld's appearance to the Heathobard's burning of Heorot. The social problems, as well as the overall life pattern, are indeed the same for Scyld and Beowulf, but Scyld's deeds are also important to the precarious state in which Beowulf finds Denmark.

Cain's relevance to Grendel has already been mentioned. Both originate feuds for no defensible reason: Cain the first to distress the harmony of creation, Grendel the first to challenge successfully the Danish prosperity founded by Scyld. And within the hall, Unferth, brother-slayer and troublemaker, sits at the feet of the Lord of the Scyldings, his presence boding ill for the future. Another referential figure apparently akin to these is Ecgtheow. Hrothgar wishes to interpret Beowulf's arrival as a gesture of thanks, not of pity, and so reminds the hero Gesloh þin fæder fæhðe mæste (l. 459)—Ecgtheow started a feud with the Wilfings and made the peninsular regions too hot to hold him. Hrothgar takes credit for sheltering Beowulf's father and composing the feud. Sigemund and Heremod are two other outside figures the poet seems to bring into this pattern. The Sigemund allusion can be justified purely on grounds of immediate local relevance: as part of celebrating Beowulf's exploit, the harper sings of another killer of monsters and eotena cynnes (l. 883). Despite the generally favorable nature of the reference, the author attributes to the harper songs concerning divers fæhðe ond fyrena (l. 879) not generally known. This may imply that the harper knew of traditions attributing feud-starting crimes to Sigemund, for the same phrase, fæhðe ond fyrene, is used of Grendel (l. 137). The Heremod passage can also be justified on aesthetic grounds, but the import of the accusing description is that Heremod became a problem, an aldorcearu or a threat to the very lives of his people, and therefore may be said to exemplify the willingness to kill and the unreason which characterize other external figures alluded to in the Grendel movement. All the currents and undercurrents of the poem's first movement concern the starting of trouble; Beowulf works to eradicate it. Specifically, in real-life terms, he meets and bests a quarrelsome drunken troublemaker without indulging in complementary violence; and in the heightened terms of the heroic agon, he defeats the feud originator Grendel.

If the poet was indeed fitting his material thematically to three monsters, we might expect abrupt and aesthetically awkward shifts as he passed from one to the next. He seems, however, to have forestalled the difficulty by providing two intermodulatory set pieces: the Finn story and Beowulf's prediction concerning Danish-Heathobard relations. That which transposes the thematic key from starting feuds to revenge, the Finnsburg story, is told as hall entertainment after Grendel's defeat and before his mother's foray. The first steps in the Finnsburg clash are unclear; all we can determine is that a solemn treaty was made, that the exigencies of winter kept the two parties penned together, and that Hengest, as spring approached, decided to seek revenge for his fallen lord despite his oaths. That the story has other artistic purposes has long been recognized. Wealtheow's joy is as doomed as Hildeburgh's, for she and her old husband are blindly determined, against custom and reason, that their young son shall inherit the Scylding throne despite the presence of Hrothulf, an adult and ambitious prince.¹⁴ The episode serves more than one function, but by the author's choice of details—little on the origins of the strife, much on the treaty and Hengest's change of mind—the revenge motif is insinuated into our thoughts before the second monster arrives, and her appearance is therefore a satisfaction to our halfroused expectations, not an awkward surprise.

Trouble is more easily checked before revenge complicates the picture than after. A good man can curb his behavior and avoid starting feuds, but he may not be able to avoid being sucked into quarrels through the actions of his relatives. Moreover, treacherous slaughter can make even a mild man thirst for vengeance if its victim is a beloved son or brother. For reasons such as these, any figure signifying revenge ought to be more difficult to overcome than one representing troublemaking. Simply within oneself, the latter is easier to control than the former. Beowulf is very hard pressed by the merewif, but with luck and God's grace he accomplishes his task. Because there are no close relatives left, the feud he has undertaken on another's behalf is ended for good. In terms of his own conduct, Beowulf is completely successful: it is not his fault (as Kahrl observes) that though he can rescue the Danes from monsters, he cannot save them from themselves.

The main action in this second movement is uncomplicated. What is problematical is the series of remarks Hrothgar makes while handling the hilt Beowulf has presented to him. The speech is clearly relevant to interpretations centered on ideal kingship, and indirectly to the theme of sapientia and fortitudo. It can be treated as a warning by those who consider Beowulf's fight with the dragon proof that his judgment has been twisted by ofermod. The words may be read as a device of characterization: the old man retreats to minatory moralizing when this embodiment of youth, strength, valor, and wisdom makes him feel his own shortcomings. The sentiments do not, however, have any direct bearing on troublemaking, revenge, or war, as I freely admit. However, Hrothgar five times touches on a complementary concern—the giving of gold. After a few words of formal praise, he says to Beowulf Ic þe sceal mine gelæstan / freode, swa wit furðum spræcon (ll. 1706-7). Given Hrothgar's notions of kingly gratitude and the phrase swa wit furðum spræcon, the implication is that Hrothgar wishes to tell Beowulf that fit gifts will be forthcoming, for their last two exchanges prior to Beowulf's descent into the mere concerned just this matter of treasure. Hrothgar promised reward for this second, unanticipated fight (ll. 1380-2) and later Beowulf asked for assurance that should he die, the treasure would be sent to Hygelac (ll. 1482-7).

Following the rhetorical convention of contrast, Hrothgar mentions Heremod, and it becomes clear that he was indeed a Cain- and Grendel-like figure who killed often and unreasonably—breat bolgenmod beodgeneatas, / eaxlgesteallan (ll. 1713-4). However, another characteristic emerges also: nallas beagas geaf / Denum æfter dome (ll. 1719-20). Hrothgar underlines the enormity of this niggardliness and of Heremod's consequent suffering by exclaiming Du þe lær be þon, / gumcyste ongit! (ll. 1722-3).

Then Hrothgar expatiates on the ruler who is given everything by a beneficent God. After describing the hypothetical ruler's blessings and the degeneration of outlook which gradually darkens his mind, Hrothgar gets down to specific results and the first is nallas on gylp seleð / fætte beagas (ll. 1749-50). Ultimately, Hrothgar points out, someone else will inherit se þe unmurnlice madmas dæleþ, / eorles ærgestreon (ll. 1756-7). Again, Hrothgar admonishes Bebeorh þe ðone bealonið, Beowulf leofa (l. 1758).

The substance of his disquisition on the fates of men and the reference to his own experience seems to be his insistence that for one who has faithfully dealt out treasure, help will come should trouble arise. Naturally such help comes because of a man's reputation for generous dealing. Hrothgar ends his speech with yet another assurance that payment will be forthcoming: unc sceal worn fela / maþ ma gemænra, siþðan morgen bið (ll. 1783-4). Gold giving is not Hrothgar's only theme by any means, but it plays a more central part than is generally realized among all the warnings about failing strength, pride, and the inevitability of death. He states the cardinal commandment enjoined upon a king by his position and the customs of the time. Just as a dragon must guard a hoard, Cyning sceal on healle / beagas dælan.¹⁵ This imperative—reward good conduct fittingly—helps a king overcome trouble and feuds, and thus strengthen social order. The same laudable rule, however, involves him in wars to win the wealth to give rewards.

Just as the first and second movements are bridged by an intermodulatory set piece—the Finnsburg Episode—the second and third are similarly spanned, this time by Beowulf's prediction concerning Danish-Heathobard relations. The former charts the development from uneasy treaty to revenge; Beowulf's prophecy takes the two nations from fragile truce to war. The fight is sparked, appropriately enough, by a piece of war-spoil. Though details of the enmity are difficult to untangle, lines 81-5 imply that ultimately the Heathobard Ingeld sets Heorot to the torch, the quintessential act of war, since it destroys the symbolic heart of a nation. Beowulf's forecast raises fairly definite expectations of the theme the author wishes next to consider.

The third movement gives the impression of separateness. Beowulf has changed. From being young, he is now exceedingly old. From being the king's nephew, he has risen through tragedy and political confusion to be king. He is not in Denmark (mostly an island-nation with natural boundaries) but in Sweden, where there are no easily defensible territorial divisions, and where neighbors are hereditary foes. Moreover, the monsters differ in the two locales. If my reading is correct, the three sections should seem more equivalent. What accounts for the separation of the third part?

The change in location presumably follows from two traditions: the author seems to have known some story of Swedish wars and either found Beowulf part of the tale, or decided to graft him into it. Also inherited in all probability was a form of the Bear's Son Tale localized in Denmark, perhaps some progenitor of the Bothvar Bjarki story. That Beowulf should prove his heroism away from his native land upsets none of our aesthetic assumptions; in folktale (and, later, romance) such a test archetypally takes place in a distant or special realm. We would feel no unease at two adventures, one Danish and one Swedish (AB), nor at three in three separate lands (ABC), nor at the Danish sequence followed by a homecoming but no dragon (aBa). What the author has given us—AAB—is unsymmetrical. But the related nature of troublemaking and vengeance, and the necessity of Beowulf's attracting a vengeful attack without reproach to his conduct, make it expedient and economical to tie the first two thematic concerns together.

As for Beowulf's being old and a king, those developments are also logically explicable. The ruler, not the hero, is the figure who decides whether to make war or not, fends off invasions, and has to concern himself with the state of his treasury. If he is to keep the loyalty and praise of his retainers, he must always be on the watch for wealth which can be obtained with as little loss to his men as possible, and must choose whether to risk battle for the gold or not. Beowulf's being advanced to lordship for a thematic consideration of war is virtually necessary, but being king at the beginning would have precluded his rightfully risking his life to free some other realm of its monsters. Goldsmith and Leyerle even argue that his foray against the dragon is improper for a king. By the tenets of later social theories, that is correct; but I question whether the logic of the later theories applies to Beowulf and to primitive kingship. The protection that Beowulf's name affords his people against hostile neighbors will last only as long as he proves powerful. A dragon unchecked in its ravages would invite invasion as readily as news of his death. Even had Beowulf failed to kill the beast, his willing gift of his life for his realm must be counted to his credit, and since he manages to kill his adversary, he seems to me to deserve nothing but admiration. Leyerle disagrees; but I would say that Beowulf cuts a much better figure than Hrothgar in a similar situation.

Beowulf's shift in age seems best explained by reference to audience response. Had Beowulf died young, or even in his prime, the effect produced would have been that of pathos, of lament for potential unfulfilled. We would feel pity for the hero and our thoughts would center on this personal tragedy. Beowulf's dying as he does reduces the pathetic and personal element to negligible proportions. To die heroically instead of in his bed is no loss to him.¹⁶ He is very old, and any span hypothetically left to his frame is borrowed time. He is spared the frustration of living beyond his power—and even granting Hrothgar all dignity and virtue, the Danish king is a man who has outlived his usefulness.¹⁷ Beowulf's dying old transfers our focus from the personal aspects of his death to larger problems—social order, the unstable nature of earthly good, dilemmas of conduct, and other such general concerns.

The dragon harms the Geat nation as a war would, with hall burning and fire raising. His reason for invading is one of the usual reasons for belligerence: some of his wealth has been stolen. Once he is pulled into the quarrel, Beowulf's concerns are those of any conscientious king—protecting his people and winning treasure for his realm. The very partial nature of his success and the messenger's foreboding concerning the fate of the nation all fit the interpretation of the dragon's symbolizing war. The pattern of episodic allusions confirms this impression, for the referential layer persistently draws our attention to the endless national bickerings between Swedes and Geats. Interpretative problems arise not concerning this main action, but rather in peripheral matters: the treasure, the lay of the last survivor, and the old man's lament. The first is a major crux, the latter two are passages of great emotional power, but sufficiently removed from the subject proposed here to deserve commentary.

The hoard is morally problematical. Those critics taking an ascetic Christian stance can condemn treasure as evil. Those willing to grant positive virtues to the wynn and dream which it can be used to support will see in what Beowulf wins the potentiality for great good. The meaning of the whole poem turns on the significance of the treasure, for Beowulf must be either praised or damned for his attitude toward it.

How we are meant to view the treasure is difficult to determine for two reasons. The first is the validity of strict Christian evaluation; the second, the poet's obscure and possibly contradictory statements about the hoard's origins and the curse laid upon it. That Beowulf is extremely eager to see what he has won is undeniable. His state of mind is revealed in lines 2747-51, when he tells Wiglaf to bring some of the gold out, and lines 2794-801, where he thanks God þæs ðe ic moste minum leodum / ær swyltdæge swylc gestrynan, and talks about bartering his life for the gold. In a monkish context, such sentiments would indeed suggest grave spiritual shortcomings, even imminent damnation. But if gold is handled here as it seems to be in the rest of the poem, then Beowulf's concern does not condemn him. The social theory he has lived by is flawed logically as well as by the standards of caritas, but he himself has done admirably in upholding and extending its best features, and his joy at winning treasure whose acquisition has lost his people so few lives is in keeping with his ideal behavior throughout.¹⁸

The curse on the treasure complicates the picture. Former owners demanded þæt se secg wære synnum scildig, / hergum geheaðerod, hellbendum fæst, / wommum gewitnad, se þone wong strude (ll. 3071-3). The absoluteness of this curse is mitigated by three factors. The first concerns the murkiness with which religion is portrayed in the poem; whatever Beowulf's spiritual status may be, the curse is purely pagan, placed on gold that is several times referred to as heathen. Whether the Christian author would have believed such a spell to have power over so virtuous a man as Beowulf is uncertain, and even if he did, we should not read into hellbendum the Christian Hell. Secondly, the author himself has left Beowulf a loophole: ðam hringsele hrinan ne moste / gumena ænig, nefne God sylfa, / sigora Soðcyning sealde þam ðe he wolde / —he is manna gehyld—hord openian (ll. 3053-6). This seems to suggest that no man would be able to get to (hrinan) the treasure unless he had God's favor; by implication, Beowulf's success means that he had divine support, and since the author describes the condition in his own narrative voice, he is granting to Beowulf aid from the Christian God, which might be thought to be more than enough to offset a heathen curse. Finally, there is Scandinavian precedent for heroes plundering tomb-hoards, most of which were presumably bespelled, without thereby being damned for desecration.¹⁹ Perhaps risking his life in struggle with the resident draugr gives a hero a right to the wealth which is denied to the mere grave robber. Very possibly, the curse of former owners does not condemn Beowulf to Hell, and indeed may not even be responsible for his death, as Smithers and Goldsmith argue. That an old man dies in a dragon fight does not mean that God has forsaken him; he cannot live forever.

The lay of the last survivor tells us something of the treasure's earlier history. War, guðdeað, has carried off all his people. The echoing emptiness, both physically of the hall and spiritually of the mind, is feelingly expressed. There is no social joy, and as death approaches, he puts the treasure in the earth, perhaps to help prevent its falling into the hands of his nation's foes. Later, when war threatens to destroy the Geats, Wiglaf prescribes the same measure, and the wealth is once again consigned to earth, possibly to prevent the anticipated invaders from making off with it. We see in this passage an unhappy awareness, couched in lyric-lament terms, that war cannot always be carried out successfully, a topic which recurs as a mournful motif whenever Hygelac's Frisian raid comes up. Allusions to that appear throughout the poem, not just in the war-movement. They remind us of how one foolish move can work toward the destruction of a society, even though that society's continued well-being demanded the action.

The old man's lament (ll. 2444-62) is actually not a monologue but an epic simile, a hypothetical portrait tangentially relevant to Hrethel. The amount of time Beowulf spends musing aloud on Hrethel, one of whose sons killed another, and on an old man whose son is hanged, is difficult to explain on logical grounds. Neither has any bearing on the dragon or on Swedish wars. True, the lamenting tone is appropriate for one whose mind is feeling wæfre ond wælfus (l. 2420), but both vignettes are more illuminating if viewed as an expression by Beowulf of the frustration an old man feels when that which he cares for is taken from him. The man whose son is hanged feels that the hall is silent, the wind whistles through the rafters, and that no harp can pierce the shell of his grief. The dragon may have taken lives, some possibly dear. Beowulf's great hall is a charred shell through whose scorched, broken beams the wind sighs. No harp can gladden. Were Beowulf like Hrethel, he might very well pine and die from sorrow. He might live in the past like the last survivor, and withdraw to nurse his grief. He might, like Hrothgar, live out a travesty version of his once great power. But Beowulf is determined to act, and is lucky in having an external foe.

IV

As this reading suggests, the poem never moves away from its pervasive concern with the maintenance of stability in an heroic society. Most of the seemingly extraneous referential material is actually directly relevant to the action of the movement in which it appears. The exceptions are minor. The concerns of Hrothgar's sermon are very natural coming from a king, regardless of immediate context. Recurring references to Hygelac's Frisian raid are justifiable both because of its importance to Beowulf's career and thematically as a many-sided negative example. Hygelac is mindless fortitudo to Hrothgar's strengthless sapientia, while Beowulf combines both. Hygelac is the overreaching king who wastes his life without profit to his realm, the ruler who loses treasure (his torque) rather than gaining it. He is not evil, as is Heremod, the other king to be mentioned several times in similar fashion. Rather, he represents the mistakes a good heroic king can make. These two and Hrothgar all serve to make plain the superiority of Beowulf's modes of conduct in each of the crises he faces.

A number of questions remain: they cannot be answered with certainty, but must be acknowledged. Would an Anglo-Saxon audience react positively or negatively to this picture of a flawed heroic society? Should we presume powerful Christian presuppositions in the poem's original audience? Was the composition of the poem so non-literary as to make elaborate literary interpretation misguided? What would make an Anglo-Saxon poet take up the subject of threats to social order?

Because the heroic society is portrayed as flawed, is the poem meant as a Christian treatise of rejection? A number of recent readers have taken this stand.²⁰ The objections to such a conclusion are forceful. The worlds of harp and hall, of gold-giving, of love between lord and retainer, are too feelingly and attractively rendered to provoke sweeping condemnation. Flawed these joys may be, and insecure, but nonetheless they are real, and within the context of the poem, they are all that stands between man and the outer darkness. For the story's characters, as for Bede's sparrow, the hall is shelter from the lashing storm, and the society in it is better than the alternative chaos. The most likely audience reaction seems to me to be at least moderate admiration. We may consider, too, that the society of the original audience, heroic in its assumptions but undistinguished and unstable-seeming to one living in it, would tell against rejection of a more glamorous and satisfactory heroic society which supposedly existed in the past.

Conceivably, the author's desire was to provoke rejection of all secular societies, past or present. He would expect the audience to know what ideal Christian life should be like. A critic espousing this general approach will stress the “tragic,” “hopeless,” “doomed” tone of the ending. But Beowulf's death need not be interpreted as tragedy. His people are due for a fall; but the fall is no more absolute than their triumph. Winning general condemnation of a way of life is better done in bleaker terms than the Beowulf-poet has used, terms which elicit less respect and admiration, less sense that the men portrayed in the story were greater in distress, as well as in joy, than their descendants.

Could religious presuppositions have overridden the natural reaction? Possibly; but it is one thing to say that men in the eighth and ninth centuries were good Christians, and quite another to assume an elaborately learned and exegetical habit of response to works not patently religious. To such an audience, gold may be invariably evil; Heorot may be Babel or Babylon; Beowulf may be covetous, or proud, or simply damned because pagan. The audience may have had at its command obscure details from the apocryphal Book of Enoch concerning the descendants of Cain, but if that was the standard of response which could be expected, why, as Halverson observes, does the author keep reminding us that Cain slew his brother Abel, and why did the scribe keep mispelling the name?²¹ Can the intellectual background for complex exegesis be expected from any but a few churchmen, who might in any case have agreed with Alcuin that Ingeld had nothing to do with Christ? Was this patently heroic poem written for such churchmen, or for laymen and those monks Alcuin was rebuking? The nation may well have been obedient to the physical demands of Christianity—church attendance, fasts, and penance—without achieving much expertise in theological profundities. Perhaps the dragon should be read as Satan and Beowulf's interest in the treasure construed as avarice, but such readings seem basically to distort the poem's natural heroic strain.

The kind of thematic reading proposed here can account for the content and structure of the poem as we have it, whereas few of the passages read exegetically by recent critics are unambiguously theological—an argument for caution in exegesis. But the thematic reading is open to challenge on external grounds by the ultra-conservative and the oral formulaicist alike. If the story was originally assembled from independent works and handed down with little but minor alterations from one generation of scop to the next, then we would not expect an ideaorientation. The Liedertheorie, by denying single, self-conscious authorship, explodes assumptions of artistic and thematic unity, and my interpretation's aptness to the poem would be coincidental. Even if the poem were composed by oral formulaic means, we would expect action- or hero-orientation to dictate the inherited story-line. But if either variety of non-literary composition was employed, then most Beowulf-criticism is invalid, just as it may be if a strict Christian outlook was expected to control the audience response. But whether educated monks would have been as reverently determined to preserve unlettered composition precisely as delivered is a question worth considering. The acrostic games of Cynewulf suggest that poetry imitating or using oral stylistic conventions could be literarily composed, and most of the Christian poetry is clearly not the product of generations of court scops. To adherents of either approach, one may also observe that the presence of complex and subtle thematic relationships is seldom an accident if they are consistently handled at every stage and level of a long poem.

Unless the themes and connections traced here and by a host of other critics are wholly imaginary, Beowulf has a great deal of deliberate literary artistry. My argument has been that the controlling interest behind that artistry is threats to social order. Better than any other yet proposed, that subject seems able to account for the nature and sequence of the monsters. Sapientia and fortitudo or Königsideal are better viewed as incidental or subsidiary interests within the broader concern of social order than as central and controlling subjects. “Order versus chaos” and “feuding” overgeneralize the point of the poem. What, though, of the semi-thematic dichotomies given prominence by Tolkien and his followers: man and his inevitable overthrow in time, or man against death; man against evil; the soul against its adversaries; youth and age?²² These seem logically wanting. There are deaths more horrible and destructive of self-respect than being rent and bitten in heroic strife, and worse tragedies than taking a dragon with you when over seventy. The contrast between youth and age can hardly be central if the change does not significantly diminish a man's ability to fight monsters.²³ Are we to feel pity and terror over Beowulf's demise? There is an extremely powerful elegiac strain in the poem, and a definite sense of the threat of death, but to my mind it is death by unnecessary violence, death in futile and petty wars, death falling on unsuspecting and innocent revelers which haunts the author, not death in the abstract. His sadness seems directed at the impossibility of realizing the ideal pattern of heroic society indefinitely, not at the limitations of this ideal from a Christian point of view or at life in general.

If we ask why the author should have been so concerned with social harmony, the answer is not far to seek: “from the close of Bede's History in 731 down to the decisive victory of Egbert over Mercia in 829, is the darkest and most barren century in the history of Christian England. The interminable strife between kingdoms and the feuds between rival claimants within the kingdoms seem … to be as futile as they are wearisome.”²⁴ The chronicles occasionally mention small feuds and large, even a stand in a hall reminiscent of Finnsburg.²⁵ However, most of the bloodshed recorded was politically motivated and would have appeared to those on the periphery sordid, selfish, unnecessary, and profitless.

Periods of civil strife may be exceedingly unpleasant to live in, but they do seem to be conducive to composition in the heroic mode. Many of the Icelandic family sagas were produced within long memory of a particularly nasty period of civil strife. Much later in English literature, the War of the Roses produced a similar response; indeed, Malory and the Beowulf-poet seem to me startlingly similar in method. Neither was recreating a genuine past; nor were they seeking mythical golden ages. Rather, they each took a system of values which was the theoretical ideal reflected in ruling class entertainment but not put into practice—the heroic and the chivalric codes of behavior. They created “past” worlds by giving life to these theories, and then tried to understand the forces which could have caused such societies to fail, or to degenerate to what they themselves lived in. Both were successful at visualizing the specific vices which would logically and naturally have flourished within their chosen codes: the Beowulf-poet's three types of violence, Malory's conflicts between allegiances to Church, state, and woman. Both seem haunted, partly by a melancholy recognition that these refined and heightened forms of their own societies would be incapable of survival because of inherent flaws, and partly by a sense that even with the faults, such societies were more attractive than what they had to live with. Both the Morte Darthur and Beowulf lament the non-existence of a pattern of living because it is possessed of the memorability, the worthiness, and the significance not found in the authors' own daily acts. We know nothing about the Beowulf-poet, and so these last observations are speculative, but they seem entirely consonant with the tone of the poem he has left to us.

Notes

1. This is all the more true if, as Arthur G. Brodeur and Lawrence E. Fast have argued, Hygelac is a unifying or centripetal force in Beowulf: see respectively The Art of Beowulf (Berkeley, 1959), pp. 79-87, and “HYGELAC: A Centripetal Force in ‘Beowulf’,” AnM, XII (1971), 90-9. Our sense that we might have expected more concerning the rise to kingship, for instance, is expressed by Dorothy Whitelock in The Audience of Beowulf (Oxford, 1951), p. 97, when she says “The poet must deliberately have refrained from enlarging on this incident.”

2. “Beowulf and the Life of Beowulf: A Study in Epic Structure,” Studies in Language, Literature, and Culture of the Middle Ages and Later, ed. E. Bagby Atwood and Archibald A. Hill (Austin, 1969), pp. 243-64.

3. For discussions of the poem's interlacement of narrative strands, see John Leyerle, “The Interlace Structure of Beowulf,” UTQ, XXXVII (1967), 1-17, and “Beowulf the Hero and the King,” Mæ, XXXIV (1965), 89-102; John A. Nist, “The Structure of Beowulf,” PMASAL, XLIII (1958), 307-14; and E. Carrigan, “Structure and Thematic Development in Beowulf,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, LXVIc (1967), 1-51.

4. All references are to Frederick Klaeber's Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, 3rd ed. (Boston, 1950).

5. Most of these critics insist that the poem is unified, but some of those who picture the author as having stitched two movements together into a whole include Arthur G. Brodeur (n. 1); E. Carrigan (n. 3); R. W. Chambers (Beowulf: An Introduction, 3rd ed. [Cambridge, England, 1959], pp. 112 ff.); Charles Donahue (“Beowulf and Christian Tradition: A Reconsideration from a Celtic Stance,” Traditio, XXI [1965], 55-116); George J. Engelhardt (“On the Sequence of Beowulf's geogoð,” MLN, LXVIII [1953], 91-5); Margaret E. Goldsmith (n. 12); Robert E. Kaske (n. 7); W. P. Ker (Epic and Romance [1897; rpt. New York, 1957], pp. 158 ff.); Frederick Klaeber (n. 4); Kemp Malone (“Beowulf,” ES, XXIX [1948], 161-72); and J. R. R. Tolkien (n. 6). Those who think in terms of triptych construction include Adrien Bonjour (“Grendel's Dam and the Composition of Beowulf,” ES, XXX [1949], 113-24); Nora K. Chadwick (n. 10); Jack Durant (n. 8); John Gardner (“Fulgentius's Expositio Vergiliana Continentia and the Plan of Beowulf: Another Approach to the Poem's Style and Structure,” PLL, VI [1970], 227-62); Bruce Mitchell (n. 22); John A. Nist (n. 3); H. L. Rogers (“Beowulf's Three Great Fights,” RES, n.s. VI [1955], 339-55); and Kenneth Sisam (n. 23).

6. “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” Proceedings of the British Academy, XXII (1936), 245-95. Quotation from p. 271.

7. Levin L. Schücking, “Das Königsideal im Beowulf,” MHRA Bulletin, III (1929), 143-54; Pamela Gradon, Form and Style in Early English Literature (London, 1971), pp. 127-31; R. E. Kaske, “Sapientia et Fortitudo as the Controlling Theme of Beowulf,” SP, LV (1958), 423-57; Margaret E. Goldsmith, “The Christian Perspective in Beowulf,” Studies in Old English Literature in Honor of Arthur G. Brodeur, ed. Stanley B. Greenfield (Eugene, Oregon, 1963), pp. 71-90; Alvin A. Lee, The Guest-Hall of Eden (New Haven, 1972), p. 171; John Leyerle, “Beowulf the Hero” (n. 3); Stanley J. Kahrl, “Feuds in Beowulf: A Tragic Necessity?” MP, LXIX (1972), 189-98; J. L. N. O'Loughlin, “Beowulf—Its Unity and Purpose,” Mæ, XXI (1952), 1-13; John Halverson, “The World of Beowulf,” ELH, XXXVI (1969), 593-608.

8. Jack Durant analyzes this “diabolic joy” in “The Function of Joy in Beowulf,” TSL, VII (1962), 61-9.

9. See Edward B. Irving, Jr., “Ealuscerwen: Wild Party at Heorot,” TSL, XI (1966), 161-8, especially p. 164.

10. For discussions of the analogues, see Nora K. Chadwick, “The Monsters and Beowulf,” The Anglo-Saxons: Studies in some Aspects of their History and Culture Presented to Bruce Dickins, ed. Peter Clemoes (London, 1959), pp. 171-203; G. V. Smithers, The Making of Beowulf (Durham, England, 1961), and Larry D. Benson, “The Originality of Beowulf,” The Interpretation of Narrative: Theory and Practice, ed. Morton W. Bloomfield, Harvard Studies in English 1 (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), pp. 1-43.

11. Maxims II, ll. 26-7, The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, ed. Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, vi (New York, 1942), p. 56.

12. Examining the third movement from different premises and perspectives, Arthur E. DuBois hints at much the same explanation of the dragon's significance; see “The Dragon in Beowulf,” PMLA, LXXII (1957), 819-22. Other interpretations include malitia (Kaske); death (Lee, who points out [p. 217] that “worms” devour corpses); Beowulf's “fate” (Irving, in A Reading of Beowulf [New Haven, 1968], p. 216); and Leviathan (Goldsmith, The Mode and Meaning of “Beowulf” [London, 1970], p. 143).

13. Leyerle, in “Beowulf the Hero,” interprets the poem as a study of the “fatal contradiction at the core of heroic society,” which he diagnoses as the demand for a personal heroism that causes a king like Beowulf to risk his life and thus harm his kingdom.

14. Wealtheow's hopes are unrealistic, whether measured by the little we know of the continental tribes of the fifth and sixth centuries, or by the later standards of Christian England of the seventh through ninth centuries. (See R. H. Hodgkin, A History of the Anglo-Saxons, 2 vols., 3rd ed. [London, 1952], II, 407-8.) Particularly when the maintenance of national wealth and stability depended on a king's waging successful foreign wars, the rule of a minor would have been as disastrous to his realm as it was unpalatable to his older uncles and cousins.

15. Maxims II, ll. 28-9, ASPR, vi, p. 56.

16. This stand is well argued by John C. Pope in “Beowulf's Old Age,” Philological Essays: Studies in Old and Middle English Language and Literature in Honour of Herbert Dean Meritt, ed. James L. Rosier (The Hague, 1970), pp. 55-64.

17. Without subscribing to his notions of ritual royal sacrifice, I think Charles Moorman, in “The Essential Paganism of Beowulf,” MLQ, XXVIII (1967), 3-18, is substantially correct in viewing Hrothgar as having outlived his capacity to fulfill the demands of a primitive kingship. Having done so, Hrothgar is not really maintaining order, but is prolonging an unstable political configuration, and causing pressures to mount.

18. For a well-argued antidote to the harshly Christian views of the hoard, see Michael D. Cherniss, “The Progress of the Hoard in Beowulf,” PQ, XLVII (1968), 473-86.

19. See Smithers, pp. 8 ff., for a discussion of heroic grave-plundering. In Egilssaga einhendar ok Ásmundar, for instance, a grave is robbed with impunity.

20. Goldsmith and Lee tend to believe a negative response is demanded. So does E. G. Stanley, “Hæthenra Hyht in Beowulf” (Brodeur Festschrift, pp. 136-51).

21. “Beowulf and the Pitfalls of Piety,” UTQ, XXXV (1966), 260-78, especially p. 268.

22. All these are suggested by Tolkien. Man against death is given special prominence by Bruce Mitchell, “‘Until the Dragon Comes …’: Some Thoughts on Beowulf,” Neophil., XLVII (1963), 126-38.

23. Kenneth Sisam makes this point in The Structure of Beowulf (Oxford, 1965), p. 24.

24. Hodgkin, II, 383-4.

25. See the “story of Cynewulf and Cyneheard” in the Laud and Parker MSS under the year 755.