SOURCE: “The Pagan Coloring of Beowulf,” in Contradictions: From “Beowulf” to Chaucer; Selected Studies of Larry D. Benson, edited by Theodore M. Andersson and Stephen A. Barney, Scolar Press, 1995, pp. 15-31.

[In the essay below, originally written in 1967, Benson studies the apparent conflict in Beowulf between Christian and pagan elements, observing that modern assumptions concerning the attitude of the Christian poet and his audience toward paganism are incorrect. Benson goes on to argue that understanding the relationship between Christian Englishmen and Germanic pagans allows us to view the poem as a framework within which Christians could contemplate the idea of the “good pagan.”]

The old theory that Beowulf is an essentially pagan work only slightly colored with the Christianity of a later scribe has now been dead for many years, and critics today generally agree that the poem is the unified work of a Christian author.¹ Indeed, most of the elements in Beowulf that once supplied arguments for its essential paganism—the function of Wyrd, the emphasis on the comitatus, the duty of revenge—are now recognized not as pagan but as secular values that were easily incorporated into the framework of Anglo-Saxon Christianity.² Likewise, though the stories of Beowulf and the monsters probably originated in pagan times, it is now generally acknowledged that they have been assimilated into a Christian world view with the monsters allied with the devil and Beowulf (or so Friedrich Klaeber and others have held) fitted to the pattern of Christ himself.³ Yet the ghost of the old pagan-versus-Christian dispute still lingers, for along with the Christian and Christianized secular elements the poem does contain some indisputably pagan features that have remained intractable to modern criticism. Moreover, the knockings of that spirit have become steadily more insistent, for the more deeply Christian the meanings of Beowulf are discovered to be, the more difficult become the still-unanswered questions raised by H. M. Chadwick in 1912: “If the poem preserves its original form and is the work of a Christian, it is difficult to see why the poet should go out of his way in v. 175 ff. to represent the Danes as offering heathen sacrifices. … Again why should he lay Beowulf himself to rest with heathen obsequies, described in all possible detail … ?”⁴ Why, one must ask, should the poet's whole representation of the Danes and Geats include all the other details that Chadwick notes—the funeral ship (27 ff.), the observation of omens (204), and the use of cremation (1108 ff., 2124 ff., 3137 ff.)?⁵

The intrusion of these pagan elements into an otherwise completely Christian work presents more difficult problems than the simple matter of factual inconsistency. Certainly the poet is inconsistent in first showing us the Danes listening to the Christian account of the Creation and then, a few lines later, telling us that they knew nothing of God and sacrificed to idols. That is only the sort of historical inaccuracy that one expects in medieval poetry; Chaucer and Shakespeare confused pagan and Christian elements in much the same way.⁶ Poets (especially medieval poets) are responsible for total aesthetic effect rather than documentary accuracy. The difficulty in Beowulf is that the pagan elements seem to confound the aesthetic effect, to destroy the consistency of tone. Instead of casually mixing pagan and Christian, as so many medieval poets do, the Beowulf poet goes out of his way to draw our attention to the Danes' heathen sacrifices. Furthermore, the paganism that he describes is not simply literary or historical; it was a still strong and threatening force in his own day. For him to present his characters as heathens is, so we assume, to show them in the worst of possible lights. Alcuin, in his famous letter to the monks at Lindisfarne, defines for us the Christian Englishman's attitude toward the pagans: Quid Hinieldus cum Christo? Angusta est domus: utrosque tenere non poterit. Non vult rex celestis cum paganis et perditis nominetenus regibus communionem habere “what has Ingeld to do with Christ? Narrow is the house; it cannot hold both. The King of Heaven wants no fellowship at all with pagan and damned kings.”⁷ Given this attitude toward the heathens, our poet's insistence that his characters are both emphatically pagan and exceptionally good seems self-contradictory, and that apparent contradiction has seemed to many critics a touch of feebleness at the very heart of the poem, so feeble that even his warmest admirers have been forced either to fall back on the old theory of scribal tampering or to conclude that the poet simply blundered.⁸

The blunder may be our own, for the apparent contradiction arises, not from the poem itself, but from our assumptions about the meaning of paganism to the poet and his audience. These assumptions have been based on our knowledge of one letter by Alcuin, written in a spirit of reforming zeal at the end of the eighth century, and scattered comments by Bede, who is not quite so inflexible in his attitude toward pagans as his doctrinal pronouncements make him seem.⁹ The extreme distaste for everything pagan that these comments exhibit is not typical of the age to which the composition of Beowulf is usually assigned; beginning in the last years of the seventh century and extending throughout the eighth, the dominant attitude of Christian Englishmen toward the Germanic pagans was one of interest, sympathy, and occasionally even admiration. This was the period during which the English church was engaged in an intense missionary activity on the Continent, sending missionaries in significant numbers first to the Frisians and Danes and then to the Old Saxons and the tribes in central Germany. This major undertaking, the great interest that it aroused in England, and the attitude it fostered toward pagandom has received relatively little attention from students of Beowulf; yet it can shed considerable light on the problems raised by the pagan elements in the poem, revealing artistry where we thought we detected blunders.

I

The missionary activity of the English church began by accident when Wilfred, on his way to Rome to protest his deposition as Bishop of York, landed in Frisia to avoid falling into the hands of his political enemies and spent the winter of 678-79 as guest of the pagan king Aldgisl.¹⁰ He preached the gospel to the heathens, apparently with some success, and then traveled on to Rome. He returned to England, where he occupied a number of sees during his contentious career, but evidently he always maintained an interest in the missionary work in Frisia. In 697 he consecrated a bishop, Suidbert, for the Frisian mission, and the founder of the most successful mission there was Willibrord, who had been Wilfred's student at Ripon and whom Wilfred visited when he again passed through Frisia in 703.

The next missionary effort came from English monks living in Ireland. As Bede tells it, the mission began with the plan of Egbert, who proposuit animo pluribus prodesse; id est, inito opere apostolico, verbum Dei aliquibus earum quae nondum audierant gentibus evangelizando committere: quarum in Germania plurimas noverat esse nationes, a quibus Angli vel Saxones qui nunc Brittaniam incolunt, genus et originem duxisse noscuntur; unde hactenus a vicina gente Brettonum corrupte Garmani nuncupantur. Sunt autem Fresones, Rugini, Danai, Hunni, Antiqui Saxones, Boructuari: sunt alii perplures eisdem in partibus populi paganis adhuc ritibus servientes … “set his mind on doing good to many; that is, by undertaking the apostolic work, to preach to some of those peoples that had not yet heard the word of God; he knew that there were several such nations in Germany, from which the Angles or Saxons who now inhabit Britain are known to have taken their stock and origin; hence, by the neighboring race of the Britons they are to this day corruptly called ‘Garmani.’ There are the Frisians, the Rugini, the Danes, the Huns, the Old Saxons, the Boructuari; there are many other peoples in these same parts still in servitude to pagan rites. …”¹¹ Egbert was deterred from this undertaking by a series of visions and a shipwreck. Yet he had established the plan, basing it on the idea of the kinship between the insular and Continental “Garmani” that was to remain a basic motivation of this missionary work. One of his disciples, Wictbert, took up the task next and preached for two years, though without success, to the Frisians and to their king Rathbod.¹²

The next year, 690, Willibrord, who had spent several years in Ireland as a pupil of Egbert after his studies at Ripon, set out for Frisia with a company of twelve English missionaries.¹³ Shortly thereafter, two more English priests, both named Hewald (known as “White” and “Black” Hewald, from the colors of their hair), journeyed to the Continent and met martyrdom among the Old Saxons (whose alderman, though a pagan, was incensed at this murder and avenged their deaths).¹⁴ But despite this setback the mission flourished. Suidbert, one of Willibroard's twelve helpers, was consecrated bishop by Wilfred and carried the mission to the Boructuari, and Willibrord received the pallium at Rome and extended his work in Frisia. He carried the gospel even to the Danes, whose king, Ongendus, received him with “every mark of honor” but was unimpressed by his preaching.¹⁵ Nevertheless, Willibrord brought back with him from Denmark thirty Danish youths whom he instructed in the Christian faith, and on his return journey he visited and desecrated the famous pagan shrine at Heligoland. At the time Bede was writing, Willibrord still lived among his converted flock in Frisia, one of the heroes of the English church.

The next and greatest stage in the movement was the mission of Boniface.¹⁶ With two companions he sailed with a trader from London to Frisia in 716. He spent the winter among the Frisians and, meeting with no success, returned to England. After a trip to Rome he went again to Frisia, preaching in places as yet untouched by missionaries. He succeeded Willibrord as leader of the movement and turned his attention to the Old Saxons. From Britain an “exceedingly large number of holy men came to his aid, among them readers, writers, and learned men trained in the other arts.”¹⁷ In his last years he went back to Frisia and, pushing farther into heathendom, was martyred near the border of Denmark in 754. He was succeeded by Lull, another Englishman, and the missionary effort of the English church continued unabated throughout the eighth century; the later intellectual expeditions of scholars such as Alcuin were only extensions of the movement that Wilfred and Willibrord began.

One of the most remarkable features of these missions was the close relation that they all maintained with the homeland. We have already noted Wilfred's continuing interest in Frisia and the fact that Suidbert returned to England to be consecrated a bishop at Wilfred's hands. We also know that another of Willibrord's helpers visited Lindisfarne, and in general, even though Willibrord's correspondence does not survive, there is evidence of frequent intercourse between his mission and England.¹⁸ Likewise, it is probable that a good many other Englishmen joined him, for the missionary expeditions were fairly large, involving not one or two wandering preachers but the mission suorum tantum stipatus clientum numero ‘accompanied only by a number of servants,’ including armed soldiers.¹⁹ Boniface's letters do survive, as do those of his successor, Lull, and beginning with the first quarter of the eighth century, we have ample evidence for Levison's assertion that “the continental mission was regarded as a national undertaking of the whole English people. …”²⁰ It was to England that Boniface looked for advice, books, and the help of prayer, and his correspondents included clergy and laymen alike from Thanet to Lindisfarne. On one occasion he addressed a letter, which we shall shortly examine, to the entire English nation. The nation responded by turning its eyes to the pagan Continent—hoping for the conversion of the heathen, for the prayers of the missionaries, or like King Ethelbert of Kent, for a pair of falcons of the sort that Boniface had sent along with shields and spears as a gift to the king of Mercia.²¹

II

The extent and intensity of this traffic with the Continent has long been known, but this knowledge has had little effect on the study of Beowulf. This is largely because the English missions have been considered only in relation to the history of the plot. As early as 1816 Outzen proposed that the missions in Frisia supplied the route by which the story of Beowulf reached the poet.²² The more recent discovery of the possible English origin of the Liber Monstrorum with its account of Hygelac, which probably came to England by way of Frisia, has led critics to reflect anew that a good many Englishmen of the late seventh and eighth centuries must have seen or heard of Hygelac's grave on that island in the mouth of the Frisian Rhine.²³ It does seem likely that English travelers would have brought home some tales of Hygelac and Hrothgar, of Finn, and perhaps even of Beowulf—if not the tales our poet used, at least some related tales that helped kindle new interest in the old materials. Likewise, the Frisians, that “great trading people of the North” who dealt with Christian London on the west and pagan Scandinavia on the east,²⁴ are the most likely means by which tales of the Swedes and stories of Sigmund would have reached England. We know that the Frisians had a recognized class of minstrels,²⁵ and it would be surprising if their store of songs did not include at least some of the tales used in Beowulf. Yet this is only conjecture, and critics have rightly set aside the impossible task of tracing the exact sources of the plot and have turned their attention elsewhere.

Unfortunately, in turning away from the Continent as a contemporary source for the poet's plot, they have also turned away from it as a source of the poet's knowledge of heathen customs, such as the burials in Beowulf. The study of Beowulf has been needlessly complicated by a search of the English past for the possible hints and memories upon which the poet could have based his accounts of pagan funerals. Even the Sutton Hoo discovery has been of little help; but on the Continent, where the English missionaries were working, pagan burials both by cremation and by interment in mounds continued throughout the eighth century, as we know from laws directed against anyone who corpus defuncti hominis secundum ritum paganorum flamma consumi fecerit et ossa eius ad cinerem redierit “has had the body of a deceased man consumed by flame and returned his bones to ashes according to the rite of the pagans” or who buried the dead ad tumulus paganorum “at pagan grave-mounds.”²⁶ Likewise, such practices as augury and sacrificing to idols might reflect a memory of England's own past but are more likely based on some knowledge of the Germanic pagans themselves, for throughout the Continent divination and idol-worship were widely and persistently practiced.²⁷ That Christians of this period were interested in learning about such practices is shown by the contemporary references to pagan beliefs that have survived,²⁸ and certainly some information of this sort must have been a common subject of conversation whenever a cleric or trader returned to England with news of the missions. We cannot be sure that any of the poet's plot reached him by this route, but we can be positive that he had at his disposal a good deal of information about the pagans that he chose to celebrate.

More important to the student confronted with the problem of the poet's characterization of his pagans is the attitude toward the Germanic heathen which the missionaries maintained and encouraged among their supporters in England. They had none of Alcuin's disdain, and from Egbert to Lull one of the prime motives for the missions was the sympathy fostered by the kinship between the English and nostra gens, the Germanic tribes on the Continent.²⁹ This sympathy appears in Bede's account of Egbert's decision to become a missionary, quoted above, and it is stated even more emphatically in the celebrated letter that Boniface wrote in 738 to the whole English nation, from the bishops to the laymen, immo generaliter omnibus catholicis “indeed, to all Catholics in general”: Fraternitatis vestrae clementiam intimis obsecramus precibus … ut deus et dominus noster lesus Christus, ‘qui vult omnes homines salvos fieri et ad agnitionem Dei venire,’ convertat ad catholicam fidem corda paganorum Saxonum, et resipiscant a diabuli laqueis, a quibus capti tenentur, et adgregentur filiis matris ecclesiae. Miseremini illorum, quia et ipsi solent dicere: ‘De uno sanguine et de uno osse sumus’ “We implore the mercy of your brotherhood with deepest prayers [that you pray] … that God and Our Lord Jesus Christ, ‘who wants all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of God,’ may turn the hearts of the pagan Saxons to the Catholic faith, and that they may repent of the devilish snares by which they are held captive, and be joined to the sons of Mother Church. Have mercy upon them, for they themselves are accustomed to say, ‘We are of one blood and one bone.’”³⁰ The tone of this letter, its certainty that the pagan Saxons are damned if they are not converted, and its intense sympathy with their plight is almost the same as that which we find in one of the most difficult passages in Beowulf, the poet's overt comment on the Danes' idol worship:

                                                            Swylc wæs þeaw hyra,
hæþenra hyht;                    helle gemundon
in modsefan,                    Metod hie ne cuþon,
dæda Demend,                    ne wiston hie Drihten God,
ne hie huru heofena Helm                    herian ne cuþon,
wuldres Waldend.                    Wa bið þæm ðe
sceal
þurh sliðne nið                    sawle bescufan
in fyres fæþm,                    frofre ne wenan,
wihte gewendan!                    Wel bið þæm þe
mot
æfter deaðdæge                    Drihten secean
ond to Fæder fæþmum                    freoðo wilnian!(31)

(178-88)

Such was their custom, the hope of the heathens; they remembered hell in their minds, they did not know the Ruler, the Judge of Deeds, nor did they know the Lord God, nor indeed did they know how to praise the Protector of Heaven, the Ruler of Glory. Woe be to him who must, in terrible affliction, thrust his soul into the embrace of fire, expect no consolation, no change at all! Well is it for him who, after the day of death, can seek the Lord and ask for peace in the embrace of the Father!

Critics have often suggested that these lines must refer to some relapse into idolatry, but the remarkable quality of this passage is its tone of compassion, and a return to idolatry is a sin for which compassion is not the appropriate emotion.³² To describe such relapses even the gentle Bede employs the conventional image of the “dog returning to his own vomit.”³³ It is to those who have not had a chance to know of God, ne wiston hie Drihten God, that one can be compassionate. Their sin, as the missionaries repeatedly tell us, is “ignorance.” They are “blundering in the darkness,” ensnared in devilish errors through no fault of their own. The poet's insistence on the Danes' ignorance of God (ne wiston, ne cuþon) places them clearly with those blameless and pitiful heathens of whom Boniface speaks.

The poet's sudden shift from the past tense, which he uses to refer to the Danes, to a more generalized present provides an even more important link between his fictional pagans and those real pagans still living on the Continent in his own time. If there is a “Christian excursus” in Beowulf, it is not in the account of the sacrifices themselves but in the lines beginning Wa bið þæm, for the changed tense shows that the object of the poet's compassion includes not only those long-dead Danes in his poem but also those heathens who exist at the moment he is speaking and who are compelled—sceal—through ignorance to thrust their souls in fyres fæþm. Their plight is made even sadder by the parallel consideration of those—perhaps their kinsmen—whose lot is the happier because they may Drihten secean. Marie P. Hamilton has suggested that “by presenting Scandinavian men of good will as looking in the main to the governance of God he [the poet] might bring them within the sympathetic ken of their English cousins.”³⁴ This is true enough, but given the English attitude toward Continental heathens, it may also be that the poet engages his audience's sympathy for his characters by emphasizing their very paganism. Certainly in this “excursive” passage he seems to step aside from the course of his narrative to draw attention to the similarity between the Danes in Beowulf and the real Danes whose salvation had become a matter of widespread concern.

The characters in Beowulf are men of good will, despite their paganism, and this has seemed to most critics the central contradiction in the poem. In the face of the attitude represented by Alcuin the only way out of this dilemma seems to be that proposed by Charles Donahue: the possibility that the poet was touched by the Pelagian heresy, which taught that pious heathens could be saved for their natural goodness and thus made it possible for a Christian to admire a native heathen hero.³⁵ Donahue shows that in early medieval Ireland some native heroes were regarded as having lived under the “natural law,” virtuous even though heathen and eligible for salvation because they were born outside the Judaic and Christian dispensations. Yet in England and on the Continent, as Donahue also shows, a strict Augustinian orthodoxy prevailed. Bede, writing an attack on the Pelagian heresy, states flatly that even the great philosophers nullam veram virtutem nec nullam veram sapientiam habere potuerunt. In quantum vero vel gustum aliquem sapientiae cujuslibet, vel virtutis imaginem habebant, totum hoc desuper acceperunt “could have no true virtue or knowledge of God. Indeed, insofar as they had any taste of knowledge or image of virtue, they received it from above.”³⁶ The second sentence seems to grant that the pagans may have some virtue after all, but even so Bede affirms that all those born outside the Judaeo-Christian law are damned, even those born between Adam and Moses, quia regnavit mors ab Adam usque Moysen, etiam in eos qui non peccaverunt “since Death ruled from Adam until Moses, even over those who had not sinned.”³⁷ This was the attitude the missionaries upheld. In the famous near-baptism of Rathbod a touch of Pelagianism would have saved that “Scourge of Christians” and made the conversion of Frisia much easier, but when Rathbod, with one foot in the water, turned to ask Bishop Wulfram whether he would meet his ancestors in heaven, Wulfram said they were in hell, Rathbod withdrew his foot, and the great chance was lost.³⁸ Boniface was as orthodox as Wulfram and Bede, and when it came to his attention that a Celtic bishop named Clement was teaching that Christ brought all from hell, “believers and unbelievers, those who praised God and the worshippers of idols,” he lost no time in bringing the matter to the attention of Rome, where the “folly” was roundly condemned in 745.³⁹ The fact that Boniface and Bede paid so much attention to this heresy may indicate that Pelagianism was more widespread than is usually thought. The lives of the early missionaries, who were trained in Ireland, show that relations between the English and Celtic churches were quite close despite their differences, and the works of Pelagius himself were circulating in England (some even under the name of Augustine).⁴⁰

However, we need not hunt for heresy to explain the poet's presentation of his heroes as both virtuous and pagan, for despite the Pelagian dispute (which turns really on the functions of nature and grace) even the most orthodox eighth-century churchmen could regard the pagans as quite virtuous, following the natural law and lacking only the knowledge of God necessary for salvation. The Translatio Sancti Alexandri puts this most clearly in its account of the Saxons: Legibus etiam ad vindictam malefactorum optimis utebantur. Et multa utilia atque secundum legem naturae honesta in morum probitate habere studuerunt, quae eis ad veram beatitudinem promerendam proficere potuissent, si ignorantiam creatoris sui non haberent, et a veritate culturae illius non essent alieni “indeed, they made use of excellent laws for the punishment of wrongdoers. And they were diligent to maintain in their conduct a very useful and, according to the law of nature, decent probity, which would have helped them to a truly deserved blessedness, if they had not been ignorant of their Creator and were not alien to true religion.”⁴¹ The praise for Germanic institutions in this work is drawn from Tacitus, and among early Latin writers—Horace, Tacitus, Martianus Capella—there was a slender tradition of idealizing the Germanic pagans for their good morals and institutions.⁴² As early as the fifth century one finds Christian writers employing this idealized view. Salvianus writes of the Goths and Vandals who were attacking the Empire: tantum apud illos profecit studium castimoniae, tantum seueritas disciplinae, non solum quod ipsi casti sunt, sed, ut rem dicamus nouam, rem incredibilem, rem paene etiam inauditam, castos etiam Romanos esse fecerunt “so much did the zeal for chastity prevail among them, so great was the severity of their discipline, that not only were they chaste themselves, but—to say a new thing, a thing incredible, a thing almost unheard of—they made even the Romans chaste.”⁴³

In addition to the weight of this minor tradition of the “honest Germanic pagan,” some of the missionaries must have been led to accept the idea that virtue can exist among the pagans simply from meeting an occasional good heathen, like this Frisian nobleman of the early eighth century: qui quamvis fidem sanctae Trinitatis nondum sciret, erat tamen adiutor pauperum, defensor oppressorum, in iuditio quoque iustus “though he did not yet know the faith of the Holy Trinity, he was nevertheless a helper of paupers, a defender of the oppressed, and also just in pronouncing judgments.”⁴⁴ Such decent men, of the sort that exist in all societies, often performed acts of kindness to the missionaries, even when they refused the chance to be converted, and they must frequently have impressed the English priests with their natural goodness.⁴⁵ They thus exemplified the most important source of the idea that pagans observe the natural law, the statements in the Bible itself, which taught that the gentiles “show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another” (Rom. 2:15).

Boniface drew on all three sources—the literary tradition represented by Tacitus, his own knowledge, and the Bible—in what must have been the most famous use of natural law in the eighth century, his letter to King Ethelbald of Mercia. Ethelbald's loose sexual conduct had become an international scandal, and it was a matter of concern to English churchmen (and probably laymen) on both sides of the Channel. Finally (around 745-46), Boniface wrote directly to the king, rebuking him for his sin: Quod non solum a christianis, sed etiam a paganis in obprobrium et verecundiam deputatur. Quia ipsi pagani verum Deum ignorantes naturaliter, quae legis sunt et quod ab initio Deus constituit, custodiunt in hac re … Cum ergo gentiles, qui Deum nesciunt et legem non habent iuxta dictum apostoli, naturaliter ea quae legis sunt faciunt et ostendunt opus legis scriptum in cordibus suis. … “which not only by Christians but even by pagans is held in shame and contempt. For these pagans, ignorant of the true God, by nature maintain in this matter those things which are lawful and what God established in the beginning. … When thus the gentiles, who do not know God and have no law according to the word of the apostle, do by nature what is lawful and show the work of the law written in their hearts. …”⁴⁶ Since Boniface himself, the persecutor of the heretical Clement, held this opinion, we need have no lingering doubts about the theological respectability of admiring the virtues of the pagans. Even Bede, despite his doctrinal rigidity, found some admirable pagans in the course of his history, and he held that at least one unbaptized pagan had been saved.⁴⁷ Certainly the author of Beowulf, even if he was a cleric addressing a clerical audience, would have encountered no difficulty in presenting his characters as both virtuous and pagan.

III

In the light of what we now know of attitudes toward the pagans in the late seventh and eighth centuries, it appears that the paganism of the poet's characters may have been a positive advantage to him rather than the insuperable difficulty that it seemed to early critics. Those critics assumed that Beowulf was originally and essentially pagan, and what pagan elements the poem contains were therefore most easily explained as mere undigested lumps of primitive matter. We are still accustomed to think of the pagan elements as part of the original essence of the poem, the Christian elements as additions—beautifully integrated, but additions nevertheless. Yet our reading of the poem does not accord with our theory. Christianity is part of the very fabric of Beowulf; the pagan elements are not. When we examine those elements that are actually pagan rather than secular, references to practices that ceased altogether or became criminal with the introduction of Christianity—augury, cremation, the worship of idols—we find that they are few in number and easily isolable. Their removal would harm but not destroy the poem (which may explain why good critics have wanted to take some of them out), for one cannot imagine Beowulf in anything like its present state without its Christian basis, but one can easily conceive of it without its few touches of paganism. Without them, it would simply be a more ordinary medieval poem, a narrative in which the past is seen through the eyes of the present, as Chaucer viewed Troy in Troilus or Shakespeare ancient Denmark in Hamlet. The tales that the poet used must have come to him in that more ordinary state, originally created in pagan times but insensibly altered to fit the requirements of new audiences by each succeeding generation of oral poets.⁴⁸ Probably it was the Beowulf poet who deepened the Christian meanings when he reshaped the inherited material; but probably it was also he who added the “pagan coloring,” drawing on contemporary information about the Germanic pagans and on the prevalent attitude toward them to add both interest and a new dimension of meaning to his materials.

The most obvious advantage that the poet gained by his use of pagan materials is that of “local color.” He was able to capitalize on the general interest in pagandom that the missions had aroused, and by providing vivid, even sensational, accounts of rites such as cremation of which his audience had only heard, he was able to engage their attention for his more important purposes. For those more sober members of his audience who, like the later Alcuin, could see no good in stories of pagan kings, the very reminders that the kings in Beowulf are pagan serve to build interest and sympathy, for the poem functions as a kind of proof of the missionaries' reports that the heathens are indeed virtuous, while the pagan elements have something of the same function as Boniface's letter to the English nation, emphasizing the perilous condition of these good heroes and thus appealing for a compassionate, serious consideration of their state. Perhaps that is why the “Christian excursus” comes so early in the poem, providing the framework within which the good Christian can ponder the deeds of the good pagans.

There must have been a good many more in the poet's audience who, like the monks at Lindisfarne, simply enjoyed a good secular tale, and for them most of all the touches of paganism are means of building interest and sympathy in the dual purpose of this poem. Beowulf is now recognized as a skillful blend of secular and religious values; it is simultaneously a celebration of the ideal Germanic warrior and a statement of Christian morality.⁴⁹ These values were not necessarily opposed, as poems like The Dream of the Rood show, but they were nevertheless quite different. Aldhelm apparently recognized this, for we are told that he would stand at crossroads, singing the old songs until he had gathered crowds for his more edifying discourses.⁵⁰ The Beowulf poet seems to employ his secular materials in the same way, using his tales of monster killing as an occasion for a meditation on life and on the meaning of victory and defeat. For those who were drawn to listen primarily to hear again the deeds of heroes, the insistence on the paganism of those heroes provided the larger context of that present day, helping to reinforce the point of Hrothgar's sermon that strength alone is not enough and to state the further requirement that even that “intelligent monotheist” cannot meet, that to strength and natural piety must be added the New Law of Christ. In this way the touches of paganism in Beowulf place the fictional ironies and tragedy of the poem within the dimension of the real irony and tragedy of Germanic history as it was viewed by an eighth-century audience newly aware of the sad condition of their Continental kinsmen to whom the gospel had not yet been preached. Thus the poet builds a link between the doomed heroes of his poem and the sad but admirable pagans of his own time, whose way of life seemed likewise fated to disappear before the apparently certain victory of the Church.

The final irony of Beowulf is that which Wyrd visited on the poet himself, when the pagans he celebrated swept down to destroy their Christian kinsmen in England. After the burning of Lindisfarne in 793, it would be another two centuries before English missionaries would again set out for the Continent and the attitude toward pagandom expressed in Beowulf would again be appropriate. We can only speculate, but it may be that we owe the survival of the poem to its touches of paganism, for the only manuscript in which it survives was written at that other moment in English history, around the year 1000, when English churchmen were again concerned with the fate of their heathen kinsmen in northern Europe.⁵¹

Notes

1. William Whallon, “The Christianity of Beowulf,” Modern Philology 60 (1962): 81-94, argues that the poet is a very naive Christian who knows little except for the tales of the Old Testament, but this is as close as critics today come to assuming a pagan author. For a full discussion see E. G. Stanley, “The Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism,” Notes and Queries, N.S. 11 (1964): 205-9, 242-50, 282-87, 324-33, 455-63, and 12 (1965): 9-17, 203-7, 285-93, 322-27, especially 11: 326-31.

2. On Wyrd see, for example, Alan H. Roper, “Boethius and the Three Fates of Beowulf,” Philological Quarterly 41 (1962): 386-400; on revenge see Dorothy Whitelock, The Audience of Beowulf (Oxford: Clarendon, 1951), pp. 13-17; the comitatus is, of course, found throughout Old English religious poetry (e.g., Andreas).

3. Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, ed. Friedrich Klaeber (3rd ed.; Boston: D. C. Heath, 1950), cxxi: “in recounting the life and portraying the character of the exemplary leader … he [the poet] was almost inevitably reminded of the person of the Savior. …”

4. The Heroic Age (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1912), 53.

5. Ibid., 52-53; I have included Scyld's funeral ship, although it seems to represent the departure of a legendary hero, as Klaeber suggests, rather than a real burial like that of Baldr.

6. Marie P. Hamilton, “The Religious Principle in Beowulf,” PMLA 61 (1946): 309-31; reprinted in An Anthology of Beowulf Criticism, ed. L. E. Nicholson (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963), 125; in The Knight's Tale Chaucer shows his essentially Christian characters worshipping in pagan shrines.

7. Alcuin, Albini Epistolae, ed. E. L. Dümmler, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Epistolae (Berlin: Weidmann, 1895), 4, letter 124, 183.

8. For example, J. R. R. Tolkien, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” Proceedings of the British Academy 22 (1937): 245-95; reprinted in An Anthology of Beowulf Criticism (note 6), 101-2. In his edition of Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, note to ll. 175-88, Klaeber holds that the poet “failed to live up to his own modernized representation of [the Danes].”

9. Chadwick, The Heroic Age, 73; his work is still the most recent full discussion of the problem, and it has been accepted without question.

10. Eddius Stephanus, Vita Wilfridi Episcopi, cap. 28, in Rerum Britannicarum Medii Aevi Scriptores, ed. James Raine (The Historians of the Church of York and Its Archbishops, vol. 1 [London, 1879]), 71:38. For a full account of the missions in Frisia see Wilhelm Levison, England and the Continent in the Eighth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1946): 45-69. Translations of some of the relevant materials are provided in The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany, ed. and trans. C. H. Talbot (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1954).

11. Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, V, ix, in Opera Historica, trans. John Edward King (New York: W. Heinemann, 1930), 2:234; the translations of Bede in this essay, however, are mine.

12. Ibid., 238-40.

13. Ibid., V, x-xi, pp. 240-52; Alcuin, Vita Willibrordi, ed. Wilhelm Levison, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores Rerum Merovingicarum (Hanover: Hahn, 1919) 7:81-141.

14. Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, V, x (2:244).

15. The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany (note 10), p. 9, notes that this king has been identified with Ongentheow in Beowulf, but I can find no basis for the identification.

16. Levison, England and the Continent (note 10), 70-93. Willibald, Vita S. Bonifacii, ed. G. H. Pertz, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores (Hanover: Hahn, 1829), 2:331-53.

17. Willibald, Vita S. Bonifacii, cap. 6 (340-42), trans. Talbot, in The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany, 47.

18. Levison, England and the Continent (note 10) 61.

19. Hermann Lau, Die angelsächsische Missionsweise im Zeitalter des Bonifaz (Kiel: J. M. Hansen, 1909), 39.

20. England and the Continent, 92.

21. Die Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus, ed. Michael Tangl, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Epistolae Selectae (Berlin: Weidmann, 1916),1, letter 105; trans. Ephraim Emerton, in The Letters of St. Boniface (Records of Civilization: Sources and Studies 31 [New York: Columbia University Press, 1940]), 177-79.

22. See Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, ed. Klaeber, p. cxvi, n. 1, for a summary of early scholars' views on this question.

23. Antoine Thomas, “Un manuscrit inutilisé du Liber Monstrorum,” Bulletin du Cange: Archivum Latinitatis Medii Aevi 1 (1925): 232-45; Whitelock, The Audience of Beowulf, 50; Kenneth Sisam, Studies in the History of Old English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1953), 288-90.

24. Matts Dreijer, Häuptlinge, Kaufleute, und Missionare im Norden vor Tausend Jahren (Skrifter Utgivna av Ålands Kulturstiftelse 2 [Mariehamn, 1960]), 71-80.

25. Cf. Bernlef who joined St. Liudger's retinue and was “loved by his neighbors because he was of an open and free nature, and would repeat the actions of the men of old and the contests of kings, singing to his harp,” Vita Liudgeri, ed. G. H. Pertz, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores 2: 403; cited and trans. W. P. Ker, in The Dark Ages (New York: New American Library, 1958), 57.

26. On Sutton Hoo in relation to the burials in Beowulf see the Supplement by C. L. Wrenn, “Recent Work on Beowulf to 1958,” especially p. 513, in R. W. Chambers, Beowulf: An Introduction (3d ed.; Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1959); for the Continental sources quoted in the text see Capitulatio de Partibus Saxoniae in Texte zur germanischen Bekehrungsgeschichte, ed. Wolfgang Lange (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1962), 154-55, nos. 7, 22. This text dates from about 789.

27. They are frequently mentioned in the texts collected in Texte zur germanischen Bekehrungsgeschichte, ed. Lange; e.g. Dicta Pirmini (written between 718 and 724), 90-91.

28. In the ninth century more extended accounts of the pagans were written, such as the Translatio Sancti Alexandri, ed. G. H. Pertz, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores 2 (note 16), 673-81, and the Indiculus Superstitionum et Paganiarum, ed. G. H. Pertz, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Leges (Hanover: Hahn, 1835) 1: 19-20.

29. Lau, Die angelsächsische Missionsweise im Zeitalter des Bonifaz, 3, quotes an Englishman, Wigbert, writing to Lull (Die Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus, letter 137).

30. Die Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus, letter 46.

31. The text is from Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, ed. Klaeber.

32. For example, Whitelock, The Audience of Beowulf, 78-79.

33. Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (note 11), II, v (1:228): Quo utroque [Eadbald and his wife] scelere occasionem dedit ad priorem vomitum revertendi ‘by both crimes [Eadbald and his wife] he gave occasion for returning to the previous vomit.’ Cf. Caesarius of Arles, Sermones, in Texte zur germanischen Bekehrungsgeschichte, ed. Lange, 61; Prov. 26:11.

34. “The Religious Principle in Beowulf,” in An Anthology of Beowulf Criticism (note 6), 125.

35. “Beowulf, Ireland, and the Natural Good,” Traditio 7 (1949-51): 263-77.

36. In Cantica Canticorum, in The Complete Works of the Venerable Bede, ed. J. A. Giles (London, 1844): 9:197. The desuper is a reminder that even a pagan like Ongendus (see n. 45) or Beowulf can be touched by grace.

37. Ibid., 199.

38. Annales Xantenses, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores (note 28), 2: 221.

39. Die Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus, letter 59.

40. Sister M. Thomas Aquinas Carroll, The Venerable Bede: His Spiritual Teachings (Catholic University of America Studies in Medieval History, N.S. 9 [Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1946]), 95. For a further discussion of this doctrine in relation to Beowulf see the suggestive article by Morton Bloomfield, “Patristics and Old English Literature: Notes on Some Poems,” Comparative Literature 14 (1962): 36-43; reprinted in Studies in Old English Literature in Honor of Arthur G. Brodeur, ed. Stanley B. Greenfield (Eugene, Ore: University of Oregon Books, 1963), 36-43, and in An Anthology of Beowulf Criticism (note 6), 367-72. In writing the present article, I have had the benefit of Bloomfield's suggestions and criticisms.

41. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores (note 16), 2: 675.

42. Horace Odes III.xxiv (referring to Getae); Tacitus Germania; Martianus Capella, De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, ed. F. Eyssenhardt (Leipzig: Teubner, 1866), 227-28, 240. Adam of Bremen takes the references in Horace and Martianus to refer to the Danes and the Geats: see History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen, trans. F. J. Tschan (Records of Civilization: Sources and Studies 53 [New York: Columbia University Press, 1959]), 195, 199, 204.

43. De gubernatione Dei, in Texte zur germanischen Bekehrungsgeschichte, ed. Lange, 16. Bede takes a somewhat similar view when he (following Gildas) speaks of the Saxon invaders as agents of God's just vengeance for the crimes of the Celtic Christians: Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (note 11), 1, xiv-xv (1: 64-74).

44. Vita S. Liudgeri (note 16), II, 405.

45. See, for example, the alderman who avenged the two Hewalds (see n. 14), the Danish king Ongendus who, though a pagan, “nevertheless, through divine intervention, received the herald of truth with every mark of honour” (trans. Talbot, in The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany, 9), the pagans who spare the lives of St. Lebuinus (ed. G. H. Pertz, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores [note 16], 2: 363) and of St. Willehad (2: 381), those pagans prudentia naturali ‘with natural wisdom’ reported in the Historia Translationis Sanctae Pusinnae (ibid., 2: 681) and the pagan Frisians who honorably received Wilfred: Cujus loci incolae, nondum imbuti fide Christi, solo humanitatis affectu eos obvii benigne suscepere, et relevantes lassitudinem ipsorum quaeque necessitas exigebat gratis obtulere “the inhabitants of this place, not yet filled with the faith of Christ, moved by human kindness alone, received them kindly along the way and, relieving their weariness, brought them freely whatever necessity required,” Breviloquium Vitae S. Wilfridi, (note 10) 71:231 (cf. Vita Wilfridi, cap. 26-27, pp. 37-58, in the same volume).

46. Die Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus, letter 73. In parts of the letter not quoted Boniface draws on Tacitus for his account of the pagans' attitude toward adultery, and he draws on his own experience by extending that account to cover also the Wends; in the passage quoted Boniface cites the Bible.

47. Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (note 11), I, vii: a pagan who refuses to execute St. Alban is himself executed, de quo nimirum constat, quia etsi fonte baptismatis non est ablutus sui tamen est sanguinis lavacro mundatus “of whom it is clearly apparent that though he was not bathed in the baptismal font yet he was cleansed by the washing of his own blood” (1: 43). Likewise, Edwin before his baptism is described as a man of “extraordinary sagacity” (II, ix).

48. Cf. Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), 100: “I believe that once we know the facts of oral composition we must cease trying to find an original of any traditional song. From one point of view each performance is an original.”

49. Arthur G. Brodeur, The Art of Beowulf (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1959), demonstrates that Beowulf and Hrothgar are “exemplars of an ideal and a course of conduct in harmony with both the best traditions of antiquity and the highest ideal of Christian Englishmen” (185).

50. However, William of Malmesbury is our only authority for the story.

51. Cf. Adam of Bremen, History of the Archbishops (note 42), 80-93; Dreijer, Häuptlinge, Kaufleute, und Missionare im Norden vor Tausend Jahren (note 24), 199-207.