SOURCE: “The Marriage of Traditions in Beowulf: Secular Symbolism and Religious Allegory,” in The Mode and Meaning of “Beowulf,” The Athlone Press, 1970, pp. 60-96.

[In the essay that follows, Goldsmith examines the ways in which the influence of Christianity accounted for a shift in the function of heroic poetry and altered the meaning of the secular symbols traditionally used in heroic poetry generally, and in Beowulfin particular.]

My attention has so far been given to the Christian climate of thought revealed in writings made in religious centres in early Anglo-Saxon England. It is now time to consider what kinds of poetic expression and what theories of the nature of poetry could have been at the disposal of the maker of Beowulf, and how far these were compatible with the attitudes inculcated in the Latin learning of the schools.

It must be admitted from the start that all statements made about native Germanic poetry anterior to Beowulf are inferential. The ‘Germanic heroic epic’ is an academic construct, since there are no direct, and, what is more important, no uncontaminated sources of information about pagan oral poetry. Of early evidence, there is the brief mention by Tacitus of the carmina antiqua which served as oral historical records among the Germani, and the battle-songs of ‘Hercules’ which they chanted before fighting.¹ The custom of preserving in verse the memory of the gods and kings and their great battles is reasonably presumed to have continued right up to the period when written annals and lettered poetry took their place—save that the pagan gods were replaced by the Lord of Hosts. The long memories of the poets could perpetuate the names of kings and heroes for three or four hundred years, as is proved by the two surviving fragments of early secular heroic verse, The Fight at Finnsburh and Waldere, and the two scopic songs Widsith and Deor, which, though not themselves heroic lays, include the names of ancient legendary heroes. All these short pieces now survive in late tenth-century manuscripts, but are thought to have been composed by the eighth century, Widsith and Finnsburh perhaps being older than Beowulf.² These poems are characterized by formulaic diction, a basically similar metrical form, a highly allusive style and a narrow range of subject-matter. Only the fragments of Waldere by their style give reason to think that in its entirety this was a poem of some length. But in this longer poem there are references to the Christian God,³ which suggests that Waldere, like Beowulf, is of mixed ancestry. We therefore have no evidence at all that the unlettered Anglo-Saxon poets composed songs of epic length and complexity. The one surviving secular piece from Germany, the Hildebrandslied,⁴ is a short self-contained lay which does nothing to contradict the impression given by the English corpus that longer poems were first made upon Latin models, or at least by educated men familiar with Latin poetry.

This impression is strengthened by the results of modern studies of living oral poetry and the techniques used by oral poets today. One might quote on this point Professor F. P. Magoun, who certainly cannot be accused of bias in favour of a literary Beowulf, since the article quoted is an attempt to explain away the fact that Beowulf presents an abnormal structure for an oral composition:

Seldom if ever does a folk-singer, composing extemporaneously without benefit of writing materials, compose a cyclic poem, that is, sing in a single session or series of sessions a story which he or she feels is a unit dealing with several consecutive events in a character's life. … In view of a general lack of cyclic composition in oral singing the apparent cyclic character of the Beowulf material in Brit. Mus. MS Cotton Vitellius A. XV is a priori immediately suspect …⁵

Magoun's explanation of the curious form of ‘the Beowulf material’ is that it was put together from separate lays with transition verses ‘by some anthologizing scribe’. It will be evident, however, that if one begins with the hypothesis of a lettered poet working with inherited verse-material about Beowulf, there is no abnormality to be explained.

The studies mentioned by Magoun have added further evidence to conclusions earlier drawn from the Homeric poems and other ancient compositions. These indicate that at a certain stage of cultural development, illiterate societies produce, and preserve in oral form, public poetry which acts as a stabilizing factor in the political and social life of the group. It incorporates religious myths, dynastic history, and customs and moral values admired by the society. (Later, when the ruling classes have become literate, oral poetry becomes the prerogative of folk entertainers and the songs become more romantic in type.) It has often been observed that some parts of the Old Testament have the mythic and social qualities I have mentioned. To find something similar today, one must turn to the emergent countries, where warrior societies built upon the clan system still produce such poetry. Recent research into living poetry among the tribes of the Congo by Dr Jan Vansina⁶ reveals some very interesting resemblances to the remnants of Germanic tribal poetry, and may help us to realize that primitive poetry of this sort is far from plain or simple in its modes of expression, though simple enough in its message. It seems to me that some of Vansina's informed generalizations about the nature of oral poetry correct some current opinions derived from vestigial folk-singing among more developed nations. In the first place, Vansina finds no marked difference between written and oral literature except for a greater frequency of repetition in oral compositions. He comments on the formal structures inherent in a given literary category, and the conventions of style, which include allusions, stock phrases and many kinds of rhetorical device. He particularly notes: ‘Dans les cultures illettrées, une des figures de style les plus appréciées est l'expression symbolique.’⁷ His comments on ‘symbolic statements’ and ‘poetic allusion’, in primitive socieities generally, may incline us to believe that the obscurities, veiled allusions and dramatic ironies found in Beowulf by modern critics are natural to poetry dependent on such an oral tradition as has been described, and should certainly not be dismissed as figments of over-subtle modern criticism.

Voiler sa pensée est dans beaucoup de cultures et pour beaucoup d'auteurs un artifice de style très apprécié. Déjà le symbolisme n'est au fond qu'une technique pour exprimer par circonlocutions une pensée qu'on ne veut pas traduire directement. Mais en dehors des cas de symbolisme que tous les participants à la culture peuvent comprendre il existe une série d'artifices, les allusions poétiques, qui restent incompréhensibles pour tous ceux qui ne connaissent pas à l'avance une partie ou la totalité des faits dont le témoignage rend compte.⁸

Vansina gives illustrations from Rwanda poetry, which he says are by no means exceptional.

Dans presque toutes les cultures on pourrait citer des exemples analogues. Il résulte de l'emploi des allusions poétiques, que pour les comprendre il faut disposer de traditions historiques parallèles au poème qui en sont un commentaire explicatif.⁹

The familiar sound of all these statements to students of Germanic heroic poetry needs no underlining. Vansina also discusses stock phrases and stereotyped motifs in the African oral texts, and again the similarity with Germanic poetry is striking. His explanation of the use of these devices is germane to my general argument about the nature of Beowulf: ‘Les lieux-communs à proprement parler apparaissent dans des textes qui traduisent des idéaux culturels acceptés par tous les tenants de la culture.’¹⁰ The complex stereotypes form the motifs of episodes; one thinks of the washing ashore of an infant in a boat as probably such a motif in Beowulf. Vansina explains the inclusion of such motifs:

Il semble bien que ces clichés complexes ne soient que des procédés purement littéraires pour expliquer un fait historique connu, pour colorer le récit ou pour rendre compte d'un événement désagréable du passé sans choquer les valeurs et les idéaux culturels du moment.¹¹

Vansina's study brings out very clearly that an initiated illiterate audience can accept and enjoy in poetry much that is obscure and allusive or symbolic in expression. If one supposes that the Anglo-Saxon nobility enjoyed similar qualities in the secular poetry recited to them, not only is the style of Beowulf what one would expect, but the obscurity and ambiguity of some other Old English poems such as The Seafarer and Exodus becomes less remarkable in works composed for laymen. Altogether, the apparent ease with which biblical and exegetical symbolism was absorbed by the Anglo-Saxons is much more understandable if the secular poetic tradition contained the elements Vansina mentions.¹² My purpose in this chapter is to demonstrate the fundamental way in which the change of cultural ideals at the Conversion altered the function of heroic poetry, and at the same time inevitably changed the meaning of traditional secular symbols. In gaining a spiritual dimension, such poetry became potentially, almost necessarily, allegorical.¹³

In the learned tradition, Virgil's Æneid was the great model for a heroic poet. The Æneid, though vastly more sophisticated, fulfils the secular functions I have been speaking of. It upholds the ruler by celebrating his predecessors and by showing that the gods destined him to reign. It presents in its ancient heroes a pattern of moral conduct. In many respects it would seem to be a fitting model for a Christian epic poet. But it has, inescapably, a pagan religious foundation, which early Christian scholars naturally found repellent, though they could not bring themselves to reject the Æneid from the educational curriculum. Instead, they followed the lead of the pagan commentators Servius and Macrobius in discovering symbolic meaning in the more superstitious passages of the epic, so that the Æneid came to be read in the Christian schools as a historical epic with allegorical elements.¹⁴

It would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that every literate poet in Europe from the fourth century onwards was influenced by Virgil, yet though Christian epic poems in Latin appeared, there were no secular epics by Christian authors at that time. The reason is not far to seek. Christendom as a realm on earth to be upheld and defended was a concept not yet formed, and the heroes whose memories were perpetuated in Christian poetry were either the Old Testament figuræ of Christ, or the Lord and his apostles, or those famous later disciples who renounced wordly honours and fought their battles with the invisible hosts of the Enemy. A secular Christian epic would have been a contradiction in terms in a cultural environment dominated by the monastic ideal, but the way was still open for the advancement of God's kingdom through allegory. In England and the Germanic countries generally, there was the further obstacle that the ancestral heroes were pagan; again, allegorical treatment would permit the celebration of their nobility and valour, because it could be believed that the good men of the past also fought the Enemy. In fact, since there could not be a legitimate marriage between the politico-social heroic poetry of the secular tradition and the epic saint's Life which celebrates a hero of the invisible Kingdom, the product of such a strange union must, like Beowulf, laud a hero who inhabits two worlds, and is not quite at ease in either.

Sulpicius Severus, author of the influential Vita S. Martini, plainly states the contrast between the aims of secular and religious writers, the one celebrating great men, the other, the saints. He speaks of the examples of great men whose memory is preserved in literature, but he regards the reading of such secular work as profitless: …

for, in truth, those who evaluate life by present actions have given their hope to fables and their souls to tombs … hence it seems to me that I shall make a work of some worth, if I write the life of a very holy man which will be an example for others in the future: through which readers will be inspired towards true wisdom and heavenly warfare and divine virtue. In this we are also thinking of our own advantage, as thus we may look for, not worthless remembrance by men, but eternal reward from God.¹⁵

The above passage may have influenced the writer of a discourse on Psalm 52: 1-4 once attributed to Bede: the work begins with a short statement of his purpose in writing: …

When I marked many clerics established in places of learning giving so much time to the acquisition of knowledge of secular compositions, which studiously teach their hearers to desire carnal things and to strive for worldly glory … I decided that I myself would collect those literary works through which I might encourage some people towards the pattern of the holy faith, towards concern for the love and fear of God, towards the purity of spiritual life, towards devotion to humility and charity, towards penance for wrongdoers and amendment of their ways.¹⁶

This purpose is served by a discourse made up of a string of biblical parables, similitudes and exempla taken from the common stock, their inclusion justified by the doctrine that God is to be seen in his creation: …

For since the visible things were created by God such that any understanding or seeking God can easily be taught in these to recognise the invisible, to inquire (of God) is to test someone subtly through those same visible things, to discover whether he loves and fears him by obeying his commandments, or whether he serves his own pleasure by accepting diabolical illusions.¹⁷

The Beowulf poet quite probably knew the Vita S. Martini, which Colgrave groups with the Vita S. Pauli, the Vita S. Antonii and Gregory's Dialogi as works ‘which had much influence on all writers of saints' lives of the seventh, eighth and later centuries’.¹⁸ And I do not doubt that he also knew material like that assembled in the Ps.-Bede discourse. It will now, I think, be plain that Beowulf, if the religious element were removed, would fall into Sulpicius's category of secular works which offer the examples of great men for emulation and celebrate worldly glory. Beowulf himself earns and receives that inanem ab hominibus memoriam which Sulpicius contrasts with the æternum præmium which those who follow the example of the saints may hope to gain. Without the religious element, the poem would most surely teach its audience pro obtinendi mundi gloria contendere but with its ‘Christian colouring’ it seems to me to lead them ad veram sapientiam et cælestem militiam divinamque virtutem. How is this done? Obviously not by an added and extraneous condemnation of everything that the narrative has extolled, but instead by the more subtle use of the ambiguities and ironies which the two scales of values generate when the audience is brought to look through the one at the other. I believe that Beowulf is shown being tested as Ps.-Bede describes, through a ‘diabolical illusion’: the treasure hoard. The poet achieves this effect by exploiting the plurality of meanings which inheres in symbols and the essential irony of the visibilia, that ‘what appears is so unlike what is’.¹⁹ No sceptical reader need think that a use of symbols in the manner I have described would be alien to the mind of an Anglo-Saxon author. It seems to me quite congruent with the treatment of persons, objects and events in commentaries upon the Bible, remembering the arbitrary and occasionally antithetical meanings which may be attached to a single symbolic word or event.

At this point, some theoretical discussion is required to explain the nature of the symbolism we are concerned with and its relation to the allegory I have postulated. Vansina's use of the word symbol needed no explanation: it implied simply the substitution of a veiled term for a literal one.²⁰ Some of the substitutions he quotes are quite trivial, others would deserve the name of symbolism on almost any definition: for example, the rumbling of a storm as sign of the coming of a king in war (the king being the tribal rainmaker), or the loss of a tribal drum signifying the break-up of a kingdom.²¹ The latter example brings to mind Mrs Winifred Nowottny's statement on symbolism in her book The Language Poets Use:

It is as though … the poet were trying to leap out of the medium of language altogether and to make his meaning speak through objects instead of through words. Even though he does not tell us what the object X stands for, or even that it does stand for anything, he makes us believe that it means, to him at least, something beyond itself.²²

This statement will serve very well as a point of departure. It will be recalled that my explanation of the purpose of Aldhelm's riddles in Chapter 2 involved this ‘speaking through objects’, and my examples of the symbols used in religious teaching could be so described. There is, I need hardly say, a profound difference between Aldhelm's speaking universe and a drum which speaks of a tribal kingdom, in respect of their philosophical implications, but as literary devices they can be classified together. Because of this, a social and political poem which uses symbolism of the latter sort can be enlarged to include religious symbolism without much violence to its surface literary integrity. This, I believe, is what happened in the making of Beowulf.

Augustine's literary theory in De doctrina christiana makes no fundamental distinction between secular and sacred symbols; he divides them into signa naturalia (such as smoke signifying fire) and signa data (which include all kinds of communication through sound or gesture, picture or object).²³ Among his illustrative examples are the dragon-standards of the army which per oculos insinuant voluntatem ducum ‘indicate to the eye the generals' intent', the perfumed ointment poured over Christ's feet, and the woman touching the hem of his garment.²⁴ These, which nowadays would probably be called symbolic objects or symbolic gestures, he uses to illustrate the various ways in which meaning can be conveyed, before he introduces the reader to the obscurities and ambiguities of Scripture. Augustine also warns his readers that similitudes in the Bible may sometimes have contrary meanings, one good, the other bad, as in the example of the lion, which signifies Christ in the Apocalypse 5: 5, and the Devil in 1 Peter 5: 8.²⁵ He moves on from figures to tropes, with a special mention of allegoria, ænigma and parabola, and a special paragraph on hironia.²⁶ It is evident from this classification and also from his explanation of allegoria in De Trinitate,²⁷ that ‘allegory’ for him was a general term for a literary device aliud ex alio significare, which included in its sub-classes both irony and enigma, the latter being an obscure allegory. A student brought up on De doctrina christiana would therefore have a very different conception of allegory from the modern student, who tends to think primarily in terms of personification allegory and the clothing of an abstract theme in a fictional dress.²⁸ Bede agrees with Augustine in regarding allegoria as a class of tropes including irony and enigma. He also rather unsuccessfully tries to find a theoretical category into which to fit the famous ‘four senses’ found in Scripture; his difficulty, of course, is that these multiplex tropes do not identify themselves by any formal sign and completely resist rhetorical classification.²⁹ (He puts them, quite wrongly, under asteismus; Augustine is content to include them under ænigma.)

In view of the attitudes to literary composition revealed here, one would not expect an allegorical work composed in Bede's time or thereabouts either to identify itself by formal signs or to preserve consistent levels of meaning. Allegory to these scholars was not a literary form, but, in the convenient phrase adopted by Angus Fletcher, ‘a symbolic mode’ of thinking and writing.³⁰ It is quite clear from the works I have just quoted that there was no theoretical separation of symbol and allegory; an allegorical work was simply one in which there was a great deal of hidden or obscure meaning conveyed in parable, enigma, proverb or almost any kind of metaphorical or ironic statement. When allegory is conceived in this way, the distinction between allegorical interpretation (of Scripture or of pagan writers) and allegorical creation (in new compositions) dissolves away. Fletcher, though in another context, makes a penetrating statement on this point:

The modern question as to how we relate the interpretative and the creative activities could not arise before a break-up of the medieval world-view. Modern empirical science, on the other hand, depends in part on the disjunction of creative (imaginative and synthetic) and interpretative (empirical and analytic) mind, a major intellectual shift which might explain the modern distaste for allegory.³¹

A great deal of modern argument about the possible existence of allegorical meaning in Old English secular compositions has developed simply from confusion of terms and failure to accept allegory as a literary mode rather than a form.

Much confusion has been caused by the existence of the ‘four senses’ or ‘planes of meaning’ in scriptural interpretation. The first point to be noted is that though the great exegetes recognized the coexistence of different kinds of meaning in scriptural passages, they were not always sure how to differentiate these kinds, and in practice they might find two, three or four planes of meaning in some verses, and only literal meaning in others. For example, Augustine in the De utilitate credendi distinguishes four senses which he calls historical, ætiological, analogical and allegorical, covering respectively the actual Old Testament event, its cause, its agreement with the doctrine of the New Testament, and its figurative meaning. (His example is Abraham's two wives signifying the two covenants.)³² As to the existence of these senses in a given text, he suggests the proper direction of scholarly enquiry in a series of rhetorical questions in the tract De vera religione:

Do some [scriptural stories] signify visible events, others the motions of the mind, others the law of eternity, or are some found in which all these are to be discovered?³³

Gregory, explaining his own method in the dedicatory letter to the Moralia,³⁴ has a slightly different system; he distinguishes historical, typological, and moral-allegorical kinds of interpretation, which may be applicable severally or in conjunction. Bede in his commentaries compiles from the work of his predecessors; in his homilies, which are based on New Testament texts, he recognizes historical, moral, and spiritual or mystical meaning.³⁵

In one homily, Bede makes an unusually clear distinction between the different ways in which a story can be understood. He uses the changing of the water into wine at the Marriage at Cana as an allegory of the transformation of the meaning of the Old Testament stories by the significance of the life of Christ. The six vessels are six Old Testament stories from which the Jews drew, and any man can draw, moral lessons: this is the water. From the same six vessels the Christian can draw a more precious spiritual nourishment: this is the wine.³⁶ The spiritual meaning comes from the typological relationship between the acts of Noah, Isaac and the other figurœ in the stories and the acts of Christ himself:³⁷ the kind of prophetic symbolism already mentioned above as the subject of pictures brought by Benedict Biscop from Rome to Jarrow. There are of course two kinds of symbolism involved in Bede's homily. Each of the Old Testament stories is symbolic in its own right, and it teaches a moral lesson, as the religious pictures might. But each in conjunction with a New Testament story reveals typological symbolism and teaches a spiritual lesson.

Beowulf, I suggest, is a symbolic history from which one can draw the refreshing water of moral lessons; some critics have been tempted to suppose that one might also draw wine, by treating Beowulf as figura or ‘type’ of Christ like Noah or Isaac. They are, I believe, mistaken. Beowulf and Hrothgar are quite probably modelled on Old Testament characters, and are, like them, moral examples. But this resemblance does not make them a part of prophetic sacred history. Typological interpretation in the strict sense has no certain place outside of the inspired Scriptures.³⁸ It might, I suppose, be legitimately extended to poems in which Christ himself is the hero, such as the Old English Phoenix, or to a paraphrase of part of the Old Testament in which the figura occurred in the source. It could only be extended to the acts of a man living in the Christian era by someone who had an incomplete grasp of the theory of typological interpretation. There is, I believe, an intended relationship between Beowulf and the warrior-Christ, but it is not a direct and simple one.³⁹

It is true that no line was drawn at that period, as in modern times, between the mythical and legendary parts of the Old Testament narrative and later history properly so called, as witness, for example, the Chronica⁴⁰ of Sulpicius Severus, whose views on the purpose of literature have been quoted above. His compact history of the world includes Cain's murder of Abel, the miscegenation which spawned the giants, and the Flood, just as the ‘historical’ poem of Beowulf does, and proceeds through such events—to take a few at random—as the burning of Rome under Nero, the finding of the Cross by Helena, and several notable synods of the Church, down to doctrinal controversies in his own day. This work was not intended to be a church history; it is a Christian's view of the history of mankind; and though there is no separation of biblical history and later events there is a line of demarcation between the era of prophecy which led up to the Incarnation and the Christian era which followed. Typology in the patristic sense of the word belongs only to the era of prophecy. There is in the holy men of the world before Christ a partial revelation of the pattern of perfection; after the life of Christ the witness of holy men is imitation of Christ; the word ‘type’ in its narrow exegetical sense can no longer apply.

Christian literature is naturally full of reminiscences of New Testament incidents and sayings. To recognize these is not the same thing as to discover figuræ Christi in the heroes of the works concerned. I quote in support of this contention that great student of medieval symbolism, Rosemond Tuve, who has discussed this question in relation to Guyon in The Faerie Queene. She speaks of Spenser's use of allegorical images to indicate

that we are to read them with this reach into ultimate questions. We recognise them as instruments for the discussion of just such matters—but able to speak in the present of the timeless, and locally of the universal. I do not mean that images repeat the story they told in the past. It does not turn Guyon into a ‘Christ-figure’ when in Canto vii. 9 Spenser directs us to see the parallel with Christ's three temptations. Rather, this indicates the amplitude of the issue and states a doctrine about the relation between all human temptations and Christ's.⁴¹

This quotation seems to me to point to the right way to read Beowulf's descent into the world of his demonic adversaries, which recalls Christ's descent into hell in rather the same way as Guyon's temptations recall the temptations of Christ. It indicates the allegorical amplitude of the issue, but it does not turn Beowulf into a ‘type’ of Christ.

If we put aside typological significance as inappropriate to Beowulf, we are left with the other kinds of allegorical meaning, the moral and the spiritual. One might distinguish these as appertaining to right conduct upon earth, and that conduct viewed in the perspective of eternal life and man's relationship with God. I think that the Beowulf poet is intermittently writing on both these planes.

It should by now be evident that when I speak of Beowulf as an allegory of the life of man I mean something rather different from what C. S. Lewis had in mind when he said of Fulgentius's Expositio Virgilianae continentiae, ‘The whole story of the Æneid is interpreted as an allegory of the life of man’.⁴² Fulgentius's interpretation of the Æneid calls for a far greater degree of abstraction than I find in Beowulf, and all the incidents are treated as images in the progress of a life. Whether Fulgentius was available to the Beowulf poet remains uncertain. There is no positive evidence that the Mitologiae and the Virgilianae continentia were known in England before the ninth or tenth century.⁴³ An instance in Bede of the Fulgentian method, namely, his allegorizing of the fabled nature of Cerberus, merely demonstrates a similar approach to the pagan myths, since Bede does not follow Fulgentius in his interpretation of the monster's three heads.⁴⁴ One might deduce that Bede would have found the work of Fulgentius congenial in some respects; his lack of reference to the mythographer's books is therefore significant. Aldhelm, who uses allegorical beasts as symbols of the vices,⁴⁵ would undoubtedly have been interested in Fulgentius had he known his compositions, but he betrays no acquaintance with them. On the whole, it seems unlikely that Fulgentius had direct influence on the Anglo-Saxon poets; those who were able to read the Æneid probably found latent symbolic significance in particular objects or actions rather than a continuous didactic underthought. Æneas's descent into the underworld had received particular attention from religious writers;⁴⁶ this could have provided a model for the allegorical treatment of Beowulf's descent into the hellish depths of the mere. It must, however, be said that the supposed Virgilian reminiscences in this part of Beowulf are rather dubious.

A minor but interesting question which pertains to the Beowulf poet's conception of allegory is whether or not he employs personification allegory in his poem. Virgil provides a model for the occasional appearance of abstractions in living form, notably in the vices which cluster round the portals of Hades.⁴⁷ There is nothing quite of this kind in Beowulf, but as Professor Bloomfield has pointed out, the names Unferth and Hygd could suggest that these characters were invented to fill the role the names connote.⁴⁸ It seems to me rather more in keeping with the poet's general practice to suppose that the characters had a traditional part to play and the names were perhaps modified to underline the nature of that part. Personified vices in beast form, on the other hand, such as appear in the battle with the vices at the end of Aldhelm's De virginitate,⁴⁹ might well have guided the poet to awareness of the allegorical potential of Beowulf's monster-fights.

I have now, I hope, shown that allegoria in Bede's time was not a category of formal structure, but a mode of figurative writing which might inhere only intermittently in a given work, and that it involved moral and spiritual symbols and figurative passages. The allegory in Beowulf, as I believe, is intermittent and concerns only one aspect of man's life, the contest with the Enemy. Though the poet quite probably knew the Æneid with its accompanying symbolic commentaries, there are no signs that he was influenced by it except in the most general way; for the kind of subject he was interested in, the saint's Life, the Bible as read by the commentators, and perhaps the psycho-machia type of allegory, would provide him with sufficient models for the religious aspect of his composition.

In a rather different respect, the way in which the æneid was read may have offered the Beowulf poet a pattern. It provided an authoritative warrant for the composition of a historical epic with moral and philosophical symbolism and with divine intervention. Whether or not Beowulf can be called an epic depends entirely on whether one sets up a theoretical category distinguished by certain formal requirements. It is of course much shorter and more restricted in its range than the classical epic, but I suppose that by the standard of the time it would have been included in the epic genre. Its shortness would hardly have been a bar, since Homer's reputation was perpetuated in Western Europe through the Ilias Latina, a first-century Latin abridgment of the Iliad in 1070 lines.⁵⁰ According to the definitions given by Isidore of Seville, which Bede used in his own brief literary treatise, Beowulf would belong to the heroica species of the genus commune (i.e. that in which both poet and characters speak). Our poet performs his function well according to Isidore's definition of the poet's task:

A poet's function lies in this, that he presents things which have actually taken place transformed into other images through oblique and figurative modes of expression, adding beauty.⁵¹

I now turn more particularly to the means by which the poet transforms the gesta in Beowulf and gives the historical narrative a new significance.⁵² It will be useful to return to Rosemond Tuve's criticism of the Faerie Queene. She speaks of Spenser's employment of classical symbols, such as the golden apples, which

evoke all those sad stretches of human history when men's concupiscence, for power of all kinds, had brought all the great typical ‘ensaumples of mind intemperate’ to their various eternities of frustrated desire. He uses what he calls ‘the present fate’ of these long-dead persons to tell the powerful who have not yet left their mortal state for that other, ‘how to use their present state’; this is evidence that he wishes us to read allegorically of the relations between a virtue Temperance and what can happen to a soul, and not merely morally of a character Guyon and his confrontation of covetous desires.⁵³

One cannot press the analogy with the Faerie Queene very far, but some of Tuve's observations appear to me also appropriate to Beowulf. The poem is undoubtedly addressed to the powerful and is designed to warn them of the dangers attendant upon power; I believe that the hero's ‘confrontation of covetous desires’ when he fights for the buried hoard is to be read as an image of the soul's struggle and not merely morally of a character Beowulf. Tuve reminds us that the images carry their history with them, to deepen the conviction ‘that all things though fully present to the senses are meaningful beyond what sense reports’.⁵⁴ The dusty gold of Mammon's cave has a long line of predecessors, among which I do not think it wrong to place the rust-eaten treasures for which Beowulf fought. The modern reader is unhappily ill-equipped with material in which to trace the history of the images used by the Beowulf poet, but some of the associations of dragon and treasure in classical and Christian writings can be recovered so as to deepen their meaning for us.

Tuve also recognizes that a poet writing in this mode must sometimes guide his readers by ‘outright conceptual statement.’ She cites ‘Here is the fountaine of the worldes good’ (F.Q. 7, 38).⁵⁵ The equivalent in Beowulf is the blunt observation,

                                                                      Sinc eaðe mæg,
gold on grund(e),                    gumcynnes gehwone
oferhigian,                    hyde se ðe wille.

(2764-6)

The audience has been prepared for this by the didactic matter in Hrothgar's admonition, which by reaching ‘into the area … of man's metaphysical situation’⁵⁶ requires the hearer to think of Beowulf's subsequent life in terms of the bellum intestinum. Thus Beowulf's dragon-fight can be read as an image of the interior struggle of the king with the Enemy. The symbolic significance of Beowulf's great contests will require a separate chapter: in what remains of this, I shall examine the purely secular symbols which the poet makes the instruments of his purpose.

It is rather obvious that the rhythmic, alliterative, and syntactic frames within which an Anglo-Saxon poet has to work inhibit precise utterance; the compound word is more useful to him than the corresponding phrase, and inevitably less specific; a range of interchangeable words is required by the metre, so that fine distinctions are worn away; and the traditional vocabulary is relatively small. All these handicaps notwithstanding, a satisfying communication is apparently achieved; and this can only be through the lighting-up of part of the spectrum of associations shared by poet and audience. As Vansina's observations showed, traditional oral poetry is one means by which a people preserves its social stability and its cultural ideals. The associations of the stylized diction are familiar and predictable, and necessarily so. This was presumably true of the oral poetry of the heathen Anglo-Saxons. But upon their conversion to Christianity, they did not discard their inherited poetry. A very strange state of affairs is thus brought about when the traditional diction serves both the old and the new ideals. It is not simply that the vocabulary has to be enlarged and adapted; more curious and interesting is that it has to accommodate the paradoxes of Christianity: that man's home is elþeodigra eard,⁵⁷ that the strong are weak and the rich poor, that the tangible sword snaps and the helmet splits, but the invisible shield of faith endures. The trappings of life remain as before and the poets retain the words for them, but their significance as symbols becomes ambivalent. In general, symbols of magnificence and grandeur will take on connotations of pride and mutability, and symbols of military prowess connotations of strife and vainglory. In addition, the old vocabulary is analogically stretched to provide a language for the invisible and eternal world. Words like woroldcyning, wuldorfull, dream and dom take on two aspects, changing as the poet shortens or lengthens his focus. Beowulf as a poem about the departed world has its own particular ambivalence.

There are, I suggest, a number of objects, persons and actions in the narrative to which the term symbol (in Nowottny's sense) can be applied, because they are given prominence in a manner not actually called for by the movement of the plot: such objects as Scyld's funeral boat, Grendel's hand, Hrethel's sword, such persons as Heremod and Hama, such actions as the arming of Beowulf.⁵⁸ For convenience in discussing them, it will be useful to class these symbols according as they have primarily religious, mythic,⁵⁹ social, or contextual significance. The categories are not, of course, exclusive: the second may impinge on the first, and the fourth embraces the others. The first three are probably inherited by the poet with his source material, the last comes as near as this public poetry allows to revealing the personal concerns of the poet. His interests are indicated by the selection and disposition of the material to hand; the relative importance accorded to the life of Sigemund and the funeral of Hnæf, for example, can be taken as evidence of particular preoccupations of the author, since neither is demanded by the action. I take for granted that once the Creator is introduced into the narrative, a perspective is opened through the whole history of the created world; the natural elements may speak of their Maker and the historical events speak of his purposes.

The poem opens with praise of the might of the Danes in geardagum, represented through the symbolic person of Scyld.⁶⁰ It is remarkable that the mysterious and exciting life of this royal hero is so slightly treated in comparison with his obsequies. The episode of the child in the boat, which as an ancient mythic, or social, symbolic motif may have recorded in a veiled form a profound change in the Danish way of life, is used by the poet chiefly to illustrate the power of God in effecting reversals of fortune and bringing comfort to the afflicted. The reversal of fortune is pointed by the contrast of the two boats, but of the two only the funeral ship is fully described, so that Scyld's mysterious origins and subsequent prosperity are quite overshadowed by the scene of his death. The heiti for God, Liffrea (auctor vitœ),⁶¹ places emphasis on the fact that the provision of an heir for Scyld and the continuation of the royal line were signs of God's care for the unhappy nation; the second name, wuldres Wealdend (17),⁶² may have the double aspect I have spoken of, praising the Lord who dispensed earthly glory to Scyld as well as the Lord who rules in Glory in his heavenly Kingdom. The effect of the two phrases in conjunction is like that of the prayer Deus, et temporalis vitœ auctor et œternœ, miserere. …⁶³ In birth and in death, man lies in God's hand: this is the affirmation made by the poet as he surveys the pagan king's prosperous career and magnificent parting from life. By this simple means he opens the perspective of eternity, and the brilliant foreground picture of Scyld's costly foreign spoils shades from a symbol of magnificent power into a symbol of transience.

The funeral ship is one of the most memorable secular symbols of the poem: isig and utfus (33), it gathers into itself the human feelings which accompany death. Both epithets have figurative meaning, icy coldness evoking misery, the readiness for a journey figuring the parting from life; nevertheless it would be wrong, I think, to empty them of literal meaning;⁶⁴ the boat shining with ice and straining at the mooring-ropes is beautiful, as the treasure is brilliant, because the poet is keenly aware of the beauty of the created world and the works of men's hands. It is the great strength of Beowulf as a poem that it does not become abstract. What more does the poet achieve with the boat-symbol? Some of its potency depends perhaps on its universal significance; it is not simply a reminiscence of an ancient custom (which a Christian poet could hardly wish to revive for its own sake), but as Cope says,

The boat is a universal symbol connected with both birth and death—cradle and coffin are alike special cases of a boat. We are reminded of such diverse examples as the boat-crib of Moses and the ship-burials of Germanic peoples right back to the Bronze Age.⁶⁵

As universal symbols framing a life, Scyld's two boats form a brilliant contrast between the destitution of the child and the wealth of the old man. But even here there are ironic undertones. The use of litotes (43-4) sets up in the mind two opposed possibilities; the words assert what the syntax denies, that Scyld in death was no better furnished than the destitute child. The reader of The Book of Job who remembers the words, Nudus egressus sum de utero matris meæ, et nudus revertar illuc ‘Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither’ (Job 1: 21) will be well aware that the treasure passed into the sea's keeping; though Scyld remained on Frean wære (27). This latter phrase seems deliberately chosen to stress God's continuous governance of mankind without introducing the issue of salvation.⁶⁶

Other ships appear in the course of the narrative, the return of a treasure-laden keel serving as a sign of victory and the victor's reward in the stories of Sigemund and Hengest as well as the story of Heorot. The faint memory of the loading of Scyld's treasure-ship may intrude its shadow in these other scenes; it is very striking that the piling of the treasure round the dead man is much more fully treated than Scyld's death, and of actual funeral rites there is nothing at all. The ships in the poem are not described objectively; like Scyld's cold and deathly funeral ship, the others reflect some of the emotions of the seamen. Beowulf's ship beginning the adventure presses on eagerly, and Hengest's ship is the prisoner of winter.⁶⁷ Of itself, Scyld's funeral ship could hardly act as memento mori in the way I have suggested, but the dark shadow is soon reinforced by other scenes in which the splendour of gold is accompanied by the thought of death.

The second great symbol of the poem is the royal hall which Scyld's descendant Hrothgar caused to be built. The narrative moves with great economy through the king's ancestry and his early successes in war, so that the building of Heorot becomes the dominant feature of the king's life-story. Hrothgar conceives the idea of having his men build the largest hall in the world, where he will hold court and dispense his bounty (67-73). The huge project needs the labours of craftsmen from many nations, and when it is finished it is a towering landmark (81 f.). He names it Heorot, and lives liberally and in convivial splendour within, at the centre of his great court. Heorot is a monument to Hrothgar's power, success and wealth. He is a good and generous ruler, and as a social symbol Heorot reflects nothing but the greatness of the king. Its name ‘Hart’ appears to connote royalty,⁶⁸ the descriptive terms horngeap (82) and hornreced (704), whatever their literal meanings, help to build an image of the majestic beast with wide-curving antlers, hornum trum (cp. 1369). That the name Heorot has some symbolic significance we cannot doubt, for no other hall is given a name. I am inclined to relate that significance to the associations given to the beast by the Latin fabulists and later woven into the Bestiaries, because these associations consort remarkably well with what I take to be the Beowulf poet's view of splendid palaces. Some years ago, C. S. Lewis offered the suggestion that a fable by Phædrus perhaps had something to do with Beowulf's dragon.⁶⁹ The evidence concerning the dragon is discussed in Chapter 4. I do not wish to anticipate that argument here, because the connection is at best unproven, but if the one fabled beast is acceptable, so perhaps is the other. In any case, the moral meaning which Phædrus and later fabulists found in the hart is one which any hunter of a reflective turn of mind might independently reach when he came upon a stag caught in a thicket. The animal's stance suggests pride in his spreading antlers, and when he is trapped by them, the moralist would find it hard to resist the thought that his pride was his undoing.⁷⁰ Is it too far-fetched to suppose that Heorot's towering gables drew Grendel to its doors and so brought death among the Danes?

It is convenient here to mention in passing that the hart as a Christian religious symbol deriving from Psalm 41: 2, Sicut cervus desiderat ad fontes aquarum ita desiderat anima mea ad te Deus ‘As the hart panteth after the fountains of waters, so my soul panteth after thee, O God’, seems to me to be unrelated to Heorot. The hard-pressed hart of line 1369 is more problematical. An Anglo-Saxon educated as I have described could not fail to know this symbol for the thirsting soul, but it is not drawn into the allegory of Beowulf.⁷¹

What I am suggesting is that the symbolism of the name Heorot could reinforce the moral attitude conveyed by the poet's juxtaposition of its building and its coming ruin (74-85). It was regal and magnificent, and as durable as good craftsmen could make it (cp. 770-82) but the poet reminds his hearers that within the lifetime of the builders it was maliciously destroyed by fire (cp. 781 f.). Thus the social symbol summing up the magnificence of a line of great kings is altered by a single stroke into a symbol of þeos læne gesceaft in which nothing endures. It may also, as I have suggested elsewhere, act as an eschatological symbol, bringing to mind a subject zealously treated by Anglo-Saxon poets, namely the destruction of the cities of earth and the engulfing of the wealth of kings by the devouring fire which was expected to bring the world to an end in some not distant time.⁷²

Contextually, Heorot acts as an image of the Danish court, first in its splendour, then in its uselessness during Grendel's persecution of the Danes. At the conclusion of the Grendel story, the hall bears the marks of Grendel's ferocious strength (997-1000). The cracks and breaks are partly masked by gold hangings which are brought out for the feast of celebration. On the surface, the court at Heorot is brilliant and splendid, but half-hidden enmities are hinted (1017-19) and as the company assembles for the feast, the author, in a rather longer moral statement than he usually permits himself, speaks of death:

                                                  No þæt yðe byð
to befleonne,                    fremme se þe wille,
ac gesecan sceal                    sawlberendra,
nyde genydde,                    niþða bearna,
grundbuendra                    gearwe stowe,
þær his lichoma                    legerbedde fæst
swefeþ æfter symle.

(1002-8)

By his brilliant placing of two quite commonplace images, escaping from death and sleeping after the feast of life,⁷³ the poet makes his hearers aware that just as Grendel vainly ran away from death over the wastes, and now after his monstrous feasting lies asleep in death, so the Danes, sitting now at the table, rejoicing that the shadow has been lifted from Heorot with the defeat of Grendel, have not escaped death after all, because the feud is not over (cp. 1251-5). And the Grendel feud has its echo in the bloody thoughts of Hrothulf which at a later time end Hrothgar's renewed hopes of a settled time of peace ahead. The cracks in the fabric of Heorot are an image of the treacherous hatreds which are already—to judge by the setting and tone of Wealhtheow's speech (1162-91)—making rifts in the concord of the kinsmen.

The other royal halls which appear in the poem have no recognizable identity. The Geatish royal hall is burnt down by the dragon without any preliminary description of it or prophecy of its destruction. These facts make the emphasis on Hrothgar's hall more striking and justify my inclusion of it among the symbols of the poem. The furnishings of the hall consist of ornamental hangings, a high seat, benches, beds and pillows, and drinking-cups. Some of these may be inferred to have symbolic significance, since the poet does not describe them as objects interesting in themselves and there is no detailed account of feasting or ceremonial. For example, the passing of the cup honours the king's guests, and with this piece of social ritual the poet succeeds in giving an impression of civilized conviviality.

Deeper meaning seems possible in two particular objects belonging to social life, namely the gifstol of line 168, and the fæted wæge of line 2282, which was brought from the dragon's hoard. I postpone discussion of the gifstol to Chapter 4, because the interpretation of the word has bearing upon the poet's conception of Grendel. The gilded cup could have come into the story simply as the cause of contention between the dragon and the Geats, but the symbolism of the cup in religious writing seems to indicate an allegorical significance; I believe it to be a reminder of Adam's þoculum mortis and, as such, a symbol of cupidity. My reasons for looking upon it in this way are bound up with exegetical interpretation of the war with the Serpent-Dragon, which is treated apropos of Beowulf's contest in Chapter 7.

Swords and armour have an important place in the poem. Their costly materials and fine workmanship are often praised by the poet, and he records, without adverse comment, that Beowulf's mail-coat was Weland's work and that three of the swords were forged by the giants; he also describes the boar-images which surmounted the warriors' helmets as protective talismans. One may guess that these three elements were more prominent in his source-material, since they smack of heathen superstition and magic, if not of pagan worship. They add an exciting air of antiquity to the story and there is no sign that the poet himself believed in their magical power. His obvious veneration for great craftsmanship is a very different matter, enhancing the stature of the heroes and magnifying the perilous adventures in which even these stout accoutrements failed those who bore them.

The poet's attitude to the boar-figures which adorned his warriors' helmets has some interest for his handling of a remnant of pagan superstition in the poem. Beowulf's own helmet, rather fully described in the careful preparations for his dive into the mere, had boar-figures round its crown:

                                                                                swa hine fyrndagum
worhte wæpna smið,                    wundrum teode,
besette swinlicum,                    þæt hine syþðan
no
brond ne beadomecas                    bitan ne meahton.

(1451-4)

The ancient smiths believed in the protective power of the boar, but if one looks rather closely at the poem, one observes that nowhere in the action does the wearing of such a helmet affect the course of events. There is instead a mute denial of the power of the boar in the scene of Hnæf's funeral, where the slain men's gold-adorned helmets lie on the pyre:

Æt þæm ade wæs                    eþgesyne
swatfah syrce,                    swyn ealgylden,
eofer irenheard,                    æþeling manig
wundum awyrded;                    sume on wæle crungon.

(1110-13)

Shields are surprisingly unimportant in Beowulf, until one remembers that Beowulf prefers to wrestle, and there are otherwise very few of the conventional cut-and-thrust combats of battle in the poem. The one memorable shield is the huge device which protected both Beowulf and Wiglaf from the dragon's fire (2675-7). Its function was to give cover to Beowulf until he was near enough to strike at the dragon, and this it did, but, like his sword, it failed him at the last (2570-2). I have already published⁷⁴ the opinion that the great shield represents the strongest human defence a man can make, and that its meaning in the allegory is that without spiritual defences (scutum fidei)⁷⁵ no man can successfully oppose the Dragon. The development of this religious aspect of the poem is treated in Chapters 6 and 7 below.

The sword is a potent symbol of varying significance in Beowulf. In the society depicted, a good sword is a sign of the prowess of the wearer; such are Unferth's Hrunting, lent to Beowulf in recognition that the Geat was the better man, and the sword of Hrethel presented to the hero on his triumphant return from Heorot. Probably also traditional is the use of a sword as signal of a re-kindling feud: such are the sword which roused Hengest, the sword which incited Ingeld's man to kill his father's slayer, and the sword Eanmundes laf which Wiglaf bore. This last example is contextually used to very subtle effect, drawing together the scattered incidents which had marked the progress of the Geatish feud with the Swedes during Beowulf's lifetime, and representing—in something the same fashion as the cracks in the walls of Heorot—at the moment when the dragon is felled, the imminent strife with the Swedes which will make an end of the tribe.

The swords which Beowulf possesses all fail him, and my observations on the iron shield in the allegory would apply also to the sword. In a quite different category is the sword which Beowulf found in the underwater hall. With this giant-made sword he beheaded his giant adversaries, and in so doing destroyed the sword, save for the curiously-patterned hilt which he took back to Heorot. I regard this as an important element in the allegory. As a symbol of the prowess of the giants, its wasting away in the corrosive blood of the slain Grendel kin has an obvious significance, but the enduring hilt brought back to the world of men has a much more complex story to tell. The ramifications of this story of the feud of the giants with God will be explored in my next chapter.

The giant sword is not said to have had magical power, nor is magical immunity offered as a reason for Hrunting's failure to bite on the giantess's hide.⁷⁶ The audience is left to think that the extraordinary weight of the ancient weapon gave Beowulf's blow the necessary force. The description of its melting blade merits special notice: the poet has focused attention upon it by his simile of the melting of icicles in the spring. The simile, beautiful and apt as it is for the change that comes over the hard iron, is remarkable in another respect. The presence of God in this dark infernal place under gynne grund (1551) is gradually manifested, first by the line,

rodera Rædend hit on ryht gesced,

(1555)

then by the appearance of light as bright as day,

efne swa of hefene                    hadre scineð
rodores candel.(77)

(1571 f.)

Then, with the simile I have mentioned, thought of the Father's control over all times and seasons turns the mind away from the curious wonder of the melting blade to the annual miracle of melting ice, and the giant sword and the power of the giant race become small in the comparison.

Beowulf carries the hilt of the wonderful sword to Heorot, together with Grendel's head, and in presenting these trophies to Hrothgar he ascribes his escape from the monster to God's protection (1658) and his sight of the giant weapon to God's favour (1661-2). The hilt is described: it is decorated with serpentine patterning and runic letters. Thus an aura of mysterious and malevolent antiquity is created about it, and at its centre is the engraved picture of God's retribution on the giants in the days of Noah. I pass over for the present the meaning of this backward extension of the feud with the giants into Old Testament times, to show the complex of symbolic meaning given to the giant sword, which is for the Danes a symbol of victorious revenge in the feud, for Beowulf a symbol of God's protective care for those who fight in his battles, and for the audience a symbol of the enduring cosmic war in which Beowulf's contests are brief incidents.

Weapons and armour, being costly and valued possessions, also appear in the poem as a species of wealth. Like the beagas which are prized as much for the status they confer upon the wearer as for their intrinsic value, the splendid accoutrements are symbols of social relationships in the society depicted. They signal the munificence of the royal giver as much as the worth and deserts of the great warrior who receives them. The poet openly approves the ancestral custom of dispensing rich gifts from the throne,⁷⁸ and considerable attention is given to the princely gifts which were conferred on Beowulf in recognition of his triumphs.⁷⁹ To a Christian poet, riches were the means through which a man could exercise the virtue of charitable giving and therefore were not invariably evil, but as the cupidity of man was potent for harm, great treasures were a source of danger. The evil which treasure could beget was both moral and spiritual, as causing violent quarrels for possession, and as contaminating the soul of the possessor. The Beowulf poet treats all these aspects of treasure while not losing sight of its social importance, principally by emphasizing the brevity of a man's possession of costly objects, and by making them the focal point in stories of bloodshed and death. The spiritual danger inherent in accumulated wealth is a major theme in the latter part of the poem.

Standing out among the regal gifts described in the tale of Heorot is the healsbeah (1195) which Queen Wealhtheow gave to Beowulf. Like the sword Eanmundes laf (2611) in the later story of the Geats, it acts as a linking symbol in a series of historical incidents. The necklace stands as a symbol for treasure as plunder, in the way that Eanmund's sword stands as a symbol of fraternal strife.

The necklace given to Beowulf reflects nothing but glory on the hero; in the social sphere it speaks of his pre-eminent achievements, in the moral sphere it shows him untouched by personal vanity or covetousness, since he does not try to keep it for himself. Hygelac later received it, and wore it on the plundering expedition which cost him his life. His premature death set in train the events which led to the death of Eanmund and the resurgence of Swedish power and enmity which Beowulf's own reign could only temporarily hold back. At the level of historical narrative therefore, the necklace serves as a useful means of uniting the histories of the Danes and the Geats. At the moral level it points the contrast between Beowulf and Hygelac. It is also made to act as a symbol of the vanity of human life. Between the queen's presentation (1192-6) and the applause of the company (1214) are sandwiched two stories of robbery and death⁸⁰ which dim the brightness of the jewel in just the way that the prophecy of consuming flame casts the shadow of death over gold-adorned Heorot (80-5).

The first of these interposed stories remains very obscure, since the incident of the necklace does not occur in any of the legends concerning Hama which survive in later German and Norse epic and saga.⁸¹ The allusion is made still more obscure by the vagueness of the two phrases to þœre byrhtan byrig (1199) and geceas ecne rœd (1201). The identity of the burg is quite unknown, and the meaning of the latter phrase is doubtful. In the present state of knowledge, one can only conjecture what the poet intended by the reference to Hama. Comparison with the structurally rather similar treatment of Sigemund and Heremod (874-915) suggests that some contrast between Hama and Hygelac is intended; the line

syþðan he for wlenco wean ahsode

(1206)

implies an adverse judgment on the king's action, which would support any interpretation of Hama as an admirable person in spite of his carrying off the Brosings' (Brísings'?) necklace. The unpleasant word searoniðas (1200) alienates sympathy from the wronged Eormenric, and the phrase geceas ecne rœd seems to imply that he made a good end.⁸² Whatever the lost details of the story, the effect of the two interposed incidents is undoubtedly to remind the hearers that man's possession of wealth is short-lived in the perspective of eternal reward. I think it can be seen that the poet deliberately created this effect, because he has separated the matter of the robbing of Hygelac's corpse on the battlefield from Beowulf's reminiscent account of his revenge on the despoiler (2503 f.). In the more natural later position, the incident would have enhanced Beowulf's reputation as an ideal retainer and winner of treasure rather better than in its present place: one cannot avoid the conclusion that the notes of tragic irony in the happy scene at Heorot were integral to the poet's theme, and that praise of Beowulf was only one element in that theme.

I come now to the last of the great secular symbols of the poem, and the most controversial in significance: the burial mound with its hidden treasure-hoard. There are only two such monuments in the poem, the one inhabited by the dragon, and the other raised over Beowulf's ashes as his memorial. This fact is in itself worth remarking. The other heroes whose death is recorded have no memorial; for Hnæf and his kinsmen there is no compensatory ritual of remembrance, only the ugly bursting of their bodies in the flame, and their epitaph: wœs hira blœd scacen (1124). Beowulf's blœd would be remembered as long as the mound remained on Hronesness (cp. 2800-8), and in a secular society that is the most that a man could ask or deserve. The poet's interest in funerals does not involve him in repetitions; each is different in conception and effect. Scyld's passing speaks of the mystery of the unknown otherworld, Hnæf's pyre is a frightening image of physical destruction, Beowulf's funeral fire is blotted out by the great beacon of earth which is his grave and his glory.

The feature common to all three funeral descriptions is the placing of treasure with the dead, and the Christian poet does not censure the practice. He speaks through the treasure itself. Scyld's vast wealth goes into unknown hands (50-2), Hnæf's treasure is swallowed up in the devouring fire (1122-4). Only of Beowulf's hard-won gold does the poet say in his own voice,

forleton eorla gestreon                    eorðan healdan,
gold on greote,                    þær hit nu gen lifað
eldum swa unnyt                    swa h(it ær)or wæs.

(3166-8)

This is a kind of epitaph upon the treasure; consigned to earth, it is seen at the last to be intrinsically worthless, though a man should give his life for it.

The burial of a treasure within the new-made tomb which the dragon afterwards made his lair is an incident which belongs to a different imaginary world from the rest of the poem. The other funeral-treasures belong to the heroic world as it was remembered; the Sutton Hoo burial might have been within living memory when Beowulf was composed,⁸³ and other less elaborately furnished graves were possibly known to the poet and those he wrote for; gold on greote was no imaginary thing. Though the Sutton Hoo deposit appears to have been a cenotaph, it is presumed that the grave goods were intended for the use of their royal owner in the next world. The burial of the treasure which became the dragon's hoard is, in contrast, a motiveless gesture, irrational in a different way from the second burial of the same treasure, since among the pagan Geats such an action could be thought to honour their king.

My justification for taking this view of the burial of the dragon's hoard lies in the nature of the character who commits it to the grave. He does not exist as a quasi-historical person like the other characters in the poem. His nearest kin is the nameless old man who grieves for his hanged son (2444 ff.). The nameless father can be absorbed into the narrative, because he exists only in a simile. He is a literary device and pretends to be nothing more. But the man who buries the treasure inhabits the same world as the exile and the wise man in The Wanderer.⁸⁴ They are faceless speakers invented by the poets to give utterance to some universal human feeling. Each is a persona of the poet, given no more individuality than his condition requires—in this they differ sharply from dramatic characters who speak in soliloquy, or the central figures in dramatic monologues. The uncomfortable truth about the man who buries the hoard is that he too is a literary device, but he needs to be more than this, because the story of the rifled hoard begins with him. He has to be believed in, like Scyld or Sigemund, as a remote historical person, but the poet has here allowed his theme to take charge of the narrative, and the beautiful elegy almost blinds one to the unreality of the whole episode.

The ritual action has no other celebrants, and no social or religious significance. Professor Smithers has interestingly argued that this scene is the garbling of a pagan story in which the last owner of the treasure was himself transformed into a dragon—as happened to several Norsemen in similar circumstances, according to the sagas.⁸⁵ But one has to admit that the Beowulf poet has altogether erased any possible former connection between man and dragon, and the critical problem remains. The burial of the treasure of a lost tribe is the improbable excuse for the lament Heald þu nu hruse … (2247-66). Man must return the treasure to earth because no other has claim upon it. It is an image signifying that the worth of gold-plated sword and goblet, helmet and armour derives from their use by men. When the heroes are dead, their treasures begin to decay. Inert, tarnished and crumbling, the buried treasure becomes for the poet a focal symbol for the transience of the material world. A critic may carp, but the bold device succeeds. Before Beowulf sets out to win the hoard, the poet has planted doubt as to whether it is worth the winning. In the outcome, his victory does not ameliorate the lot of anyone concerned, and the second burial of the treasure symbolically re-enacts the tragedy of the lost race.

The hoard, as I see it, is from the outset conceived as a symbol of transience. Another element in the conception is indicated by the epithet hœðen (2216, 2276). The word is elsewhere applied to Grendel and to the idolatrous Danes; the use of it for the treasure might be an oblique condemnation of the pagan custom of burying grave goods, but it undoubtedly gives a general atmosphere of evil to the hoard.

I come now to the most curious aspect of the treasure-hoard as symbol, the curse upon it. The oddity about the curse is that the poet makes no good use of it, and it becomes a literary blemish. Without it, there is a satisfying moral sequence; with it, there is a conflict of causes which obscures the circumstances of Beowulf's end. I have shown that this hoard was from the first mention associated with death; the imagined owner, with a sentimental attachment to his possessions which the Anglo-Saxon audience might find understandable, made a grave for the treasure of his dead tribe. The consequence of his act was the appearance of the dragon, and ultimately Beowulf's death and the ruin of the Geatish people stem from the burial of the hoard. The curse, as it is reported, sealed up the gold in the tomb until God should grant the power to touch it to some man of his choosing (3051-7). It looks as though the poet was working with intractable material, since his faith required an affirmation of God's power to break the ancient spell, but his moral and his religious theme are considerably weakened by the existence of the spell, and even more by the proviso that God could prevent its dire effect. One may wonder why he kept the curse in the story at all. Two reasons suggest themselves: the first, that the heathen þeodnas mœre, by invoking evil powers to protect their hoard (3069 f.), were thought to have called the dragon into being; the second, more prosaic, possibility is that the curse was a well-known feature of the given story which the poet felt obliged to include. Having brought it in, he could make no effective use of it, since if Beowulf was estranged from God it needed no curse to consign him to hell-bonds, and if on the other hand he remained uncorrupted by the gold, he retained his Lord's favour and would be divinely protected from the curse. An operative curse belongs to a poem of a different kind, in which the characters are unwitting victims of fate, and such a conception could not be harmonized with the doctrine of God's watchful care for mankind expressly affirmed more than once in Beowulf.

The inconsistency between the þeodnas mœre who sang the incantation and the lone survivor who buried the hoard is a very clear sign that in this part of the poem the author's thoughts were dominated by his theme, to the detriment of the narrative. Uppermost is the doctrine that the burial of the hoard was itself a wrong action. The lone survivor's imagined gesture and the curse upon despoilers each sprang from men's desire to store up possessions even when they have no use for them. This is the characteristic desire of the dragon of European fable, as will be shown in the next chapter. Every pile of gold is potentially dangerous to mankind, as readers of St Antony's Life were reminded, for when the saint found gold in his path he passed by as though going over fire, knowing it for another temptation of the Enemy.⁸⁶

I think it is fair to conclude from the transformation of the secular materials I have described that the poet was very much aware of the ambivalence of his symbols, which reflect the paradox of earthly life as it was then understood. The two great symbols, Heorot and the treasure, embody the magnificence and the wealth which are a hero's reward. But in the longer perspective they can be seen to be the images of man's pride and cupidity, the two fundamental sins which tie the carnal man to earth. To their possessors they seem to be durable; to the Christian audience they are presented as brilliant and destructible, costly and without worth.

Notes

1. Tacitus, Germania, c. 3; quoted by Wrenn, OE Literature, pp. 74-5.

2. For a convenient summary of their contents and scholarly opinion on the dating, see Wrenn, op. cit., pp. 76-83 and pp. 85-90.

3. Wrenn, op. cit., p. 87, says ‘Its definitely Christian references to God … would seem, perhaps, to point to a clerical maker’.

4. Edited by E. von Steinmeyer, Die kleineren althochdeutschen Sprachdenkmäler (Leipzig, 1916).

5. F. P. Magoun, ‘Béowulf B: a Folk-Poem on Béowulf's Death’, in Early English and Norse Studies presented to H. Smith, ed. A. Brown and P. Foote, pp. 128-9. His observation that one finds no cyclic poem in Old Icelandic (p. 129) is also pertinent.

6. Jan Vansina, De la tradition orale.

7. ibid., p. 63.

8. ibid., p. 64.

9. ibid., p. 65.

10. ibid.

11. ibid., p. 67.

12. Apart from Beowulf itself, the remains of Germanic secular poetry are too short to provide a clear general picture, but the allusive style is very marked in Deor and Widsith.

13. I use the word ‘allegorical’ here in a very broad sense, which could be defined as ‘saying one thing in order to mean something beyond that one thing’ (cp. Angus Fletcher, Allegory: the Theory of a Symbolic Mode, p. 4). For further definition of the kinds of allegory and symbolism in Beowulf, see below, pp. 68 ff.

14. cp. D. P. A. Comparetti, The Study of Vergil in the Middle Ages, trans. E. F. M. Beneke (London, 1895), especially pp. 57 and 59. For details of the symbolic meanings found in æneid VI, see P. Courcelle, ‘Les Pères devant les Enfers. Virgiliens’, Archives d'Histoire Doctrinale et Littéraire du Moyen Age.

15. Sulpicius Severus, Vita S. Martini, ed. C. Halm, 110 f.

16. PL 93, 1103.

17. PL 93, 1109; cp. Ps. 52: 3 and p. 52, above.

18. B. Colgrave, Felix's Life of Saint Guthlac, p. 16.

19. The phrase is from Christopher Fry. A Phoenix too Frequent (Oxford, 1946), p. 31.

20. See p. 63

21. One is reminded of the loss of meodosetla signifying the end of tribal independence in Beowulf (5).

22. W. Nowottny, The Language Poets Use, p. 175.

23. Augustine, De doctrina christiana, ed. W. M. Green, p. 34.

24. Augustine, ibid., p. 35.

25. ibid., p. 100. Had he not been writing for beginners in biblical study, he might have included also St Peter's ambivalent symbols which mean one thing to the faithful and something quite other to the unbeliever, viz., the corner-stone which is the foundation of a spiritual edifice to the Christian and a stumbling-block to the unbeliever (1 Pet. 2: 7-9), and the Flood-waters which prophesy baptism and salvation to the former and destruction to the latter (1 Pet. 3: 20-2); cp. Jean Daniélou, Bible et Liturgie pp. 89-104.

26. Augustine, op. cit., p. 103.

27. Augustine, De Trinitate, PL 42, 1068, on the text 1 Cor. 13: 12. Here he compares in ænigmate with in allegoria (Gal. 4: 24), explaining that translators who did not wish to use the Greek word have employed the circumlocution which signify one thing by another.

28. Personification allegory was of course also known to the Anglo-Saxons from Virgil's use of it and from Prudentius's Psychomachia. The last part of Aldhelm's verse De virginitate is written in this mode; see MGH AA xv, pp. 452-71.

29. Bede, De schematibus et tropis sacræ scripturæ, PL 90, 184-6. His definition is as follows:

    Allegoria est tropus quo aliud significatur quam dicitur.

    Allegory is a trope in which something other is signified than what is said.

    Among the kinds, he brings in the four senses thus:

    Item allegoria verbi, sive operis, aliquando historicam rem, aliquando typicam, aliquando tropologicam, id est moralem rationem, aliquando anagogen, hoc est sensum ad superiora ducentem, figurate denuntiant.

    In like manner they intimate in a figure allegory of word or deed, sometimes a historical matter, sometimes a prefiguration, sometimes a tropological matter (that is, a moral concern), sometimes an anagogical relation (that is the sense guiding us to things above).

30. Fletcher, op. cit., pp. 2-3, takes very much Augustine's general view based on the linguistic process involved in making an allegory: ‘In the simplest terms, allegory says one thing and means another. It destroys the normal expectation we have about language, that our words “mean what they say” … In this sense we see how allegory is properly considered a mode: it is a fundamental process of encoding our speech. For the very reason that it is a fundamental process of encoding our speech. For the very reason that it is a radical linguistic procedure it can appear in all sorts of different works …’

31. Fletcher, op. cit., p. 135.

32. Augustine, De utilitate credendi, ed. J. Zycha, 1, 70.

33. Augustine, De vera religione, ed. W. M. Green, pp. 7 f.

34. Gregory, Moralia, PL 75, 513:

    Sciendum vero est, quod quædam historica expositione transcurrimus, et per allegoriam quædam typical investigatione perscrutamur; quædam per sola allegoricæ moralitatis instrumenta discutimus; non nulla autem per cuncta simul sollicitus exquirentes, tripliciter indagamus.

    It is to be recognized that we hasten over some things in a historical exposition and we scrutinize some by the use of allegory in search of typological significance; some we discuss only as instruments of moral allegory; on the other hand, some we explore in three ways, carefully looking for all these senses together.

35. Bede, Homeliæ, CCSL 72, passim.

36. ibid., Liber Primus, Homelia 14, pp. 95-104. There is further complexity in the homily in that each of the O.T. stories represents one of the Ages of the World. The homilies also include a good deal of incidental symbolism. One example contrasts dove and raven, which could conceivably shed light upon the raven who wakes the men of Heorot:

    Habent autem oscula et corvi, sed laniant, quod columba omnino non facit: significantes eos qui loquuntur pacem cum proximo suo, mali autem sunt in cordibus eorum. Ravens too have kisses, but they tear with them, which the dove never does, signifying those who speak peace with their neighbour but evil thoughts are in their hearts. (Hom. 1, 15, p. 107). One remembers the hints of hidden hostility in lines 1164 and 1015 ff. of the poem.

37. For a clear explanation of the theory of figura, see E. Auerbach, Mimesis, trans. W. R. Trask (Princeton, 1953), pp. 73-5.

38. Auerbach, op. cit., sees ‘figural thinking’ in Dante's view of the universal Roman monarchy as the earthly anticipation of the Kingdom of God. ‘An event taken as a figure preserves its literal and historical meaning’ (p. 196). As I have sai elsewhere (Neophil. 1964, p. 67) an Augustinian view of history perhaps underlies the symbolic treatment of events in Beowulf. But it is difficult to believe that an Anglo-Saxon poet saw the wars of the Swedes and Geats as part of the divine plan of salvation, or that he disregarded the fact that Beowulf lived after the Incarnation, from which the figuræ Christi take their meaning.

39. For further discussion of this matter, see pp. 241 ff., below.

40. Sulpicius Serverus, Opera, ed. cit., pp. 1-105.

41. Rosemond Tuve, Allegorical Imagery, pp. 32-3. Professor Tuve makes a clear distinction between a moralization and an allegory in discussing late medieval and Renaissance texts. I do not think such a distinction is valid for Old English poetry, and I have not used ‘allegory’ in Tuve's more precise sense, following her own principle: ‘It is as well to repeat periodically that we do not seek to define allegory as if it were some changeless essence, and then in turn use the definition to admit or shut out poems from the category. We seek something quite limited and historical—what was involved in reading allegorically to certain writers at a given time, and for reasons we can trace.’ (ibid., p. 33).

42. C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: a study in medieval tradition, pp. 84 f.

43. Alcuin's catalogue of authors in the library at York includes the name Fulgentius, but it is by no means certain that the mythographer was intended. For discussion of the extant works ascribed to Fulgentius and argument against identifying the mythographer and the Bishop of Ruspe, see M. L. W. Laistner, ‘Fulgentius in the Carolingian Age’, in The Intellectual Heritage of the early Middle Ages, ed. C. G. Starr (New York, 1957), pp. 202-15.

44. Fulgentius had related the three heads to three kinds of contention in the world (Opera, ed. R. Helm, Leipzig, 1898, pp. 20 and 98 f.); Bede interprets the Dog of Hell as Avaritia, and its three heads as the three kinds of concupiscence in 1 Jo. 2: 16. (Ep. Ecg., Plummer 1, 422 f.).

45. cp. pp. 76 and 135, below.

46. See P. Courcelle, op. cit., for the patristic treatment of the scene.

47. æneid VI, 273-89.

48. M. W. Bloomfield, ‘Beowulf and Christian Allegory, An Interpretation’, Traditio 7 (1949-51), 410-15. He suggests that Unferth = Discordia, as in Prudentius's Psychomachia. As Prudentius is thinking in terms of schism and heresy within the Church, the connection is not very likely.

49. Aldhelm, De virginitate, MGH AA xv, 452-471, lines 2446-2914; see also p. 135, below.

50. E. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, p. 49.

51. Isidore, Etymologiae, ed. W. M. Lindsay; De Poetis, Book 8b, 7.

52. I do not of course imply that he was working with raw historical material; no doubt a good deal of transformation had been effected by the oral poets who transmitted the matter.

53. Tuve, op. cit., pp. 32 f. See my observations above, p. 74, n. 1, on her use of the word ‘allegory’.

54. Tuve, ibid., p. 32.

55. ibid.

56. ibid., p. 17.

57. cp. The Seafarer (38) where the paradox is exploited by the poet. See also the discussion of the phrase by P. L. Henry in The Early English and Celtic Lyric (Belfast, 1966), pp. 195 ff., following up a suggestion by Professor C. L. Wrenn.

58. Of the objects and persons mentioned, Grendel's greedy and grasping hand and Hrethel's symbol of prowess require no special comment; for Heremod, cp. pp. 184 ff., for Hama, p. 91, for Beowulf's weapons and armour, pp. 86 f.; Scyld's funeral boat is treated here.

59. I use the word mythic here in the sense ‘pertaining to an anonymous story telling of origins and destinies’; cp. R. Wellek and A. Warren, Theory of Literature, 3rd ed. (Peregrine Books, 1963), p. 191. Under this definition both Scyld and Cain are mythic symbolic persons.

60. In geardagum (1) is to be noted, as clearly placing the story in remote time.

61. For Latin equivalents to the OE names for God, see F. Klaeber ‘Die Christlichen Elemente im Beowulf’. He draws upon the liturgy and Latin hymnaries and the earlier work of J. W. Rankin, ‘A Study of the Kennings in Anglo-Saxon poetry’.

62. Rankin, op. cit. notes the parallel development of Latin gloria in Christian use.

63. The prayer quoted is among Orationes tempore belli in The Gelasian Sacramentary (ed. H. A. Wilson, London, 1893, pp. 275 f.). It reads:

    Deus, et temporalis vitae auctor et aeternae, miserere supplicium in tua protectione fidentium, ut per virtute brachii tui omnibus qui nobis adversantur revictis, nec in terrenis nec a caelestibus possimus excludi.

    O God, author of life both temporal and eternal, have mercy upon the suffering of the faithful within thy protection, that we, having conquered through the strength of thine arm all who oppose us, may not be hindered in things earthly nor from things heavenly.

    It is not possible to establish whether this particular prayer was in use where the Beowulf poet was educated, but rather similar prayers also occur in The Gregorian Sacramentary revised by Alcuin (ed. H. A. Wilson, London, 1915). In both prayer-books the enemy attacks are attributed to the sins of the nation. (e.g. Gelasian, p. 273, Gregorian, pp. 198 f.) For the circulation of these two prayer-books, see Deanesly, Pre-Conquest Church, pp. 156-9. My point is that such prayers represent a current attitude towards God's giving or withholding success in war which is relevant to the whole of Beowulf.

64. E. G. Stanley, in ‘OE poetic diction and the interpretation of The Wanderer, The Seafarer, and The Penitent's Prayer’, Angl. 73 (1955) 441, suggests that isig (Beow. 33) is the equivalent of winterceald, figuratively evocative of sorrow. However, there seems no good reason also to reject the literal ‘icy’, since the season of Scyld's death is not otherwise mentioned, and the beginning of spring with its breaking-up of the ice would fit the circumstances.

65. Gilbert Cope, Symbolism in the Bible and the Church, p. 36.

66. The word wær is used of God's covenant with Abraham in the OE Genesis (2204); apart from its general sense of ‘protection’ here it may therefore have associations suggesting a pre-Christian man's relationship with God.

67. Wind and weather likewise mirror the feelings of men, as for example in the struggle with the sea (545-8) followed by the peace and brightness of morning (569-72); when Beowulf voyages, the wind is with him (217, 1907-9).

68. Wrenn calls attention to the bronze stag found in the Sutton Hoo deposit, apparently designed to be carried as a standard (Beowulf, p. 314). The use of hornas in Finnsburh (7) shows that a derived sense ‘gable’ had developed, but the name ‘Heorot’ would surely recall the older meaning of horn. The epithet banfag (780) also brings the stag to mind.

69. C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image, p. 152.

70. See The Fables of Phaedrus, ed. C. H. Nall (London, 1895), pp. 7 f., Cervus ad Fontem.

71. As Augustine's examples showed, a biblical scholar had no difficulty in accepting contrary meanings for the same symbol in different contexts. D. W. Robertson finds in the hunted hart a symbol of the faithful soul which will not enter the waters of cupidity; for discussion of Robertson's argument, see pp. 120 f., below.

72. cp. The Judgment scene in Christ II, especially 811-14 (ASPR iii, 25), also Phoenix 500-8 (ibid., p. 108).

73. A variant of the same image is used of the sea-beasts cheated of their supper and put to sleep by the sword in lines 562-7. (The Andreas poet also uses it of the dead cannibals (1002 f.), perhaps in imitation of Beowulf.)

74. In ‘The Christian Perspective in Beowulf’, Brodeur Studies, p. 85.

75. cp. Eph. 6: 16.

76. The swords of Eofor and Wiglaf are also described as eotenisc (2616, 2979), so the word obviously carried no necessary connotation of magical properties—for Eofor at least fought in ordinary human wars. Grendel had put a spell upon swords (804), but he uses no magical arts against Beowulf, so he is hardly more of a magician than the ancient princes who wove a spell about the hoard (3051 ff. and 3069 ff.). That Anglo-Saxons of the period believed in the power of incantations may be inferred from the Act of the synod of Clofesho (747) which commands the bishop to travel about his diocese forbidding pagan observances, including incantations. (cited by Whitelock, Audience, p. 79.)

77. The significance of the light in the allegory is further discussed in Chapter 8.

78. See, for example, line 80 f. and cp. 20 f.

79. The whole passage from line 1020 to 1055 describes the rewards given to Beowulf and his men.

80. It is likely that some of the poet's audience would sympathize with the plundering. Guthlac's early life was spent in such enterprises, and his biographer Felix shows no disapproval (since he gave back a third part of his booty), Vita Guthlaci, ed. cit., p. 80. The author of Guthlac A, on the other hand, describes how the saint's evil angel incites him to join a raiding band,

                                                                swa doð wræcmæcgas
    þa þe ne bimurnað monnes feore
    þæs þe him to honda huþe gelædeð
    butan hy þy reafe rædan motan.

    (129-32)

    It was presumably one of the tasks of the early Anglo-Saxon church to dissuade young princes from taking up a life of pillage.

81. For a general survey of the references to Hama in early literature, see R. W. Chambers, Widsith (Cambridge, 1912), pp. 52-7. The sources seem to be agreed that Hama lived by plunder and that he acquired treasure; in Widsith he rules with Wudga over a people (129-30), which may suggest, as Chambers thinks (p. 223), that ‘the bright city’ of Beowulf (1199) was his own stronghold.

82. The phrase is discussed with similar phrases in Chapter 5, pp. 167 ff., below.

83. For a convenient survey of articles on the Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial, see the Supplement by C. L. Wrenn to R. W. Chambers, Beowulf: An Introduction, 3rd edition.

84. See p. 2, above.

85. G. V. Smithers, The Making of Beowulf, p. 11; see also p. 103, below.

86. Athanasius, Vita S. Antonii, PG 26, 862.

Abbreviations

The following shortened forms of titles of books, periodicals, etc. are used throughout the footnotes and the practice of the notes generally is to omit details of publication if the work cited is listed in the Select Bibliography.

ASPR: Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records Series

ASS: Acta Sanctorum Bollandiana

(Bede) HE: Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum

(Bede) Ep. Ecg.: Epistola Bedae ad Ecgbertum Episcopum

Beiträge: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Deutschen Sprache und Literatur

Brodeur, Art: A. G. Brodeur, The Art of Beowulf

Brodeur Studies: Studies in Old English Literature in honor of Arthur G. Brodeur

CSEL: Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum

CL: Comparative Literature

CCSL: Corpus Christionorum Series Latina

Continuations: Continuations and Beginnings: Studies in Old English Literature, ed. E. G. Stanley

Deanesly, Pre-Conquest Church: Margaret Deanesly, The Pre-Conquest Church in England

Dobbie, Beowulf: E. v. K. Dobbie, ed. Beowulf and Judith, ASPR IV

Donahue, Traditio, 1949-51: Charles Donahue, ‘Beowulf, Ireland and the Natural Good’, Traditio, 7 (1949-51)

Donahue, Traditio, 1965: Charles Donahue, ‘Beowulf and Christian Tradition: a reconsideration from a Celtic Stance’, Traditio, 21 (1965)

Godfrey, AS Church: J. Godfrey, The Church in Anglo-Saxon England

Gregory, Moralia: Sancti Gregorii Magni Moralium Libri, sive Expositio in Librum B. Job

Kenney, Sources: J. F. Kenney, The Sources for the Early History of Ireland, vol. 1, Ecclesiastical

Klaeber, Angl. 1912: F. Klaeber, ‘Die Christlichen Elemente im Beowulf’, Anglia, 35 and 36 (1912)

Klaeber, Beowulf: F. Klaeber, ed., Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg

Laistner, Thought: M. L. W. Laistner, Thought and Letters in Western Europe, A.D. 500-900

Magoun Studies: Medieval and Linguistic Studies in honor of Francis P. Magoun, Jr.

MGH: Monumenta Germaniae Historica

MGH AA: Auctores Antiquissimi

MGH Ep.: Epistolae

MGH Ep. Kar.: Epistolae Karolini Aevi

MGH Ep. Mer.: Epistolae Merowingici et Karolini Aevi

MGH Poet.: Poetarum Latinorum Medii Aevi

Ogilvy, Anglo-Latin Writers: J. D. A. Ogilvy, Books known to Anglo-Latin Writers from Aldhelm to Alcuin

PG: J. P. Migne, ed. Patrologia Graeca

PL: J. P. Migne, ed. Patrologia Latina

Rankin, JEGP, 1909: J. W. Rankin, ‘A Study of the Kennings in Anglo-Saxon Poetry’, JEGP, 8 (1909) and 9 (1910)

von Schaubert, Beowulf: Else von Schaubert, ed. Heyne-Schückings Beowulf

Sisam, Structure: Kenneth Sisam, The Structure of Beowulf

Sisam, Studies: Kenneth Sisam, Studies in the History of Old English Literature

Tolkien, Monsters: J. R. R. Tolkien, Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics

Whitelock, Audience: Dorothy Whitelock, The Audience of Beowulf

Wrenn, Beowulf: C. L. Wrenn, ed. Beowulf

Wrenn, OE Literature: C. L. Wrenn, A Study of Old English Literature