[In the essay below, Baum explores the possible audience for which Beowulf was composed and argues that internal evidence suggests the poet intended to create a “quasi-heroic” poem for his own enjoyment, with the hope that others might also be pleased with his work.]

Some years ago (1936) Professor Tolkien, in his British Academy lecture, created an academic stir with his complaints that the scholars had been too busy about their own concerns and had neglected the criticism of Beowulf as a poem.¹ Latterly, Miss Whitelock (1951) attempted to recreate the ‘audience’ of Beowulf in the interests of bringing forward its date from the early to the late eighth century.² Though the two subjects are not closely related, one may be used to throw light on the other.

Tolkien was attacked and defended, but the questions are still open—and little wonder, for the critical handicaps are forbidding. The language of the poem is difficult, partly owing to the state of the text and partly because the poet chose to make it so. Very few, even of the specialists, can pretend to such a feeling for style as we bring to the appreciation of later English poets; and the others are dependent on translations of uncertain merit and fidelity. Knowing so little about whom the poet addressed, we cannot easily estimate the responses he expected: what seems remote to us may well have seemed simple to them. It would help a good deal if we knew whether he wrote to please himself, to satisfy an inner need, or for recitation to a listening audience capable of following with pleasure and understanding his often cryptic language and his often intricate plan of narrative, his ironies, and his exhilarating methods of reticence and indirection. Moreover, Beowulf is unique. Being the first of its kind in the vernacular, it has an honored position, but it exists, for us, in a kind of literary vacuum without historical perspective. Nothing is certainly known of its author or of his ‘audience.’ And its survival in a single manuscript and a different dialect some two and a half centuries after its original composition tells us little; it does not signify a continuous history of recitation or reading.

I

There are really two poems: one about Beowulf and the Danes, the other, roughly half as long, about Beowulf and the Geats. They have in common the same hero, first as a youth then as an old man, overcoming first two water-monsters and later a fire-drake. The earlier victories appear to be successful, though in delivering the Danes from Grendel and his Mother the hero has left them a prey to subsequent disaster; he has established his renown, which was paramount, but as the savior of a nation in distress his achievement was only temporary. His later victory has also a tragic irony: it brings his own death and so opens the way to disaster for his own people. Thus the two poems, or parts of the same poem, share a single theme: that beyond the hero's bravery there are forces which he cannot subdue. Valor is vanity in the end. So much any reflective reader may see.

The plan of Part I looks simple: the Danish setting, the hero's journey and reception, his fight and the celebration of his victory, his second fight and the following celebration, his return home and report of his adventures. But such is the poet's chosen method that he disguises the symmetry by making his concluding point (Hroðgar's plan to heal a feud with the Heaðobards) look like an irrelevance. This is the result of pursuing two themes at once, the plight of the Danes and their deliverance by the hero—with the necessary interchange of background and foreground. For the rest, having not much story to tell and meaning to tell none as story, the poet took his raw materials from the old ‘lays,’ and combining them with history and with folklore created something new, not exactly a heroic poem, (for there is less of that sheer delight in man-to-man fighting than we expect in heroic poems; compare the tone of the Finnsburgh Fragment with the poet's treatment of the same situation) and certainly not an epic, but a modification or adaptation to suit himself—a mixture of pagan matter treated in a somewhat non-pagan manner and of heroic matter from the legendary and historic past along with court ceremonies as he understood them. The actual fighting, including Beowulf's recapitulation, occupies less than one-tenth of the whole.

Part II, with less than a thousand lines, is another poem with the same hero. No significant differences in vocabulary, syntax, style, or meter have been found, and in the face of an improbable assumption of two men writing at about the same time in the same, or almost the same, manner, it must be taken for granted that both poems are by the same author. There are small linkages, but the subject and planning of the two Parts are different; there is a wholly new cast of characters, the emphasis is shifted, the polarity is altered. Part I had a beginning, a middle, and an end. Part II is less simple, it is more confused, the so-called digressions occupy relatively much more space (besides being more puzzling to the modern reader), and the whole is more gloomy, not only with the hero's death but also with the presage of disaster for his race.

II

One of the ‘intentions’ attributed to the poet is the portrayal of a virtuous pagan who might be said to manifest some of the high qualities inculcated by the new religion; and this might imply, or even signify, a semi-didactic purpose. Perhaps, as some have thought, he felt the zeal of a new convert; but if so, one would have expected him to go further. Or perhaps, as Gang conjectures, “Beowulf, so far from being a Christianized epic, is an attempt at a sort of secular Saints' Life,” as though to prove that the heathen legends contained, latent, “a great deal of sound doctrine and Christian morality.” Perhaps; or, since the divine guidance of the world, though prepotent, evidently—from the turn of events among Danes, Swedes, and Geats—leaves room for family and dynastic distress (gyrn æfter gomene), the poet's aim might be a warning to his contemporaries, pointing a deadly parallel to the local wars he saw all about him and their inevitable outcome. Or, even more narrowly, he might mean to show that the supernatural forces which threaten mortal man can be overcome—Grendel driven off and finally beheaded, his Mother killed in her hidden haunt, the Dragon tumbled lifeless over the cliff—but the human conflicts, treachery and cowardice against loyalty and bravery, bring ineluctable doom. But if so, the poet has left these inferences to our ingenious interpretation. He was too much the artist to certify a “palpable design.”

The symbolic or parabolic interpretations have a distinguished history. They go back at least to Grundtvig and they seem now to be taken for granted.³ They are only suspect when they are applied to raise the epic level of the poem and to dignify the monsters—otherwise crude and merely folklorish—by assuming that they stood in the poet's mind for the dark forces of evil which oppress mankind and thus acquire in the reader's mind a Satanic stature. This “usury of our own minds” should not be allowed to crystallize into dogma.

Nor need we stop with the monsters. For example, if Hroðgar thought it necessary to warn Beowulf against pride, it is a short step to discovering a psychic disturbance in his own predicament. He himself has been guilty; he has erected his splendid meadhall and God is punishing him with Grendel. Grendel is specially irritated by the revelry and the sound of the harp. And Beowulf? Unbidden—or so we may suppose, though the poet is not altogether perspicuous on this point—he has crossed the seas and freed Heorot of its plague, and has thus interfered with divine justice and punishment, just as he did later when he became entangled with the accursed hoard. Moreover, Hroðgar's warning goes unheeded, for Beowulf at the end of a long and prosperous reign interferes again and stubbornly insists on fighting the Dragon in spite of his advanced age. Pride must have its fall and he is punished both by the humiliation of having to depend on Wiglaf and by his own death.

Moreover, the poem may be read not as an exaltation of manly valor and fortitude but a lament for the hopelessness of the human lot—“an heroic-elegiac poem” (Tolkien), beginning with a burial, ending with a cremation, and all that seemed so heroic in between coming to naught. But then, by superimposing a Christian orientation on those noble heathens, the poet compromised his Christian faith in God's goodness; or perhaps one should say he acknowledged the pessimism latent in Christian doctrine, a resignation to the evils of the world, without being able to hold out the hopes of relief and salvation in another life.⁴ Thus as critical latitude broadens, puzzling difficulties deepen.

One might go further. Beowulf is, as Chambers said, a poem of ambiguities; and in every ambiguity may lurk a secret meaning. For example, Beowulf encounters in Part I the evils of water (especially with Grendel's Mother) and in Part II the evils of fire (the fire-drake and his cremation). With this there is a chiastic balance which ought to be significant; for in Part I Heorot's destruction by fire is prophesied and in Part II the Dragon is pushed over into the sea. And, assuming a little different position, one notes that Grendel is the agent, not the enemy of God; he was sent to punish the Danes and the poet was only adding his touch of cunning subtlety when he said Godes yrre bær.

One more speculation. Taking a leaf from Samuel Butler, one could argue that the poet was a woman, a learned abbess inspired, say, by Hild's success with Cædmon—or why not Hild herself? Feminine authorship would account for many things in the poem: the absence of gory fighting and lust of battle; the vagueness of detail in the wrestling match with Grendel and in the encounter with his Mother and in the final contest with the Dragon, so much interrupted by Beowulf's speeches; the touches of pathos here and there, the implied sympathy with Hildeburh, and with the Dragon; the praise of queen Hugd and queen Wealhþeow; in general, “the poet's sympathy with weak and unfortunate beings” (Klaeber); Beowulf's interest in the gold ornaments from the hoard; the feeling for harsh landscape on the way to Grendel's mere; the delicate reticence about the parentage of Fitela; the absence of gluttony and lechery (though there is abundance of mead and the duguð get drunk, drunkenness leads to nothing worse than noise and some reckless talk); the celebrations of victory in Part I by singing and racing, with none of the grosser indulgences; the pervasive manner of indirection; the extraordinary amount of talking and the tendencies to ‘digress’; the pessimistic judgment on men's inability to rule successfully at home and abroad (the hero's long reign is only an apparent exception; it was far from peaceful); the crowning attribute of mildness in Beowulf; and much more. An enthusiast could write convincingly on this topic.

These, and other such hypotheses, do no harm if they are not taken too seriously. They testify to our critical industry and also—which is the point here—to our uncertainty about the fundamental criteria of the poem. They emphasize its enigmas.

III

A poem assumes readers, but since in the eighth century the Beowulf poet could hardly expect any considerable number of readers and since then poetry was commonly recited, read aloud with some sort of musical accompaniment—

                    þær wæs hearpan sweg,
swutol sang scopes—

it is usually taken for granted that the Beowulf poet cast himself in the role of scop and both recited his poem to a group of listeners and hoped that others would do the same. Miss Whitelock has computed that the poem “could easily be delivered in three sittings,” and it only remains to inquire who the listeners would be. This question she has faced with courage and great learning; she presents her case with shrewd caution, avoiding over-confidence: “it would be unsafe to argue that any part of England was in the eighth century insufficiently advanced in intellectual attainments for a sophisticated poem like Beowulf to have been composed there and appreciated.” Most admirable caution, though one might have hoped for a more positive conclusion. “The audience,” she says, “would doubtless consist of both veterans and young men” in the royal retinue, as well as “an audience of sportsmen.” They would probably be Christians. Remembering Alcuin's Quid Hinieldus cum Christo, she seems not to have included a monastic audience. (One wonders how much Alcuin knew about Ingeld. Saxo's spelling is Ingellus.) The men on the mead-bench are slightly disguised as veterans and young men: they would have to be more temperate than the celebrants in Heorot.

For such an “advanced” audience two requisites must be met: one, a group both interested in the fearless exploits of a heathen hero, modified for Christian ears, who fought ogres and a dragon in the long ago, and sufficiently familiar with Geatish and Swedish feuds and with continental legends and sagas—Sigemund and Heremod, Hengest and the Heaðobards, and so forth—to be able to absorb easily and with pleasure the poet's somewhat abrupt allusions; and secondly, a group capable of the concentrated attention necessary to follow, while listening, a narrative as involved and circuitous (“circumambient,” “static” with the illusion of forward movement), in a style as compressed and often cryptic, as that of Beowulf. The reasoning assumes not only a group of listeners knowledgeable on all the many topics to which the poet points and passes, as well equipped as the poet himself, and sufficiently able to fill in all that he leaves out or hints at, but a fortiori nimble-minded enough (“alert”) while listening to, say, three sequences of about 1000 lines each, to pick up and drop at need the several allusions historical and traditional without losing the main pattern, to adjust and readjust their attention in rapid alternation to diverse matters without sacrificing their interest in the principal concern. Could such a listening audience ever have existed? Did ever a poet before or since ask so much of one?

The ‘argument’ was succinctly put, long ago, by Gummere: “The style of reference to the death of Hæthcyn shows how familiar the whole story must have been.”⁵ Miss Whitelock elaborates this. At every turn she insists that the poem would not be intelligible unless the audience was well informed—on Christian doctrine, for example, to understand a Biblical reference (the giants of Exodus), or on the subsequent history of Hroðgar's strife with his own son-in-law to catch the hint of þenden (1019), and so on. “To an audience that did not know that Hrothulf killed Hrethric, the whole section [1164 ff.] would be pointless.” She dwells at length on the fourfold account of Hygelac's Frisian raid. It would ask a good deal for the audience to pick up the second hint eleven hundred and forty lines after the first unless they were well acquainted with Frankish tradition and Geatish history. It assumes “the likelihood that the poet could rely on his hearers' previous knowledge of the Geatish kings as on that of the Danish kings, and could leave it to them to supply more than he chose to tell them”—while they listened for what was coming next. And finally, “if even a few of the claims I have made are true, we must assume a subtle and sophisticated poet, and an alert and intelligent audience” later than the age of Bede.

Those elements of the minstrel style which the poet made use of, and his picture of the improvising scop at Hroðgar's court will not have deceived him, or us. He was not composing an enlarged tripartite ‘lay.’ “The first concern of heroic poetry,” says Bowra, “is to tell of action, … bards … avoid … not merely moralizing comments and description of things and places for description's sake, but anything that smacks of ulterior or symbolic intentions”; “the listening audience requires single moods and effects, without complications.” A bard has to hold the audience's attention, “to make everything clear and interesting.”⁶ This hardly describes the Beowulf poet and his work. The “discontinuity of action” (Tolkien) and the calculated double movement of Part II especially, with its rapid interchange of present (Beowulf and the Dragon) and the historical past is the last thing a scop would submit to a group of listeners. Miss Whitelock's “we must assume” is therefore circular: if the poet wrote for an audience, the audience must have been waiting.

Who will, may hear Sordello's story told.

IV

We are still in the dark about the poet's intentions. If we knew anything precise about those lost ‘lays’ we might guess a little about his originality. Did he invent Grendel's Mother, for instance? and why did he give her no name? The supernatural elements were, one assumes, in the ‘lays’ and he accepted them; they are the folklore coefficient of heroic saga. The Scandinavian settings were, one assumes also, in his ‘lays’ and he had to accept them and try his best to make them interesting to his Anglian ‘audience.’ He would celebrate a hero whose life was dominated by a (pagan) desire for fame, who won fame by overcoming superhuman opponents, and whose last act was to order a burial mound on a conspicuous headland as a monument to his fame, and whose epitaph was lofgeornost. But he would raise what might seem like a tale of adventure “above mere story telling”; he would make it a poem and load every rift with ore. So he avoided continuous narrative, intercalated fragments of story with recondite, enriching, sometimes teasing, allusions and with forward and backward glances into the historical backgrounds, and arrayed it all in a highly ornate, alembicated style, with some vestiges of the minstrel formulas to set it off. These have an odd look alongside his methods of “syntactic correlation, parallel and antithetic structure, parenthesis, and climactic progression” (Klaeber). His style is one of the poet's glories—and impediments. It makes his poem a tour de force, which he must have enjoyed writing and hoped others would enjoy—enjoy the peculiar strain he put upon language and relish the tension of keeping pace with his structural convolutions. But this combination is so curious, so original, in the sense of being contrived, that the whole seems more like an artifact than a poem created out of the artist's experience.

When, finally, one thinks of the modern reader, Beowulf suffers the drawbacks of all subjects drawn from Northern myth and legend. The Greek and Roman world is too much with us. The subject of the poem is unsympathetic to our taste and the cultivation of a taste for it is a burden. Its people are alien to us. The tribal conflicts of sixth-century Danes and Swedes have no recognizable place on our stage of history. Their names have no familiar associations; and for our confusion there are twenty-six personal names beginning with H———. We have some acquaintance with literary dragons, but our imagination can do little with ogres and trolls; and what is more, none of the characters in the story makes an empathic appeal to us. Only by intervals is there a touch of human feeling or anything that speaks directly to us. There is no conception of character tested in significant human situations or any clear sense of tragic conflict, man against man or man against fate, with a catharsis which ennobles the victim through his sacrifice and the reader through contemplation of victory in death. (The hero's end is confused, for the reader, by his involvement with the heathen hoard.) The divided spirit of Hroðgar; the plight of that terrible old Ongenþeow, his queen captured and rescued and his death at the hands of a young man; the graciousness of Wealhþeow; the pathos of Hildeburh and the indecision of Hengest; the little comedy (if it be comedy) of Unferð—these seem to us undeveloped possibilities. We can see them but they are offered in passing. Like the tragic glimpses of Heremod and young Dryð, and all the so-called digressions, they are absorbed into the main ‘narrative’—smaller or larger pieces of color, purple or crimson or black—with little attention to their emotional or psychological interest. Whether functional or decorative or both at once, they appear suddenly and are gone quickly, and one hardly has time to enjoy them. The poet evidently set great store by them, but his touch-and-go use of them robs them of their power. The one major character for whom we are invited to feel sympathy is the Dragon.

All this and more would make for the dulness and dimness which the late Middleton Murry saw in the poem.⁷ But dulness and dimness are relative terms, and it is worth recalling that to some Racine is dull, his characters a seeming vehicle for rhetorical declamation. To your French critic Shakespeare is chaos. Even Prometheus Bound is a strange work unless one brings to it the right kind of sympathetic understanding; Prometheus on his rock and the Oceanides singing would be, if we were not brought up on them, as remote as Hroðgar and his trolls or Beowulf and his Dragon. The language of Aeschylus is as difficult, until one has learned it, as the language of Beowulf.

As literature, said Mr. Murry, Beowulf is “an antediluvian curiosity,” and Professor Gilbert Highet, speaking as a classicist, says that “artistically Beowulf is a rude and comparatively unskilled poem.”⁸ Well, it must be conceded that Beowulf is a foreign masterpiece, as foreign to modern taste in subject and manner as in language. It has, however, affinities with much of Donne and some of Browning, and it looks forward, curiously, to the very modern handling of time-sequence. But it cannot be translated into our idiom because we have no language corresponding to its ideas and emotions and we have no ideas and emotions to fit its peculiar language. The poet seems to have created many of his own difficulties. He had, one surmises, his own taste of chaos and in his fashion revived it, recreated it, while at the same time he looked back to a time of ideal loyalties and heroism. Simplicity, clarity, and elegant organization were luxuries he could not afford if he was to communicate what he felt the need of expressing. Why did he try? He could expect few silent readers in his own day. He adopted a tense crowded style and a convoluted method of narration, the very antithesis of a minstrel's, most unsuited for oral recitation, and if he looked for an audience of listeners he was extraordinarily, not to say stubbornly, sanguine. But all the signs point (they can hardly be called evidence but they are all we have) to a very individual man, a serious and gifted poet, steeped in the older pagan tradition from the continent, moved perhaps by a pious desire to compromise his two religions, and above all delighting in his unusual skill with language (as all poets do)—all the signs point to such a poet sitting down to compose a quasi-heroic poem to please himself, in the quiet expectation of pleasing also just that “fit audience though few.” Shelley said of Prometheus Unbound that it was “never intended for more than five or six persons.” It may seem odd to picture such an ivory-towered poet in the eighth century, but Beowulf is unique in every sense, and in the balance of probabilities the scales incline to even this unlikely assumption: a poet as individual and apart as his style, his plan, and his subject.

Notes

1. J. R. R. Tolkien, “Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics,” Proc. of the British Academy, xxii (1936), 245-295. This has been called a “masterful defence of the monsters against the critics.” It was attacked by T. M. Gang, “Approaches to Beowulf,” RES, iii (1952), 1-12, and defended by A. Bonjour, “Monsters Crouching and Critics Rampant,” PMLA, lxviii (1953), 304-312. Cf. also Arthur G. Brodeur, “The Structure and Unity of Beowulf,” PMLA, lxviii (1953), 1183-95. Also cf. J. R. Hulbert, “The Genesis of Beowulf: a Caveat,” PMLA, lxvi (1951), 1168-76, which shows how far we are from agreement on even the essential points, and warns against the dangers of “a new orthodoxy.”

2. Dorothy Whitelock, The Audience of Beowulf (Oxford, 1951).

3. Cf. H. V. Routh, God, Man and Epic Poetry (Cambridge, 1927), i, 13, 17, 21; Malone, English Studies, xxix (1948), 161-72; Klaeber, 1, li; Tolkien passim; Arthur T. DuBois, PMLA, xlix (1934), 374-405 and ibid., lxxii (1957), 819-822.

4. The poet shows some knowledge of the Old Testament (which aligns him with Cædmon) but none of the New (which distinguishes him from Cynewulf). The Sermon on the Mount and the Epistles of Paul have not touched him. The doctrines and dogmas of the Church—sin and redemption, revelation, a future life—have left little mark on his poem; at least he found no place for them. For obvious reasons there are no miracles; but the friends of Bede would have cleansed Heorot with Holy Water and vanquished the Dragon with a sign of the Cross. Beowulf seems to have followed St. Paul's exhortation to avoid women—thereby unfortunately leaving the succession open.

5. The Oldest English Epic (New York, 1910), p. 129.

6. C. M. Bowra, Heroic Poetry (London, 1952), pp. 48, 55, 215.

7. J. Middleton Murry, a review of the translation by C. K. Moncrieff, in The Nation and the Athenœum, 22 October 1921.

8. Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition (Oxford, 1949), p. 24.